- Convenors:
-
Mahtab Uddin
(University of Manchester)
Nabila Hasan (University of Manchester)
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- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Conflict, crisis and humanitarianism
Short Abstract
This panel explores Palestine's (focusing on Gaza) economy under siege, examining how conflict, blockade, and aid dependence reshape livelihoods, markets, and agency - challenging conventional notions of development, resilience, and justice through rigorous quantitative and mixed-method research.
Description
This panel will bring together economists and development studies scholars to examine Gaza and Palestine as one of the starkest cases of economic de-development in the modern world. It will explore how markets, livelihoods, and individual agency survive under prolonged siege, and what this means for the very language and logic of development studies.
The Panel will ask for paper submissions that employ quantitative and mixed-method evidence from household surveys, trade and labour data, and satellite-based measures of destruction. Papers will be given priority that interrogate how conflict, blockade, and occupation have reshaped Palestine's/Gaza’s labour markets, production systems, and social structures. The discussion will address not only the economic costs of isolation but also the adaptive strategies, informal economies, and solidarities that sustain life and dignity under extreme constraint.
By situating Palestine/Gaza within broader debates on decolonising development and redistributing power, the panel will ask whether traditional tools of economics and development studies can meaningfully capture resilience, justice, and wellbeing in such contexts. It calls for a more humane and reflexive economics and development studies — one that confronts structural violence, engages with ethics as part of empirical analysis, and reimagines the boundaries of “development” when normality itself is denied.
Accepted papers
Paper long abstract
This research examines the efficiency of foreign aid in alleviating food insecurity among Palestinian households, emphasizing heterogeneous outcomes of food security groups and heterogeneous population groups. This analysis estimates the effect of assistance on household food security transition and considers the targeting that humanitarian actors implement based on the results from the Food Security (SEFSec) survey (2018 and 2020), and through the propensity score matching. Evidently shown from the time comparison, there have been significant changes in both targeting and results over a timeframe defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, limiting occupation policies, and deteriorating economic conditions. Findings in 2018 show that assistance benefited food-secure and marginally insecure households but hindered moderate and severely food-insecure populations. By the year 2020, these adverse effects particularly worsened in Gaza, and the previous positive effects vanished. The results challenge traditional beliefs on aid efficacy and highlight the importance of context-sensitive and programmatic adaptive strategies.
Paper short abstract
We study how conflict-driven violence, displacement and service breakdown in Palestine affect children’s mental health and, through this channel, their school enrolment, delayed entry and dropout, using World Bank microdata from the 2022 Palestinians’ Psychological Conditions Survey.
Paper long abstract
Armed conflict threatens human capital formation not only through the destruction of physical infrastructure and income-generating opportunities, but also via damage to mental health. Children in conflict zones confront a combination of direct violence, displacement, and breakdown of basic services. These shocks affect their psychological well-being and may alter educational trajectories in ways that persist well beyond the end of active hostilities.
In Palestine, repeated cycles of violence, closures, demolitions, and mobility restrictions have created an environment in which children’s daily lives are tightly intertwined with conflict. A rich literature documents the adverse effects of conflict on schooling, lower test scores, reduced years of schooling, greater child labour, and higher dropout. At the same time, research in psychology and public health shows a high prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder and related symptoms among Palestinian children exposed to violence.
The explicit link between conflict exposure, children’s psychological trauma, and schooling decisions such as grade-for-age, late enrolment, and dropout is still underexplored. Existing economic studies treat mental health either as a control variable or as an unobserved “black box” shock. Conversely, clinical and psychological studies rarely connect trauma measures to detailed educational outcomes using cutting-edge causal methods.
This project seeks to bridge that gap by placing children’s psychological conditions at the centre of the analysis. Using the Palestinians’ Psychological Conditions Survey (2022), we quantify how exposure to violence, displacement, and service breakdown affects children’s mental health, and how this, in turn, shapes school enrolment patterns, delayed entry, and dropout.
Paper short abstract
In zones of protracted conflict and occupation, SMEs operate where traditional development frameworks are either absent or obstructed. Yet, a variety of adaptive, resource efficient, and circular practices are emerging not as environmental luxuries but as strategic necessities.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates how SMEs survive in contexts of Palestine experience. It critically examines whether, how, and under what conditions SMEs not only sustain themselves but also contribute meaningfully to national development including through job creation, improved balance of payments, and social stability, despite enduring structural violence and systemic obstruction. In stead of assuming the presence or success of circular economy (CE) strategies, the panel seeks to explore to which extent such strategies actually emerge in these settings. In environments where formal development infrastructures are denied or destroyed, CE practices may arise not through policy design but through necessity, improvisation, and inherited local knowledge.
By exploring these issues through SMEs strategies, researchers, and comparative regional insights, this opens a deeper conversation about the limits and possibilities of circularity as a developmental framework in colonised, conflict affected regions, mainly through investigation the Palestinian context.
The discussion will bridge academic and practitioner perspectives, including voices of SME owners in Palestine, to critically assess how CE discourses must be decolonised and adapted for fragile and militarised contexts.
We particularly will open discussion on:
- SMEs survival and development in conflict war zones.
- Case studies highlighting the strategic agency of SMEs under siege.
- CE practices as adaptive responses to conflict, blockade, or occupation.
- Comparative insights from conflict-affected states.
By situating circularity within conditions of structural violence, this discussion opens space for rethinking resilience, sovereignty, and economic imagination in the margins of global development.