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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how refugee leaders from Bethlehem reimagine aid and development through grassroots initiatives that operate within and against dominant aid systems. It also analyses how transnational solidarity networks allow new modes of organising while reproducing global power hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Palestinian refugee leaders in the camps surrounding Bethlehem are reimagining aid and development through grassroots, refugee-led initiatives that operate both within and against dominant aid systems.

Based on long-term ethnographic engagement in Dheisheh, Aida, and Azza camps in occupied Palestine, the paper analyses efforts by refugee organisers to fund and run community-based projects that respond to everyday needs amid military occupation, protracted displacement, declining UNRWA funding, and international aid agendas that often clash with local political and social values. These initiatives seek to provide alternatives to internationally driven development projects, instead foregrounding local priorities and explicitly contesting dominant aid-sector logics, including depoliticisation, upward accountability, and professionalised relationships.

At the same time, refugee leaders must navigate entrenched global funding and surveillance regimes that continue to reproduce the very hierarchies they aim to disrupt. To circumvent restrictive donor frameworks, many have cultivated transnational solidarity networks with European and North American supporters. While these networks open new spaces for organising and resource mobilisation, they also reinscribe asymmetries of power, privileging those able to translate their struggles into the languages of Global North audiences. The paper ethnographically traces these tensions to show where Palestinian grassroots actors are able to reshape how aid, solidarity, and care are practiced in their communities, but also where the global aid system has created impenetrable walls.