Noga Malkin | Georgetown University (original) (raw)
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Papers by Noga Malkin
Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 2015
The language of development and humanitarian ‘interventions’ suggests a binary relationship betwe... more The language of development and humanitarian ‘interventions’ suggests a binary relationship between an active, intervening agent and a passive victim, a recipient. This article examines what happens when the lines blur and subjects of intervention — the ‘beneficiaries’ in need of ‘saving’ — become the agents of intervention, the aid-workers: when refugees, recipients of aid, are also aid givers. Through ethnographic research at a community centre on the Turkish–Syrian border, where Syrian refugees worked as aid-workers assisting other refugees as part of the centre’s ‘participatory approach’, I explore the unintentional ‘side effects’ of a participatory approach to a refugee assistance project and look at the productive effects of participation. Through the stories of several such refugee aid-workers I explore the ways in which including refugees in aid delivery may reinforce existing class structures, as posited by the approach’s critics, and the unexpected opportunities, such as social mobility, that crisis creates.
Conference Presentations by Noga Malkin
In the rupture to Palestinians’ daily life in the area that was to become Israel after the events... more In the rupture to Palestinians’ daily life in the area that was to become Israel after the events of 1948, one institutional link remained to a now lost past. The Ottoman legal system remained virtually unchanged by both the British and later the Israelis in regards to matters of personal status as codified in the 1917 Ottoman law of Family Rights. Sharia courts, and the Palestinian qadis presiding over them, continued post-1948 to manage the personal affairs of Muslim Palestinians who were now citizens of Israel. Focusing on the 1950s and 1960s - a historically marked period during which the Arab population in Israel was subject to martial law - I examine the ways Palestinian qadis used codified Islamic law as a tool for negotiation with, and circumvention of, their new political environment.
The use of codified law in Sharia courts in a non-Muslim country led to a unique phenomenon within modern states’ application of Islamic law. Absent a higher authority such as the Ottoman Office of the Şeyhülİslam or the Supreme Muslim Council monitoring the implementation of codified law, and with no effective system of appeal, the effects of codification were unlike those analyzed in other contexts. Sometimes seen as a tool that limits judicial discretion and qadis’ relative freedom of interpretation within their schools of law, the effects of codified Islamic law in Israel’s Sharia courts where a higher Islamic authority was lacking allowed judicial discretion to reclaim its historical significance.
I examine in particular the productive effects of the crisis through the innovations it produced and afforded to women as well as to the judges who sought to accommodate change through the courts. I focus on divorce cases brought to the Sharia courts in in the first two decades of Israel’s existence, specifically on women’s appeals for judicial dissolution (faskh) in cases of husbands gone absent by war and the redrawing of borders, and on the strategic use of suspended repudiation through delegation (tafwid) to bypass and challenge the Israeli legislature’s attempt to sanction husbands’ ability to divorce a wife against her will. Examining court records allow us to look at both social practice as reflected in court records and at judicial debates around the procedures of the law’s application, providing a glance into the inner workings of the legal leadership of the Muslim Palestinian minority.
Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 2015
The language of development and humanitarian ‘interventions’ suggests a binary relationship betwe... more The language of development and humanitarian ‘interventions’ suggests a binary relationship between an active, intervening agent and a passive victim, a recipient. This article examines what happens when the lines blur and subjects of intervention — the ‘beneficiaries’ in need of ‘saving’ — become the agents of intervention, the aid-workers: when refugees, recipients of aid, are also aid givers. Through ethnographic research at a community centre on the Turkish–Syrian border, where Syrian refugees worked as aid-workers assisting other refugees as part of the centre’s ‘participatory approach’, I explore the unintentional ‘side effects’ of a participatory approach to a refugee assistance project and look at the productive effects of participation. Through the stories of several such refugee aid-workers I explore the ways in which including refugees in aid delivery may reinforce existing class structures, as posited by the approach’s critics, and the unexpected opportunities, such as social mobility, that crisis creates.
In the rupture to Palestinians’ daily life in the area that was to become Israel after the events... more In the rupture to Palestinians’ daily life in the area that was to become Israel after the events of 1948, one institutional link remained to a now lost past. The Ottoman legal system remained virtually unchanged by both the British and later the Israelis in regards to matters of personal status as codified in the 1917 Ottoman law of Family Rights. Sharia courts, and the Palestinian qadis presiding over them, continued post-1948 to manage the personal affairs of Muslim Palestinians who were now citizens of Israel. Focusing on the 1950s and 1960s - a historically marked period during which the Arab population in Israel was subject to martial law - I examine the ways Palestinian qadis used codified Islamic law as a tool for negotiation with, and circumvention of, their new political environment.
The use of codified law in Sharia courts in a non-Muslim country led to a unique phenomenon within modern states’ application of Islamic law. Absent a higher authority such as the Ottoman Office of the Şeyhülİslam or the Supreme Muslim Council monitoring the implementation of codified law, and with no effective system of appeal, the effects of codification were unlike those analyzed in other contexts. Sometimes seen as a tool that limits judicial discretion and qadis’ relative freedom of interpretation within their schools of law, the effects of codified Islamic law in Israel’s Sharia courts where a higher Islamic authority was lacking allowed judicial discretion to reclaim its historical significance.
I examine in particular the productive effects of the crisis through the innovations it produced and afforded to women as well as to the judges who sought to accommodate change through the courts. I focus on divorce cases brought to the Sharia courts in in the first two decades of Israel’s existence, specifically on women’s appeals for judicial dissolution (faskh) in cases of husbands gone absent by war and the redrawing of borders, and on the strategic use of suspended repudiation through delegation (tafwid) to bypass and challenge the Israeli legislature’s attempt to sanction husbands’ ability to divorce a wife against her will. Examining court records allow us to look at both social practice as reflected in court records and at judicial debates around the procedures of the law’s application, providing a glance into the inner workings of the legal leadership of the Muslim Palestinian minority.