Basem Ezbidi teaches in the Department of Political Science and the master’s program in Democracy and Human Rights at Birzeit University. He holds a PhD in political theory from the University of Cincinnati. His research covers Hamas, state-building, political reform, democratization, and the relationship between the West and the Islamic world. He is co-author of The West and the Muslim World: The Muslim Position (IFA, 2004) and co-editor of Popular Protest in the New Middle East: Islamism and Post-Islamist Politics (I.B. Tauris, 2014).
From this author
A Palestinian leadership vacuum looms due to the ill health of the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Saeb Erekat, and the frailty of the Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO and its main constituent party Fatah.
The failure to conduct local elections in the occupied territories and the Fatah conference, which largely reaffirmed a moribund status quo, are the latest examples of stymied Palestinian democracy. Al-Shabaka analysts examine the notion of democracy under military occupation, the factors constraining it, and the form that makes sense for the Palestinian people.
