Governing Inhabitance in Palestinian Jerusalem: Bureaucracy, Belonging, and Majoritarianism at the Center of Life

Author

Thayer Hastings, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Gary Wilder

Committee Members

Mandana Limbert

Beth Baron

Rema Hammami

Subject Categories

Arabic Studies | Near and Middle Eastern Studies | Near Eastern Languages and Societies | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Jerusalem; Majoritarianism; Surplus Life; Bureaucracy; Everyday; Palestinians;

Abstract

Neither citizens nor migrants, Palestinian permanent residents of Jerusalem are required to regularly prove that their “center of life” is within municipal limits or risk residency revocation and expulsion even if their families have lived in the city for generations. Stateless Palestinians inhabit Jerusalem not by right, but by navigating a bureaucratic system and its pressures on them to leave the city. From a site of governmental hyperactivity, this dissertation, Governing Inhabitance in Palestinian Jerusalem: Bureaucracy, Belonging, and Majoritarianism at the Center of Life, documents the practices, orientations, and strategies people on the borders of inclusion within the national state deploy in pursuit of remaining in place. Overall, the dissertation explores the relationship between the bureaucratic forms of proof Palestinians produce to prove their “center of life” in Jerusalem and Israel’s settler-colonial anxiety over maintaining a Jewish demographic majority in the city at the local scale.

The dissertation argues that the project of producing Jerusalem as a capital city through the politics of majoritarianism is largely externalized onto the Palestinian residents of the city. Rather than treating the production of surplus life as exceptional, the dissertation approaches partial and appended belonging as the starting point for analysis. Through fieldwork, patchwork ethnography, interviews, and an array of sources including legal documents, the dissertation shows how official belonging is reduced to the immediacy of inhabiting Jerusalem. The chapters of the dissertation investigate different pathways of renewing the “center of life” and the contradiction that Palestinians, who are formally excluded from the body politic of the Israeli state, manage by proving that they are indeed living in Jerusalem. The result is a multiplicity of forms that anchor people and reinforce their belonging rather than the singularity that a “center of life” suggests. Attending to how Palestinians live with and transgress conditions of bureaucratically-inflected domination offers avenues for reconsidering the broader political problem of surplus life and the politics of majoritarianism in the present conjuncture.

Recommended Citation

Hastings, Thayer, "Governing Inhabitance in Palestinian Jerusalem: Bureaucracy, Belonging, and Majoritarianism at the Center of Life" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6495