Abstract
Beyond the Lines explores the social underpinnings of rebel adaptation and resilience. How do rebel groups cope with crises such as repression, displacement, and fragmentation? What explains changes in militant organizations' structures and behaviors over time? Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic research, Sarah E. Parkinson traces shifts in Palestinian militant groups' internal structures and practices during the civil war of 1975 to 1990 and foreign occupations of Lebanon. She shows that most militants approach asymmetrical warfare as a series of challenges centered around information and logistics, characterized by problems such as supplying constantly mobile forces, identifying collaborators, disrupting rival belligerents' operations, and providing essential services like healthcare. Effective negotiation of these challenges contributes to militant organizations' resilience and survival. In this context, the foundation of rebel resilience lies with militants' ability to repurpose their everyday social networks to organizational ends.
In the Lebanese setting, Beyond the Lines demonstrates how regionalized differences in Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese deployment of violence triggered distinct social network responses that led to divergent organizational outcomes for Palestinian militants.
About the speaker
Dr. Sarah E. Parkinson is the Aronson Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines organizational behavior and social change in contexts of war and disaster. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa, Parkinson studies how actors such as military organizations, emergency response agencies, and humanitarian groups adapt in the face of crisis, disruption, and fragmentation. Parkinson’s scholarship has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and the European Journal of International Relations in addition to outlets such as Foreign Policy, the Middle East Report, and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage.
Parkinson holds a PhD and MA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University. She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at Northwestern University Qatar, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, and Yale University's Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. Parkinson is a co-founder of the Advancing Research on Conflict Consortium and serves on the Advisory Committee of the Project on Middle East Political Science. She is an active first responder in her free time.
You can download her book Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon here.