This study will study how peace action in Palestinian/Israeli peace organizations is being institutionalized as expert culture. Using ethnographic research methods, this project will compare the lived experience of peace practitioners in three transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) located in Palestine/Israel and California to account for how individuals articulate expertise and knowledge projects from different cultural locations (ethnic, religious, gender, national, and political). The main objectives are to examine (1) how ethical imperatives are translated into institutional knowledge; (2) how techniques of audit and "best practice" come into or out of peace practitioners' knowledge projects; and (3) how peace practitioners perceive their practices as affecting them and their intended target groups. By tracking the ways in which ethics and audit intermingle in processes of institutionalization in these three NGOs, this study seeks to account for how the triad of ethics/audit/policy might be constitutive of new subjectivities and social relations. The intellectual merit of this research lies in its exploration of administrative infrastructure as productive of new forms of social organization and processes of subject formation. Building on important work in the anthropology of institutions, and law and society, it continues an analytic tradition that grasps institutions as fully cultural, appropriate objects of ethnographic study by investigating the institutionalization of ethical imperatives. By understanding peace practitioners as belonging to moral communities, it explores how values and practices bind individuals together, not in geographically bounded units, but rather in "affective and ethical fields" that operate in the transnational space of global civil society. It engages with the anthropology of Human Rights, peace and solidarity activism, and scholarship that is increasingly grappling with how to study and write ethnography about sophisticated political actors and policymakers who employ the analytical and self-analytical tools and modes of critique of social science as part of their activism. Finally, it also builds on radical scholarship about Palestine/Israel that contests the conflict as existing between two discrete entities, and instead advances the thesis of relationality. The broader impacts of the research lie with its unique position within the body of work about, and with its approach towards, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By comparatively studying different techniques, discourses, and practices of peace activism in three peace organizations that operate in a place that is highly politicized and contested, and under international scrutiny, the findings of this project have the potential to help shape the practice of peace organizations that operate in the region and beyond. By focusing on cooperation within the broader context of conflict and violence, it has the potential to break down rigid understandings of victim and perpetrator.
