Kareem Rabie

Throughout the West Bank over the last ten or fifteen years, there has been discussion of the link between businessmen in Hebron and China. Hundreds of Palestinians have settled in China or travel there annually. I will study political economic governance through those traders and travelers who navigate changing forms of circulation, figures who allow us to see states, law, and global economics through daily practice. Through ethnography in the West Bank and China, and between the two, as well by documenting the process and progress of a container I plan to import from Yiwu, I will unearth intertwined and global economic and social histories. Within and beyond Palestine and China, I ask: what does governance around circulation and movement look like? Who is it for? How does it inflect local social life and politics?