Lee Ann Fujii Award Winner 2023: Sarah E. Parkinson, for Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon

Winner: Sarah E. Parkinson (Johns Hopkins University), for Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon (Cornell UP, 2023).

Based on extraordinary ethnographic fieldwork, Sarah E. Parkinson’s Beyond the Lines demonstrates how insurgent groups survive in the face of state repression. Parkinson moves the reader between intimate, anecdotal excursions, informed by her ethical, interpretative lived experiences in Palestinian communities in Lebanon. In so doing, Parkinson provides a practical approach to studying militant organizations through careful relationship building, to learn with and from people she met in the course of fieldwork through their everyday social networks. Beyond the Lines also presents a challenge to political science as a discipline - to capture the complexity of the human experience in and beyond mass violence, to prioritize people’s contradictory and sometimes incomprehensible lived experiences. Parkinson’s findings illustrate the felt effects of violence, in its physical, emotional and structural forms in ways that speak to the goals of the Lee Ann Fujii award (citation written by Susan Thomson).

Selection Committee:

Susan Thomson, co-chair (Colgate University)

Helen Kinsella, co-chair (University of Minnesota)

Natasha Behl (Arizona State University)