ABSTRACT
Nonviolence has long provided women around the world with an accessible means of fighting for national and human rights issues. Compared with violent resistance, nonviolence presents lower moral, social, and physical barriers, and therefore attracts participants in greater numbers and from a wider variety of groups – from women, to children, to the elderly. During the First Intifada in Palestine international attention turned to the large number of women at the frontlines of Palestinian civil resistance. Numerous articles, documentaries, and books have highlighted the creativity, resilience, and fortitude these women showed in sustaining the uprising. Since this time, however, as the conditions of occupation have worsened for Palestinians living in the West Bank, women have withdrawn from collective popular resistance. This book provides an answer to the question of why, when there are seemingly more oppressive policies and practices to resist, women would retreat from direct nonviolent resistance and the organisations that support it. This chapter introduces the reader to such questions, runs through some key approaches, and outlines how the study was conducted.
