Amplifying Local Voices: A Participatory Action Research Study on Evolving Violence and Community Response in Tulkarm

Swiss partners

• HETS-Genève: Silvia Garcia Delahaye (main applicant)

 MENA partners

• An-Najah National University: Samah Saleh (main applicant), Jamal Dabbeek

Other partners

• IHEID: Alexandre Dormeier Freire

Presentation of the project

This proposal builds on our previous research and community engagement in Tulkarm since 2018 funded by the MENA Leading House. Findings from earlier phases show that the implementation of international standards protecting vulnerable groups in Tulkarem remains weak (Dormeier et al. 2024; Saleh 2022; Garcia Delahaye et al. 2021). Drawing on Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence (1969), our findings highlight the diversity of violence patterns across the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the largely informal, locally specific responses developed by social actors to address them.

Since our last fieldwork 2022, the scale, intensity, and continuity of military attacks and forced displacement over the past year have fundamentally transformed the social realities of Tulkarm’s communities. Necessitating a renewed and deeper engagement. Partners from both academia and civil society, whom we engaged with during earlier phases, have strongly encouraged us to update and deepen our analysis in light of the current unrest, particularly regarding the capacity of social mechanisms to mitigate violence.

This research proposal represents a critical next phase following our initial study on the multifaceted nature of violence and community-based interventions, responding to recent upheavals by moving beyond traditional research models. Adopting a robust Participatory Action Research framework, the project will directly collaborate with social workers through a training workshop that empowers them to co-design the research, collect data within their communities-particularly among women, children, and adolescents- and collectively analyse the findings. By centring social workers as co-researchers and frontline knowledge producers, this approach ensures that lived experiences and localized responses to violence and displacement are integral to understanding the crisis and developing contextually grounded strategies for interventions. Our main research question will address how are changing forms of violence in Tulkarm experienced, interpreted, and addressed by frontline social specialists and the communities they work with.

The core objective of this research project is to collaboratively document, analyse, and understand the changing landscapes of violence in Tulkarm and the adaptive response mechanisms developed and needed by the community, with a specific focus on the perspectives of frontline social specialists and in order to strengthen their capacities.