Building Arafat's Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories After the Oslo Agreement

by Brynjar Lia

Building Arafat's Police examines the role of international donors in creating and reforming the Palestinian police and security forces. The book brings a unique insight into the problems of providing aid to police forces created by a national liberation organization in a war torn society, and also offers a detailed account of a much neglected research topic, namely police reform efforts in the Middle East peace process. The book demonstrates how the donor officials struggled to overcome ingrained unwillingness at home against the use of aid funds for police reform purposes, while at the same time maneuvering uneasily between Israeli obstructionism and security concerns, rivalries between Palestinian police generals, as well as a lack of Palestinian preparedness for the technical and practical aspects of police reform.

452 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Brynjar Lia (born July 14, 1966) is a Norwegian historian and professor of Middle East Studies at Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. He is also an adjunct research professor at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) where he headed FFI's research on international terrorism and global jihadism between 1999 and 2011. Lia is viewed as one of Norway's foremost experts on terrorism and is much cited in Norwegian and international media in connection to Al-Qaeda and international terrorism. Lia's last book is about Abu Musab al-Suri, which has been reviewed in publications like Newsweek, The Economist, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.