Mitchell Institute Fellow Dr Erika Jiménez has been awarded the Association of Middle East Children’s and Youth Studies (AMECYS) 2025 Book Award for her book Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Insights from Palestinian Youth (Hart 2024).

The AMECYS Book Award recognises outstanding scholarly contributions on the study of children and youth in the Middle East, North Africa, and their diasporic communities.

Palestinians have deployed the discourse of human rights in their struggle against the Israeli occupation and to articulate the injustices they experience.  Palestinian youth learn about human rights at school whether they live in the cities, villages or refugee camps.  However, they experience a dissonance between the aspirational and internationalised framework of human rights norms they learn about inside school and the layers of injustices they face in their everyday lived experience outside school.

In the book Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Insights from Palestinian Youth, Erika draws on empirical research in the occupied West Bank and unpacks the three main layers of marginalisation identified by Palestinians youth in relation to their rights. 

The main barrier was the Israeli occupation that denies them their humanity as Palestinians.  The second obstacle facing youth was the Palestinian pseudo-state (and those who represent it) that denies non-elites a voice through violent and bureaucratic means.  The third obstacle identified was the patriarchal aspects of the culture that prevent youth and girls specifically from exercising agency.

The book explores how these injustices shaped young people’s interpretations of human rights but also how they deployed human rights discourse as a vehicle to struggle against these very factors that sought to marginalise them.  Overall, this work is informed by decolonial, third world and Islamic contributions to human rights and human rights education.

Read more about Erika’s research in her blog.

Dr Erika Jiménez 

Erika is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Law (being mentored by Professor Colin Harvey) and a Mitchell Institute Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast.  

Her current project explores how the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan impacts the lives of youth from the remaining Druze communities and their views on the usefulness of human rights in their struggles for justice.  It compares Golani perspectives with those of their Palestinian peers in the occupied West Bank drawing on her previous research but also new insights from Palestinian youth from the refugee community.  It examines what youth from both jurisdictions understand about one another’s human rights situations.  

The research team includes two local youth advisory groups, Golani and Palestinian researchers.  This is being done with support from Al-Marsad Arab Human Rights Center and Psychology Spa and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.