Resistance Studies Affiliate

Mahmoud Soliman

Mahmoud Soliman is a Palestinian nonviolent activist and academic. He completed his PhD in Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies from Coventry University in April 2019. His thesis focus was on mobilization of Palestinian society towards nonviolent resistance in the Period from 2004-2014. He has more than 15 years of experience in organizing nonviolent campaigns and nonviolent collective actions against building the Segregation Wall and the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestine.  He is one of the founders of a Palestinian popular nonviolent resistance network called the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC) and the co-founder of the popular nonviolent resistance committee in the southern Bethlehem area of Occupied Palestine. The PSCC was formed in 2009 by grassroots activists from the different villages across the Occupied Palestine that had resisted the Segregation Wall and the forcible displacement of communities in the previous decade. It has operated as an umbrella organization that supports nonviolent campaigns with material resources and strategic planning and building activists’ capacities.

In the last two years Soliman coordinated a project called “On Our Land” in marginalized communities of the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley in Occupied Palestine to protect their cultural heritage from the Israeli occupation. His present research project includes an article about Building capabilities of youth through a participatory oral history project: The South Hebron Hills case study. His present research forthcoming is a monograph about Civil Resistance Movements and Material Resources with ICNC.

Soliman was recognized by different human rights organizations, such as Protect Defenders, as a human right defender. He was a located in the UK from 2015-2019. Soliman co-authored a Chapter in a volume Zwahre. M (2019) ‘The environment as a site of struggle over settler- colonialism in Palestine’ In the Environmental Justice, Popular Struggle and Community Development. ed by Anne Harley and Eurig Scandrett. Policy Press. In addition he collaborated on a journal article, Soliman (Zwahre), M., Scandratt, E. and Stone, P. “Cultural Resistance in Occupied Palestine and the Use of Creative International Solidarity through Song” to be published in the international Journal of Arts & Communities.