Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Awards
Faiq Mari
ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture
2025 Winner (Social Sciences)
Faiq Mari
Mashaʿ of the Periphery: Collective Labor and Property in Palestinian Liberation Struggle
Faiq Mari’s Mashaʿ of the Periphery: Collective Labor and Property in Palestinian Liberation Struggle is an exceptional and timely work that redefines understandings of collective labour, property and resistance in Palestine. Combining rigorous scholarship with lived engagement, Mari skillfully weaves together ethnography, historical reconstruction and theoretical analysis—linking contemporary cooperatives, revolutionary institutions of the 1960s–1990s, and the writings of Iraqi Marxist Hadi al-ʿAlawi. Through this deeply original and methodologically versatile study, Mari reframes “the commons” through the Arabic mashaʿ, offering a powerful lens on anticolonial and anticapitalist struggle. Amid ongoing genocide and dispossession, this dissertation illuminates the enduring vitality of Palestinian collective life and liberation.
The dissertation was completed at ETH Zurich in the Department of Architecture under the supervision of Philip Ursprung and Christian Schmid (internal) and Abdel Razzaq Takriti (external))