Research on Israel-Palestine has only become more important since the two-year war began in October 2023, says Kellogg Dissertation Year Fellow Hannah Early Bagdanov, whose own fieldwork and publications focus on how Palestinians living in East Jerusalem interact with Israeli state power.
Bagdanov lived at Notre Dame’s Tantur Ecumenical Institute while collecting data in Summer 2022 as she sought to understand the points at which East Jerusalemites – always living in day-to-day tension over sovereignty and Israeli authority – choose health care, schools, policing, and other state services.
In this context, the Palestinians interviewed seem to draw a distinction between explicitly political systems, like the courts, and what she calls “technical services” like bus rides, city parks, and utilities.
“Civilians will avoid engagement with force-monopolizing institutions, such as the police and the judiciary,” writes Bagdanov in an August 2025 article for the American Political Science Review.
“However, civilians will accept necessary public goods and services such as water, sanitation, and healthcare, having granted the state a limited degree of legitimacy to provide basic, though non-coercive, goods and services.”
Now, as Bagdanov completes her doctoral degree with support from the Kellogg Institute, she’s already looking ahead to how the conflict has changed the contours of life in East Jerusalem and the wider region. While the growing tension was clear ahead of October 2023, many observers actually felt the greater security threats were in the West Bank rather than Gaza.
Factors like home demolitions and politically motivated violence continue for Palestinians who don’t live in Gaza, including those in East Jerusalem. There’s also more uncertainty about the future.
“There is a general sense that international recognition and attention could lead to a historic moment that could move the Palestinian national cause forward,” Bagdanov said. “There's also extreme skepticism about whether this moment leads in another direction, to the annexation of the West Bank or the military occupation of Gaza.”
She notes that the October 7 attacks and subsequent war in Gaza made clear how little academic study is devoted to understanding Palestine’s internal politics and the dearth of related writing.
“With my research trajectory, I still see myself as somebody who wants to contribute to the study of Palestinian politics,” she said. For example, there are now new questions on how the war has shaped Palestinian views in East Jerusalem.
“The data I have is kind of capturing that prewar moment and then, of course, everything shifted,” Bagdanov said. “I think there's a comparative opportunity there, to understand how these engagement patterns and attitudes have shifted.”
Bagdanov says “Kellogg’s fingerprints are all over this project” as she completes her dissertation work with advisors that include dissertation directors Guillermo Trejo and Keough School faculty member Victoria Hui, both Kellogg faculty fellows.
She looks forward to seeing how the theory of engagement she developed while working in East Jerusalem might be used in places like Somalia, Haiti, Mali, and beyond. The rapid developments in the Middle East also are leading to new questions that, though specific to Israel and Palestine in some ways, may deliver insights that have broader applications in contested regions.