In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage.It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context. Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape.

With her book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects- notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwag, and the Palestinian Museum-and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites the mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state unctions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle tor Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence- and a model of how things could be.

Taking this discussion further for Palestine as a paradigmatic case of enduring conflict and contested heritages, Chiara's latest paper "Creative constitutionalism asks: What role does the reconstruction of heritage play in enduring conditions of conflict, which never seem to give way to peace? When a state has either collapsed or never existed, can local civil societies establish or reinvent the functions of a state, whether in relation to cultural heritage or beyond? If so, how might they go about it! With heritage urban regeneration, and museum projects of widely different scales proliferating across the Middle East, how can societies harness these developments to rethink 'urban recovery'? Might civil societies mobilize such tools of urban recover to engender a measure of positive social change, even before a given conflict is over!