An afternoon with Abdalhadi Alijla: Fearful in Gaza

Please join us in ABC Amsterdam for the book presentation of by Abdalhadi Alijla. He will talk about his work, have a Q&A session with the audience, and sign the book afterwards.
About the book:
One family's fight to survive, and remember, in a land that won't let go of hope.
Abdalhadi Alijla's unflinching work moves beyond headlines to examine the lived reality of ordinary Gazans — not as statistics, but as human beings navigating a world where fear has become the only constant.
Through a mosaic of personal testimonies, social analysis, and quiet observation, Fearful in Gaza traces how decades of blockade, conflict, and isolation have reshaped the very fabric of daily life. Parents calculating the safest route to a bakery. Children who have learned to distinguish between the sounds of different drones. Young people weighing dreams against checkpoints. Alijla, a Gazan scholar, does not write from a distance. He writes from within — bearing witness to a society where fear is not an emotion but an architecture: political, economic, psychological. And yet, amid the rubble, he finds flickers of resilience, dark humor, and the stubborn refusal to stop hoping.
This is Alijla at his most essential: a meditation on survival, dignity, and the human cost of unresolved conflict. Fearful in Gaza asks not whether fear can be defeated, but how people find the strength to wake up anyway.
About the author:
Abdalhadi Alijla is a Palestinian-Swedish social and political scientist and science advocate. He is the author of Fearful in Gaza, Trust in Divided Societies and co-editor of Rebel Governance in the Middle East. Abdalhadi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative. He is the 2021 International Political Science Association Global South Award recipient. He is a co-founder of the Palestine Young Academy in 2020. In 2025, he won first place of literature section at "Un Mondo di parole – A world of words", Italy. He is an Associate Researcher and the Regional Manager of Varieties of Democracy Institute (Gothenburg University) for Gulf countries. He was a Post-doctoral fellow at the Orient Institute in Beirut (OIB). Since 2021, he has been an associate fellow within SEPAD, sectarianism, proxies and de-sectorisation at Lancaster University. He was the Co-Leader of Global Migration and Human Rights at Global Young Academy. Abdalhadi has a PhD in political studies from the State University of Milan and an M.A. in Public Policy and Governance from Zeppelin University- Friedrichshafen, Germany. He has been granted several awards and scholarships, including Gerda Henkel (2022), DAAD (2009), RLC Junior Scientist (2010), UNIMI (2012), ICCROM (2010), Saud AL-Babtin(2002), among others. He worked for many NGOs and INGOs in the Middle East and Europe, such as Transparency International, GiZ, EU Maddad Fund for the Syria Crisis, and UNV. He is a member of the scientific and consultative committee of the Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut, and International Science Council, among others.
He is a member of the scientific and consultative committee of the Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut. His main research interests are divided societies, Social Cohesion, Rebel Governance, Social Capital, Middle East Studies, and Comparative Politics.