Tilman Brück1, Simon Hug2 3  , Sandra Penić4, Wolfgang Stojetz5

First abstract: April 2025, this abstract and outline of some ideas: Jun 23, 2025
Paper prepared for presentation at the 21st HiCN Workshop
(Berlin, September 30 - October 1, 2025)

The impacts of road blocks for mental health in Palestine

The impacts of road blocks for mental health in Palestine6

Abstract

Physical obstacles installed by the occupying forces in the West Bank are known to affect a myriad of aspects of Palestinians' lives. Drawing on some precursor work and employing a large-scale survey carried out in 2022 in the Occupied Palestinian Territories combined with fine-grained geo-coded information on physical obstacles, we assess how the proximity to these obstacles affect the psychological well-being of Palestinians. We argue that this proximity to physical barriers lowers psychological well-being. We expect that this effect plays out in two ways, namely on the one hand in a direct way, as these obstacles, especially checkpoints, increase the chances of negative contacts with soldier of the occupying force, and on the other hand also in an indirect way. As living in a community with many obstacles in its vicinity leads to a large number of members of this community to have these negative contacts, there is also an effect on psychological well-being through the community-level exposure to physical obstacles. We provide evidence for this more fine-grained effects by drawing on additional survey data which allows us to evaluate these claims.

Footnotes:

1Humboldt University, ISDC, Berlin, email: brueck@isdc.org
2  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Université de Genève, 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve, 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland, phone +41 22 379 83 78, email: simon.hug@unige.ch.
3 CefES research fellow, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
4  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Université de Genève, 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve, 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland, email: Sandra.PenicJunge@unige.ch
5ISDC, Berlin, email: stojetz@isdc.org
6Research assistance by Sarah Fenzl is gratefully acknowledged as is the partial funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. 219891) obtained by Sandra and Simon. We also appreciate Sami Miaari's sharing of his data on check-points.

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