Leila Farsakh

Leila Farsakh is a Palestinian political economist who was born in Jordan and is a Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her area of expertise is Middle East Politics, Comparative Politics, and the Politics of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Farsakh holds a MPhil from the University of Cambridge, UK and a PhD from SOAS University of London.
Farsakh conducted post-doctoral research at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and was a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She has worked with a number of organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah.
In 2001, she won the Peace and Justice Award from the in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Farsakh was member of the editorial Board for the Journal Of Palestine Studies and was the Project Co-Director for Jerusalem 2050, a problem-solving project jointly sponsored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies. She has written extensively on issues related to the Palestinian economy and the Oslo peace process, international migration and regional integration.
Farsakh was also a member of the Board at the non-governmental organization RESIST, founded in 1967 to provide grant money and support to grassroots movements advocating for social change.

Selected publications

Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation. Taylor & Francis Ltd, United Kingdom..
Development Strategies, Employment and International Migration,, OECD Development Center Publications, Paris, 1996.
Palestinian Employment in Israel: 1967-1997 Ramallah, 1998.
Commemorating the Naksa, Evoking the Nakba,, Electronic Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Spring 2008, MIT, Boston, 2008.
,, Columbia University Press, 2020.
Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition, University of California Press, 2021.

"Palestinian Labor Flow to Israel: Is it Over?", at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, 19 February 2002.
, Chomsky Lecture on Middle East Crises, December 14, 2000
, at Northeastern University in Boston, 19 November 2006.
, at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, 16 March 2007.