From Rubble to Renewal: Hannah Arendt’s Natality as a Framework for Peacebuilding in Gaza’s Humanitarian Collapse

Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, marked by starvation, displacement, and loss of life, exposes the limitations of conventional peacekeeping, hindered by bureaucratic constraints and top-down approaches. This paper proposes a novel peacebuilding framework grounded in Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, the human capacity for new beginnings through collective action. Grounded in natality’s emphasis on the possibility of political rebirth, it reconsiders how peacekeeping might create conditions that allow new political spaces to emerge through local agency. By empowering communities through grassroots aid networks, dialogue platforms, and reconstruction initiatives, this approach counters the despair of conflict with civic renewal. The study situates natality within peacekeeping scholarship, highlighting its absence in dominant realist and liberal paradigms and applying it to Gaza, where ongoing blockades, military operations and authoritarianism stifle hope. Practical recommendations include UN-mediated forums to amplify diverse voices and training peacekeepers to support community-led initiatives, while navigating complex challenges such as Hamas’s governance and regional tensions. Inextricable from Arendt’s principle of plurality, Gaza’s crisis reveals the urgent need for a shift in peacekeeping theory and practice with implications for sustainable peacekeeping beyond Gaza. This piece invites scholars and practitioners to rethink peacekeeping as an act of creation, born from the rubble of despair.

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