| Streszczenie: | <p>This thesis addresses the question of how non-state actors impact regional and international systems dominated by states. It does so by analysing the Palestinian transnational student movement between 1948 and 1982. It argues that in different phases of Palestinian history, Palestinian student movements played a crucial role in reorganising their scattered society transnationally, establishing and sustaining mechanisms and practices of popular mobilation and internationalising their struggle. In doing so, they contributed to the emergence of the Palestinian movement as a recognised actor able to impact regional and international systems dominated by states. Building on post-colonial approaches to IR and particularly on Gramsci´s theory of organicitá, this study defines the transnational Palestinian student movement as an anti-colonial organic vanguard of the Palestinian people. Students were a vanguard as they led Palestinian political reorganisation, creating unions often recognised as representative bodies of their people in the context of exile, statelessness and absence of national institutions. This role of “engine” was made possible by the “organic relation” between students and the people: students were an expression of their own society and voiced its anti-colonial ambitions. The study analyses Palestinian student mobilisation in Cairo, Beirut and Amman in the aftermath of the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948. It explores the emergence of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) as the first transnational popular organisation able to voice Palestinian demands at the international level. It analyses GUPS role in the national movement before and after the establishment of the PLO. Methodologically this study draws on archival research and particularly oral history, relying on 76 interviews with former members and leaders of the Palestinians student movement. The thesis contributes to IR theories by providing an exhaustive study of the role of non-state actors in state-centered systems such as the Middle East, analysing the specific role of the people. </p>
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