The single most important intellectual awakening of my life was that year in Palestine teaching. Nothing has come close since
- 14 mins read time
- Published: 19th June 2026
“The single most important intellectual awakening of my life was that year in Palestine teaching. Nothing has come close since”
Dr Brendan Ciarán Browne hails from Belfast, in the north of Ireland – where he works as an academic and researcher. He currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution at Trinity College Dublin; primarily focusing on transitional justice and liberal peace building with a geographic focus on the north of Ireland and Palestine.
Like most people, his birthplace has had a major impact on his life – and especially in his choice of career, which occasionally analyses the living history of the North. Born halfway between the start of The Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement, Browne describes his interest in the North’s transition to “what I could call an imperfect peace”:
“A big part of it for me has been born in a space that's going through a conflict, or going through a transition away from conflict. I tried to figure out ways of understanding that a bit more intentionally. I read Law at Queen's University Belfast, and then did a Master's degree in Human Rights Law. Again, human rights and the language of rights was really central to all that I was seeing around me and all that I was experiencing. During that time, I began to be exposed to other global issues, more international conflicts. A desire to know more deeply about these things was awakening in me.”
During the summer of Browne’s Master’s degree, he travelled to Palestine for the first time.
“I was invited by a friend who was over there doing some voluntary work with an organisation called UNIPAL. He said to me, ‘Look, if you're interested in human rights and the resolution of intractable conflicts, you need to come and see what's happening on the ground. I flew over and spent 10 days with him north of Ramallah, in a refugee camp called Al-Jalazon. That was the spark for me that really transformed my life. It changed how I looked at the world and gave me a real desire to go deeper into understanding the complexities of colonial violence. Resistance, self-determination...taking the Palestine context and trying to understand it more broadly.”
“I saw that the best way to sort of understand more was to do a PhD. After undertaking this at Queen's, I eventually went back to Palestine, where I took up a job at in Al-Quds University in occupied Jerusalem. From there I ended up getting a job at Trinity. Your lived experiences change how you see the world. I think I've had quite a few.”
Since leaving his second home, Browne’s research and teaching explores the north of Ireland, conflict resolution, transitional justice and Palestine. Many might presume that he connects the North’s struggle with that of Palestine’s, but the reality is significantly more complex. In a 2021 paper with researcher Elaine Bradley, Browne emphasised the tenuous use of the Good Friday Agreement as an example to create the illusion of peacebuilding. It ignores colonial violence, rather than acknowledging that the occupied and occupier are never on an equal playing field:
“In the context of Palestine/Israel, the import of the Northern Irish model that includes ‘cross-community’ or ‘shared future’ initiatives elides colonial realities to reinforce the idea that at the heart of the matter are two communities who just can’t get along. Peacebuilding then serves as a diffusing device for those committed to overturning the settler-colonial project in Palestine/Israel.”
His initial perceptions of Palestine, however, were not overtaken by the colonial history of the place he was raised – which remains a space coming to terms with decades of lingering conflict.
“You’re trying to understand your presence in Palestine at that moment - I wasn't looking at myself as an Irish person who lived in an area under occupation and had a natural affinity to people who are going through the same experience of living through conflict. I would push back against drawing false equivalencies between the two. You can't compare the situation in Palestine to anywhere, and certainly not to the situation presently in the north of Ireland. That's not to say there haven't been moments of extreme violence and the denial of rights. We know all of that about the North.”
“The experience of living and working in Palestine going on 16 years has sharpened my intellectual understanding of some of the residual issues that we have in our own context. It's certainly given me a vocabulary and a confidence to put names on things that I would have been a bit more reluctant to do so in the past. To name colonial violence or to name what justice ought to look like - to talk about reparations and transition more honestly - and to push back against some of the liberal approaches that we have to conflict resolution and peace building.”
“I have lots to thank Palestine for in that regard, but I don't know if it was always as cognisant at the time. I was also surrounded by comrades from all around the world and who'd experienced other forms of conflict. In many ways, it was good for me not to exceptionalise our own experience in the North.”
Browne reflects on a “lovely, very protected” childhood as one of four kids in a Catholic middle-class Protestant area, experiencing more cross-community interaction than many.
“We were very much one of a small group of Catholic families in our area. All of the kids that I hung out around and played football with were all little Protestant kids. I always had an interaction and engagement from the get-go. But that doesn't say that there weren't moments of experiencing sectarian incidents. Of course there were. There were things that happened during moments of heightened tensions in the city. I remember leaving our house in the east where we felt a little unsafe and move temporarily to the west of the city, which is almost an exclusively Catholic area, to stay with my granny and to stay with my aunt for a period of time when things kind of settled down.”
“We always went to Donegal or the west coast of Ireland for holiday at a time when it was known as the marching period or marching season. That was a very tense moment. There were times growing up as well where you experienced sectarian slurs and got a chase from lads from a different school because you were the wee Catholic boy. Sometimes we normalise all of that. We think that - just because you didn't get beaten up all the time or your house wasn’t attacked - you didn't experience everyday incidents of sectarianism. If you go one generation back, my father was burned out of his house when he was a young kid. They were burned out of a Protestant area in east Belfast and ended up moving to the west of the city. That's a trauma and a violence. The impact of that does translate. It’s the nervousness about where you live and where you're from, and it’s your parents trying to make sure that you're always safe.”
“My wife's family have experienced trauma directly - they lost family members during the conflict,” Dr Browne adds. “It's always there. You can't hide away from the residual trappings of violence when you see it painted on gable end walls, and you see guys with balaclavas and AK-47s talking about the right to return to what they see as a conflict. That’s still very present, but we've moved a lot further than we were in 1994.”
Refocusing the lens from the North to Palestine, Dr Browne remembers his surprise at the geographical closeness of the place – brimming with life and culture, and yet only a four-hour flight from London.
“I just knew Palestine as somewhere I assumed to be far, far away. But it really isn't. When I got there, I went straight into Jerusalem – which is a real assault on the senses. Jerusalem's old city is incredibly powerful place to be. Very ancient in parts; the old walls and roads, all the smells and signs. It just captivates you as a place. It's also hugely significant because the monotheistic faiths all collide there.
“My experience in Ramallah and then in Al-Jalazon was a bit more confronting because I didn't have a sense of what a refugee camp might look like,” he notes. “I didn’t appreciate the semi-permanence of some of these camps. It was a densely populated area - there were challenging issues with regards to resources - but they were amazing spaces of energy and brilliant people. When I travelled further around Palestine, what was most striking for me was the militarisation of the space, which is under occupation with checkpoints. Nothing really can prepare you for the volume of it. Then there’s the wall that carves right the way through Palestine and up the West Bank, which is really significant intervention and infrastructure. You're talking about over 700 kilometres of concrete wall with gun towers manned by security staff. You see how people's movements are restricted and challenged every single day.”
As I entered Dr Browne’s home, there was an incredibly detailed, hand-drawn sketch of a garden hanging proudly in the hall. He tells me it was the view outside a Bethlehem house where he stayed during his year of working at Al-Quds University in 2015.
“I lived in an old Arab house, and the lady who owned the house lived upstairs,” he describes. “She was a Nakba survivor from 1948. She used to live in Jaffa in historic Palestine and then became a refugee and moved to Bethlehem. I just remember being completely engrossed by her garden. Everything was being grown there. You moved with the seasons, you ate with the seasons, you trim the trees and you tended the land with the seasons. I became completely obsessed with that. We were drinking our tea with sage in the winter and mint during the summer. There’s a real sense of time passing. Equally, I got a real sense of how challenging life can be.”
“Palestinians have their water monitored and turned off and on by the occupation. People would all have black tanks on top of their roofs to store the water when it was turned on. You became very sensitive to not being wasteful of resources. Movement between Bethlehem to the university was through a road that went through lots of villages, with a big checkpoint right in the middle. When we were there, there was a real spike in violence against my students and students across the West Bank. We got insight into what it meant to be attacked and targeted, and to teach through that.”
The academic’s recollections of his time at Al-Quds University paints a vivid picture of how the rights of Palestinians are painfully and ruthlessly limited in every possible way.
“I never felt more out of my depth,” he posits. “It wasn't because I couldn't recite back all these international organs and laws and human rights. When you're trying to teach those to people who are experiencing every violation of them with a straight face - tell people all the things you're meant to have - it's very, very confronting. Students would look at me and say, ‘Why is this happening?’ I didn't have an answer for them.”
Since October 2023, all of Gaza’s university campuses have been purposefully destroyed and intensely bombed, with dozens of surviving buildings irreparably damaged. However, attacks on schools and universities are not a recent occurrence in Palestine, says Browne. It predates the latest genocidal attack, with educational facilities subject to closure, military incursions and missile strikes by Israeli forces. Additionally, both staff and students have faced violent censorship, travel restrictions, financial disruptions, arrest without charge and detention. Browne’s experience in 2015 was a good illustration of all this.
“That year, our university was attacked every day from the middle of September through to the final day of the semester in December. Every day there was an incident. The physical attacks on campus included smashing windows and doors. We had to lock the gates to make sure the army wouldn't storm. You'd be standing in the middle of the courtyard area and then there'd be tear gas fired in. There are varying degrees of tear gas severity, and in many ways, in Palestine people are used as experiments for this form of violence.”
“A student once came up to me during an attack and handed me a sliced onion with the skin still on it. They told me to sniff the onion to take away the impact of the tear gas. I'm teaching international law, transitional justice - and yet the simplest educational moment for me was a student giving me an onion. It was the teacher becoming the student. The single most important intellectual awakening of my life was that year in Palestine teaching. Nothing has come close since.”
Coming away from the experience, his perspective undoubtedly evolved.
“I definitely went into that space being much more positive in general with the rules-based order. I could see that there was a hierarchy. I came away very jaded by that entire notion. People have long talked about the violence of international law and white supremacy – regulations created for colonial powers to extend their colonial violence through legal organs. You have a moment of rupture in any intellectual endeavour. I refer to my moments in Palestine as a process of unlearning. I need to peel back everything I’d been taught. It sparked something that changed my way of looking at the world. For that, I'm forever grateful.”
Dr Browne’s students, like many educators, stayed in his memories long after he left.
“There's a preface of a book I wrote on transitional justice where I make reference to a student of mine who started crying in the classroom. I stopped the lesson and asked her if everything was alright. She said, ‘What is the point in talking about any of this?’ She was deeply impacted because her cousin had been murdered the day before in Hebron, where she was from. They were doing a funeral procession on campus - he was a member of the engineering faculty in Al-Quds. I could hear the noise of the gathering of his friends outside come in the classroom while I was talking about truth-recovery processes after conflict. I was very impacted by her asking that question."
“There were also stories of endurance. Some students would travel and get stuck at checkpoints but still make their way to class, even though it took them two-and-a-half hours. Every one of my students understood extremely seriously the value of education and the significance of learning together. I was really challenged by my students in Palestine to be a better teacher. It's a lovely thing to be able to say.”
Moving around Dr Browne’s home in Belfast, memories of his time in Palestine are all over the walls. Paintings by revolutionary leaders who inspire him, poetry, drawings, photographs alongside his wife Emma showcase signs of a beloved period of his life.
“I don't talk about this place in an abstract way,” he says. “All of my professional life is there. It's difficult for me to reduce anybody or any society into some kind of trope, but Palestinians are my comrades and friends. They’re just like you and me. Palestine is a second home for both of us and it’s just devastating to watch it be completely destroyed.”
