What About the Land? Reframing Palestine as a Question of Land Justice
Thursday, February 20, 2025 5pm
About this Event
Central Campus
Land, we are often told, is at the heart of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. But when we survey the field of Palestinian Studies, we find that scholars often treat land as an abstraction and rarely study the people who live on and from it. In this talk, I focus on a legal relationship that has complex political and social meanings for Palestinians: private property. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the highlands of Palestine, I explain why rural Palestinians turned to private property to defend their land from settler dispossession after 1967, and how, since the mid-2000s, the formalization of property ownership across the West Bank has enabled Palestinian capital to transform agricultural land into real estate, sparking new debates over the role that property should play in anti-colonial practice and social life. I show that by foregrounding how Palestinians use, value, and importantly, own land, we can reframe Palestine as a question of land justice, and rethink what the Palestinian struggle has to teach us about the battles for land unfolding across the world today.
Speaker Bio
Paul Kohlbry is a socio-cultural anthropologist. His research brings together critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and legal anthropology. He has worked, studied, and carried out research in the Middle East, primarily Israel/Palestine, since 2007. His writings have been published in American Ethnologist, Antipode, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Journal of Peasant Studies, and elsewhere. His first book, Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine, will be published next year by Stanford University Press. His next book project, tentatively entitled “Making the Desert Green: Agriculture, Technology, and Climate Change,” will be a multi-sited ethnography of the arid regions of Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Qatar, and the UAE. He has held positions at Brown University and the University of Chicago, and is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Next fall, he will be an assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Sponsors: Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative, with support from Near Eastern Studies.
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