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Settler Colonialism, Political Economy, and Land-Based Struggle in Palestine
Abstract
This paper explores the structures and process of settler colonialism in occupied Palestine, how it constrains the livelihoods of Palestinians, and how Palestinians respond to those social, political, and economic realities. Much work has been done in recent years to understand these dynamics and the difference a frame or approach that gives attention to settler colonialism and indigeneity makes for understanding Palestinian life and land. This paper provides an overview of that discussion and explores land-based configurations of power, struggle, and resistance--resistance that expresses competing understandings of land and the everyday acts that express those visions. In doing so, it begins to explore the contours of a decolonial approach to political economy that foregrounds land and the experience of indigeneity in the context of racialized settler colonialism--an approach that also uncovers global, transnational, anti-colonial inflections of that struggle. Exploring settler colonialism and political economies of resistance in Palestine underscores that a decolonial approach not only gives attention to enduring indigeneity, erasure, and interpretation, but also to the role of land in social and political economy in the struggle for autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None