Please join us for a new book presentation by Paul Kohlby, Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and former postdoctoral researcher at the Pozen Center. Kohlby will be discussing his new book Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine. He will be in conversation with Aaron Jakes, Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and the College.
The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland.
Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds, Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible.
Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.
Lunch will be served for those who register.
Paul Kohlbry is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research brings together critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and legal anthropology. He has worked on questions of peasant agriculture, property law, land politics, anti-colonialism, and agrarian transformation. Since 2013 he has carried out archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle East, primarily in Palestine and Israel. His scholarship has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and others. Before arriving at UCSB, Paul held postdoctoral positions at Brown University, the University of Chicago, and Cornell University.
Aaron Jakes is an Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and the College. He is a scholar of the modern Middle East specializing in the historical geography of global capitalism, comparative studies of colonialism and empire, and environmental history.