Course information

Course synopsis 

The course explores Palestine as a decisively global space that plays a central role in the global circuits of violence, economy, and geopolitics. We discuss how forces of settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism shape life in Palestine/Israel, and how such global forces can be understood through Palestine. In this course, Palestine is not approached as a periphery of the “global”, but a site of its making; a space where flows of technology, capital, ideology, imaginary, ecology, being, and resistance and power generate dynamic entanglements, contestations and transformations that simultaneously expand globally.  

The course conjures an array of leading visiting lecturers whose expertise on Palestine/Israel spans across disciplinary boundaries, from geography, anthropology, political theory, international relations, to science and technology studies (STS). The themes to be examined include: the deep affinity between Israel and countries in the Global North; the circulation of capital, technology and militarism between India and Israel; the travel of social, economic and imaginative geographies between China and Palestine; the mechanization of Israeli settler colonialism; Israeli regimes of control and incarceration; the politics of international ‘peace’ and ‘development’ projects in Palestine; the role of academic institutions in sustaining colonialism and military occupation; environmental forms of violence; and the ways in which Palestinian modes of being, endurance and struggle persist, evolve, precede and exceed the imposed colonial conditions. 

Conceptually and methodologically the course helps the students to reflect upon entanglements of global and local, particularly what it means to embark on a ‘global’ critical analysis of Palestine. Instead of locking ourselves into pre-established and contained geopolitical cartographies (such as the ‘Middle East’), simplistic dualisms (such as ‘West/East’) or traditional state-centric geopolitics, the course elaborates processes that move beyond them. This includes highlighting the role of cities, ecologies, capitalist elites, new technologies, academic institutions, political and social movements, and the shifting and emerging alliances of colonialism and indigenous resistance.