Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalising Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine

Using Palestine as a case study, Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States shows how recognition politics operate to legitimise long-standing colonial power structures. 

In existing scholarship, recognition has been seen as an asset coveted by indigenous communities. This book forwards a new, theoretically ground-breaking perspective.

The book provides in-depth critical analysis of liberal recognition politics and shows how recognition can be a tool for elimination. In colonial contexts, settlers use recognition to legitimise and normalise the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people. More than this, settler colonial states themselves actively pursue recognition, employing it as a means to further the elimination of the indigenous societies they seek to replace.

In making the case, the book critically examines the Euromodern categories of race, racism and racial hierarchies and draws new conclusions about the interplay between colonialism, racism and Zionism. Central to this analysis is how anti-Zionism has been strategically equated with anti-Semitism, and effectively used as a tool for the advancement of both settler-colonialism in Palestine and Israel’s recognition politics on the international stage.

The book delves into indigenous normative resistance against colonial recognition politics through the lens of the Palestinian practice of ṣumūd (steadfastness), extracting its philosophy of liberation as a pathway towards a decolonial future for all in Palestine and beyond.