Decolonial Sociology of Law Seminar Series: Decolonial Tours of Palestine

• Attend the seminar online via Zoom

In this talk I will focus on how and why Palestine occupies center stage in global conversations on colonialism and decolonial reparative approaches to politics and society. For one thing, the colonial imprint on global politics is evident in the way the Palestinian national movement has been treated in scholarship, public discourse and policy engagements. Palestine is thus elaborative of the racialized and imperial hierarchies that have shaped the makings and workings of international relation. At the same time, Palestine – not least in this current era of crisis and genocide – would need to serve as a starting point for exploring reparative discourses, vocabularies and strategies for revisioning the hierarchical nature of global politics.

Somdeep Sen has been an associate professor of international development studies since 2020. His research focuses on race and racism in international relations, liberation movements, spatial politics, settler colonialism and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial (Cornell University Press, 2020), and was the co-editor of Globalizing Collateral Language: From 9/11 to Endless War (University of Georgia Press, 2021).