Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine

The King's Anthropology Network Welcomes Paul Kohlbry, to discuss his new book Plots and deeds: Agrarian annihilation and the fight for land justice in Palestine, currently shortlisted for the 2026 Palestine Book Awards. Please complete the free registration to attend.

How should we understand land dispossession in Palestine today? And what can we learn from the Palestinians fighting to remain and return? This book talk explores these questions from the central highlands of the West Bank. It offers a framework for understanding how the destruction of agrarian life involves both coercive violence and the slow erosion of rural labor, land, and ecology. It also shows how efforts to defend land and rebuild livelihoods are transforming the practices, ethics, and politics of peasant farming and property ownership in the highlands. This project demonstrates how the struggles and ideas of Palestinian farmers, activists, and thinkers can enrich agrarian studies, and how in turn agrarian studies can help us see the ways that Palestine is part of a global struggle for land justice.

Meet the speaker

Paul Kohlbry is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2013 he has carried out archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle East, primarily in Palestine and Israel. Paul studies property, farming and food working to centre how the experiences and perspectives of those working in the food system can advance our understandings of agrarian change and justice. His research brings together insights from agrarian studies, political ecology, and legal anthropology. Plots and Deeds is his first book.