Book talk: Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States – Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine
Wednesday 26 November, 15:00 – 16:30
Jubilee 155, University of Sussex
Join us for a conversation with Dr Emile Badarin (University of Exeter) about his new book Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine (Bloomsbury, 2025). The discussion will be chaired by Professor Alan Lester (Geography, School of Global Studies).
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 often been understood as an asset sought by Indigenous communities. This book offers a new, theoretically ground-breaking perspective. Emile Badarin demonstrates that in colonial contexts, settlers use recognition to legitimise and normalise the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples. 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.
The book critically examines 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 to advance both settler colonialism in Palestine and Israel’s recognition on the international stage.
Finally, the book explores Indigenous resistance to colonial recognition politics through the Palestinian practice of sumud (steadfastness), highlighting its philosophy of liberation as a pathway towards a decolonial future for all in Palestine and beyond.
Dr Badarin holds a PhD in Middle East politics from the University of Exeter. His research spans international relations, Middle East politics, colonialism and coloniality, the Question of Palestine and recognition politics. He has published widely in leading international journals, and is also the author of Palestinian Political Discourse: Between Exile and Occupation (2016).
You can read more about Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States on the Bloomsbury website.
This event forms part of the Palestine Interdisciplinary Dialogues series.
All are welcome.