Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States – Dispossession & Elimination in Palestine

Описание: This video featured a conversation with Dr Emile Badarin from the University of Exeter about his book Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine published by Bloomsbury in 2025. The discussion was chaired by Professor Alan Lester from Geography in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex and formed part of the Palestine Interdisciplinary Dialogues series.

Using Palestine as a case study, the book showed how recognition politics have operated to legitimise and sustain long-standing colonial power structures. Rather than treating recognition as an asset primarily sought by Indigenous communities, Dr Badarin presented a new and theoretically ground-breaking perspective. He argued that in settler colonial contexts, recognition has been actively used by settlers and settler colonial states to normalise and legitimise the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonial states themselves were shown to pursue recognition as a political strategy, using it to further the replacement of Indigenous societies.

The discussion explored the book’s critical examination of Euromodern categories of race, racism and racial hierarchies, and the conclusions it drew about the relationship between colonialism, racism and Zionism. Central to this analysis was the strategic equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and how this has been used to advance settler colonialism in Palestine while supporting Israel’s recognition on the international stage.

The conversation also addressed Indigenous resistance to colonial recognition politics through the Palestinian practice of sumud, or steadfastness. This was presented as both a form of everyday resistance and a philosophy of liberation, pointing towards a decolonial future 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 published in 2016.

Further information about Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States was available on the Bloomsbury website.

This event was part of the Palestine Interdisciplinary Dialogues series at the University of Sussex.