Plots and Deeds

Paul Kohlbry's Plots and Deeds examines how state violence, legal regimes, and market pressures together produce an ongoing process of agrarian annihilation in the West Bank.

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the central highlands, the book traces how peasant labor, property practices, and land-defense traditions shape—and are reshaped by—processes of dispossession and real estate development.

Kohlbry foregrounds villagers' reclamation efforts and agroecological experiments as forms of resistance while critically assessing the limits of private-property–based strategies.

The book situates Palestinian agrarian struggles within broader global debates about primitive accumulation and land justice.

It offers a nuanced account of social, ecological, and legal entanglements that both threaten and sustain rural life under occupation.