Paul Kohlbry, "Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Mar 20, 2026

Paul Kohlbry, Assistant Professor of Global Studies and anthropologist focused on agrarian studies, explores agrarian annihilation and the fight for land justice in Palestine. He discusses the shift from peasant farming to real estate, how property can both dispossess and defend, reclamation and experimental farms, gendered land injustices, and the role of international solidarity.

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INSIGHT

Agrarian Annihilation Combines Violence And Markets

Agrarian annihilation captures fast coercive violence (bulldozers, wells) and slow market-driven pressures (wages, rising land prices) that together destroy agrarian life.
Kohlbry links Israeli legal regimes and Palestinian real estate to ecological loss like crop decline and olive monoculture.

ANECDOTE

Harab Reveals Competing Stories About Ruined Land

Kohlbry recounts how villagers used the term harab to describe neglected terraces and olive groves, revealing competing narratives about responsibility and ruin.
Developers read ruined land as neglect and bought plots, while villagers saw opportunities for reclamation and defense.

ANECDOTE

Experimental Farm Turned Ruined Hill Into Community Asset

In Barqa an abandoned rocky hillside transformed into an experimental agroecological farm used for subsistence, market sales, and trainings.
The farm hosted school visits and embodied reclamation via present labor rather than nostalgia alone.

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The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland.

Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible.

Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.

Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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