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

Mar 20, 2026

Paul Kohlbry, an anthropologist and UCSB professor who studies agrarian politics, discusses Palestinian land as home, property, territory, and homeland. He explores agrarian annihilation, contrasts fast and slow violences, and examines how titling, property, and reclamation shape rural life. Conversations cover gendered inheritance, commodification, and strategies for land defense and regeneration.

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INSIGHT

Agrarian Annihilation Links Violence And Markets

Agrarian annihilation links fast, visible state violence with slow market and ecological pressures that together destroy agrarian life.
Kohlbry pairs bulldozers and cemented wells with rising wages, land prices, crop loss, and olive monoculture to show convergence.

ANECDOTE

Harab As Material And Moral Ruin

The Arabic term harab captures ruined land as both material decay and contested moral history in Palestinian villages.
Kohlbry recounts walking fields with surveyors and hearing residents narrate abandonment, blame, reclamation, and real estate opportunities.

ANECDOTE

Barca's Experimental Agroecology Reclamation

Barca transformed a patch of 'ruined' land into an agroecological experimental farm used for subsistence, market sales, and community trainings.
The site hosts school visits and farmer exchanges, showing reclamation through present labor despite uphill challenges.

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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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