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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 of agrarian life, discusses land as home, property, territory, and homeland. He traces agrarian annihilation in the West Bank, legal and market pressures on peasant farming, ruined land and reclamation projects, property as both tool of conquest and defense, and gendered inheritance and land-for-tillers claims.

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INSIGHT

Agrarian Annihilation Connects Violence And Markets

Agrarian Annihilation Links Rapid Coercive Violence With Slow Market Pressures to erase agrarian life.
Kohlbry connects bulldozers, legal dispossession, wage labor in Israel, and rising land prices as converging forces degrading ecology and peasant livelihoods.

ANECDOTE

Harab Landscapes Tell Competing Stories

Villagers labeled neglected plots harab and offered competing narratives: personal failure, reclamation opportunity, or evidence for developers to buy.
Kohlbry observed surveyors, owners, and developers use 'ruined land' to justify sales or mobilize return projects.

ANECDOTE

Experimental Farm Reclaimed A Ruined Plot

A ruined rocky plot outside Barja became an experimental agroecological farm used for training, school visits, and market sales.
Kohlbry returned years later to find the site transformed into a communal learning-and-production space tied to land defense.

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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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