IAS Book Launch: Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States

ABOUT THE EVENT

Using Palestine as a case study, Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine shows how recognition politics operate to legitimize long-standing colonial power structures. In existing scholarship, recognition has been seen as an asset coveted by indigenous communities. This book forwards a new, theoretically ground-breaking perspective. The book provides in-depth critical analysis of liberal recognition politics and shows how recognition can be a tool for elimination. In colonial contexts, settlers use recognition to legitimize and normalize the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people. More than this, settler colonial states themselves actively pursue recognition, employing it as a means to further the elimination of the indigenous societies they seek to replace.

In making the case, the book critically examines the Euromodern categories of race, racism and racial hierarchies and draws new conclusions about the interplay between colonialism, racism and Zionism. Central to this analysis is how anti-Zionism has been strategically equated with anti-Semitism, and effectively used as a tool for the advancement of both settler colonialism in Palestine and Israel’s recognition politics on the international stage. The book delves into indigenous normative resistance against colonial recognition politics through the lens of the Palestinian practice of ṣumūd (steadfastness), extracting its philosophy of liberation as a pathway towards a decolonial future for all in Palestine and beyond.

Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine is published by I. B. Tauris, Bloomsbury.

ABOUT THE EVENT

Emile Badarin will present his book and afterwards be in conversation with respondents. Names will be confirmed closer to the event.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emile Badarin holds a PhD in Middle East politics from the University of Exeter. His research cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of international relations, Middle East politics, colonialism and coloniality and the Question of Palestine. He has published widely on these topics in impactful international journals. He is the author of Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine (June 2025) and Palestinian Political Discourse: Between Exile and Occupation (2016).