RACE AND THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE

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What role does the issue of race play in understanding the question of Palestine? Drawing on a book of that title edited by the main speaker Lana Tatour (with Ronit Lentin), this event focuses on the colonisation of Palestine as something which – like other imperial and colonial projects – cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Race is the great unspoken in the field, yet it operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, and above all as set of legal and discursive practices. The law’s coercive power in Palestine draws its strength from, and is made sense of by, an understanding of the operation of race.

Speaker

Lana Tatour is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of New South Wales, and an Associate at the Australian Human Rights Institute. She is a scholar of settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, and citizenship, with a focus on Palestine. Her coedited book, Race and the Question of Palestine was published in 2025 with Stanford University Press. She is currently completing her monograph, Colonized Citizens: Liberalism, Settler Colonialism, and Palestinian resistance.

Discussants

Neve Gordon Professor of International Law and Human Rights at Queen Mary University; Vice-President of the British Society for Middle East Studies
Ayça Cubukcu Associate Professor in Human Rights at LSE; formerly Co-Director of LSE Human Rights
Ralph Wilde Professor of International Law, UCL

Chair

Dr Luke McDonagh

Organised by Professor Conor Gearty