Global Studies Annual Lecture

Dr. Paul Kohlbry

Assistant Professor, University of California–Santa Barbara 

What can property teach us about Palestine, and what can Palestine teach us about property? This talk will explore how settler colonialism separates property from property relations. By telling the stories of how property is woven into the lives of Palestinian refugees, surveyors, lawyers, women, and villagers, it examines the collapse of the boundary between “social” and “national” questions, the ways that liberal norms have become embedded in anti-colonial politics, and whether, at a time of seemingly lawless paramilitary plunder and genocidal war, critiques of law and property still matter at all.

Paul Kohlbry's research brings together critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and legal anthropology. Since 2013 he has carried out archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle East, primarily in Palestine and Israel. His scholarship has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and others. He is the author of Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford, 2026).