| dc.description.abstract | The city of Rawabi is a hybrid phenomenon. At once a real estate project, capitalist venture, and urban space, its construction raises interrogatives about contemporary configurations of Palestine’s settler colonial geography and political economy. Existing literature on Rawabi has so far analysed the project in relation to neoliberal capital and Palestinian state-building. This thesis expands on existing approaches by engaging with settler colonial theory and theories of recognition.
When analysed through the lens of settler colonial theory, which emphasises the geographical expansion of settler polities at the cost of the contraction and confinement of Indigenous space, Rawabi appears as an anomaly in Palestine’s settler colonial landscape. The aim of this thesis is to deconstruct Rawabi’s anomality and assess the role of the project in shaping settler-Indigenous relations in Palestine. It does so by introducing a class perspective to the study of settler colonial structures, which highlights the role of Indigenous capitalist classes in the (re)production of a colonial politics of recognition.
Through an analysis of three dimensions of the Rawabi project – planning, architecture, and city-branding narratives – this thesis investigates the political implications of the reproduction of ideology in and through Rawabi. It argues that Rawabi’s narrative, which disguises neoliberal development as an instrument for achieving national self-determination, is at its core a mechanism of ideological interpellation that reproduces settler colonial relations and subjectivities.
The thesis thus intervenes not only in theoretical debates within settler colonial studies, by advancing a class approach to existing theorisations of Indigenous agency, but also in conversations on the present and future of the Palestinian national movement and prospects for decolonisation. | en_GB |
