PhD research on Palestinian resistance in the village of Ni'lin

The paper is based on his PhD research which focuses on Palestinian resistance in the village of Ni'lin; a frontier for Israeli settlement expansion and an area where the Israeli separation wall had been constructed. With different waves and forms of land confiscation, fragmentation having led to the separation of people from their ancestral land, Imad's research focuses on people's experiences in resisting the transformations they are confronted with as a result of the settler-colonial encounter. The paper specifically deals with the narration of different time periods, the imposition of colonial borders, and how people remap the changing landscapes through reasserting indigenous truths and histories that do not need any outside legitimisation. The paper was presented at the panel entitled Global Palestine which was organized by Klaudia Rottenschlager and Imad Sayrafi.

Imad Sayrafi is a researcher at the Center for Development Studies at Birzeit University in the Westbank. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Development Studies in the University of Vienna focusing on resistance strategies and economic transformation in rural Palestine. He is an APPEAR scholarship holder within the project “Rooting Development within the Palestinian Context | ROOTDEVPAL”. He also holds a master’s degree in Gender and Development Studies from Birzeit University.