Book Launch of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel

Join us for the launch of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel: The Promise of Decolonial Sovereignties, a groundbreaking new book by Dr. Muhannad Ayyash. This event will feature a talk by the author followed by a virtual discussion with renowned scholar Prof. Nahla Abdo.

This interdisciplinary book offers a timely and fresh perspective on Palestine-Israel by rethinking the nature of settler-colonial sovereignty and the relationship between land and people. Muhannad Ayyash argues that this relationship exists in two distinct forms: a settler-colonial type, practiced by the Israeli state, which consists of “lordship” over land and people, and a decolonial type, evident in Palestinian popular organizing, that he calls “land as life,” a reciprocal bond. The former is characterized by private ownership, possession, and violent expulsion of others; the latter by communal ownership, belonging to the land, and opposition to the violence of expulsion.

Ranging widely across theory and history, Ayyash contends that the opposition between these two types is at the core of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. The choice before us today, he concludes, is between the continuation of the Israeli settler-colonial project in particular and the project of colonial modernity in general, or the commencement of a decolonial age in Palestine-Israel and beyond. Offering both novel theorizations and politically engaged analysis, Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel illuminates how decolonial sovereignties represent an alternative to settler-colonial violence.

Speakers

Dr. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada, where he is a Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel (Columbia University Press, 2025) and A Hermeneutics of Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2019). He has published over twenty journal articles and book chapters on topics such as political violence, Zionism and colonial modernity, settler colonial sovereignty, anti-Palestinian racism, BDS, and Palestinian decolonial movements in journals including the European Journal of Social Theory, Critical Sociology, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Middle East Critique. He has co-edited two books; the most recent, with Jeremy Wildeman, is titled "Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine" (University of Alberta Press, 2023). He has written over fifty commentaries, policy analyses, and opinion pieces for Al-Jazeera, The Baffler, Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, Arab Center, and Al-Shabaka, among others.

Dr. Nahla Abdo

Professor Abdo uses an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist feminist approach to highlight the profoundly gendered nature of colonialism. With a focus on Palestine and Palestinian women, Professor Abdo’s research underlines the intersectionality of gender, race, class, sexuality, and the state. Anti-colonial feminism, it is argued, is the way to challenge and resist settler colonialism.