Badarin, E. (Forthcoming). Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalising Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine (I.B. Tauris, Bloomsbury: London)
This book offers a critical contribution to understanding how recognition operates at international and domestic fronts, to legitimize long-standing colonial power structures, which is the same pattern utilized to enable and legitimize settler-colonial elimination of colonized indigenous peoples. Given the embeddedness of recognition within colonial structures, this book moves between and infuses distant and present times, places, contexts and fields of study to explain how colonial recognition has operated since the invasion of Abya Yala in 1492 to the present settler-colonization of Palestine. Contrary to conventional notions of recognition as a mutual process leading to emancipation, the book shows how recognition has been wielded by colonial states to dispossess and transform the colonized.
The grammar of recognition in colonial situations stems from European modern/colonial power relations, which render recognition politics and struggles as mediums for subjugating and transforming colonized peoples and landscapes. Colonial transformation is a graded phenomenon. At one end, transformation manifests in the destruction of indigenous metaphysics – their traditions, spirituality, institutions, economies and languages. At the other end lies physical destruction, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Dwelling on the empirical case of Palestine-Israel, a prime example of an active frontier settler-colonialism, the book lays bare the thought structure of the settler-colonial recognition politics and its eliminatory nature in everyday life. Equally significant, the book delves into indigenous normative resistance. Here, it examines the Palestinian praxis of ṣumūd (steadfastness) excavates its decolonial philosophy and uses it to construct a decolonial vision and future.