Kareem Rabie
Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of Illinois, Chicago. His work focuses on privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited came out summer 2021 with Duke University Press. Kareem is beginning new work on the human geographies of Palestine/China trade; while on research leave this year, he is visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; and Committee on Globalization and Social Change. Previously he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS).
Collected Work
“Everywhere in the World There Is a Chinatown; in China There Is a Khaliltown”
Throughout the West Bank over the last twenty years, there has been discussion of the link between businessmen in Hebron (Khalil) and China, and hundreds have settled or travel there annually. This study combines ethnography in the West Bank and China with documentation of the process and progress of a container moving from Yiwu to the West Bank, and uncovers intertwined and global economic and social histories. Within and beyond Palestine and China, it asks: what does governance around circulation and movement look like? How does it inflect local social life, geography, and politics?
“On Israel’s Settler-Democratic Reform”
A lot of ink has been spilled during the recent months defining Netanyahu’s reform of Israel’s judiciary as an “assault on Israeli democracy” and a “judicial coup.” But a closer look at the political-legal agendas and historical development of some of the most ethno-nationalist sectors of the Israeli government reveals a more complicated relationship between the judicial overhaul, the Occupation, and Israel's settler democracy.
“Combined and Uneven Catastrophe”
A conversation with Joshua Craze on the shift in the Palestinian Authority’s politics away from an emphasis on acquiring sovereignty toward a focus on making markets and building up state-like institutions in the absence of statehood, examining how the current assault on Gaza and the intensification of violence in the West Bank is affecting about the combined and uneven spaces of Israeli colonization.