This Kashmir-Palestine Conversation examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after the empire. Drawing from Dr Yael Berda’s book of the same name, this webinar explores how post-colonial states use their inherited administrative legacies to classify and distinguish between loyal and suspicious subjects and manage the movement of populations, thus shaping the practical meaning of citizenship and belonging within their new boundaries. Berda’s research offers a novel institutional theory of ‘hybrid bureaucracy’ to explain how racialized bureaucratic practices were used by powerful administrators in state organizations to shape the making of political identity and belonging in the new states. Combining sociology and anthropology of the state with the study of institutions, this book offers new knowledge to overturn conventional understandings of bureaucracy, demonstrating that routine bureaucratic practices and persistent colonial logics continue to shape unequal political status to this day.
This event will take place on Tuesday 14 February 2023, at 5.00 pm Jerusalem time; 3.00 pm UK time.
To register to attend this webinar, please register here.
The event will also be made available on CBRL’s YouTube channel.
About the speaker
Dr. Yael Berda is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University and was an Academy Scholar for International and Area Studies at Harvard University from 2019-2021. She received her PhD from Princeton University; her MA from Tel Aviv University, and her LLB from the Hebrew University Faculty of Law. She was a practising Human Rights lawyer, representing clients in Israel’s Military, District and Supreme courts. Her latest book is Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is also the author of Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the West Bank (Stanford University Press, 2017).