Silicon Palestine: Antti Tarvainen, Silicon Palestine: An Inquiry into the Entanglements of Innovation and Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, Univesrity of Helsinki, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Silicon Palestine: Antti Tarvainen, Silicon Palestine: An Inquiry into the Entanglements of Innovation and Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, Univesrity of Helsinki, 2025

11May25

Abstract: ‘New worlds’ and new beginnings populate the dreams of both innovation and settler colonialism. In this dissertation I examine how innovation economy is made in entanglement with settler colonial expansions and struggles. The thesis takes place in ‘Silicon Palestine’: the shifting frontiers of technological innovation and risk capital that bring Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and spaces like San Francisco and Dubai into interplay. ‘Innovation’ appears in this dissertation not as a universal economic form but as a site of political struggle and creativity. Innovation is a gathering of heterogenous and contradictory forces, actors and imaginaries in which the purity of settler colonialism and capitalism is lost. The conceptual framework of the thesis bridges settler colonial and relational theory. Through the perspective of ‘entanglements’ — a relation that is not determined but inherently dynamic and heterogenous — I examine the relations between settler colonialism and innovation economy through four analytical lenses: political myth, temporality, spatiality, and embodiments. The research material is collected through an explorative and ethnographic research design between 2019 and 2023, during a total of 13 months of fieldwork in the urban spaces of innovation. Most data come from the Palestinian occupied territories: Ramallah, Rawabi, and East Jerusalem – but also from places such as Tel Aviv/Jaffa and San Francisco. Key materials include 140 interviews with Israeli and Palestinian innovation elites, photographs and fieldnotes from innovation hubs, and popular innovation literature. The empirical chapters interrogate the entanglements of innovation and settler colonialism in their various constellations ranging from histories to political myths, from urbanities to practices of tech-outsourcing, and from peace- to genocidal war-making. The work contributes to discussions on the relationships between settler colonialism and global capitalism, the critical analyses of innovation, and the global approaches on Palestine/Israel. Two key arguments are central to the work. First, Silicon Palestine shows that the settler colonial state plays a defining role in the global constitution of innovation economy. The study decenters both the neoliberal and the techno-universalist notions of violence to make space for a more colonially informed reading. Second, Silicon Palestine productively destabilises both the categories of ‘innovation’ and ‘settler colonialism’ by departing from the unidirectional dramas of capitalist expansion and the contained geographies and binaries of settler colonialism. Rather than a periphery or a passive object of capitalist and settler colonial expansion, Palestine emerges as a crucial site of global theory. Silicon Palestine shows power in its violence and in its irresolvable heterogeneity and fragility.

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