The political economies of settler colonialism: Surbhi Kesar, Don Goldstein, ‘Introduction to the Symposium on Political Economy of Occupation, Colonialism, and Conflict in Palestine’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The political economies of settler colonialism: Surbhi Kesar, Don Goldstein, ‘Introduction to the Symposium on Political Economy of Occupation, Colonialism, and Conflict in Palestine’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 2025

13May25

Excerpt: The discipline of economics and the subdiscipline of political economy have managed to, for the most part, distance themselves from studying the issue of occupation, colonialism, and conflict in Palestine. This engagement is aimed to remedy that. We consider such an engagement crucial for two reasons. On one hand, by way of this intervention, we are adding a speck to the brave and varied voices of resistance in the academic community to Israel’s violent onslaught on Palestine. The response has ranged from students occupying university spaces in asserting their right to protest and resist and calling for their universities to divest from the Israeli institutions complicit in genocide, to unions organizing and calling for action against scholasticide in Palestine, to students and academics organizing teach-outs to educate those around us about the historic forms of colonialism and the ongoing system of apartheid in Palestine. This has also led to a reckoning for many academics about how our own social positions might be implicated within global imperialism and continuing forms of colonial domination. It is not surprising that as radical political economists we consider this reckoning seriously. In the first issue of this journal, Weeks (1969) argues that economists are very much implicated within the status quo and are a part of the elite that gain from the way the system is structured, which makes it unsurprising that few utilize their tools to challenge it. In contrast, the mandate of radical political economics is to utilize and construct frameworks and tools geared toward systematically questioning and critiquing the contemporary economic structure, whose very dynamics are inherent with conditions for generating economic and social inequalities (Resnick and Wolff 1987). A failure to intervene in this current moment—which is probably the most destabilizing and politically charged one in the last few decades—would be a failure of the radical political economy project. On the other hand, this intervention is directed internally towards our academy in order to chisel space for engaging with some crucial questions about processes of racialization, colonialism, and dispossession that have underpinned capitalism’s expansion—dimensions that many political economy frameworks based on Western imaginations of capitalism have often considered peripheral. This is not a new critique levied against such frameworks. Over time, many debates have emerged to expand or reformulate the frameworks to include these “peripheral” dimensions. These include incorporating forms of structural domination, such as processes of identity, including gender and race, as mutually co-constitutive of capitalist class exploitation (see, e.g., interventions from Marxist-feminist scholars such as Matthaei 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996; Federici 2004). Another important dimension has been to incorporate colonialism as a central feature of development of global capitalism, along with the contemporary role of imperialism in shaping economies today (Luxemburg (1913) 1951; Lenin 1937; Rodney [1972] 2018; Amin 1974; Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Recent calls have pushed this forward to identify the specific dynamics of postcolonial economies, marked by dispossession without proletarianization, that cannot simply be analyzed as underdeveloped versions of advanced capitalist economies of today, but rather characterize the very dynamics of postcolonial capitalism (Sanyal 2013). These debates have challenged the Western-centric approaches to political economy and have, in response, reformulated and further developed the radical political economy frameworks. This project takes on new urgency in the wake of this moment.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed