Settler colonial embeddedness: Joseph Rafael Kaplan Weinger, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Colonial Settlement, Splintered Sovereignty, and the Making of an Injurious Alliance, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial embeddedness: Joseph Rafael Kaplan Weinger, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Colonial Settlement, Splintered Sovereignty, and the Making of an Injurious Alliance, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: This dissertation develops a sociological account of colonial settlement by examining the historical formation and contemporary operation of the Israeli settler–state compact in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It asks how political projects that instrumentalize violence are carried out when the actors who advance them occupy disparate social and institutional locations, and how variable coordination shapes outcomes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Occupied West Bank among Israeli settlers, soldiers, state and military officials, and Palestinians living in the rural frontiers of Areas B and C, alongside semi-structured interviews and extensive archival research, the study reconstructs the processes through which territorial expansion and coercive governance are produced through interaction. The dissertation advances a theory of colonial embeddedness to capture the historically produced entanglement of state institutions and settler networks in the joint exercise of rule. Rather than treating settler–state alignment as given, it shows how this relationship is assembled through contingent yet patterned processes, including path-dependent institutional repertoires, learning through diffusion and adaptation, institutional transformation, and the empowerment of extra-state actors. These processes redistribute coercive capacity across formal and informal actors, producing what the study terms splintered sovereignty: a governing arrangement in which domination is delegated and unevenly coordinated. Empirically, the dissertation traces the evolution of Zionist settlement from its late-Ottoman and Mandate-era foundations through the territorial reconfigurations of 1948 and 1967 and into the contemporary West Bank. It argues that war functions as a critical juncture that reorganizes the conditions under which colonization proceeds, opening space for actors to reconfigure territorial rule and set durable trajectories of expansion. Colonial violence emerges through relational mechanisms: settler actors deploy territorial and vigilante violence and, together with state actors, give rise to deprivation, predation, constraints on social reproduction, and manipulations of futurity. Their articulation is mediated through mechanisms such as social appropriation, entryism, bureaucratic forbearance, and role collapse, which blur the boundary between state and non-state authority. Palestinian contention, in turn, reshapes these dynamics by delaying, disrupting, exposing, and possibly entrenching practices of domination. By foregrounding process over teleology, the dissertation shows that dispossession and displacement arise from shifting configurations of embedded rule. In so doing, it contributes to sociological debates on state formation, the organization of political violence, and the nature of colonial rule.

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