« Settler colonialism is disabling: Amanie Issa, ‘Beyond the Body Count: Gender, Disability, and the Settler Colonial Logic of Genocide in Gaza’, Violence and Genocide Research, 2026

The incomplete state of the settler colonial state: Ahmed Nabwy, ‘Architecture of hegemony: Israel as a colonial outpost and deferred statehood in the Middle East’, Third World Quarterly, 2026

21Sep26

Abstract: This article argues that the Middle East’s incomplete state-building is not merely due to cultural or institutional ‘failure’. Instead, it results from an external architecture of hegemony, organised around Israel as an advanced colonial outpost. By combining neo-colonial theory, Agamben’s state of exception, securitisation theory and settler-colonial studies, it develops the concept of ‘deferred statehood’. This describes a condition in which the region’s states exist but are structurally prevented from consolidating. The paper shows how permanent emergency, security-driven governance and fragmented sovereignty are reproduced through Western backing for Israel’s qualitative military edge and exceptional diplomatic status. Israel acts as a hegemonic metronome, dictating a tempo of crisis that structures regional political time and obstructs democratic consolidation. In this reading, the region is not ‘lagging behind’ modernity. It is held in suspension by a system that requires its unfinishedness.


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