Wassim Ghantous

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Geography at the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), in the Administrative Studies department, Tampere University. I received my PhD (2020) in Peace and Development Research from the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In 2020 I started my postdoctoral fellowship at Tampere University, first as part of the project "Present-futures in/of Palestine", funded by the Academy of Finland (ended 2023), and since 2024 I am a researcher in, and co-administrate, the ERC funded project Dwelling in Crisis (lead by Dr. Mikko Joronen). In 2022, I spent an academic year as the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, New York. Previous to my academic career, I worked in several Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, most notably at the BADIL Resource Center and B’Tselem.

My academic engagement cuts across the fields of Political Geography and International Relations, focusing on questions of politics, (settler) coloniality, violence, surveillance, (in)security, and resistance, as they play out in the context of Palestine/Israel and beyond. In my PhD (2020) I explored the workings of Israeli regime of control in the occupied West Bank as it plays out through a settler colonial assemblage: of public, hybrid and civilian actors and their operations of various technologies of surveillance, confinement, and violence. I am in the process of converting my PhD dissertation into a book (tentatively) titled The Rise of the Israeli War Machine: Palestinians’ Encounters of Spectral Violence, Destructive Velocities, Intensive Elimination. 

At the same time, I am interested in the political economy of Israel’s regime of colonization which I scrutnize through the spatiotemporal dimensions of its unfolding. In this work I focus on the temporal dimension of Israeli settler-capitalist frontier expansions which appeared in my co-authored article on the acceleration of Israel settler colonialism titled Dromoelimination, as well on the transformations underwriting Israeli colonial expansion through processes of security privatization and outsourcing to Israeli settlers, hybrid and private security actors, published in my book chapter Encountering the Israeli War Machine. More recently, I engage the atmospheric dimensions and material unfolding of Israeli colonial policing and violence. Particularly I researched the workings of the Israeli invented Skunk Water technology, and the ways in which it works to colonize and inflict violence over Palestinian spaces, bodies, sensory and affective registers, as well the ways in which Palestinians develop micro-climates of refusal and resistance. This latter work was published in the co-authored articles Weathering Violence, and the forthcoming article Stench Atmospheres: Policing, Affect, and Colonial Boomeranging in Palestine/Israel (Security Dialogue).

More recently, I am developing new research in the field of political ecology of Palestine. This research revolves around Palestinian relations to nature and the more-than-human under Israeli settler colonialism in two sites: Palestinian pastoral communities and Palestinian permaculture farming collectives. Research into the first site, which is conducted together with Dana Massad, delves into indigenous Palestinian relations to shepherding and landscape vis a vis the new colonial phenomenon of settler herding outposts. In this work we are interested in understanding and unpacking the ways in which Israeli settlers intend to “indigenize” themselves through herding practices, and how they weaponize the more-than-human (sheep/cows/goats) as to become agents of colonial policing and expansion. This enquiry is juxtaposed to, and researched from the viewpoint of, Palestine pastoral communities, their relations to the more-than-human and ways of being in the world. Research into the second site explores the proliferating phenomenon of Palestinian farming collectives and focuses on the decolonial potentialities that they generate. The manifesting crises of climate change have made critical reflections on the relations between politics, coloniality, capitalism, and the natural environment more urgent and pertinent than ever. In the context of Israel’s colonial conquest of Palestine, such relations come to exhibit distinct modes of differentiation and destruction whereby capitalist logics of extraction and accumulation interweave with settler colonial logics of eliminating the native Palestinians, their landscapes, and their ways of being in the world. By merging permaculture principles (e.g., balance and interaction with environment, plant diversification, energy conservation, etc.) with the heritage of Palestinian farming techniques and culture. Through ethnographic research in some of these farming collectives, my work aims to generate and promote potential decolonial alternatives, ontological and practical, for new modes of being in, and thinking through, the natural environment. These modes have the capacity to help us counter and transcend broader modernist and colonial systems of signification clustered along notions of enclosures, monoculture, extraction, segregation, private property, homogeneity, nationhood, among others.

Political Geography, Critical Geography, Critical Theory, Deleuze and Guattari, Critical Security, Surveillance Studies, Settler Colonialism, War & Conflict, Geographical Theory and Methodology, Middle East (West Asia), Palestine/Israel.

Ghantous, W. & Joronen, M. & Shalhoub-Kevorkian N. (forthcoming). Stench Atmospheres: Policing, Affect, and Colonial Boomeranging in Palestine/Israel. Security Dialogue.

Joronen, M. & Ghantous, W. (2024). Weathering violence: Atmospheric materialities and olfactory durations of ‘skunk water’ in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 0(0).

Ghantous, W. & Joronen, M. (2022). Dromoelimination: Accelerating settler colonialism in Palestine. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40 (3): 393-412.

Ghantous, W. 2023. Encountering the Israeli War Machine: Imminent (In)security, Vortical Violence, Rhizomatic Sumud. In Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mikko Joronen & Mark Griffiths. University of Nebraska Press.