LCIL Friday Lecture: 'Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev' - Alexandre Kedar - CANCELLED

Unfortunately, due to industrial action, this event has now been cancelled. We will update this website and our social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, once we find an alternative date in the near future. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Professor Kedar will present his book Emptied Lands (co-authored with Amara and Yiftachel). Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international- comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the “dead Negev doctrine” used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state. Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice.

Professor Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar teaches at the Law School at the University of Haifa. He holds a Doctorate in Law (S.J.D) from Harvard Law School. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School as well as a Grotius International Law Visiting Scholar there and a visiting associate professor at the Frankel Institute for Judaic studies in the University of Michigan. His research focuses on legal geography, legal history, law and society and land regimes in settler societies and in Israel. He served as the President of the Israeli Law and Society Association, is the co-coordinator of the Legal Geography CRN of the Law and Society Association and a member of its international committee. He is the co-founder (in 2003) and director of the Association for Distributive Justice, an Israeli NGO addressing these issues.

Among his recent publications: "Dignity Takings and Dispossession in Israel" Law and Social Inquiry (2016); “Between Rights and Denials: Bedouin Indigeneity in the Negev/Naqab,” Batia Roded, Oren Yiftachel, Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar Environment and Planning A, Vol. 48, pp. 2129-2161 (2016); “The Development Authority and the Formative Years of the Israeli Land Regime,” Ela Trachtenberg, Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar and Deborah Shmueli, in Journal of Israeli History, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 215-243, published online: Nov 2016; “The Reflection of The Israeli ‘Incorporation Regime’ The Land Allocation Institution in Israel’s Urban Area, 1950-1960,” Ela Trachtenberg, Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar and Deborah Shmueli, Middle Eastern Studies (2017). He is the co-editor, with Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley and David Delaney of The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press, 2014) in which his "Expanding Legal Geographies: A Call for a Critical Comparative Approach" was published as well as a co-written introductory chapter, "Expanding the Spaces of Law: An Introduction." Kedar has just finished co-writing with Amara and Yiftachel a book titled Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev,  (Stanford University Press, 2018.)

Further details on "Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev"

Professor Kedar has recently been awarded an Israeli Science Foundation research grant for the next four years on The Land Regime of the Territories Occupied by Israel: A Legal Geography of The West Bank, 1967-2017 and is working on a book and several articles on this subject.

A sandwich lunch is available for all attendees from 12.30 pm in the Old Library.

The Lauterpacht Centre Friday lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press

Numbers are limited so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Please note the lecture programme is subject to revision without notice.