Zeina Jallad (American University of Beirut): The Death of Sovereignty: Palestine and the Economies of Erasure

About the Speaker
Dr. Zeina Jallad is the Director of the Palestine Land Studies Center and Assistant Professor of International Law at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She serves as Senior Legal Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and sits on the Board of Trustees at Birzeit University. Her research lies at the intersection of international law, political economy, and decolonial thought, with a focus on Palestine, sovereignty, and land. She previously led legal reform and human rights programs across the MENA region and has held fellowships at Harvard, Columbia, and NYU Law Schools. Dr. Jallad holds a J.S.D. from Columbia Law School (Summa Cum Laude) and an LL.M. from Columbia University. Her current work examines the structural violence embedded in legal and economic architectures that sustain colonial domination and the erasure of sovereignty.

About the Topic
This lecture examines the death of sovereignty as a legal fiction and material reality under conditions of occupation and genocide. Drawing on the Palestinian experience, it traces how international law and economic governance, through the Paris Protocol, aid regimes, and border control, reproduce colonial domination in the language of development and cooperation. Attending to land rights and property relations, the lecture situates private law as central to the production of power asymmetries and material dispossession. These intersecting architectures of law and economy sustain what may be called economic apartheid: a mode of control that replaces territorial conquest with dependency and bureaucratized violence. Together, they produce structural vulnerabilities that help explain the rapid onset of starvation in Gaza. From a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) perspective, the lecture interrogates how the promise of sovereignty itself becomes a vehicle of erasure, compelling a rethinking of liberation beyond the state.

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