Paul Kohlbry

Topics of Interest:
Land Registration, Private Property, Surveying and Mapping, Settler Colonialism, Land Markets, Agrarian Change 

Countries/Regions of Interest:
Israel/Palestine, Jordan, North America

List of Publications

Book Reviews:
“Accounting for the Occupation: A Review of The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression beyond Exploitation by Shir Hever.” Historical Materialism. 24.3: 206 – 216. 
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“Review Essay: Carbon Democracy and Rule of Experts.” Dialectical Anthropology. 37.3 (2013): 477 – 489.

​Paul is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University. He is currently completing a dissertation on the institution of private property in the West Bank, based on archival and ethnographic research of land registration initiatives: Jordanian land tilting in the 1950s and 1960s, Israeli state land surveys, "first registration" undertaken by private Israeli and Palestinian real estate companies, and contemporary Palestinian Authority land titling projects. Focusing on rural lands, his work tracks the changing legal, practical and technical understandings of private property; the material relations it has facilitated; and the role it has played in the political and economic projects of settlers, cultivators and capitalists. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Palestinian American Research Center.