Omar Jabary Salamanca

Topics of Interest:
Urban Studies, Settler Colonialism, Political Economy, Development, Middle
East politics, Infrastructure, Urban Political Ecology, Materiality, Social
Movements and Film and audio-visual arts.

Countries/Regions of Interest:
​Palestine/Israel, Middle East, Colonial and Postcolonial States.

List of Publications
*Special Issues *

2016 | Special Feature. with Linda Tabar. “After Oslo: Settler Colonialism,
Neoliberal Development and Decolonization”. Journal of Palestine Studies
(forthcoming)

2012 | Special Issue. Guest edited with Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie and Sobhi
Samour, “Past is present: Settler colonialism in Palestine” in Settler
Colonial Studies, 2(1)

*Peer-reviewed papers*

2016 | “When settler colonialism becomes ‘development’: ‘fabric of life’
roads and the spatialities of development in the Palestinian West Bank”.
Journal of Palestine Studies (forthcoming)

2011 | “Unplug and play: manufacturing collapse in Gaza” Human Geography,
4(1):22-37

2011 | “In the midst of the Arab uprisings. Notes on the Palestinian
anti-colonial struggle” Sampol, 6(11):25-41 (in Dutch)

2009 | “Gated-Entrepreneurialism in Palestine” Agora, 25(2):21-24 (in
Dutch)

2007 | “The Madrid Conference: Translating the One-State Slogan into
Research and Political Action Agendas” The Arab World Geographer, 10(1):1–24

*Book chapters*

2014 | “Road 443: cementing dispossession, normalizing segregation and
disrupting everyday life” in Infracity: The materiality of everyday life,
edited by McFarlane, C. & Graham, S. Routledge.

2012 | with Sigrid Vertommen “One swallow does not make the Palestinian
spring” in The Arab Revolution” EPO Books (in Dutch)

*Book Reviews*

2016 | Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear by Nadera
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, International Journal of Middle East Studies
(forthcoming)

2015 | Locating Urban Conflicts Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday by
Wendy Pullan and Brit Baillie, Journal of Palestine Studies (forthcoming)

2013 | The least of all possible evils: humanitarian violence from Arendt
to Gaza by Eyal Weizman, Antipode

*Interviews*

2015 | with Nasser Aburahme. “Reading political economy and socio-political
histories materially with Timothy Mitchell” Jadaliyya.

Omar Jabary Salamanca is an urban geographer and Marie Curie Postdoc fellow currently based at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is also affiliated to the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at Ghent University. His work lies at the intersection of urban studies, settler colonialism, political economy and Middle East studies. Drawing on the histories and geographies of road and electricity infrastructure in Palestine, his dissertation examined the ways these socio-technical networks are constructed, imagined and governed but also how they are experienced and contested. Currently he is revising his dissertation into a book manuscript. Recent work considers colonial and post-colonial geographies of infrastructure, settler urbanism, theories of socio-materiality, urban political ecology, energy politics as well as social movements and resistance. Omar has published several scholarly articles, books chapters and edited compilations on themes related to urban infrastructures, settler colonialism, development and politics. He is editorial board member of the journal Antipode, contributor to the Jadaliyya Cities Page Network, member of the steering committee of the International Critical Geography Group, and programmer for Eye On Palestine Arts and Film Festival and Palestine Cuts series.