Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow
Academic Year 2023-24
Ali H. Musleh is a researcher at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and alternative futures.
Ali H. Musleh will be working on his first book project, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life. What happens when the settler-colonial encounter becomes largely an encounter with machines? What are the embodied, spatial and perceptual spheres of experience that emerge from mediating Palestinian and Israeli life within these automating enclosures? Rather than treat these weapons as novelties, the book takes Palestinians’ forms of insurgent study seriously as they encounter settlers as contingent and transitory human-weapon assemblages that shape colonial society at the broadest and most intimate levels. Through their embodied studies of the everyday, Palestinians reveal and unravel the spatial embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, and regimes of truth these human-weapon assemblages enact as lived world(s) of experience. Following Indigenous studies that treat Native practice as theory generation, this book contributes to studies of Palestine and settler colonialism by heeding Palestinian encounters with war that put into question the givenness of the settler and the settler state while provoking us to consider weapons as critical points of inquiry into the mobile martial phenomenon that is settler colonialism.
