Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Israeli colonial herding in the occupied West Bank, where animals—sheep, goats, and cows—are deployed as instruments of frontier expansion. It explores how this practice appropriates, instrumentalizes, and weaponizes indigenous pastoral traditions to eliminate Palestinian life.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the emergent phenomenon of Israeli colonial herding outposts in the occupied West Bank, whereby animals – sheep, goats and cows – are deployed as a method for frontier expansion. Specifically, the paper interrogates the ways in which colonial herding operates through appropriation, instrumentalization, and weaponization of indigenous pastoral practices and animal bodies as means to erase and replace Palestinian life and lifeways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Palestinian shepherding communities at the forefront of frontier violence and drawing on theorizations across the fields of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and political geography and ecology, the paper unravels the logics underlying colonial herding and the eliminatory geographies it produces. It argues that colonial herding responds to settler-capitalist logics that transform animals into ‘colonial subjects’ whose mobility is weaponized and instrumentalized drawing an elastic and expansive frontier – a wandering frontier. The paper concludes with Palestinian pastoralist resistances to colonial herding, spotlighting decolonial openings through positioning Al-Ard (the land) as a relational, symbiotic and grounded site of Indigenous struggle and knowledge production.