Research Interests and Trajectory
Haifa’s research investigates how imperial law and settler-colonial governance reshape the foundations of sovereignty, legality, and political personhood. Working within postcolonial studies, political theory, and socio-legal analysis, her work examines how colonial regimes normalised exceptional forms of power—embedding emergency rule, racialisation, and bureaucratic domination into the ordinary structures of modern governance.
Her doctoral research developed the concept of the State of Inceptional Exception through the question of Palestine, read against the historical lens of empire. Rather than treating emergency powers as episodic departures from legal order, her work demonstrates how colonial legal frameworks institutionalised permanent exception as a foundational mode of rule. Drawing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and Giorgio Agamben, this research traces the imperial origins of contemporary regimes of sovereignty and state violence.
Haifa’s postdoctoral research extends this inquiry through a comparative study of Ireland and Palestine, examining how Britain’s earliest colony functioned as a laboratory for exceptional law, paramilitary policing, and colonial bureaucracy. Legal measures first entrenched in Ireland were later exported to imperial territories including Mandate Palestine, where they helped shape the legal architecture of the Israeli state. The project also traces the reciprocal circulation of anti-colonial strategies between Irish and Palestinian movements, illuminating how both imperial domination and resistance travelled across colonial worlds.
Education
PhD in Postcolonial Studies (2025)
University of Kent at Canterbury
School of Humanities; Centres for the Global Study of Empire and Colonial-Postcolonial Studies
Doctoral Thesis: The Holy Waste Land: Palestine and the Settler-Colonial State of Inceptional Exception
Supervisor: Dr Bashir Abu-Manneh
External Examiner: Dr Robert Spencer (University of Manchester)
Internal Examiner: Dr Maria Ridda
Kent Academic Repository: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/114027/
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7155-1200
