Broken Subjects: Ireland, Palestine, and the Colonial Origins of Juridical Lawfare
This postdoctoral project traces how Ireland became a laboratory for British imperial emergency law, coercive policing, and colonial bureaucracy, and investigates how these juridical technologies subsequently circulated across the empire. Focusing on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I examine connections between practices developed under British rule in Ireland and Mandate Palestine, distinguishing direct transfer, adaptation, and structural correspondence. I then trace how emergency laws and administrative practices were retained and transformed after 1948.
The project also follows circulation in the other direction, examining connections between Irish, early Zionist and Palestinian anti-colonial movements and solidarities forged through histories of dispossession and resistance. Combining archival research, legal-historical analysis, and political theory, Broken Subjects reconstructs colonial and resistant ideas across Ireland and Palestine, including their contemporary mobilisation within nationalist/republican and unionist/loyalist political cultures in Northern Ireland, revealing how imperial legal architectures travelled, changed, were resisted and acquired afterlives across distinct political formations.
