Dr Dr Noam Leshem

My work documents violent conflicts and their aftermath, specifically addressing how these events remake the relations between the state and those subjected to it. I have written extensively on settler colonial space and the violent transformations of Indigenous landscapes. This is the subject of my first book, Life After Ruin (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the focus of my current research on the agency of displaced Palestinian communities in determining the fate of excavated cultural heritage under ongoing conditions of settler colonial dispossession.

My forthcoming book, Edges of Care (Chicago University Press, 2024) offers a political history of No Man’s Land. Based on nearly a decade of field and archival research, the book is a granular account of life under conditions of extreme sovereign abandonment. Particular attention is dedicated to the Middle East, where entire regions have been subjected to systemic deprivation and confinement. Through extensive ethnographic work in Palestine and Syria, the book grapples with the ways contemporary siege is more than a form of extreme punishment. Instead, I argue that these spaces radically redefine the very logic of sovereign care.