About

Noura Erakat is a Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is a legal scholar with research interests in humanitarian law, human rights law, critical race theory, national security law, and Palestinian Studies. She authored the book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. Erakat has published extensively, including over two dozen academic articles and book chapters in prominent journals such as the American Journal of International Law, American Quarterly, and the Oxford Bibliographies in International Law. Her work includes co-chairing an Independent Task Force on the Application of National Security Memorandum-20 to Israel, which documented violations of U.S. and international law related to U.S. arms to Israel. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya, an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies and Human Geography, and a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. Erakat has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee, Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center, and as a national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. She has produced video documentaries and her writings have appeared in major outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Al Jazeera. Erakat is a frequent media commentator and has completed fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and Brown University. In 2022, she was named a Freedom Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, and in 2025, she was named the Amnesty International Chair at the University of Ghent.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• History
• Law and economics
• Economics
• Criminology

Selected publications

• Settler colonialism

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-10-14

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• 3 Zionism as a Form of Racism

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2025-07-29 · 1 citations

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• Resisting the Racist New McCarthyism: An Interview with Noura Erakat

  Spectre Journal · 2024-05-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this interview, Noura Erakat exposes the racist New McCarthyism that is repressing and criminalizing Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and solidarity activists standing up against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

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• Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine: Upending Circuits of State Violence

  State Crime Journal · 2024-02-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Between 2016 and 2018, Black, Palestinian and Jewish organizations, under the banner of the Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine coalition, led a campaign in Durham, North Carolina, that successfully passed a City Council resolution prohibiting US police exchanges with Israel. Based on direct interviews with the activists who led the campaign, this article sets out to trace the history of the Demilitarize! Effort, detailing its chronological developments with an eye on highlighting how Black–Palestinian solidarity continues to function as an anti-imperial analytic. Particularly, it illuminates how settler colonialism unsettles the demarcation between foreign and domestic frontiers thus entwining military and police force expressed in transnational state violence against racialized communities. In doing so, the article will offer and preserve a movement archive developed by activists in Durham. The Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine coalition is built upon a rich legacy of local Palestine solidarity activism and its coalitionary efforts focused on a narrative of racialized state violence that directly connected militarized US law enforcement to trainings in Israel thus illuminating the local manifestations of US empire. This article also seeks to use the movement archive to consider how seemingly formidable circuits of state violence that undergird imperial domination are simultaneously vulnerable to attack and dismantlement.

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• “A thorn in their throat” planning for settler colonial removal in hizma

  Human Geography · 2023-03-02 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel has arbitrarily severed from it in its quest to expand and entrench a Greater Jerusalem. To eliminate the village and its natives, the settler state has incrementally deployed a series of urban planning policies that together constitute an eliminatory infrastructure. These have included overlapping and tenuous jurisdictional areas; movement restrictions imposed through closures, checkpoints, and surveillance regimes; transformation of common lands into a state-run nature preserve; and the construction of the Apartheid Wall through the village. These measures have concentrated Hizma's residents into an urban area and severely isolated them from their agricultural lands, places of worship, education, families, and health facilities. Based on field work conducted between 3 August and 18 August 2019, this essay sets out to explore two phenomena. First, it seeks to understand how Palestinians navigate and resist Israel's eliminatory infrastructure. Second, it explores what this infrastructure revealed about the relationship between the violence of settler colonialism and the banal administration of urban planning. Using autoethnography, this essay documents the journey of Palestinians in Hizma across three eliminatory terrains erected by planning policies: through the Apartheid Wall, within the suffocating physical and juridical bounds of entrapment, and into the community's expropriated spring.

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• Race, Palestine, and International Law

  AJIL Unbound · 2023 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  In 1922, the League of Nations inscribed the goal of establishing a settler colony in Palestine for the Jewish people—in denial of the national self-determination of the Indigenous Arab population—in public international law. The Palestine Mandate juridically erased the national status of the Palestinian people by: (1) framing the Arabs as incapable of self-rule; (2) heightening the significance of establishing a Jewish national home; and (3) distinguishing Palestine from the other Class A mandates for possessing religious significance that exceeded the interests of any single national group. A century later, the still-unresolved “question” of Palestine remains central to struggles for anti-racism and anti-colonialism in international law. This essay revisits two flashpoints in the tangled history of Palestine and international law, where questions of race and racism have been central: first, ongoing debates over the regime and crime of apartheid; and second, the now-repudiated UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, recognizing Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. Both stories demonstrate the importance of understanding race and colonialism as conjoined concepts, neither of which can be properly understood in isolation from the other.

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• Extrajudicial Executions from the United States to Palestine

  2023-09-28 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter uses the analytical framework offered by Black-Palestinian solidarity to reveal the co-constitutive nature of racism and colonialism as well as the enduring significance of the anti-imperialist struggle. It does so first by examining how Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy is predicated on the racialization of Palestinians within the framework of national security law. It then uses an internationalist approach, which situates Black subjugation in the United States in the context of global regimes of capital, violence, and governance, to help explain the militarized response to Black uprisings. Using Aimé Césaire’s “boomerang effect,” the chapter then traces the iterative development of police militarization, forged within the crucible of U.S. imperial dominance since at least the late 19th century, and highlights how contemporary U.S. law enforcement trainings in Israel are among the most recent iterations of this trend. The chapter concludes with reflections on the limits as well as the potential of anti-imperialist activist efforts embedded in the praxes of Black-Palestinian solidarity.

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• Roundtable: Locating Palestine in Third World Approaches to International Law

  Journal of Palestine Studies · 2023-10-02 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Zionist settler colonization of Palestine was, alongside apartheid in South Africa, one of the paradigmatic global issues that animated discussions among Global South anti-colonial scholars and leaders in the Bandung–Tricontinental era of the 1950s–1970s. While processes of formal decolonization have since played out across most of the Global South—notwithstanding the inequalities and violence of the postcolonial state and the neocolonial order—Palestine remains a quintessential site of ongoing settler colonialism and apartheid. This roundtable brings together scholars of Palestine and international law in discussion about the place of Palestine in Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship. Among other queries, it asks: Where and how is Palestine present and absent in TWAIL scholarship? How has international law been complicit in histories and legacies of settler colonization? What role has the UN played in perpetuating the settler colonization of Palestine?

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• <i>JPS</i> “Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: The Law and Palestine

  Journal of Palestine Studies · 2021-01-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay examines JPS’s fifty-year archive of law-related content from the prism of its contribution to the author’s own thinking (and writing) about the relationship between law and politics in the context of the Palestinian question. Noura Erakat identifies as a “greatest hit” Hanna Dib Nakkara’s “Israeli Land Seizure under Various Defense and Emergency Regulations” (1985) for its meticulous documentation of the Israeli legal regime established to confiscate Palestinian lands. Erakat’s “hidden gem” is “Juridical Characteristics of Palestinian Resistance: An Appraisal in Law,” coauthored by W. T. Jr. and S. V. Mallison. Published in 1973, the article argues for the treatment of captured fedayeen as prisoners of war four years prior to the amendment of the Geneva Convention recognizing national liberation struggles as international conflicts.

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• Outsiders at Home

  American Quarterly · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Ferguson–Gaza moment, characterized by the concurrent bombardment of Gaza and occupation of Ferguson in the summer of 2014, catalyzed a renewal of Black–Palestinian solidarity as an analytical framework and political practice. During its apex from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Black–Palestinian solidarity emerged from the crucible of a Third World upheaval and framed racism and colonialism as entwined and co-constitutive structures of domination. Drawing on the stories of four key Palestinian American activists who helped forge Black–Palestinian solidarity in the Ferguson–Gaza moment, together with reflections of key Black activists, this essay shows that a critical germ for current renewals developed among Palestinian Americans in response to white supremacy. Black–Palestinian intimacies together with critical encounters with anti-Black racism mobilized these interlocutors to align with Black communities in solidarity and joint struggle for liberation. These stories help reveal that US white supremacy is a critical and catalyzing force of transnational solidarity. They also signal how Black–Palestinian solidarity continues to function as a political analytic targeting imperialism, rather than a form of identity politics. Finally, a structure of intimacy helped develop articulations of Black–Palestinian solidarity outside the context of a Third World revolt, thus indicating that contemporary renewals constitute an “independent historical conjuncture.”

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Frequent coauthors

• Sherene Seikaly

  2 shared

• Hani Sayed

  1 shared

• Nir Rosen

  1 shared

• Thalia Anthony

  University of Technology Sydney

  1 shared

• Ardi Imseis

  Queen's University

  1 shared

• Elliott Colla

  Georgetown University

  1 shared

• Zainab Saleh

  Haverford College

  1 shared

• Michael Hudson

  1 shared

Labs

• Black Ecologies LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Law

  University of California, Berkeley

  2011

• Other, Juris Doctor

  University of California, Berkeley School of Law

  2007

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  2003

Awards & honors

• Palestine Book Award
• Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Cu…
• Freedom Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation (2022)
• Amnesty International Chair at the University of Ghent (2025…