Noura Erakat

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…

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

  2019-04-23 · 113 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict's most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel's settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel's military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accord's two-state solution is now dead letter. Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle f…

  PublisherDOI

• Justice for Some

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 84 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The struggle for Palestinian sovereignty has been a quest for inclusion in—and recognition from—a world order that left them behind. Sovereignty has become a trap for Palestinians and getting out is a matter of political vision and will. The law does not determine any particular outcome, it only promises the contest over one. While Jewish and Palestinian sovereignty are incommensurable, their belonging is not. The law is not just and justice is not rule-based.

  PublisherDOI

• Geographies of Intimacy: Contemporary Renewals of Black–Palestinian Solidarity

  American Quarterly · 2020 · 63 citations

  1st 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…

  PublisherDOI

• The Sovereign Right to Kill: A Critical Appraisal of Israel’s Shoot-to-Kill Policy in Gaza

  International Criminal Law Review · 2019-10-01 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the ‘Great Return March’ of 2018. In its late May 2018 ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court held this use of force as legitimate self-defense. This article challenges Israel’s security response to these protests in an attempt to both unsettle a warfare discourse and to urge for a distinct ontological approach. The article argues that an ongoing settler-colonial project has racialised the Palestinian body a…

  PublisherDOI

• Race, Palestine, and International Law

  AJIL Unbound · 2023 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  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 manda…

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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…

Similar researchers at Rutgers University

• Kim D. Butlerh-11
• Brittney Cooperh-10
• Edward Ramsamyh-5