I consider myself a scholar-activist and in that capacity, try to answer questions raised by movements to which I am accountable and in which I am embedded. My formal training, together with my experience on the ground, has poised me to engage in transformative scholarship that combines the most relevant of theoretical ideas with the concerns and material conditions of the present moment.
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Erakat is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as Human Geography.
She is a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures—from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza—Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions.
The extent of this protection gap has been vividly demonstrated during several episodes of secondary forced displacement in the Middle East.
What to learn more about the Freedom Scholars?
Questions about the Freedom Scholar awards can be sent to freedomscholars@caseygrants.org.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE FREEDOM SCHOLAR AWARDS HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY THE INATAI FOUNDATION.
