The politics of ‘actually existing intersectionality’: animal and human rights activism in Israel-Palestine

<p dir="ltr">This thesis examines the capacity of animal activists to negotiate intersectional, human and animal alliances in a settler colonial context. It frames intersectionality as a politically contested, uneven and partial process that involves compromises and trade-offs with implications for human and animal life. Central to this argument is the need to interrogate idealised models of intersectionality such as calls for ‘total liberation’ and ‘mutual avowal’ that envisage animal-human coalitions that transcend the politics of the settler colonial state, legacies and ongoing realities of entrenched differences, and conflicting interests and subjectivities. Within the context of idealised conceptualisations of intersectionality that underestimate the challenges for activists to create coalitions of animal and human rights struggles, this thesis has two key aims. First, to further advance conceptualisations of intersectionality in the Animal Studies literature by exploring the processes and power relations that shape the cultivation of human and animal rights in settler colonial states. Second, to expand understandings of intersectional animal activism through an exploration of the ways activists negotiate and practise human and animal rights agendas on the ground in a settler colonial context, and with what impacts. To achieve these aims, the thesis adopts multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with animal advocacy movements in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories to investigate the limitations of alliance-building in contexts of violence and trauma, and to highlight the agencies of Palestinians who have a range of political objectives that exceed Israeli colonial oppression.</p>