Wassim Ghantous

I am a senior researcher in the project 'Global Palestine: Frontier Geographies of a Region in Flux' (2025-present; PI Mikko Joronen), and member of two the research groups: Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP) and Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), in the Administrative Studies unit, Tampere University. I received my PhD (2020) from the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and since then I occupied three postdoctoral fellowships: 1) The 'Present-futures in/of Palestine' research project (Academy of Finland; ended 2023); 2) The Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence (ERC; 2023-2025); 3) The Ibrahim Abu-Lughod postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University (2021-2022). Previous to my academic career, I worked in several Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, most notably at the BADIL Resource Center and B’Tselem.

My research focus engages critical theory, human and political geographical approaches for studying questions of de/coloniality, political violence, technologies of surveillance and security as they play out in the context of Palestine/Israel and beyond. In my PhD (2020) I explored the diffused workings of Israeli regime of colonization in the rural areas of the occupied West Bank, and currently I am in the process of converting the dissertation into a book manuscript (tentatively) titled The Rise of the Israeli War Machine: Palestinians’ Encounters of Spectral Violence, Destructive Velocities, Intensive Elimination. 

Furthermore, I am interested in the political economy of Israel’s regimes of colonization and militarization which I scrutnize through geographical prisms. In this work I focus on the temporal dimension of Israeli settler-capitalist frontier expansions which appeared in my co-authored article on the acceleration of Israel settler colonialism titled Dromoelimination (2022); on processes of security privatization and outsourcing to Israeli settlers, hybrid and private security actors, published in my book chapter Encountering the Israeli War Machine (2023); and on the logics and workings of surveillance in the paper Rethinking the Surveillant Assemblage (2025). I am also interested in the atmospheric dimensions and material unfolding of Israeli policing technologies. Particularly I researched the Israeli invented Skunk Water technology, and the ways in which it works to colonize and inflict violence over Palestinian spaces, bodies, sensory and affective registers, as well the ways in which Palestinians develop micro-climates of refusal and resistance. This work was published in two co-authored articles Weathering Violence (2024) and Stench Atmospheres (2026).

More recently, my research oppened to the filed of political ecology, particularly focusing on Palestinian relations to nature and the more-than-human under Israeli settler colonialism. This research, conducted together with Danna Masad, focuses on Indigenous Palestinian praxis among both fellahin and bedouin communities' while juxtaposed to the emergent colonial phenomenon of settler herding outposts. In this work we are interested in understanding Indigenous Palestinian ecological praxis as well as the ways in which colonial herding operates as mode of appropriation, instrumentalization, and weaponization of Palestinian pastoral practices and animal bodies to erase and replace Palestinian life and life-worlds. This research was published in the co-authored atricle The Wandering Frontier (2026). 

Currently, I am leading two working packages in the Global Palestine research project which is interested in tracing the different ways in which the question of Palestine, and especially since October 2023, reverberated globally and destablized liberal world order. In this regard I published the Homological Correspondance (2026) methodlogical paper that situates Israel as a frontier of global centers of domination. 

Political Geography, Critical Theory, Deleuze and Guattari, Critical Security, Surveillance Studies, Settler Colonialism, Decolonization; Indigenous struggles, War & Conflict, Geographical Theory, Middle East (West Asia), Palestine/Israel.

Ghantous, W. (2026) Homological Correspondence: Israel as a Frontier of Global Domination. Antipode, 58: e70128.

Ghantous, W. & Joronen, M. & Shalhoub-Kevorkian N. (2026). Stench Atmospheres: Policing, Affect, and Colonial Boomeranging in Palestine/Israel. Security Dialogue, 00(0), 1–13.

Ghantous, W. (2025) Rethinking the Surveillant Assemblage in Palestine: Racialization, Friction, Speed. Surveillance & Society 23 (4): 505-510.

Joronen, M. & Ghantous, W. (2024) Weathering violence: Atmospheric materialities and olfactory durations of ‘skunk water’ in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 0(0).

Ghantous, W. & Joronen, M. (2022) Dromoelimination: Accelerating settler colonialism in Palestine. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40 (3): 393-412.

Ghantous, W. 2023. Encountering the Israeli War Machine: Imminent (In)security, Vortical Violence, Rhizomatic Sumud. In Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mikko Joronen & Mark Griffiths. University of Nebraska Press.