The Ibrahim Abu Lughod Institute of International Studies extends an invitation
“ The Ramallah Congress on the Decolonization of Palestine”
11 - 12 November 2025
In November 2025, scholars, diplomats and movement leaders from around the world will come together for the inaugural Ramallah Congress on the Decolonization of Palestine.
Convened by the Progressive International, Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit University, the Congress aspires to create both a space for collective deliberation and an engine of collective action for the liberation of Palestine.
From the Nakba of 1948 to the Naksa of 1967, from the walls that divide villages and besiege the Gaza Strip to the checkpoints that cage entire cities, Palestine has been a laboratory for the practice of colonization for more than a century. This colonization never ended — it has only escalated. In October, the Knesset approved preliminary plans for Israel to formally annex 82% of the Occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, settlers rampage through Palestinian towns with the support of Israeli Occupation Forces.
While world leaders and international institutions might formally condemn the crime of occupation, they all too often fail to address the Zionist settler colonial regime as a whole — and the extensive mechanisms that enable Palestinian oppression at both local and global scale. A more systematic appraisal is necessary to make sense of the ever-expanding infrastructure of settler-colonialism — and what can be done to dismantle it.
That is why we have come together to convene the inaugural Ramallah Congress: to interrogate the interests that sustain and inflame the practice of Palestine’s colonization — and to hold them to account.
Set across four days on the campus of Birzeit University and across occupied Palestine, delegates will hear expert testimony, deliberate the economic and legal dimensions of occupation, and prepare a collective roadmap for urgent international action.
We invite you to join us — in person or through the transmission of the Congress activities — as we develop the tools for our political parties, social movements, trade unions and academic institutions to work in unison until the occupation of Palestine, and the colonial order it represents, are finally dismantled.
The conference will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 11 and 12, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m, at Hall 243, Institute of Law Annex Building, Birzeit University. It will feature several sessions focusing on themes related to the political economy of Israeli settler colonialism, its structural dynamics, and the strategies of struggle and resistance
We kindly ask you to confirm your participation by registering through the following link
Take a look at the full conference program