Joseph Kaplan Weigner

Research interests: Comparative-historical sociology; political sociology; colonial settlement; violence; bureaucracy; and the modern Middle East.

Bio: Joseph Kaplan Weinger is an Academy Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He holds a doctorate from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research, situated in political sociology, spans the history of colonial state-making. He examines the depredation wrought by colonial settlement and the institutions erected in its wake. Specializing in the history of late-modern and contemporary Palestine–Israel, his current research examines the causes and consequences of coercive territorial redistribution and the wavering relations between settlers and the Israeli state.

Research Summary: At Harvard, Joseph is working on completing his first book manuscript, The Settler’s State: Israeli Colonial Settlement, Splintered Sovereignty, and the Making of an Injurious Alliance. It examines the oscillating relations between discrete Israeli state institutions and settler movements from 1967 to the present, asking when settlers and state actors collaborate, when they come into conflict, and how their shifting compact shapes the prospect for territorial redistribution and dispossessory violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The book’s title names its central dynamic: state institutions foster agents of coercion whose capacities they in turn alternately harness, contest, and fail—or decline—to contain. Rather than treating settlers as simple proxies of a coherent state or as autonomous, exogenous challengers to it, the book shows how colonial rule is always assembled through realignments among bureaucracies, agents of coercion, and civilians, and always in relation to native contention. These realignments produce neither a stable monopoly of violence nor a vacuum. They produce a fluid, hybrid system in which formal power and extralegal force become mutually constitutive.

This information is accurate as of the affiliate year indicated. (last updated 09.01.2026)