11-12 Nov 2025. Ramallah Congress on the Decolonisation of Palestine. Birzeit University. West Bank

11-12 Nov 2025. Ramallah Congress on the Decolonisation of Palestine.  Birzeit University. West Bank.

Ccholars, diplomats, and movement leaders from around the world will come together at Birzeit University for a historic gathering convened by Al-Shabaka, Progressive International, and the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies.

The Congress aims to create both a space for collective deliberation and an engine for collective action to challenge and dismantle the century-long colonization of Palestine.

Over four days, delegates will:

- Hear expert testimony on legal, economic, and political dimensions of the occupation

- Deliberate strategies for global solidarity and accountability

- Develop a roadmap for urgent international action

We invite policymakers, academics, civil society actors, and movement leaders to join—in person or through live transmission—as we work together to build the tools to dismantle the colonial order in #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.  

The UN has recorded more than 2,000 incidents of settler violence in the West Bank since October 2023, killing more than 1,000 Palestinians, more than 200 of them children — at the very same time as the Israeli regime has accelerated its genocidal war on the people of Gaza less than 100 kilometres away.  

At the same time, Palestinians in the 1948 territories are increasingly repressed and ghettoised.

The practice of colonisation cannot be captured by bombs and bulldozers alone. Rather, it relies on an intricate system of banks, businesses, and institutions that comprise Israel’s system of apartheid, supplying its weapons, and profiting from its spoils.    

Yet 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 the Progressive International, Al-Shabaka, and the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute have come together to convene the inaugural Ramallah Congress: to interrogate the interests that sustain and inflame the practice of Palestine’s colonisation — 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.