Role: Independent Researcher

  Contact: rafana@emory.edu

  Research Interests:
Israel/Palestine | Settler Colonial Studies | Transitional Justice | Conflict Transformation | Peace Psychology | International Law | Environmental Ethics

Rimona’s work integrates cross-disciplinary research, civic activism, and multimedia artwork to track how meaning is institutionalized and contested on pressing global matters such as violent conflicts, state crimes, colonial legacies, and environmental harms. Rimona is now working on two book projects: one revisits through a vulnerability lens her prior findings on the justice–reconciliation nexus in Israel/Palestine; the other project looks at how jurisprudence can address the ties between ecocide and speciesism. This last project has been recently awarded a peace research grant by the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) Foundation. Her PhD, completed at the Transitional Justice Institute in Northern Ireland, examined the synergies, tensions, tradeoffs between justice and reconciliation in the (com)promised lands, documenting the challenges presented by settler–extractive colonialism to transitional justice. Her prior studies and research, completed in Romania, the Netherlands and Germany, centered on conflict transformation, human security, corporate social responsibility, and on the intercultural ramifications of human rights theory and praxis. Over the past fifteen years Rimona has been active civically, mainly in Europe and the Middle East, on human rights, international justice, corporate accountability, environmental protection, development, culture and arts. Aside from research and activism, she encrypts rootlessness–transience–dissonance in words and visuals: poems, flash fiction, photography, drawing, painting, collage, and audio–video collaborations.

 

Recent work

 

“Ecocide, Speciesism, Vulnerability: Revisiting Positive Peace in the Anthropocene”, forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace (K. Standish et al, eds), Palgrave Macmillan (2021)

“The Occupation–Colonialism Continuum: Impact on Transitional Justice in Palestine/Israel”, forthcoming in Prolonged Occupation and International Law (S. Power & N. Kiswanson, eds), Brill/Nijhoff (2021)

Review of The Crimes of Wildlife Trafficking: Issues of Justice, Legality and Morality by Ragnhild Sollund (2019, Routledge), forthcoming in State Crime Journal, 10(2) (2021)

“Ecocide/Speciesism — Legislating Interdependence, Hierarchy, Death” (convener/chair), stream at the Critical Legal Conference, University of Dundee (2–4 September 2021)

“Multispecies Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Ecocide, Speciesism, Vulnerability”, Unraveling the Anthropocene podcast series, Pennsylvania State University Liberal Arts Collective (2021)

“Ecocide/Speciesism — Revisiting Hierarchy in the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Em. Prof Richard Falk, Prof. Ragnhild Sollund, Prof. Rob White” (convener/moderator), expert panel at Earth Day Art Model festival, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (22 April 2021)

Review of The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide by Benjamin Meiches (2019, University of Minnesota Press), State Crime Journal, 9(2), 258–261 (2021)

Review of The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution by Kitty Millet (2017, Bloomsbury Academic), State Crime Journal, 9(1), 138–141 (2020)

"Forest Nativity: Amazon Fires, State–Corporate Crime, Vulnerability." London: International State Crime Initiative & republished on the Emory University Vulnerability Initiative Scholar Blog (2019). 

"The Map is (k)Not: A Vulnerability Lens to Enteric Diseases Epidemiology"

"wood," poem and electroacoustic composition, collaboration with Adam Mirza and Jason Calloway. Presented at the University of Miami St. Bede Chapel (May 2019), Emory University CompFest (January 2020), IUPUI Earth Day Art Model (April 2021)