Oren Yiftachel

In 1990, he received a Doctor of Philosophy from the Department of Geography, the University of Western Australia, Perth, and the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.

Yiftachel is also an activist, and has been a member of several notable organizations, including Faculty for Israel-Palestine Peace (FFIPP), PALISAD, The Negev Coexistence Forum, Adva (centre for social equality), and Habitat International Coalition.

In recent years Yiftachel served as a board member and chair of B'tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories; and has co-founded a new Israeli-Palestinian peace movement – "A Land for All - Two States, One Homeland".

[2] Yiftachel's works develop critical perspectives of space and power; minorities and public policy; 'ethnocratic' societies and land regimes.

Yiftachel has worked on the political and legal geography of indigenous peoples, focusing on Bedouins in Israel/Palestine in a comparative framework, and developed concepts such as 'gray spacing', 'mtrozenship' and 'urban displaceability'.

In a series of books and articles, Yiftachel explores comparatively the types of regimes that typically develop under condition of ethnic conflict.

His early work also focused on the tension between liberal and ethnocratic-religious components of the Israeli regime, and on the privileged status given European over Eastern Jews established during the settlement project, but also the recent closing of the gaps through on-going colonization of Palestinian lands.

His recent work also develops a 'South-Eastern' perspective by providing alternative conceptualizations to the dominant theories and discourses generated by American and European academic centers.