(Dis)Connections: Ethnographic Insights into Contentious Belonging in Palestine and Brazil

This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological discourse on belonging by conducting a comparative ethnographic analysis of quilombola land struggles in Brazil and the experiences within the Al-Am’ari Palestinian refugee camp in Palestine. By juxtaposing these two contexts, the article analyzes how belonging is generated, challenged, and reconfigured across distinct yet structurally analogous histories of colonial domination and dispossession. By focusing on practices of (dis)connection, it demonstrates that belonging is an affective, performative, and imagined status that emerges in response to spatial control, marginalization, and exclusion. The article juxtaposes these ethnographic cases, contributing to an anthropology of belonging that is critical to power, space, and the political implications of lived relationality in colonial and postcolonial contexts.