The scale and sophistication of Israel’s regime of spatial control over Palestinians in the occupied territories is without precedent. Composed of a dense matrix of internal and external checkpoints, closed military areas, buffer zones, and more than 700 kilometers of concrete wall and electronic fence, the spatial regime is multi-layered, all-encompassing and overwhelming. It has garnered increasing interest from a host of social scientists (particularly human geographers and critical planners) who have primarily conceptualized it through reference to Foucauldian notions of panoptic surveillance and treated its impact on Palestinians in terms of Agembem’s notions of Homo Sacer/ Bare Life. What is missing from these accounts however, is any account of Palestinian agency. Palestinians are not simply objects of Israel’s technologies of control but are also active subjects who through a variety of everyday practices negotiate, elude, subvert and sometimes over-turn the operations of the spatial regime while constantly resisting the range of impacts it has on their lives. Through reference to sustained ethnographic research undertaken at checkpoints in the West Bank over the past decade, this lecture aims to shed light on the range of these resistant practices, while posing the larger question of what does Israel’s spatial regime aim to do? And what exactly does it accomplish?
14.06.2012
The Carceral Geography of Late Colonialism
– an ethnographic view
