Managing violence: aid, counterinsurgency, and the humanitarian present in Palestine

Abstract

Violence is most often theorized in relation to overt and sensational displays of sovereign power and military force. Less frequently, however, is violence considered within the remit of humanitarian technologies, discourses, and practices. Taking Eyal Weizman's theorization of the relationship between humanitarianism and violence as a point of departure, this paper traces the deepening entanglements between liberal war, violence, and civilian intervention in Palestine/Israel. Drawing on research conducted in the West Bank on the US Agency for International Development and the vast web of aid intermediaries, experts, lawyers, and contractors through which it operates, this paper attends to the ways in which counterinsurgency and pacification strategies are being mobilized through the networks of aid governance. Centrally this paper argues that, while the foreign aid regime in the Palestinian territories has served to mitigate the most deleterious effects of military occupation and dispossession, it has at the same time, further extended a regime of war and policing into ever-more intimate spaces of Palestinian everyday life. In tracing these processes, this paper brings to the fore the persistence of war in moments when direct military violence is held in abeyance. More broadly, it argues that the case of Palestine lends insight into the multiple forms of violence that exist within our concept of ‘war’—not only the spectacular and the crisis-laden, but also the mundane, bureaucratic, routinized, and largely concealed. In so doing, this paper invites a consideration of the ways in which regimes of war and violence are reproduced through mediums, practices, and institutions that emerge to realize ‘stability’ and ‘peace’.