Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine

Mikko Joronen

doi:10.1111/anti.12518

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines the ways in which colonial violence is transformed and spatialised into negotiated precarities at the occupied Palestine. The notion of “negotiated precarity” is developed herein, to refer to two aspects in particular. First, to spatial compartmentalisation, which shows how the settler colonial power operates by creating precarious administrative zones, where the life of the colonised becomes prone to several flexible, negotiated uses of power. Second, negotiated precarity is used to refer to the conduct of the colonised that counters, transforms, redirects, cancels or hampers the colonial spatialisations of power. By focusing on the “negotiated precarities” in a singular West Bank village, I exemplify how the colonial governing is entwined with spatial compartments that enable several informal, indirect and ad hoc techniques of colonial violence, but also how the colonial governing is constantly mobilised, negotiated, countered and redirected in/through the everyday Palestinian spaces.

Highlights

As Frantz Fanon (1963:29) wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “the colonial world is a world divided into compartments”
These two tensions—the one between the political distribution of precarities and ontological precariousness, and the other between precarity as a source of governing and counter-conduct— help in understanding how the corresponding spatialities between the compartmentalisation and the negotiated precarities operate in a way that takes into account the irreducibility of Palestinian spaces to the precarities imposed by Israeli settler colonialism
As the paper has shown, permits, development plans, restrictions and conservation all exemplify how occupation is spatialised into compartments, where the Palestinian life becomes exposed to manifold combinations of even contrary colonial practices

Summary

Introduction

As Frantz Fanon (1963:29) wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “the colonial world is a world divided into compartments”. I will do so by focusing on the West Bank village of Al-Walaja, which I show to provide an exemplary site for examining the variety of techniques Israel uses to spatialise its settler colonial project, but the ways in which these precarities become implemented, negotiated and redirected in practice.

Results

Conclusion