Slow urbicide: Accounting for the shifting temporalities of political violence in the West Bank

Abstract

The article explores the conceptual affinities of slow violence and urbicidal policies in the context of the ongoing Israeli colonization of the West Bank. It investigates the processes of the systematic degeneration of Palestinian urban tissue, triggered by state-supported intentional developments connected to the Israeli settlement project. Building on recent scholarship on slow violence, on the one hand, and urbicidal policies, on the other, the article proposes the concept of “slow urbicide” to account for the shifting temporalities of urbicidal violence as much as for its reliance on, or activation of, human and more-than-human agencies and forces. Engaging briefly with scholarly work on urban trauma connected to dispossessions and deliberate destructions, the analysis also draws attention to the effects of slow urbicide. On a more general level, the article aims to contribute to enhanced understanding of problems situated at the overlap of urban studies and investigations of state-sponsored violence, focusing specifically on issues related to urban warfare. It suggests that the different speeds at which urbicide is perpetuated should be taken into consideration in order to better capture the character of violence against the built environment and to expose its complex multitemporal operations.