Social Agency, Spatial Practices, and Power: The Micro-foundations of Fragmented Sovereignty in the Occupied Territories

Abstract

The study of the relationships among social agency, spatial practices, and political power opens new directions for empirical inquiry and theorization of current modalities of sovereignty. Yet, recent research has overemphasized external variables, such as globalization and international forces, as conditioners of sovereignty and state power, with diminished attention on national and local realms. In the following article, I investigate state power beyond the limits of its official boundaries, by examining how intruder states produce, manage, and sustain effective authority over occupied territories and populations. I use the example of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank to demonstrate how such cases of political authority are based on fragmented sovereignty: comprised of multiple, localized, and relatively autonomous cores of power, instead of an all-encompassing structural and centralized modality of control. I propose that fragmented sovereignty is shaped and operated through the increasing autonomous power of ground level state agents and in the ways spatial perceptions and practices are interwoven into localized political processes.