Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.This work was supported by the SOAS, University of London; University of London Central Research Fund

Introduction: speaking of racism

It has never been easy, but speaking about racism in the western political climate of the first decade of the twenty-first century is more difficult than ever before. There is a feeling in post-colonial and post-immigration societies that the blatant, overt racism of the past is no longer as pressing. We hear more and more talk of euphemisms such as discrimination, intolerance or the challenges of living with diversity than of the bluntness of racism. Racism evokes times past: the extermination of the "racially impure", the trade in captured slaves, the lynchings, the injustices of Apartheid... It is unimportant that the legacies of these histories continue to define societies in many areas of the world. What is important is that "we" can relegate these horrors to times and peoples past. Anything that reminds us of them - the chanting neo-nazi "thugs", their excrement through letter boxes, the jokes in bad taste - are written off as ingnorance at the margins, psychologically challenged individuals to be either helped and educated or written off

Ireland: Racial state and crisis racism?

This article theorises the state as central to the construction of racism in the Republic of Ireland, which, since the 1990s economic boom, has become an in-migration destination. State racism culminated in the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, in which, at a majority of four to one, the Irish electorate voted for the removal of birth right citizenship to children of migrants. Based on Goldberg?s theory of the racial state, which, in constructing homogeneity, obscures existing heterogeneities, and on Foucault?s theory of biopolitics, leading to the state supposedly caring for the population through a series of technologies aiming to regulate and manage racial diversities, the article examines recent developments in Ireland?s immigration and asylum policies. The debates around the Citizenship Referendum are theorized as constructing what Balibar terms `crisis racism?, blaming migrants for the problems of the system

Memory and forgetting: Gendered counter narratives of silence in the relations between Israeli zionism and the shoah

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020