Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and) - Softcover

Kotef, Hagar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822358557 ISBN 13: 9780822358558

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via "regimes of movement." Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of "liberty" in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hagar Kotef is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.
 

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Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

On Liberal Governances of Mobility

By Hagar Kotef

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5855-8

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 / Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir, 
2 / An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement, 
3 / The Fence That "Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement": Locomotion and the Liberal Body, 
4 / The Problem of "Excessive" Movement, 
5 / The "Substance and Meaning of All Things Political": On Other Bodies, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Between Imaginary Lines

Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine

Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir

Then he [the soldier] saw a large group of women, those still waiting for their men who are being kept inside.... He went over to them and stood with his foot marking the soil. Over there, he signaled, showing them the way with his foot, his hands in his pockets. Over there, he signaled with his chin in the general direction behind them, and they started to move back.... Among them was a young woman holding three plastic bags. The soldier approached her and kicked her bags. She looked, waiting for him to say something; to signal. Over there, he said, or perhaps didn't even talk, and anyway, when he talked it was only in Hebrew. But she got the point and retreated with her bags beyond the line he had marked. A line that represents nothing but the true purpose of the checkpoint ...—harassment for its own sake. All the rest are clichés that the fictive history one learns here, the brainwashing and the ever-hovering racism offer, for harassing without the slightest movement of a butterfly's wing another people, merely for being the other.—MahsanMilim.com, 2007

Israeli checkpoints are positioned throughout the West Bank as a web, capturing, regulating and often prohibiting movement. They are a component within one of the most material, most efficient, and most destructive means of the contemporary modes of the Israeli occupation, a mode commonly referred to as "the regime of movement." Gradually developed from 1991 (the first general closure of the occupied Palestinian territories), this regime subjects to Israeli control the circulation of people, goods, and services—and with them the economy, society, and polity—in the West Bank. Together with a wide variety of obstacles (ranging from ditches, to metal gates, to walls) and accompanied by a complex and convoluted system of permits, the checkpoints form a dense grid, fragmenting both the space and the Palestinian social fabric living within it. Most are not located between "Israel" and "Palestine," but rather inside the Palestinian territories: on the entrance roads to towns and cities, restricting the movement of vehicles entering or leaving them; enclosing the cities, separating them from the surrounding villages that depend on them; and fracturing the few roads on which Palestinians are allowed to move. They inhibit and, in fact, prevent any real possibility of maintaining the mundane aspects of daily lives (getting to work, school, the doctor, the market, or visiting family members or friends); they impede—almost completely paralyze—the economy (hindering the circulation of goods and labor power); and they prevent the establishment of a viable, independent Palestinian political entity (as they prevent maintenance of a political community and territorial continuity).

These checkpoints are elements of a political technology aimed at securing a particular mode of control over the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). They are also particular sites that can be seen as a condensed microcosm of this political technology. The form of control to be found at these sites—indeed, the form of control I seek to decipher here—was consolidated some time between the Oslo Accords (1993—the formal beginning of the ongoing "peace process") and the years following the El Aqsa Intifada (2000). At this juncture, a growing appeal to the logic of security constantly countered (and still continues to counter) the language of political compromise. Yet the two opposite trajectories—the discourse of reconciliation and its constant undoing by growing securitization, which often takes the form of eruptive violence—keep working in tandem. In fact, I argue that the mediation of the two, which is necessary for the simultaneous sustainability of both, is what gave rise to the new modes of control that form the current stage of the Israeli occupation. To reconcile these contradictory logics a justification mechanism is needed: one that would enable a regime of occupation to be sustained amid peace negotiations and vice versa. Such a mechanism may be obtained by proving that the Palestinians cannot govern themselves. If this were to be the case—and I argue that Israel keeps producing the conditions to (at the very least) simulate that this is indeed the case—it would be justified to continue controlling them (always temporarily, only until they could do it themselves; a date always deferred precisely by mechanisms such as the one in question).

This chapter proposes that movement and its regulation are essential to both the logic of security and the above justification mechanism. Not only has movement become fundamental to Israel's control, and to its understanding of the threat posed by Palestinians, as demonstrated by the technological developments of the regime of movement. Movement is also a key to understanding the production of Palestinians as unruly subjects. This chapter focuses on one local example of such a mechanism; a particular technique of marking the space of the checkpoints—and more accurately, of unmarking it. Merav Amir and I named this technique "the imaginary line." The imaginary line joins other political technologies—such as sets of contradictory orders, obscure and constantly changing regulations and instructions (that sometimes even change on an hourly basis), or a system of permits that is impossible to abide by and that sometimes renders people illegal residents even in their own home—to form a new mode of population management: one that is based on concealment rather than knowledge, on confusion and irregularity rather than regulation. In the first part of the chapter, I describe the operation of this technique of (un)marking. In the second part I further explore the particular subject-position produced by this line by comparing it to another line, and by comparing the Palestinians at the checkpoints to other regular inhabitants of these sites. I examine a tangible demarcation of the space allocated to the activists of the human rights organization that regularly operates at the checkpoints: Checkpoint (Machsom) Watch. This enables me to identify the particular subjectivization processes occurring at the checkpoints and to argue that the checkpoints are part of a corrective system that is meant to fail. Finally, I move to examine a new form of checkpoint: the terminals. Analyzing the emergence of these sites I question the liberal impulse to appeal to regularity and regulation to counter eruptions of violence that induced failure facilitates.

On Imaginary Lines and Technologies of Power: The Checkpoints

The imaginary line...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822358557
• ISBN 13: 9780822358558
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande