Palestinian experiences of (in)security, surveillance and carceral geographies
Wassim Ghantous’ dissertation examines the operations of contemporary Israeli security machinery, as it unfolds in the course of expanding the Israeli colonial frontier over Palestinian rural areas of the occupied West Bank. The thesis ‘Settler-Colonial Assemblages and the Making of the Israeli Frontier: Palestinian experiences of (in)security, surveillance and carceral geographies’ was successfully defended at the School of Global Studies on 28 February 2020.
To study how the Israeli frontier is made today, the dissertation follows Palestinian villagers’ everyday experiences of (in)security and control as they play out through a multitude of formal and informal colonial actors, institutions and technologies.
Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ontology of ‘assemblage thinking’, and on their theorizations regarding power, politics and contemporary war-making, the dissertation pays attention to various domains in which the Israeli assemblage operates today in relation to Palestinian bodies and landscapes.
The dissertation identifies dominant features of Israeli power, as they play out across imaginative and spatiotemporal domains of the Israeli assemblage, highlighting relations between political and security discourses, securitization practices, and the movement and intensity of control and violence. By investigating the operations of Israeli power in rural areas of the West Bank, the dissertation offers novel conceptual insights regarding political processes and logics that inform contemporary Israeli regimes of control and colonization in the occupied Palestinian territory more broadly.
Contact:
Wassim Ghantous
wassim.ghantous.2@gu.se