Failure to build: Sewage and the choppy temporality of infrastructure in Palestine

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork in the West Bank (2007–2016) with engineers building sewage infrastructures for the would-be Palestinian state, I make a three-pronged argument. First, I argue that “failure to build” is its own thick, disorienting, and molasses-like condition. It is also “choppy”: it has a disjointed, jerky, quality that is inconstant and unsettling as if one is at sea without a lifeboat. It is limited neither to short-term, tactical governance—a governmentality looking to survive in the short term—nor to strategically planning for the future. It combines the durability of the temporary with the fragility of the future. Second, I propose that the failure-to-build temporality is structured by and structures the intersection of two phenomena: nonsovereignty, for example but not only in settler colonialism or war, and particular environmentalist logics. Failure to build takes on its moral valence from the way those who rule Palestinian life—Israel, international donors, and the Palestinian Authority—determine the environmental standards for Palestinian infrastructures. For these actors, the environment is a singular entity “shared” across political borders. It requires expertise Palestinians are repeatedly suspected of lacking, partly because they lack a state and experience running their own infrastructures. Failure to build thus works circularly in relation to nonsovereignty. The more nonsovereign communities “fail to build,” the more those who govern them can claim the right to control what and how they build. Third, I argue that waste infrastructures such as landfills, incinerators, and sewage treatment plants are particularly susceptible to a failure-to-build temporality because of their association with environmental harm.

Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe

“…Palestinians in the West Bank, unlike Israeli settlers living in neighboring settlements, have no influence on Israel's decisions to operate waste treatment facilities on their land. And because Palestinians lack the state capacity to develop their own waste processing infrastructures, dominant Israeli discourse weaponizes this “failure to build” to justify Israeli control over Palestinian environmental management (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020). In violation of both international laws of war and international laws of hazardous waste transportation, Israeli authorities burden Palestinian communities with the hazardous byproducts of Israeli life in occupied Palestine while foreclosing on Palestinian environmental sovereignty.…”

Scratch-and-sniff Palestine: How olfaction shapes nonsovereign infrastructural spaces

“…Much of that work demonstrates how excrement materializes and perpetuates difference and hierarchy, for example where infrastructures expose some human groups to excrement’s health hazards and olfactory irritations, while protecting others from the same (e.g. al-Mohammad, 2007; Anand, 2012; Arefin, 2019; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019, 2020). Excrement has, alternatively, served as object and tool of imperial and postcolonial sanitation campaigns aimed at transforming people’s relationships with their bodies, space, and political authority (e.g.…”

“…Palestinian university-based and NGO researchers I met were concerned that the PA’s approach to wastewater recycling obstructed other, more immediate solutions to sewage pollution. Many with whom I spoke did not wish to wait for the necessarily slow and unpredictable process (see Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020) through which the PA applied for permits from Israel for any large-scale infrastructures connected to water and wastewater. They understood that these infrastructures were tied up in aspirations for a particular version of Palestinian statehood that many of these non-PA interlocutors supported in principle, but also questioned for its immediate consequences.…”

The temporal fragility of infrastructure: Theorizing decay, maintenance, and repair

“…The "temporal fragility" of infrastructure Our engagement with infrastructural time and temporality is in conversation with recent work (Appel, 2018;Gupta, 2018;Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020) that maps how expectations of infrastructures failing, developing, existing, and enduring over set time periods and scales, diverge from everyday experiences of infrastructures. If (social) time is structured through historical pasts and has implications for future social reproduction, then temporality allows us to unpack what becomes mediated in the process.…”