Political geography II: Violence

Abstract

This report focuses on the diverse and multiple manifestations of political, state, and counter-state violence. Many of the examinations of political violence in this report highlight the continued need for disparate methodological and analytic lenses towards robust understandings of political violence across scales. Displacements and mobilities associated with flight from conflict are discussed in relation to the institutionalization of harm, trauma and containment through various state and supranational mechanisms of control. These mobilities include border crossings and associated violence against vulnerable populations seeking refuge. This is buttressed by discursive binary logics, such as us/them categorizations, which remain endemic to both structural and physical violence and foundational to right wing populism, jingoism, and other forms of political extremism. This report concludes by arguing the peace is not the opposite of war but rather its temporal substitute and partner in an assemblage of political and economic co-dependence.

Slowness as warfare: Towards a relational approach to political violence in the West Bank

“…Challenging the prevailing tendencies to focus on abstract categories and generalizations, these thinkers expose the bodily character of political violence (e.g., Sylvester, 2005Sylvester, , 2011Sylvester, , 2012aSylvester, , 2012bScarry, 2005), paying attention to gendered, raced, and sexualized aspects of geopolitics and IR (e.g., Enloe, 1983Enloe, , 1989Enloe, , 2010Iveson, 2010;Katz, 2007;Mayer, 2008;Moser & Clark, 2001;Puar, 2005Puar, , 2017Puar & Rai, 2002;Radcliffe & Westwood, 1993;Sharoni, 2001;Zarkov, 2001). By dislocating the long-established binarism of the global/international/national/public and the intimate/domestic/banal/private, feminist theorists demonstrate how violence operates in multiscalar ways (see, e.g., Brickell, 2015;Cuomo, 2013;Pain, 2014Pain, , 2015Pain & Staeheli, 2014), exposing the continuities of military warfare and everyday violence (Christian & Dowler, 2019;Christian et al, 2016;Cuomo, 1996;Fluri, 2022;Jones, 2023). Such a formulation enables 'the dovetailing of grand geopolitical discourse and lived, quotidian geographies of the home, the street, the border, the combat zone, the factory or the prison camp' (Jones & Sage, 2010, p. 316).…”

“…In line with feminism‐inspired analytical frameworks indicating that in order to better understand the tangled continuities of political violence's complex operations it is necessary to work across different subfields of geographical research (Christian & Dowler, 2019; Christian et al., 2016; Cuomo, 1996; Fluri, 2022; Gregory, 2010; Jones, 2023), this section discusses the current circumstances of the West Bank, in which slow violence and warfare could be seen as part of a ‘single complex of violence’ (Christian & Dowler, 2019; Christian et al., 2016; Pain, 2015).…”

“…Thinking of fast and slow, public and private, extraordinary and banal, international and domestic, visible and invisible modalities of political violence as part of ‘a single complex’ (Christian & Dowler, 2019; Pain, 2015; Pain & Staeheli, 2014) may link the unspectacular violent developments—encouraged by the state and enabled by structural inequalities and dominant cultural discourses—to the more spectacular Israeli military tactics, facilitating the conceptualization of slowness as a specific form of warfare , while investing in uncovering the accountability for slow violence's atrocious operations. Such an analytical perspective, informed by settler colonial studies and employed across different subdisciplines engaged in the examination of violence (Christian & Dowler, 2019; Christian et al., 2016; Cuomo, 1996; Fluri, 2022; Gregory, 2010; Jones, 2023), can substantially recalibrate the definitions of war and warfare, by pointing to their ‘everywhereness’ (cf. Gregory, 2011), the tacit measures they employ, their long‐distance consequences, and their hidden vicious developments.…”

“…Nevertheless, the predominant tendency within geography and war studies has been to focus on violence's specific dimensions (cf. Fluri, 2022, p. 699; Pain, 2015). Human geographers engage in the study of diverse manifestations of slow violence of toxicity (e.g., Davies, 2018, 2022; LeBel, 2016; O’Lear, 2015, 2016, 2018), post‐military contamination (e.g., Dillon, 2015; Gregory, 2016) and pollution (e.g., Gorostiza & Sauri, 2017); poverty, dispossession, and deliberate negligence of specific areas (e.g., Cahill, 2015; Kern, 2016; Pain, 2019); separation of families (e.g., De Leeuw, 2016); antimigration policies (e.g., Davies & Isakjee, 2015); discrimination and exclusion (e.g., Mahtani, 2014; McKittrick, 2011; Smith, 2016); and class‐ or race‐based intentional neglect (or increased policing) of certain spaces (Cahill et al., 2019; Pain, 2019; Pain & Cahill, 2022; Shaw, 2019).…”

Gaza and the Great March of Return: Enduring violence and spaces of wounding

“…The ‘hot’ and the ‘banal’, the ‘geopolitical’ and the ‘intimate’, ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ violence, and ‘war’ and ‘peace’ are more productively approached as co‐constitutive (Brickell, 2015; Brickell & Cuomo, 2020; Christian et al, 2016; Gregory, 2010; Pain, 2015). To this end, geographical scholarship on slow violence has recently suggested that fast and slow violence should be treated as a single complex (Cahill & Pain, 2019; Fluri, 2021). Christian and Dowler have insisted that: ‘Slow forms of violence imbricate with the fast, and the fast inescapably shapes the slow’ (2019, p. 1072).…”