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

Abstract

Engaging with recent applications of the concept of slow violence to the ongoing political developments in the West Bank, this review article argues that the relational approach offered by feminist geopolitics facilitates the conception of slow violence and warfare as part of a single complex of violence. The article traces feminist geopolitics' contribution to research on geographies of slow violence on the one hand, and to the analyses produced within the fields of critical geopolitics and critical war studies on the other, exposing that scholarly work exploiting the relational approach generated within and across these areas of research enables a broader understanding of political violence's tangled operations. Based on the analysis of the recent scholarly engagement with slow violence in the West Bank, the article proposes that thinking of slowness as a form of warfare captures the complex entanglement of different modalities of violence as they materialize in specific spatio‐temporal circumstances. Moreover, such an approach contributes to the further reinvigoration of feminist geopolitics with insights generated within (settler) colonial studies.

Gaza: A decolonial geography

“…Existing work in geography and cognate disciplines draws on these themes to show, for example, how forms of colonial violence in Palestine are normalised as a status quo with the potential to explode into terrible scenes of injury or death. Violence against Palestinians can be slow and unspectacular, bureaucratic and debilitating, or productive of interlinking vulnerabilities and precarity (Amira, 2021; Golańska, 2023; Hammami, 2016; Harker, 2020; Joronen, 2021; Puar, 2021). These registers of violence manifest in subtle but pernicious ways: the passing of laws sanctioning land grabs (Englert, 2020), arbitrary decisions and regulations (Berda, 2017; Griffiths & Joronen, 2021), the silencing and outlawing of Palestinian civil society organisations (Gordon, 2023; OHCHR, 2022), the revocation of travel and residency permits (Tamimi, 2017; Wari, 2011).…”