Waste Siege

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

“…In Waste Siege (2019), Sophia Stamatopoulou‐Robbins analyses the malfunctioning of the state‐managed waste disposal infrastructure in the West Bank as well as the harmful waste‐related policies slowly wreaking havoc on bodies and the environment in the region (Roberts, 2017). Since the West Bank serves, formally and informally, as a dumpsite for Israeli and Jewish settlers' waste (including toxic and infectious leftovers, sewage sludge, and electronic waste; Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2019, p. 5), as well as due to the inadequacy of infrastructure serving the Palestinian refuse in the region, waste figures as ‘a fundamental part of the experience and politics of living … imprisoning bodies in forced and constant proximity to it’, creating a ‘wastescape in which people dwell and that dwells within them’ (Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2019, p. 107). Documenting daily encounters with waste's (mis)management in the West Bank, Stamatopoulou‐Robbins exposes how, after the second intifada, waste siege displaced direct Israeli violence, as well as how it ‘interacts with occupation, distracting people from occupation’ (2019, p. 9) while making accountability for its atrocious impact much cloudier (2019, p. 8).…”

“…Since the West Bank serves, formally and informally, as a dumpsite for Israeli and Jewish settlers' waste (including toxic and infectious leftovers, sewage sludge, and electronic waste; Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2019, p. 5), as well as due to the inadequacy of infrastructure serving the Palestinian refuse in the region, waste figures as ‘a fundamental part of the experience and politics of living … imprisoning bodies in forced and constant proximity to it’, creating a ‘wastescape in which people dwell and that dwells within them’ (Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2019, p. 107). Documenting daily encounters with waste's (mis)management in the West Bank, Stamatopoulou‐Robbins exposes how, after the second intifada, waste siege displaced direct Israeli violence, as well as how it ‘interacts with occupation, distracting people from occupation’ (2019, p. 9) while making accountability for its atrocious impact much cloudier (2019, p. 8). Waste Siege reveals the post‐Oslo geographies of inflicting harm whereby the division of the West Bank into Area A (under full Palestinian civilian and security control; 18% of the area), B (under Palestinian civilian control and Israeli security control; 22% of the area), and C (under full Israeli civilian and security control; 60% of the area) serves the Israeli administration as a tool for deliberately obstructing the Palestinian Authority's (PA) endeavours aimed at providing the region with proper waste disposal infrastructure (e.g., landfills, sewage treatment facilities).…”

“…Israel does not issue construction permits in Area C (most suitable for such developments) or conditions the construction of such facilities upon the connection of (illegal) Jewish settlements to them, which—from a political point of view—remains unacceptable for the PA. Engaging with everyday practices and experiences of Palestinians in the West Bank, Stamatopoulou‐Robbins (2019, 2021) documents how landscapes of toxicity and intentional neglect produce delayed harm to human bodies inhabiting the area and the region's indigenous ecologies, slowly accumulating damage over extended periods of time.…”

“…As these works demonstrate, slow violence—hidden under the language of modernization, development, and improvement—constitutes an inherent element of the Palestinians' life in the West Bank, remaining conditioned by the Israeli military presence in the region. But, even though it clearly relates to the situation of occupation—symptomatic of the condition in which the sovereign Palestinian state is absent while the military presence of the Israeli state is substantial—‘the chains of responsibility’, as Stamatopoulou‐Robbins underlines, ‘leading back to occupation and to Palestinians’ resultant nonsovereignty tend to be less visible’ (2019, p. 9). Such violence becomes disentangled from the agency of those who should be held accountable for it, producing what Nicholas J. Crane and Oliver Hernández Lara call ‘landscapes of disappearance’ (2021)—a spatial form of managed violence (cf.…”

“…This article engages with geography‐related applications of Rob Nixon's concept of ‘slow violence’ (2009, 2011), focusing specifically on recent contributions that are linked to the ongoing political developments in the West Bank 1 (Amira, 2021; Golańska, 2022, 2023; Joronen, 2021; Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2018, 2019, 2021). Drawing on this scholarship, the article contends that slow violence and warfare should be seen, at least in certain contexts, as part of what feminist geopoliticians call a ‘single complex of violence’ (Pain, 2015; see also Christian et al., 2016; Christian & Dowler, 2019).…”