SLOW URBICIDE

The book presents a new materialist understanding of acts of deliberate

destruction of the built environment and, specifcally, of the politics of
aggressive spatial containment and regularization of urbanity employed
within the confict in Israel/Palestine. Building on recent scholarship on slow
violence and urbicidal policies, it discusses the different dimensions of the
violence against the urban space, as well as exposes the complex material-
semiotic character of the urban territory and of its destruction. By referring
to the concepts of “ethno-territoriality” and “the right to the city,” the
book aims to generate an enhanced understanding of problems situated at
the overlap of urban studies and investigations of state-sponsored violence,
focusing specifcally on issues related to urban warfare.
Adopting a new materialist perspective, the book is a searing examination
of political violence in our times. The volume will be of great interest to
scholars and researchers of political science, international relations, cultural
studies, and urban studies. It will also appeal to NGO professionals and
activists across the world.

Dorota Golańska is Associate Professor (Cultural Studies and Religion)

at the Department of Cultural Research, University of Lodz, Poland. She
has degrees in Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, and International Studies.
Her research interests include feminist approaches to political violence and
studies of collective memory, especially in relation to traumatic experiences
and their representation in culture. She also works on such issues as creative
strategies of resistance as well as intersections of memory, art, and activism.
In her work she uses philosophical and methodological approaches related
to new materialism and posthumanism. Since January 2021 she has served
as a Principal Investigator in the project Political Dimension of Violence
Against Cities: Urbicide in Palestine—A Case Study, funded by the National
Science Centre in Poland under grant number UMO-2020/37/B/HS5/00837.
 SLOW URBICIDE
A New Materialist Account of Political
Violence in Palestine

Dorota Golańska
 First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2023 Dorota Golańska
The right of Dorota Golańska to be identifed as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations, and other
information shown in the maps in this work do not necessarily imply
any judgement concerning the legal status of any territory or the
endorsement or acceptance of such information.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003157687
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 CONTENTS

Figures vii
Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: Politics of Destruction 1

Urbanity Under Siege 1
Slow Violence, Slow Urbicide 5
The Politics of Space 12
Ethno-territoriality 14
The Right to the City 16
Design of the Book 19
Notes 23
Bibliography 24

1 New Materialism and the Study of Political Violence 31

War as Practice 31
Situating New Materialism 33
Agency Undone 37
Political Violence Through a New Materialist Lens 40
Notes 49
Bibliography 51

2 Mapping Urbicidal Violence 58

Urbanity as Target 58
Toward a (New) Materialist Understanding 62
A Topology of Concepts 67
Notes 78
Bibliography 79

v
 CONTENTS

3 Geographical Warfare in Palestine 84

Lethal Geographies, Slow Violences 84
Case Study 1. Cartographies of Domination in the West Bank 92
Violent Cartographies 95
Environmental Injustice 101
Parallel Geographies 104
Case Study 2. Regularization in the Naqab/Negev Desert 107
Technologies of Drawing 109
The Violence of Urbanization 111
Landscape Politics 117
Notes 122
Bibliography 126

Conclusions 136
Bibliography 144

Index 147

vi
 FIGURES

3.1 Administrative division of the West Bank (Oslo II Accord)

and the Jewish settlements in the area. Compiled based on
datasets made available by United Nations Offce for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, B’Tselem,
and PeaceNow 87
3.2 Precipitation in the Naqab/Negev and location of the
Bedouin townships established by the Israeli government.
Partly based on data made available by the Israel
Meteorological Service 115

vii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book arises from my longstanding engagement with the political, social,
and cultural realities of Israel/Palestine and my regular research trips to the
region that have taken place since 2013. Initially motivated by altogether
different study interests, over the years, my scholarly work has increasingly
focused on the spatial politics in the region, exploring how spatiality has
been incorporated as an important dimension of the political project of
constructing Israeli territoriality and sovereignty in Palestine. Most of the
material covered in this study was gathered during ethnographic feldwork
undertaken in Israel and the West Bank in December 2018, January 2019,
and February 2020. It is necessary to underline here that the experience of
traveling in Israel, and especially in the Occupied Territories, calls for a care-
fully situated account of geopolitical developments in the region and how
they affect the different populations inhabiting these areas. As a holder of
an EU member state passport, while moving through the checkpoints estab-
lished within the Occupied Territories and at their border with Israel, I was
not usually required to go through the extended control procedures, which
separated me—much to my discomfort—from other travelers. I could only
witness the security routines they had to undergo on an everyday basis while
commuting for work, family purposes, or to deal with administrative issues.
Due to my specifc national belonging, my experience has been substantially
different from the experiences of those who are permanently exposed to
operations of the Israeli system of surveillance and control. Thus, in the
course of my research, my perspective was one of what Bracha Ettinger calls
“wit(h)nessing,” amounting to emotional, even affective, participation in
others’ experiences while remaining aware of the unbridgeable differences
between our distinct geopolitical positionings. I constantly keep these dis-
similarities in mind while conducting my scholarly investigations in Israel/
Palestine as well as while drafting written accounts of these experiences.
My work involved examination of the architectural and infrastructural
developments in the region, as well as explorations of its topography and

viii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

how it has been mobilized for the purpose of asserting Israeli territoriality
in Palestine. The feldwork included visits to urban areas in the West Bank
and in the Naqab/Negev Desert and engaging in participant observation
or bearing witness to the quotidian violence that geographies of domina-
tion systematically generate. Detailed analyses of maps, including investiga-
tions undertaken from a historical perspective, substantially added to the
fnal shape of the argumentation, enriching it with explorations of how the
cartographical representation of the Occupied Territories and the Israeli
mainland have evolved over time since the beginning of the occupation and
the inception of the Israeli state, respectively. Comprehensive study of the
reports systematically published by such organizations as B’Tselem, the
Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, and PeaceNow has been of
invaluable assistance in understanding the scale and the particular charac-
teristics of the researched situation, enabling a better consolidation of the
ideas offered in Slow Urbicide. These efforts were supplemented by a com-
prehensive review of the often heartbreaking materials released by various
press agencies, NGOs, and activist groups covering incidents of expulsion,
land confscation, dispossession, and house demolition.
Theoretical elaborations and conceptual work on the gathered evi-
dence were predominantly carried out throughout the year 2021, within
the scope of the research project Political Dimension of Violence Against
Cities: Urbicide in Palestine—A Case Study, generously funded by the
National Science Centre in Poland under grant number UMO-2020/37/B/
HS5/00837. Spanning a period of over three years (2021-2024), this pro-
ject is hosted by the Faculty of Philology at the University of Lodz (Poland).
One of its objectives is—based on the empirical research and theoretical
elaborations—to shed an altogether different light on the dominant under-
standings of the concept of political violence, looking closely into the shift-
ing temporalities of violence, as well as its invisible daily operations. The
study draws both on ethnographic evidence and documentary, historical
analysis of urbicidal developments in the region. It has also been greatly
informed by engagement with the extensive scholarly literature in the feld.
All these undertakings have generated material to underpin an elaboration
of the concept of “slow urbicide” offered in this book, a term which refers
to the form of violence that has been experienced in the studied areas since
1948, or even earlier, gradually contributing to the destruction of their
indigenous spatialities and substantially affecting the demography, topog-
raphy, and natural environment of the region. Even though the notion can
well be used in other contexts and in reference to different geopolitical
circumstances, it was conceptually crafted to capture specifcally the nature
of the urbicidal project in Israel/Palestine. Therefore, as is presented in this
book, the application of the term “slow urbicide” remains supported by
the historical evidence documenting the life of affected communities in this
particular area.

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the course of my research, it became strikingly clear to me that what I

call the policy of “slow urbicide” draws heavily on more-than-human agen-
cies and forces, manipulatively mobilizing them against the native popu-
lations in the region. To do justice to these complex entwinements and
assemblages, the book adopts a new materialist philosophical approach,
which has signifcantly informed both the analyses offered in this book and
the concepts that it develops. Such a strategy enables a fuller realization of
the intricate character of the contemporary tactics of political violence, as
well as revealing how different agencies and forces happen to be mobilized
for the purpose of the military urbicidal effort. In the context of the ongo-
ing situation of asymmetrical war tackled in this book, it seems necessary
to take account of these lethal developments and to document their tacit
operations in order to, at least partly, prevent a denial—and thus also a
perpetuation—of violence.
It must be acknowledged here, however, that my engagement with new
materialism does not come out of nowhere. I have had the privilege of work-
ing collaboratively with a broad community of new materialist intellectuals
for the last 15 years within diverse transnational institutional circumstances.
In this regard, I owe a lot to Iris van der Tuin, a person whom I have known
for many years now and who has always been willing to help. In 2014, she
invited me to join an outstanding network of researchers gathered within the
COST European Cooperation in Science and Technology project on New
Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to
Matter” (Action IS1307) wherein, for the period of four years, I served as an
offcial representative of Poland. The researchers I met there, as well as the
events in which I participated, led to a substantial broadening of my knowl-
edge of new materialism, allowing me to grasp the marvelous diversity of
this philosophical ferment. The analysis offered in Slow Urbicide benefted
a great deal from my participation in this stimulating setting and from the
academic interactions with scholars from different geographical and dis-
ciplinary contexts that it enabled. It is not possible to name all those who
contributed to the exceptional quality of my experience of participating in
this network, but—if I am to name just a few of them—I want to express
my gratitude to Monika Rogowska-Stangret, Olga Cielemęcka, Katve-Kaisa
Kontturi, Felicity Colman, and Anna Hickey-Moody for their friendly sup-
port and intellectually invigorating discussions.
Since the work on this book has been conducted over an extended period
of time, some ideas, concepts, and cases offered therein have already been
presented to selected audiences. A more concise discussion of the urbi-
cidal tactics employed by the Israeli state in the West Bank developed in
Chapter 3 was included in my article, “Slow Urbicide: Accounting for
the Shifting Temporalities of Political Violence in the West Bank,” pub-
lished in Geoforum 132 (2022), pp. 125-134 (Elsevier). More general
refections on the entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies in the

x
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

cartography-driven urbicidal project in Palestine were presented within

the ad hoc Design Studio New Materialist Articulations at the Technical
University of Vienna in April 2021, to which I was invited by the conveners
of the event, Iris van der Tuin, Nanna Verhoeff, and Vera Bühlmann. I also
presented my elaboration of the concept of “slow violence” as applied to
the warfare strategies in Palestine during the conference “(Im)materialities
of Violence” at the University of Birmingham in November 2021 within
the ERC-funded project entitled Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-2019):
Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence, where my invited con-
tribution was hosted by Katharina Karcher and Evelien Geerts. I am grateful
for these opportunities.
Several people have offered support and understanding in the course of my
work on this book. My special thanks go to Marta Woźniak-Bobińska—my
hardworking research partner in the project Political Dimension of Violence
Against Cities—for her rigor, engagement, and constructive support. I
thank the members of my wonderful team at the Department of Cultural
Research at the University of Lodz, who continuously offer immense assis-
tance in the everyday running of the department, willingly participating in
all its daily tasks and processes (including those that are not exceptionally
fascinating). I very much appreciate the editorial work of Alex Ramon and
Ginevra House, who proofread the book manuscript, making the text more
approachable for readers. I would also like to thank Anna Wosiak for her
help in preparing the two maps included in Chapter 3. I am grateful to
Aakash Chakrabarty, the editor at Taylor & Francis, for his patience and
understanding. Finally, and most importantly, I want to express my volumi-
nous gratitude to my loved ones—my parents, my partner, and my son—for
always being with me and giving me a lot of support and encouragement.
Working on this book during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic without
their continuous assistance would not have been possible.

xi
 INTRODUCTION
Politics of Destruction

Urbanity Under Siege

In the post-Cold War era, the deliberate destruction of the built environ-
ment, and especially of cities, in inter- and intrastate conficts has captured
the attention of political analysts and scholars. The list of the most notori-
ous cases of this kind of violence includes the widespread destruction of the
urban environment during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War (Bogdanovic 1993,
1994; Coward 2006, 2009), the damaging Russian tactics employed within
the Chechen campaigns of 1994-1996 and 1999-2000 (Kramer 2005), the
ruination of Beirut, and Israeli policies of house demolition in the Occupied
Territories, especially the siege of Palestinian cities during the 2002 military
operation Defensive Shield (Graham 2004a; Abujidi 2014). Also, as Nurhan
Abujidi argues, “the latest developments in the Arab world, in what is con-
troversially called the Arab Spring, is an explicit example of how cities
became the very theatre … of oppression” (2014, loc. 380). Among the
most recent instances of enormous destruction of the built environment, we
can include the shattering of Aleppo and the demolition of Damascus and
Dara between 2013 and 2017 during the war in Syria (Sharp and Panetta
2016), as well as the massive devastations of Iraqi cities (Baghdad, Fallujah,
Mosul) in the context of counterinsurgency military strategies employed
within the so-called “war on terror” (Graham 2005). The destruction of
Mariupol (Ukraine) by the Russian army in March 2022 may serve as the
most recent graphic example of urbicidal violence.
Even though, historically, there had been numerous examples of rubbli-
zation of cities or villages, what is striking in the above-mentioned cases is
the massive, systematic, and deliberate character of violence against the built
environment. The attacks on urbanized sites in these instances constitute an
important element of war strategy. Noticeably, as Martin Coward under-
lines, the destruction in many urbicidal cases is considerably “out of propor-
tion to the military aims of the confict” (2009, 9). The issue is especially

DOI: 10.4324/9781003157687-1 1
 INTRODUCTION

worth exploring due to the currently changing patterns of war, which now-
adays center on localized struggles over strategic urban territories. Even
though cities, or political control over them, have always been considered
crucial to intra- and international conficts, recent times have witnessed an
unprecedented scale of deliberate destruction of urban environments, often
accompanying ethno-national struggles. Closely interwoven with military
technologies, concerns, and strategies, today’s cities participate in warfare
in signifcantly reconfgured ways. As Stephen Graham explains, “it is now
clear that the intensifcation of global urbanization, resource shortages, ine-
qualities and population pressures are further deepening the role of urban
terrain as the strategic site of military, social and representational struggles”
(2002a, n.p.). This substantially affects the ways in which we should under-
stand contemporary instances of political violence, especially if they involve
a deliberate assault on urbanity.
The massive scale of attacks on urban environments has recently led to
the reconceptualization of the term “urbicide,” originally used in the con-
text of important reorganizations of large American cities leading to the
destruction of traditional streetscapes by new planning projects, elaborated
upon by such critics as Wolf von Eckardt and Marshall Berman. Today the
term refers to more extreme forms of confict and terror connected to urban
violence and the unprecedented scale of militarization of urban terrains.1
The destruction of buildings, or of cultural artifacts, so often accompanying
contemporary conficts, is a multidimensional issue bringing about major
consequences. It can be considered, according to Andreas Riedlmayer, a pro-
cess of killing collective memory (1995)—often embodied in, or associated
with, material objects and spaces—and therefore important to the continued
existence of political/social/cultural communities. This is exceptionally vital
in the context of ethno-national conficts, especially those involving the pro-
duction, or serious reconfguration, of a state’s territoriality, perceived as a
complex mixture of material, spatial, symbolic, and mental objects and ritu-
als. As Nicholas Adams announces, the survival of architecture and urban
life is of crucial importance to the survival of people (1993, 390), which is
an issue often omitted, or relegated to the second plan, in analyses of con-
temporary conficts. Similarly, Katherine McKittrick notes that even though
the term urbicide, through its focus on the destruction of the built envi-
ronment, “inadvertently abstracts humans from violence against the city”
and “depersonalizes acts of violence,” it remains very human (2011, 952).
Such statement assumes the deep entwinement of human and nonhuman
elements within a spatially organized community. For McKittrick, urbicide
must be situated in the context of “imperialism, violence, and economic,
racial and ethnic terror, while also hinging on specifcities: scale, region,
economy, place, and how each destructive force is delivered, all matter”
(2011, 952). Exploring the politics of destruction in Israel and the Occupied
Territories, this book engages with how they matter. Thus, in its focus on

2
 INTRODUCTION

urbicidal developments, my work aligns with the current debates present,

even though still marginally, in the feld of cultural studies of conficts and
critical security studies. Recently, however, increased interest in questions
of deliberate destruction of urbanity has been expressed by a number of
scholars working in a range of other academic felds. When thought of as an
important environment co-constituting social and cultural life, urbanity can
be approached as a vital element of territorial struggles and ethno-national
rivalries. In such a conceptual context, Coward (2006, 2009), for instance,
reads urbicide as an attack on the conditions of social heterogeneity that the
built environment creates. Accordingly, urbicidal violence should be seen
as a chief element of a project of erasing difference (be it racial, ethnic,
religious, and so on) from the sociocultural and material landscape of a
given community, and—as I aim to demonstrate in this analysis—a crucial
component of ethno-territorial politics.
Although the destruction of different kinds of buildings has been widely
acknowledged in the literature devoted to the discussion of the dynamics of
(ethnic) conficts, the thorough theorization and conceptualization of this
process remain underdeveloped, and the phenomenon has yet to be amply
explored. This concerns both the nature of urbicidal violence, the philo-
sophical and cultural groundings of such violence, its scale, as well as how
its contemporary forms are situated in the context of the history of urban
militarism. Also, neither the unconventional forms of urbicidal tactics nor
its shifting temporalities and varying intensities have as yet been suffciently
studied. One of the reasons that the nature of violence against the built envi-
ronment remains a relatively unexplored issue of political theory is that it
has typically been considered just one dimension of other forms of violence
(mostly aggression against peoples, ethnic groups, or individuals) and it has
therefore been regarded as secondary to, or a side effect of, genocidal pro-
jects. This has been rather common and is unsurprising within an anthropo-
centric philosophical landscape centered primarily on the human dimension
of political processes. Thus, while primary attention has traditionally been
paid to the systematic killing of people or the destruction of human commu-
nities, violence against urban infrastructure, perceived as an accompanying
process, has not necessarily been seen as worthy of detailed examination on
its own.
Contrary to these assumptions, this book argues that the deliberate
destruction of urban areas is a central component of the program of ethno-
national and ideological violence, often accompanying colonial projects
as much as remaining crucial to the analysis of violence against people.
Concerned with the harboring of identity in material objects and places,
urbicide serves as an important measure in endeavors to generate specifc
understandings and experiences of territoriality. Yet, although it usually
goes hand-in-hand with strategies of genocide, forced displacement, separa-
tion, or the politics of carving out “ethnically pure” enclaves, it should not

3
 INTRODUCTION

simply be reduced to them. Rather, it is necessary to acknowledge that it

entangles nonhuman and human components with each other; it remains
equally vital to pay attention to how it is productive of substantial recon-
fgurations of more-than-human political realities. Taking into considera-
tion the multifaceted ways in which urbicidal violence is perpetrated, in this
book I argue that in order to understand the complex nature of the destruc-
tion of urbanity, as well as to fgure out what is at stake in urbicide, we need
to acknowledge the “material-semiotic” (Haraway 1988) or “material-dis-
cursive” (Barad 2003, 2007) character of political violence, by considering
the variety of agents and forces involved in it, as well as by recognizing the
entangled composition of its effects. The nature of territoriality—a notion
which is fundamental to understanding the character of the Israeli colonial
project in Palestine—is also material-semiotic (an issue to which I will soon
return), and so are the different experiences of (non)belonging that territo-
riality is capable of producing. However, in order for this to be fully recog-
nized, it is necessary to turn to philosophical and conceptual developments
facilitating such relatively novel ways of thinking within the feld of political
science, international relations theory, and confict studies.
Feminist new materialism—recognizing the dynamic and constantly
shifting co-constitution of matter and meaning, and underlining the impor-
tant implication of matter in social, political, and cultural processes—
seems to offer an adequate “ethico-onto-epistemological” (Barad 2007)
tool with which to approach the complex nature of urbicidal politics. I
will delineate the conceptual contours of this philosophical perspective in
Chapter 1 of this book, but here I would like to briefy indicate that my
adherence to new materialism by no means signals a need for taxonomiz-
ing another theoretical or epistemological position. Rather, it consists of a
partial rereading of the extant conceptualizations while accentuating their
different aspects and paying attention to those dimensions of the analyzed
phenomenon that have previously been marginalized, or made less visible,
in the vast majority of available scholarly considerations. Accordingly,
the objective of such a philosophical framing of my analysis is, following
Donna Haraway, to make “new patterns from previous disputes” rather
than offering an altogether different understanding of the explored pro-
cesses. As Haraway underlines, new knowledge—theoretical and practi-
cal—emerges from such creative recontextualizations (1997, 304–5, n. 32).
Thus, new materialism, I argue, offers promising possibilities to look at
the ethno-territorial and material-semiotic aspects of Israeli politics toward
the Palestinians—a major issue this book explores—from a less conven-
tional analytical perspective. It pays attention to the nuanced operations
of urbicidal violence and focuses on the more-than-human forces that it
mobilizes in its destructive efforts; it also offers a recalibration of under-
standing of who (or what) counts as a political agent in the Israeli colonial
project in Palestine. As Jason Dittmer evinces, “because power is enacted

4
 INTRODUCTION

through assemblage, it must be understood as distributed among the vari-

ous components of that assemblage, human and non-human” (2014, 388).
This analytical lens enables a more thorough engagement with the how
question of urbicide, exposing those dynamics of social injustice that,
“while material in process and effect, are also suffused with representa-
tional politics” (Sharp 2021, 991). Bearing this formulation in mind, one
of my objectives is to point to the potentially enriching impact that new
materialism could have on this feld of academic inquiry, shedding light on
relatively uncharted aspects of political violence and acknowledging the
different speeds at which it unfolds. Subscribing to such ways of thinking
and aligning with McKittrick’s point of view delineated earlier (2011), this
book maintains that the violence against urbanity poses questions as fun-
damental as those raised by the destruction of human life (Coward 2009).
These kinds of damaging tactics serve as one of the crucial elements of
exclusionary political forces associated with (ethno)nationalism actively
engaged in the processes of territorialization of (ethnic) identity. Such a
hypothesis has important implications for a more general understanding of
the concept of political violence, which has to be signifcantly broadened
to include instances of targeting, or purposeful erasure of, urban spaces
(Coward 2009), taking into consideration its shifting temporalities and
silent operations.

Slow Violence, Slow Urbicide

This book sketches a new materialist understanding of acts of deliberate
destruction of the built environment and, specifcally, of the politics of
aggressive spatial containment of urbanity employed within the Israeli colo-
nial project in Palestine.2 In contrast to the majority of extant analyses of
this problem, however, my explorations focus on the different speeds at
which violence unfolds, paying attention to the unconventional tools on
which its attritional operations rely. Given the convoluted nature of the
political tension analyzed in this work, as well as the sinusoidal dynamics
and territorial reconfgurations these developments entail, the term urbicide
is used here in quite encompassing ways. It refers to a deliberate assault
on the material fabric of a city, village, camp, or neighborhood, or, more
broadly, a violence against urbanity. As well as its traditional interpretation
as an element underlining the politics of destruction, urbicide in Palestine
must also be approached as a generative process, capable of producing
new—and more desired by the Israeli state—forms of surveilled spatiality.
As highlighted in this book, however, the targeting of urban spaces does
not always take the form of immediate and spectacular annihilation but
can consist—as Eyal Weizman notes—of rearrangement, reconfguration,
closure, or denial of the urban area (2002, 2007). These policies are imple-
mented at different speeds and with varied frequency, leading eventually to

5
 INTRODUCTION

the gradual degeneration of particular kinds of urbanity. Such an under-

standing remains in line with what has been widely practiced by the Israeli
governmental circles within the scope of the Israeli ethno-territorial project
implemented in Palestine since the proclamation of the State of Israel.
I am, however, far from assuming that such forms of violence should
be exclusively correlated with ethno-nationalist tendencies or colonial aspi-
rations, as is the case in Palestine. Rather, it must be acknowledged that
acts of violence against the built environment have been common in miscel-
laneous conficts and in various geopolitical and ideological contexts. So,
even though I limit my explorations to particular case studies, the analysis
remains nonetheless exemplary for more general discussions of an array
of urbicidal politics. Noticeably, ethno-nationalism and colonialism—both
used strategically as vehicles for advancing key political agendas—seem
to constitute important driving forces behind many current conficts and
wars. Exploration of selected examples of urbicidal strategies employed in
a specifc geopolitical context reveals the intricate nature of the problem,
its important spatio-temporal dynamics, and its reliance on the entangle-
ment of discursive and material elements. It also uncovers a crucial agency
of more-than-human forces, exposing how they have been mobilized, or
recruited, for the purpose of accomplishing a political project of territorial
expansion.
The question of the Israeli political stance toward the Palestinians has
been extensively investigated within the feld of political science and inter-
national relations theory. These analyses, however, have typically centered
on periods of wars and uprisings (intifadas), leaving the phases of what is
considered peace beyond the immediate scope of their interests. Contrary to
these tendencies, rather than studying conventional Israeli warfare (which
obviously includes massive use of urbicidal strategies) during the periods of
intensifcation of confict, my inquiry centers on the means and phases of
what I call “slow urbicidal violence,” that is, the kind of violence that seems
to be especially effcient in times perceived as interludes between wars, or
phases of relative stability—at least as they are experienced by the Israeli cit-
izens, but much less so by the Palestinians. This corresponds to Sari Hanaf’s
statement about the specifc nature of this confict which is connected to its
pretty low intensity, “a spectacle of destruction without/with little death”
but in which intentional state-sponsored demolition should be seen not as
a “side effect of the war but [as] the main leverage of political pressure”
(2012, 192). Given the various peculiarities of this situation, it seems justi-
fed to assume that, in the case of Palestine, urbicidal violence has to be
understood in more nuanced ways and as operating at various speeds.
To situate my deliberations in an adequate historical context, a brief
reconstruction of the employment of urbicidal violence in this geopoliti-
cal situation should be offered here. It must be kept in mind that the poli-
tics of destruction of the built environment has been systematically used

6
 INTRODUCTION

against Palestinian-Arabs since the inception of the Israeli state. Between

1947 and 1948, while the new political entity was being established, hun-
dreds of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods were methodically emp-
tied, blown up, and bulldozed, while the land was confscated by the Israeli
forces (Hassan and Hanaf 2009; Morris 1987; Pappé 2006). This period,
called the Nakba (or “catastrophe”), is at the roots of a persistent refugee
problem, forcing a huge number of Palestinians to leave their indigenous
space and, subsequently, denying their right to return. Similar problems
were generated in the aftermath of the Naksa (or “day of the setback,” a
period after the Six-Day War in 1967), in which a considerable number of
Palestinians fed war atrocities or were forcefully relocated. Certain scholars
(e.g., Weizman 2004; Graham 2003, 2004a) tend to connect the relatively
recent destruction of Palestinian urban communities—especially within the
2002 military operation, Defensive Shield, in which a number of Palestinian
towns, villages, and camps situated in the Occupied Territories were mas-
sively damaged—with similar actions in 1948 and 1967, as part of the same
historical process. They insist on these events being perceived as an intensi-
fcation of the old policy.
Analogous destructive tactics have been continually implemented in the
Israeli heartland since 1948, leading to the gradual erasure of the Arab
presence from the Israeli sociocultural and political landscape, a process
that was triggered by a systematic degeneration of indigenous urbanity and
traditional ways of dwelling associated with this (Jabareen 2015; Leshem
2016). Some of these places were later repopulated by Jewish settlers, while
these sites’ original names were changed and their vernacular organiza-
tion altered to refect the intended Judaization of the region (Leshem 2016,
106). The politics of planting and greenery management also contributed to
the reworking of the local scenery (Cohen 1993)3 and partial erasure of its
original character. The demolition of houses has constituted an important
dimension of this political project, and it has been a chief part of the policy
of reconfguring the demographic landscape of the then newly established
country. As Weizman underlines, along with more subtle means, Israel has
typically used the bulldozing of houses as a weapon of collective and individ-
ual punishment and intimidation and as a means of shaping the geopolitical
confguration of territory (2004, 197). To fully account for the frequency
and intensity of urbicidal violence in Palestine, it is nevertheless necessary to
acknowledge its convoluted character. It consists of a number of interrelated
means, including the material destruction and spatial reconfguration of
Palestinian urbanity, the dissipation of spatiality, the construction of Israeli
infrastructures, and extensive invigilating control, which manifests in the
constant operation of a state-sponsored apparatus of surveillance, as well
as in the application of measures seriously constraining the quotidian func-
tioning of Palestinian communities (Weizman 2007, 2017; Abujidi 2014;
Graham 2004a; Hochberg 2015). It should also be emphasized, following

7
 INTRODUCTION

Edward W. Soja, that within such a context urbanity and urbanization have
to be understood in quite encompassing ways. As Soja explains, urbaniza-
tion is “generated primarily in and from dense urban agglomerations, but …
the urban condition has extended its infuence to all areas: rural, suburban,
metropolitan, exurban, even wilderness, parkland, desert, tundra, and rain
forest … the whole world has been or is being urbanized to some degree”
(Soja 2010, 6). Such an understanding of the urban condition, or urbanity,
is central to the argumentation that I offer in this book.
The temporalities of urbicidal violence are equally complicated. Except
for times of confict escalation, in which parts of Palestinian urban tissue
are intentionally demolished within a period of a couple of days, the poli-
tics of destruction operates at a much slower pace, leading to the gradual
fragmentation and continuous degeneration of the Palestinian spatiality.
Overall, the whole process has a very important material dimension, which
obviously combines with its more symbolic, or semiotic, layer. This urges
us to approach it through an analytical framework capable of doing justice
to this material-semiotic complexity, while keeping in mind its shifting tem-
poralities. As I suggest, the term “slow urbicide”—referring to Rob Nixon’s
concept of “slow violence” (2009, 2011) rooted in the domain of environ-
mental humanities—could function as a suitable conceptual fguration in
order to get to grips with the intricate operations of violence against urban-
ity implemented by the Israeli government against the Palestinian-Arab pop-
ulation. The notion of “slow urbicide,” recently used by Ian Shaw (2019)
in the context of urban policies of neglect and abandonment in the UK, has
not yet been applied in the analyses of warfare strategies, as the latter are
typically associated with more dynamic occurrences. In my opinion, how-
ever, not only does the concept of slow urbicide enable acknowledgment of
the complex temporalities of urbicidal warfare (recognizing its injurious,
indeed vehement, nature), but it also exposes the Israeli state’s slow-motion
investment in preventing Palestinians’ spatially organized self-governance,
embodied in the inhabitants’ capacity for the ongoing production of urban
space.
The genealogy of the term “slow violence” can be traced back to aca-
demic concerns with such issues as extensive pollution, contamination of the
natural environment, or overexploitation of resources (Nixon 2009, 2011;
O’Lear 2016, 2018; Davies 2018, 2019), but also—to a lesser extent—to
investigations of house dispossession (Pain 2019; Cahill 2015; Kern 2016),
separation of families (De Leeuw 2016), or antimigration policies (Davies
and Isakjee 2015). It has important and obvious connections to neoliberal
ideologies; however, in the introduction to his book, Nixon (2011) explic-
itly claims that the inspiration for forging the concept of “slow violence”
also comes from his profound engagement with Edward Said’s writings on
the everyday lives of Palestinians. Acknowledging violence’s fuidity and its
temporal dimension, the concept, as Thom Davies claims, “uses time as

8
 INTRODUCTION

provocation” (2019, 2). For Nixon (2009, 2011), “slow violence” is meant
to describe “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of
delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional
violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011, 2). Arising
from the feld of environmental humanities, the concept of “slow violence”
can be relevant—as demonstrated by Rachel Pain in her compelling study of
chronic urban trauma (2019)—for research on urban politics, tackling the
different speeds and delayed effects of miscellaneous reconfgurations of the
urban fabric. Similar problems have also been raised by Karen Till’s (2011)
work on urban dispossession and gentrifcation projects. As I propose, the
increased attention paid to the shifting temporalities of urbicidal strategies
could be equally productive, shedding an altogether different light on the
investigations of political violence effectuated by scholars working in the
felds of political science, confict studies, and international relations theory.
The project of territorial expansion and demographic reconfguration
of the Occupied Territories progresses in slow motion. The infrastructure-
related processes accompanying the Israeli settlement enterprise in Palestine
have been well documented in the literature of the feld (see Allegra et al.
2017; Alkhalili 2017; Gregory 2004a, 2004b; Hanaf 2009, 2012; Makdisi
2010; Weizman 2002, 2007). Concepts of “verticality” (Graham 2004b,
2016; Graham and Hewitt 2012; Weizman 2002, 2007; Segal and Weizman
2003) and “volume” (Elden 2013, 2021) have been used to capture the con-
text-specifc space-centered nature of the Israeli colonial endeavors (espe-
cially in the West Bank), mostly from the perspective of what Peter Adey
calls “a particular kind of state/technocratic gaze” (2013, 53). However,
even though exposing the complexity of the processes mobilized for the
construction of Israeli territoriality, these accounts tend to be critiqued for
paying scant attention to the inherent dynamics of vertical/volumetric space
(Garrett 2016; Campbell 2019) as well as for neglecting its effects on the
organization of what Chris Harker calls “intensive relations” within the
affected communities (2014; see also Harker 2011). It is also advised that
ethnographic explorations of how verticality and volume are experienced
and negotiated in embodied ways should be undertaken to better account
for the topographical-topological complexity of urban life (Harker 2014;
Harris 2015). While not intending to downplay the importance of vertical
and volumetric analyses of spatial politics in Israel/Palestine—and appreci-
ating their important contribution to studies on urbicidal developments—I
suggest they could beneft from a closer dialogue with scholarship on tem-
poralities of violence, adding another dimension to the examination of the
enduring consequences of urbicidal transformations. Thus, the analysis
offered in this book aims to partly depart from a purely vertical/volumetric
approach to engage with the concept of “slow violence”—exploring how
violence operates, to paraphrase Rob Nixon, not only across space but
also across time (2011, 2). Such a shift of perspectives, I argue, enables

9
 INTRODUCTION

exposition of how certain destructive tactics, working smoothly and to

a great extent unnoticeable to external observers, constitute a systematic
and violent assault on Palestinian urbanity, leading to the fragmentation
and dissolution of Palestinian space. Hence, urbicide in Palestine must be
understood in a very nuanced manner, as operating both through complex
entanglement of different means and at different speeds. The notion of slow
urbicide, I maintain, may be useful in grasping these interwoven operations,
as it invites us to reconsider the weaponization of both space and time in the
Israeli colonial enterprise in Palestine.
Thus, drawing on relatively recent conceptual developments and taking
into consideration the tangled operations of urbicidal politics in Palestine,
I consider the notion of “slow urbicide” as capable of accounting for the
complexity of destructive tactics targeting indigenous urbanity in the region.
Such a perspective allows for a transcending of the tendency to ponder urbi-
cidal warfare as limited to instances of intensive open war, instead drawing
attention to how political violence could be perpetrated on a more eve-
ryday basis, including in periods considered—at least by Israel—as rela-
tively peaceful. Even though slow urbicide seems to operate in subtle and
unspectacular ways, its traumatizing effects remain as similarly detrimental
as those of fast urbicidal violence. To clarify, with “fast urbicide” I refer
to tactics such as the aerial bombing of cities, drone strikes, air raids, and
detonation of the built infrastructure, typically associated with military
operations performed in periods of open war. Slow urbicide, conversely,
signals a chronic condition of emerging harm; it does not, however, stand
in direct opposition to fast violence but should be seen as its long shadow.
Advancing slowly, it involves gradual destruction of indigenous urbanity
through such strategies as physical strangulation, obscure systems of land
administration, bureaucratic neglect, pollution, and obliteration of the ver-
nacular landscape, continuously exacerbating the conditions of Palestinian
urban areas. Paradoxically, such policies are implemented through means
typically associated with urban development rather than destruction and
represented in the dominant discourse—quite commonly among colonial
enterprises (Mbembe 2001; Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2007)—as “inno-
cent” signs of progress and modernization. Such a strategy tends to con-
ceal these policies’ delayed urbicidal effects. Since slow violence, as Nixon
argues (2011), is typically unspectacular, it remains diffcult to mediatize. It
progresses slowly, gradually reaping its deadly harvests, somewhat “out of
sight” (Nixon 2011, 2) of the general public. As such, its silent operations
could easily be ignored, remaining visible and meaningful only to those who
are directly affected by them. This seems to be the most conspicuous peril
that slow urbicide generates, as its invisibility can tacitly contribute to the
denial of violence, obfuscating its state-sponsored character. It is therefore
of crucial importance in the examination of enduring conficts to focus
on how fast violence silently morphs into slow violence (and vice versa),

10
 INTRODUCTION

without establishing any kind of straightforward binarism between the two.

Refraining from positioning slow against fast violence, it is nevertheless nec-
essary to consider political violence as a process happening at various speeds
and with different frequencies. The attentive focus on the unspectacular tac-
tics and invisible workings of “slow urbicide” in Palestine enables such a
thorough (re)conceptualization.
As explored in this book, slow urbicidal violence in Palestine refers to
the systematic premeditated containment of Palestinian areas, intense
Judaization of the region, and deployment of military forces as much as to
a whole variety of strategies of spatial manipulation which operate in con-
cealed ways before, after, and beyond the moment of immediate warfare.
Thus, examination of slow urbicide helps us to make sense of the empirical
realities at hand in Palestine, revealing the necessity of examining not only
the confict as it displays itself in remarkable moments of intense war but
also how destructive tactics work in silence, accumulating their catastrophic
damage over a signifcant period of time. A new materialist perspective, I
argue, allows for a more complete understanding of these processes, espe-
cially of their environmental and material dimensions. As I will explain in
Chapter 3, in order to grasp the dynamics and entangled nature of urbicidal
politics in Palestine, it is useful to resort to the analysis of “geographical
warfare” (Lacoste 1976) in which the forces of the landscape and its phys-
ical features are recruited for the purpose of advancing the ideologically
motivated political agenda. As such, in my analysis I am more interested in
what happens in between the moments of escalation of violence and sub-
sequent peace negotiations. My aim is to pay attention to the mundane,
everyday means with which the suppression of Palestinian culture and its
important urban dimension have regularly been carried out in both Israel
proper and in the Occupied Territories and how these have involved human
and more-than-human resources and potentialities. Such an investigative
strategy offers an insight into the present nature of the colonization/occu-
pation, rather than delving into its history or projecting possible future
politically oriented solutions. This would mostly deal with the already
well-researched trajectory of the confict, often narrowed to the moments
of “fast” violence. Conversely, the analytical focus on the periods between
wars aids understanding of the situations which regularly lead to outbursts
of violence (Ophir et al. 2009) including the earlier Israeli-Arab wars, the
Palestinian uprisings, and retaliatory violence, as well as regular individual-
ized episodes of mutual aggression that have been troubling the region for
decades. Even though generally “out of sight” of the international commu-
nity and, perhaps, also of the Israeli citizens supporting the political goals
of their governments, slow urbicidal violence remains very visible to those
who regularly fall victim to it, while its harmful effects are in fact viscer-
ally and bodily felt on an everyday basis. As Davies explains, “As a spatial
concept, slow violence invites us to include the gradual deaths, destructions,

11
 INTRODUCTION

and layered deposits of uneven social brutalities within the geographic here-
and-now” (2019, 2). This has to be taken into consideration if we want to
thoroughly understand how political violence works, as well as to account
for its complex multilayered consequences.

The Politics of Space

Even though slow urbicide seems to be primarily defned through its tempo-
ral dimensions, it equally has to be understood in spatial terms. In his thor-
ough conceptualization of space, Henri Lefebvre (1991) contends that space
should be thought of as a politicized object—a political instrument, a set of
ideological superstructures, and a mechanism of social regulation (see also
Butler 2012, 42). This applies to its both micropolitical and macropolitical
understandings. Space is infused with ideology and politics and plays a stra-
tegic role in the defnition and maintenance of a state. A state’s sovereignty
has an important spatial facet which manifests in both the state’s control of
its borders and in the assertion of sovereignty itself. Sovereignty over space,
Lefebvre underlines, is “established and constituted by violence,” while
“state power endures only by virtue of violence directed towards a space,”
so that the “hallmarks of the state” are the “founding violence, and continu-
ous creation by violence” (1991, 280). Accordingly, state power is violently
imposed—as Chris Butler explains—“in the form of coercive strategies and
sanctions, technologies of administrative governance and the abstractions
of legal formalism” (2012, 58). In the context of colonialism, the founding
principle of violence gets additional meaning—as Achille Mbembe remarks,
violence (of conquest) contributes to the creation of a space over which
authority (derived directly and exclusively from the fact of conquest) was
subsequently exercised (2001, 25). The concept of territory, one of the cen-
tral state attributes, relies on such a politicized understanding of space—a
mixture of the empirical world and mental projections, which makes for its
“entirely ideational” (Soja 1996, 79) existence. But it also serves as a physi-
cal anchorage for the state, turning the latter into a somewhat inevitable, or
natural, being with historically (that is, temporarily) and geographically (that
is, spatially) shaped boundaries and “content.” Today it is not possible to
think of a state as abstracted from its territory (Gottmann 1951) or proceed
without acknowledging the state’s production of a politicized space over
which the state’s authority (often violently) spreads. In Lefebvre’s account,
the state produces a physical space (the national territory), the social space
(an edifce of institutions, laws, and conventions built upon a system of val-
ues spread via language), and mental space (a system of representations of
the state, both formalized and popular) (2003, 94). Spatial relations consist
of an entanglement of practices, representations, and the imaginary. Hence,
space is neither an inert background or container of social relations; nor is it
a product of a purely discursive feld. Rather, it actively co-constitutes, and

12
 INTRODUCTION

is co-constituted by, social relations (Lefebvre 1991). Such an account sig-

nals a complex, multidimensional, or indeed “material-semiotic” (Haraway
1988) understanding of space as both a product of and a condition for the
production of social relations, and encourages a conceptualization of space
as a cogent, active, and formative element of human geography.
When approached from the perspective of political objectives, space—or
territory, understood as a certain organization, or instantiation, of space—
is often thought of as a material property (also, through the etymological
affnity of Latin terra [land] and “territory”; see Elden 2010) as much as a
symbolic source of identity of an ethnic group (i.e., as a homeland), which
tends to defne itself in reference to its spatio-temporal, or geographical
and historical, embeddedness. The latter aspect of territory gained another
signifcance with the growth of nineteenth-century nationalism and the
emergence of the notion of the nation-state, with its exclusionary politics
corresponding well to the idea of the state as premised on processes of (ter-
ritorial) inclusions and exclusions. So, even though historically territories
evolved, as Jordan Branch notes, from being seen as land properties used for
the extraction of resources and for generating strategic benefts to be subse-
quently tied to the “imagined communities” of nationhood (2017, 141; see
also Anderson 1983), they remain quintessentially material-semiotic entities.
Examining the processes of the material inscription of immaterial (or affec-
tive) social relationships, Andrea Brighenti concludes that territories “exist
at the point of convergence, prolongation and tension between the material
and the immaterial, between spaces and relationships, between extensions
(movements) and intensions (affection and passions)” (2010, 223). Thus,
territories emerge as complex conglomerates of physical aspects of space
and its cultural, or psychic, understandings, as well as constructs brought to
life through a range of measuring technologies, historical reconfgurations,
political-economic handling of land, and ideological meaning-making prac-
tices. All these are infused with constantly shifting power relations. In that
sense, a territory, as much as its various resources and features, typically
gets subordinated to political ends in the project of producing specifc forms
of spatially understood territoriality.
As Stuart Elden notes, “territoriality” is typically understood in two
ways, as “the condition or status of territory” or as “a mode of operat-
ing toward that territory” (2010, 801), imposing a certain form on land
(see also Lefebvre 1991). Saskia Sassen understands territoriality “as a legal
construct that marks the state’s exclusive authority over its territory” (2013,
24), while Robert Sack’s formulation connects the territory, power, and peo-
ple within the concept of territoriality understood in terms of a geopolitical
strategy. Sack conceives territoriality as “a primary geographical expression
of social power” and “a powerful geographic strategy to control people
by controlling area” (1986, 5). This characteristic of territoriality is also
alluded to by Richard Ford, when he claims that territoriality—understood

13
 INTRODUCTION

as territorial jurisdiction—developed as a result of modern cartographical

techniques and rational thinking as much as it is an upshot of the discourse
encouraging people to see themselves as “organically connected to other
people and to territory in a way that requires jurisdictional autonomy”
(1999, 899). In a somewhat different manner, partly inspired by Lefebvre,
Elden proposes that it is territory, rather than territoriality, that should be
understood as technology, or “a distinctive mode of social/spatial organiza-
tion, one which is historically and geographically limited and dependent”
(2010, 810). These differences in theorizations notwithstanding, states are
quintessentially territorial and territorializing entities and are usually imag-
ined as bound to a certain space. The space is often territorialized through
acts of violence (of various kinds) which operate at different speeds.
With the aim of deepening the analysis of “slow urbicidal violence” in
Palestine, in this book I situate it in the context of two meaningful—and
to a certain extent contradictory—concepts, namely “ethno-territoriality”
and “the right to the city.” They are crucial for understanding the processes
related to the production and maintenance of particular forms of territorial-
ity in Palestine, both being principally preoccupied with the notion of space
and how the distribution of space is related to issues of social justice or
spatial citizenship (Dikeç 2001, 2009; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2010,
2011, 2015; Soja 2010). Recognition of their, to a certain extent, conficting
nature, connected to the juxtaposition of nationalism’s inclination toward
ethnic separation and the right to the city’s reliance on generative affrma-
tion of difference, exposes the vital importance of these two notions for
understanding the material-semiotic character of acts of (slow) violence
against urbanity taking place in the context of ethno-national conficts.

Ethno-territoriality
The Israeli policy in Palestine has been greatly concerned with the issue of
physical space as fused with the Zionist principles of Jewish belonging in
this region and the idea of the nation’s return to the “promised land.” This
political (in fact, purely colonial) project relies heavily on ethno-territorial
assumptions. Unsurprisingly, in the context of nationalism’s revival at the
twilight of the twentieth century, the concept of ethno-territoriality has
recently captured the attention of scholars dealing with questions of ethnic
confict and nationalism in their diverse aspects and dimensions.4 Given the
particular mechanisms in place in the process of constructing Israeli territo-
riality—frst, on the territory incorporated into the newly established state
and, second, in the Occupied Territories militarily controlled by Israel since
1967—I fnd the recourse to the discussion of ethno-territoriality pertinent
in approaching the theme that this book tackles.
The production of territoriality seems to be one of the most fundamental
objectives of ethno-nationalist politics. It was a chief element of the Zionist

14
 INTRODUCTION

colonial project in Palestine, an aspiration to produce a persuasive idea and

compelling experience of Jewish territorial belonging in the mythic land. As
Adam Moore explains, ethno-territoriality “involves the fusion of territori-
ality with ethnic or national claims” (2016, 95). The aim of this “social and
political project” is “to establish an explicitly spatial basis for claims involv-
ing ethnic identity, cultural rights, and political authority by identifying and
constructing certain places or territories as belonging to or appropriate for
certain ethno-national categories of people and practice, and by extension
displacing other categories” (2016, 95). As Moore elaborates, the politics
of displacement and relocation accompanying ethno-territorial aspirations
can take various forms, “ranging from ethnic cleansing and genocide, to
forced removal of an ethnic community from a state’s borderlands to urban
planning decisions restricting the use and settlement of land by a targeted
category, to demands that specifc cultural practices be allowed or restricted
in certain neighborhoods or villages” (2016, 95). This is aimed at creating
an ethnically “pure” environment, where symbols and associations related
with the “undesired” ethnic group have to be eradicated or substituted with
new artifacts evoking the symbolic and material belonging of the “desired”
ethnic group or underlining its “natural” right to the specifc land. A con-
sideration of some of these measures seems to be exceptionally relevant for
the analysis of the systematic assault on Palestinian urbanity advanced by
the Israeli government, both within Israel proper and in the occupied West
Bank. Such strategies, however, usually operate in combined, nuanced ways,
entangling different policies and acting upon different aspects of the terri-
tory, including its spatial and demographical confgurations. Acknowledging
the complex nature of ethno-territorial aspirations, Moore refers to four
general, usually overlapping, dimensions of ethno-territoriality. In his for-
mulation, ethno-territoriality can be enacted discursively (through symbolic
mapping and marking of spaces via meaning-making representational strat-
egies), bodily (through physical daily participation in public performances),
materially (through urbicidal tactics or specifc design of infrastructure and
the built environment), and institutionally (through adjustment of political
structures and institutions to the ethno-territorial principles) (2016, 95). It
must be kept in mind that the delineation of these four dimensions is only
provisional and meant to serve certain analytical purposes. In practice, they
tend to overlap and merge, translating into complex tactics and ways of
thinking that structure the life of a given community.
One of the founding myths of the Zionist expansion in Palestine is
embodied in the oft-quoted slogan “a land without a people for a people
without a land,” questioning the presence of an indigenous population in
Palestine prior to the proclamation of the Israeli state. A representation of
mythical Palestine as an empty land has typically served as a means of legiti-
mizing Jewish settlement in this region or a need for a homeland understood
as “a national space of one’s own” (Smith 2009, 163), which is never given

15
 INTRODUCTION

but has to be collectively constructed and maintained. The colonial expan-

sion has been habitually justifed by a number of such cultural contractions
or fabrications, casting doubt on the Palestinian right to the contested land
(Pappé 2017). The strategy of invisibilizing—in fact negating—the exist-
ence of the Arab population in Palestine has been mobilized in an effort
to build what Oren Yiftachel calls “ethnocracy” (2006), a state organized
around a principle of a collective “project of exerting ethno-national control
over a territory perceived as the nation’s (exclusive) homeland” (Yiftachel
and Ghanem 2004, 651). Such projects are often embedded in the idea of
an imagined homeland, a territory to which a given ethnic group has an
unquestionable “natural” right. Territories, however, are generated from
space in the process of its “territorialization” (Raffestin 1980), while space
itself remains a scarce resource. Hence, ethno-territorial projects strive to
naturalize the link between territories and peoples through the (often vio-
lent) production and maintenance of territoriality. As mentioned earlier,
this occasionally requires “purifcation” of the territory from “others,” both
materially and symbolically. Therefore, since the establishment of the State
of Israel, its (still contested) territory has been systematically Judaized (also
through de-Arabization). This has been performed via the forced relocation
of populations and the confscation of property, as much as through a strat-
egy of renaming geographical areas, towns, and villages, and the reinvention
of the region’s history, including, as Ilan Pappé mentions (2006), the strat-
egy of memoricide. The latter process consisted of constructing imagined
narrative bridges across otherwise discontinuous events from the past and
incorporating such mnemonic practices into the nationalist imaginary circu-
lated via the dominant ideology.5 This contributed to the further politiciza-
tion of space and the construction of particular forms of territoriality rooted
in the principle of “natural” belonging. In Lefebvrean terms, together with
a systematic production of physical space (through careful politics of plan-
ning and design; see Weizman 2007) and a highly institutionalized social
space (based on discriminatory differentiation between Jewish and non-Jew-
ish inhabitants of this space; see Ophir et al. 2009], a mental image of the
state as an heir of the rich history and culture of the region has been created
with the aim of supporting the project of colonization of Palestine. This has
been implemented via—inter alia—a systematic eradication of indigenous
cultures and their routine forms of inhabitance.

The Right to the City

The notion of inhabitance is central to Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to
the city” (1996, 1968). It stands for the demand for access to urban life in
all its diversifed richness and refers to a multiplicity of political, social, cul-
tural, and material processes. Every right, for Lefebvre, is a manifestation,

16
 INTRODUCTION

or the end result, of collective claims made by mobilized citizens/inhabit-

ants. Because they result from struggle, they are always subject to renewed
political agitation. Rights, therefore, are entangled with politics, and the
right to the city—as elaborated upon by the philosopher—refers to a deeply
spatial understanding of politics that tends to place urban space at the very
center of its vision. This is due to the close links between urbanization and
industrialization, yet the city cannot be reduced merely to the spatial prod-
uct of the latter. Lefebvre’s concept calls for the reintegration of the urban
space into the web of social connections, which stands for the appropriation
of the space in the city by its inhabitants (regardless of their national, ethnic,
class, or religious belonging). The urban space is where the sociality of those
inhabiting it is rooted and enacted; it is meant to be constantly remade, as
an always-becoming “work,” or oeuvre, of its citizens. Such space should
be approached as a zone of encounter, with respect to differences, but also
mobilizing collective effort to counter the dominance of the state as far as
production of spatiality is concerned. Putting inhabitance at the center of
spatial politics openly undermines the assumption that everyday dwelling
should be regulated by the functional characteristics of habitats advanced
by bureaucratic planning and architectural developments. “The right to the
city” highlights instead the entitlement to physically occupy space which
pertains to the inhabitants (Lefebvre 1996, 158). But inhabitance is not lim-
ited to this; it also extends to inhabitants’ capacity to participate in collec-
tive decision-making about the space. This entails the ability to use the space
in daily routines and practices as well as participation in the processes of
deciding over the production of urban space (Lefebvre 1996, 179).
Because of its salience—as much as its reference to issues of cultural,
or spatial, citizenship—the concept of “the right to the city” has recently
been pronounced by many politicians and activists as part of a broader
agenda for human rights. The idea has also drawn the attention of a grow-
ing number of academics.6 As rearticulated by many scholars, today the
concept often evokes the right to shape the city according to inhabitants’
needs and in connection to citizenship’s rights. Such an approach stresses
the inclusivity of urban space while addressing a whole range of inequalities
implicated in current urban processes. This is especially vital in the context
of multi-ethnic (urban) societies. As Butler explains, “The right to the city
legitimates the refusal to allow oneself to be removed from urban reality by
a discriminatory and segregative organization” (2012, 144; original empha-
sis). Lefebvre’s proposal, however, remains a radical one, so it would be a
betrayal of his original ideas to reduce “the right to the city” to a positivist
understanding of it in terms of a legal asset. Rather, it must be seen as a
creative means of producing a social space, somewhat away from the func-
tionalist state intervention, and adjusting it to inhabitants’ diverse needs and
ideas, yet avoiding legal individualism, the latter potentially entrenching

17
 INTRODUCTION

segregation, discrimination, or intolerance (see Purcell 2008). Such attitudes

and practices, however, are often the case, while the fact of preventing cer-
tain groups from participating in the collective act of producing space must
be perceived in terms of a denial of “the right to the city.”
In an ethnocratic state, where one ethnic group dominates over, and dic-
tates the spatial conditions for, another, the limitations of “the right to the
city” pertaining to a specifc ethnic group translate into a system of spatial
disadvantage, where basic needs to shape the space of inhabitance are not
attended to. As Adi Ophir et al. explain, in the Occupied Territories, where
the right of the Palestinians to produce space and spatially co-constituted
social relations is seriously constrained, the suppression of indigenous forms
of dwelling is mainly generated through “the unique logic of withheld or
suspended violence, in which the means of violence are on display rather
than in actual use, and by the systematic production of uncertainty that
strips the subject of rational mastery of her future and destiny” (2009, 22).
This uncertainty applies to the future of urban spaces as much as to inhabit-
ants’ capacities to decide about them. By sustaining a discriminatory legal
system which gives priority to the citizens of Israel over the inhabitants of
territories under the Israeli occupation—or, in the case of the Israeli main-
land, by privileging the citizens of Jewish identity over others—the rights
of a huge segment of the population are being systematically denied. The
legal system works differently on Israel’s mainland and in the Occupied
Territories, as well as generating realities which are experienced dramati-
cally differently by Jewish citizens and non-Jewish residents of the same geo-
graphical area. The situation of Palestinian-Arabs is further aggravated by
the unequal provision of vital public services (such as transportation, con-
struction permits, maintenance of infrastructure, access to drinkable water,
and siting of toxic facilities). This system translates into, to refer to Soja
(2010), a “geography of (in)justice,” where “spatial justice” is understood
as “an integral and formative component of justice itself, a vital part of how
justice and injustice are socially constructed and evolve over time” (2010,
1; see also Dikeç 2001, 2009; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2010, 2011).
Such a model of thinking is based on the assumption that there exists a
“formative relation between the social and the spatial dimensions of human
life” (Soja 2010, 4), meaning that spatiality actively shapes and confgures
social relations while social processes co-constitute and give meaning to spa-
tialities in which humans and objects are situated.
The politics of space is actively involved in the process of slowly pro-
ducing the geographies of discrimination, the phenomenon that I call here
“slow urbicide.” This links the struggles over space to the ideas connected
to the concept of “the right to the city,” packed, as Soja underlines, “with
powerful ideas about the consequential geography of urban life” (2010, 6).
Hence, exertion of “the right to the city” is tantamount to the struggle for
spatial justice, even though such endeavors in many contexts—including

18
 INTRODUCTION

the Palestinian one—often fail. As a result, Palestinians are usually not able
to maximize what Mark Purcell understands as the use value of the space
(2002, 103). Rather than enjoying the right to the collective production
of an urban spatiality that would attend to the needs of its inhabitants,
they remain subordinated to violent and unequal geographies. Slow urbi-
cide extensively contributes to the advancement of these discriminatory pro-
cesses, gradually deepening spatial injustices.

Design of the Book

Slow Urbicide consists of three chapters and recapitulative conclusions, with
Chapter 1 exploring the theoretical approach adopted in these investiga-
tions, Chapter 2 focusing on the history and meaning of urbicidal violence,
and Chapter 3 discussing two case studies of slow urbicide in Palestine.
While this introduction can be seen as a robust presentation of concepts that
structure the argumentation offered in the book, the chapters that follow
should be read in sequence. The organization of the book serves its twofold
objective, defned in terms of the investigation of currently used tactics of
slow violence against urbanity and the expansion of the new “ethico-onto-
epistemological” (Barad 2007) perspective to study political violence and
its aftermath. Even though the theoretical and empirical explorations are
woven together within the book, a clear division between the delineation of
the conceptual approach (Chapters 1 and 2) and its more practical opera-
tionalization in further deliberations (Chapter 3) is clearly discernible. Such
a construction facilitates the fulfllment of the two complementary goals set
up in the book, namely methodological innovation and the analytical study
of violence against urbanity in Palestine.
In Chapter 1, entitled “New Materialism and the Study of Political
Violence,” starting with a discussion of war as practice, I offer a detailed
introduction to new materialist ways of thinking, focusing on how this ten-
dency is situated vis-à-vis its immediate predecessors, such as social construc-
tivism and discourse theory. My aim here is to elaborate on the potential
advantages that new materialism offers to the study of political violence as
well as to a more general analysis of international relations, and especially
how (slow) political violence is enacted and experienced. It is important
to bear in mind that new materialist thinking should be seen as a substan-
tial correction to what Robert Keohane termed “refectivism” (see Booth
et al. 1996) in international relations theory, rather than being positioned
in antagonistic relation to it. New materialism’s distinctive characteristic
is that it pays unprecedented attention to issues of matter and material-
ity, understanding them as important agents contributing extensively to the
production of knowledge and experience. This entails acknowledgment of
the material-semiotic nature of all processes, as well as the spatio-temporal
contexts in which they are situated. This, I argue, is especially vital in the

19
 INTRODUCTION

context of urban space being a dynamic conglomerate of material arrange-

ments and cultural meaning-making practices. Such a formulation seems to
correspond well to Lefebvre’s conceptualizations of socialized lived space,
which extends beyond the narrow understandings and delineations of urban
areas. Space is an organization of physical and spatial forms which materi-
ally and mentally entangle with socialized lived time, creating “our biogra-
phies and geo-histories” (Soja 2010, 8), and which are connected to broader
geographically and historically shaped situations and circuits. In that sense,
new materialism helps us to realize that space is not a dead background or
inert stage for human activities; rather it should be conceived of as a collec-
tion of material and imagined forces, actively shaping and co-constituting
social events and experiences, individual and collective. This substantially
reconfgures the dominant thinking in terms of temporal metamorphoses
of situated social processes, adding an important spatial (that is, also mate-
rial) dimension to it. As Soja underlines, “the new spatial consciousness”
stimulates awareness “that geographies in which we live can intensify and
sustain our exploitation as workers, support oppressive forms of cultural
and political domination based on race, gender, and nationality, and aggra-
vate all forms of discrimination and injustice” (2010, 19). Analysis of the
role that urbanity as well as the forces and rights associated with it play
in ethno-national conficts reveals the complex material-semiotic nature of
both urban practices and political violence. To do justice to this complexity,
part of Chapter 1 focuses on the concept of agency. Agency—which is abso-
lutely crucial for the domain of international relations theory—is problema-
tized by new materialism in ways that transcend matter’s both positivist
and constructionist renditions. Thus, this chapter points to the investiga-
tive richness that the innovative nature of a new materialist approach could
potentially contribute to the feld of widely defned political science or cul-
tural studies of politics, broadening the spectrum of political agents which
count in the political processes, locally and globally.
Entitled “Mapping Urbicidal Violence,” Chapter 2 familiarizes readers
with historical understandings of the concept of urbicide, drawing paral-
lels between current and historical instances of violence against the built
environment but also focusing on the signifcant differences between today’s
uses of urbicidal tactics and their historical equivalents. It offers—following
Coward (2009)—a critical overview of the dominant ways of conceptual-
izing urbicidal violence and critically assesses these tendencies. This part of
the book also more thoroughly engages with Coward’s materialist claims,
fostering an even more complex new materialist understanding of urban
destruction. Differently from Coward, I propose to approach urbicidal
violence as entangled with—rather than separate from—other manifesta-
tions of political violence, placing emphasis on the need to acknowledge its
material-semiotic character and the consequences of this. While mapping

20
 INTRODUCTION

the various formulations of urbicidal violence, I pay attention to how it

contributes to the creation of “placelessness,” or to killing “the sense of the
place” (McKittrick 2011) of a particular community, substantially recon-
fguring the politics of belonging and mutual codependence of spatial and
social structures. Thus, in order to understand what is at stake in urbicide,
in Chapter 2 I also discuss the concept of “home” and how it is situated
vis-à-vis its natural, physical, social, and cultural contexts, as well as how
its destruction matters. Adopting a cartographic approach, grounded in
new materialist ways of thinking, this part of the book offers a topology
of concepts used for referring to violence against urbanity, highlighting the
material dimensions of home and community as much as of their destruc-
tion. As I want to underline, the demolition of urban spaces—understood
inclusively as spreading far beyond urban areas—amounts to the annihila-
tion, or denial, of “the right to the city” conceived of not only as the right to
shape the urban according to inhabitants’ needs but, crucially, as the right
to active resistance against state policies, manifested, among other ways, in
aspirations for self-governance. If the pursuit of “the right to the city” is
perceived as a continuous effort at reappropriation of the space, counter-
ing the centralized state’s endeavors (so meaningful in the context of the
Israeli spatial politics in Palestine), then the criminalization and subsequent
eradication of Palestinian urbanity as an important context of collective
resistance must be seen as a process that may lead to the construction of
such forms of violence-based territorial dominance that would be diffcult,
or even impossible, to contest or resist. In the context of ethno-territorial
rivalries, this seems to be of fundamental importance for the effcient pro-
duction of territoriality in a project of violent colonial expansion. An assault
on urbanity could be understood, in such a situation, as a necessary element
of the political state-sponsored organization of space, involving representa-
tional strategies and material rearrangements. This policy results in the crea-
tion of oppressive geographies and spatial injustices based on ideologically
shaped ethnic divisions and intentionally impaired participation in decision-
making processes by the marginalized groups.
The violent geographies and geographical warfare in Palestine are fur-
ther explored in Chapter 3 with reference to particular case studies. This
part of the book tackles cartography as a powerful instrument in producing
spatial injustice through a material-semiotic process of organizing political
and physical geographies. The chapter explores spatial strategies of occupa-
tion, dispossession, exploitation, and domination as implemented in both
the Occupied Territories and Israel proper and how they have been effec-
tively used in the process of production of Israeli territoriality (including
in occupied areas). “Geographical Warfare in Palestine” focuses specif-
cally on those spatial manipulations that contribute to the process of mate-
rial, social, cultural, and symbolic boundary making. The two case studies

21
 INTRODUCTION

offered in Chapter 3 seek to reveal the convoluted ways in which urbicidal

violence operates at subtle levels and at a relatively slow pace, as well as
how it relies on political framing of the colonial project in terms of devel-
opment and modernization. First, exploring the geographies of occupation
generated in the West Bank, my analysis focuses on the state-sponsored
measures used as tools in the production of the desired forms of spatiality,
facilitating the construction of Israeli territoriality on the occupied areas.
Politicization of such agents as, for instance, road infrastructure, plants,
or waste remains a signifcant means for advancing slow urbicidal violence
in the region. Second, the analysis of forced urbanization processes in the
Naqab/Negev,7 and how the Israeli state recruits the natural forces active in
the region for its colonial enterprise, exposes tacit operations of slow urbi-
cidal violence in the Israeli mainland, revealing the diversity of colonization
techniques employed in the various areas remaining under its jurisdiction.
The studies included in this part of the book are by no means meant to
be exhaustive. Rather, my intention is to draw attention to the situated
material-semiotic, natural-cultural, and human-nonhuman processes of
advancing destruction and deracination of indigenous populations through
a systematic assault on the traditional organization of urban communities.
Policies drawing on similar logic have been undertaken in other areas and
against other urban communities in Israel proper (e.g., Galilean cities with
substantial Arab populations) and in the Occupied Territories (e.g., the
Gaza Strip). Thus, the two case studies discussed in this book serve merely
as an illustration of a more general politics of slow-motion destruction, and
the list of possible examples could easily be extended. My objective, how-
ever, is to point out that the strategy of “slowness” employed by the Israeli
state may serve as an effective means of obfuscating the state-sponsored
character of such violent spatial developments, gradually leading to the pro-
duction of forms of territorial authority that are desired by the colonizer. As
the book underlines, without spatial awareness, or awareness of the shift-
ing temporalities of urbicidal violence, the production and maintenance of
unfair geographies and spatial injustices are likely to remain unchallenged.
The unspectacular nature of such forms of urbicidal violence, or its “slow-
ness,” successfully invisibilizes its detrimental effects, leaving them often
unaccounted for. It is therefore necessary to pay attention to the indirect,
sophisticated operations of a whole array of multilayered techniques, as
well as to the injustices that they produce in their effort to construct a spa-
tially organized system of control and discrimination.
In the concluding part of Slow Urbicide my intention is to provide an
answer to the question of what is at stake in urbicide, as much as in docu-
menting violence against urbanity. Informed by fndings presented in earlier
chapters, this part of the book offers a refection on the specifcity of current
warfare and how—or why—it uniquely affects urban communities. The
idea is to explore why violence against urbanity has been an increasingly

22
 INTRODUCTION

popular strategy and to reveal the rationale behind such policies. A new
materialist approach, as must be once more underlined, may be very helpful
in demonstrating these points. At the same time, on a more general level,
the fnal part of the book intends to encourage a consideration, informed by
the earlier-presented investigations, of the ways in which, as Diana Coole
reminds us, humans “encounter, are affected by, respond to, destroy, rely
upon and are generally imbricated with matter, and to assume a critical
stance by exploring the dangerous ways matter is being reconfgured and
distributed” (2013, 468). It is therefore necessary to document and refect
on the current warfare strategies and—especially—their slow, silent, almost
invisible operations.

Notes
1 See, for example, Graham (2002b, 2002c, 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2010), Campbell
et al. (2007), Cowen (2007), Shaw (2004), Ramadan (2009), Fregonese (2009),
and Weizman (2007).
2 In this book, I use the term “Palestine” to denote the territory of the former
British Mandate, whose signifcant parts were effectively colonized by the
Jewish settlers (and soldiers) before and after the offcial proclamation of
the State of Israel in May 1948. These territories are now either considered
as belonging to the Israeli state (although the political borders of this organ-
ism are still not fully recognized) or remaining under its occupation. The term
“Occupied Territories” is used to refer specifcally to the lands of the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip, which came under the Israeli occupation in 1967, after the
Six-Day War. In the aftermath of this war, Israel, as the victorious side of the
confict, managed to spread its military control over the West Bank in the east
and reached the eastern band of the Suez Canal in the west. After later negotia-
tions, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt (1973) but remained as an occupying force
in the West Bank and Gaza. In 2005 Israel offcially withdrew from Gaza, but it
continues to block the area from each side, hampering its urban expansion and
economic development.
3 For exploration of the politics of biosphere and greenery management in the
context of the Israeli presence in Palestine, see also Cohen and Gordon (2018)
and Weizman (2017).
4 For the intersection of nationalism and territorial politics, see, for instance,
works by O’Loughlin and Ó Tuathail (2009) or Moore (2016); for exploration
of the entanglement of nationalism and ethno-territoriality with understanding
of human bodies and necropolitics, see Verdery (2000) and Leshem (2015).
5 The reinvention of the Jewish nation and its history as embedded in territorial
practices or natural belonging has been discussed, among others, by Hochberg
(2015), Zerubavel (2020), Morris (2007), or Sand (2009).
6 Detailed scholarly discussions of the concept of “the right to the city” can be
found in Purcell (2002), Mitchell (2003), Dikeç (2007), Leavitt et al. (2009),
Marcuse (2009), Harvey (2008), Attoh (2011), Soja (2010), Fernandes (2006,
2007), Dikeç and Gilbert (2002), and Gilbert and Dikeç (2008).
7 I am using the double name of the region throughout the book. The desert is
called “Naqab” by the Palestinian-Arab population but it is referred as “Negev”
by the Jewish population. I use the two names with a slash to represent the colo-
nial reality of this area.

23
 INTRODUCTION

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 1
NEW MATERIALISM AND THE STUDY
OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

War as Practice
In his seminal work, The New Western Way of War (2005), Martin Shaw
argues that “the defect of most social theory of war and militarism is … that
it has not considered war as practice, i.e., what people actually do in war”
(2005, 40; original emphasis). The prevailing academic ignorance of this
immediately practical dimension of war has produced a situation in which,
in line with the causal logic pervading Western scientifc efforts, war is pre-
dominantly theorized in instrumental terms and in reference to such con-
ceptual abstractions as states, structures, conditions of anarchy, balances,
systems, or power. Infused with ideas borrowed from Newtonian physics,1
political theory conceives of these actors as atomic autonomous entities,
preexisting any relations in which they enter, and whose interactions within
a closed system result from objective laws and regularities and are thus to
a large extent predictable. Figuring merely as a consequence of other forces
and events, war remains epiphenomenal. Such a theoretical rendition pays
attention to its political goals and effects, remaining in line with Carl von
Clausewitz’s infuential understanding of war as a rational continuation of
(interstate) politics with the addition of other means, whose possible uncer-
tain effects, nevertheless, must always be kept in mind (1976). At the same
time, the question of what war actually is remains, to a considerable extent,
an underexplored trope of scholarly investigations, as the vast majority of
scholars working in the feld of political science and international relations
theory do not address in detail the key elements of war, that is, its “empiri-
cal content” and the “how” of war.2 As Hew Strachan notes in reference
to the international legal frameworks, one of “the central challenges con-
fronting international relations today is that we do not really know what
is a war and what is not” (2007, 2). Even though the defnitions and legal
regulations are already at hand, the empirical dimension of war cannot be
easily subordinated to the extant theoretical and analytical categories. The
strategy of bracketing off war’s immediately practice-related aspects does
not offer critical insight into its real content, even though, as Shane Brighton

DOI: 10.4324/9781003157687-2 31
 NEW MATERIALISM

claims, “war presents a surfeit of being over knowing” (2011, 102). This
means that the focus on the practices of war could shed an entirely different
light on the understanding of its complex ontology. The problem is some-
what broader, as historically, war—Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton sug-
gest—has not typically been perceived as an object of critical inquiry per se;
“attention has been fxed on particular wars rather than war as a general
force” (2011b, 129). Studied within various disciplines and in divergent
scholarly contexts, the trope of war has operated as a “decentered” and
“fragmented” theme of academic studies (Barkawi and Brighton 2011b,
129). The result is, in Barkawi and Brighton’s words, that “the most basic
questions regarding the ontology and epistemology of war have hardly been
asked, much less have they issued in a substantial body of theory” (2011b,
127; see also Barkawi and Brighton 2011a).
Recently, however, a growing body of academic scholarship situated
within the feld of “critical security studies” and “critical war studies” has
started to focus on different aspects of the experience of war, where war, as
a “generative” force (Barkawi and Brighton 2011b, 126; see also Brighton
2011), is conceived of in reference to the embodied practices it entails along
with an exploration of what it is capable of doing—both in the short and
in the long run, both on the micro- and macroscale. In their framing of the
ontology of war, Barkawi and Brighton opt to conceptualize war in terms of
an “excess,” understood as the capacity of organized violence to exceed the
“kinetic exchange” (that is, fghting) and to work as a constitutive “event
for politics and society” (2011b, 136). Thus, war should be understood as
a multiplicity of practices, objects, and forces that directly affect human
bodies as much as they translate into the generative reconfguration, or dis-
ruptive decomposition, of social, cultural, economic, and political systems.
Even though partly continuing the legacy of Western anthropocentric phi-
losophy, such lines of criticism—exposing the immediately bodily character
of the use of political violence—advocate for a more encompassing (and
empirical) understanding of war, which would include, for instance, the
bodily experience of injury and pain (Scarry 2005; Sylvester 2011, 2012a,
2012b),3 or insist on approaching war in terms of an “embodied social prac-
tice” (McSorley 2012, 236). Starting from different methodological para-
digms (such as feminism, social constructivism, or phenomenology), several
recent works quite explicitly challenge the prevailing tendencies of “war
studies” to focus on abstract categories and generalizations, instead postu-
lating explorations of human involvement in, and experience of, war,4 thus
shedding light on its inevitably human character.
An understanding of war as practice, however, should not be limited
to the study of the experience of the human bodies involved in it. Instead,
such a grounding of these critical investigations enables a conceptualiza-
tion of war as an event compounding a variety of agential forces and pro-
cesses. War recruits and combines such complex natural-cultural5 entities

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 NEW MATERIALISM

as states, nations, ethnic groups, objects, forces, technologies, strategies,

infrastructures, (sexed and raced) human bodies, buildings, (in)securities,
acts of violence, ideologies, economies, households, animals, international
organizations, NGOs, families, microorganisms, representations, memories,
resentments, affects, emotions, and other agents within its deadly assem-
blages. These dynamic entanglements produce important effects. Thus,
keeping this richness in mind, in this book I argue that examination of the
sole experience of the human body as involved in, and affected by, politi-
cal violence of different kinds—even though of tremendous importance
for contemporary understandings of the practice of war beyond a purely
functional approach to political violence—is not enough to fully compre-
hend the ontologies of war and political violence. Rather, it is necessary to
take into account the whole range of more-than-human6 agents involved
in these complex “material-semiotic” (Haraway 1988, 595) events. War is
relational, and this is what primarily makes it what it is. Therefore, contem-
porary political violence has to be thought of as a compound human-non-
human, as much as an actual-virtual, assemblage. Approaching the current
war strategies—as well as their goals and effects—in terms of intricate and
dynamic entanglements of material and nonmaterial bodies7 and forces is
what translates into a different perspective of thinking ethically and politi-
cally about current instances of state-sponsored violence. This is relevant
especially in the context of the emergence of what Mary Kaldor calls “new
wars,” whose characteristics include “the politics of identity, the decentrali-
zation of violence, [and] the globalized war economy” (1999, 138). In such
circumstances, war emerges as an amalgam of processes which, on the one
hand, remains narrated into a form of knowledge about it, but which, on
the other hand, profoundly shapes and sustains this narration as much as
it is shaped by it in return. The multifarious and dynamic entanglement of
the discursive and the material in the ontology of war is generative, hence
likely to produce meaningful, although often unexpected, effects. In its per-
formative ontology, as a material-discursive ensemble produced within a
number of agential apparatuses and assemblages, working through different
modalities of agencies and compositions of power, war generates (or annihi-
lates, which is an equally “productive” move) histories, states of affairs, and
future im/possibilities. Approaching war in such ethico-onto-epistemologi-
cal8 ways fts well within the new materialist philosophical strand, within
which—as already signaled in the Introduction—the argumentation offered
in this book is positioned.

Situating New Materialism

In the last couple of decades, beginning in the late 1990s, a turn to matter
(or a material turn) has been gaining momentum within the social and natu-
ral sciences, as well as in the humanities. Neither a violent rupture with the

33
 NEW MATERIALISM

constructivist approaches associated with poststructuralism and discourse

theory (its direct “chronological” predecessors in cultural criticism) nor a
straightforward return to previous forms of materialism (Coole 2005, 451),
this new philosophical tendency nevertheless constitutes a meaningful shift
in conceptualizing the relationship between the material and the discursive
in the “practices of knowing in being” (Barad 2003, 829). In its attempt at
transcending, at least to a certain extent, the thinking linked to the para-
digm of the “linguistic turn,” new materialism (or neo-materialism), initially
inspired mostly by the works of Manuel DeLanda (1996, 2006) and Rosi
Braidotti (2000, 2002, 2006), calls for a detailed examination of matter as
lively, generative, and processual. This applies to the materiality of human
bodies, although it is not limited thereto. Even though this philosophical
strand, in Braidotti’s words, aims at “[r]ethinking the embodied structure of
human subjectivity after Foucault” (2000, 158), new materialist approaches
do not restrict the scope of their interests to the exploration of the bodily
dimension of humanity, instead encompassing also other material entities,
both animate and inanimate. Critical toward the constructivist tendency to
privilege language, values, and culture in analyzing broadly understood pol-
itics, new materialism nevertheless acknowledges that constructivist insights
have made obvious the inability to return to questions of materiality and
matter in purely representational or naturalistic ways. In other words, con-
structivist legacies thrive within the new materialist endeavors devoted to
revealing the compound, entangled nature of our world.
In her infuential contribution to these ways of thinking, Donna Haraway
points to the complex mutual co-constitution of the material and the semi-
otic, rendering obsolete any thinking in terms of straightforward binary
oppositions (1988, 2003). In a similar way, Karen Barad’s “agential real-
ism” acknowledges that matter is as active as our interpretative frameworks,
arguing that matter and meaning co-form each other (Barad 2003, 2007;
more on this will follow). As it can be inferred from the brief references
above, new materialism draws heavily on the achievements of social con-
structivism and often tends to reread many of the seminal poststructuralist
oeuvres. At the same time, however, it constitutes a challenge to those pre-
dominant tendencies of cultural studies, which limit cultural critique to an
analysis of the ideological structures of power and meaning. Instead, it pre-
fers to pay more attention to the notion of “matter,” typically elided from
the dominant Western philosophies, pointing to its metamorphous nature
and underlining its agential faculties. Nonconfrontational and monistic in its
construction, the new materialist ferment renounces thinking in terms of the
dualisms persistent in the humanist tradition, which is manifest in its pay-
ing special attention to material processes, making meaning, or mattering,
possible. Preoccupied with the inherent dynamism of matter and sensitive
to the complexity of the phenomena troubling our world at the turn of the
millennium, new materialist analyses combine detailed studies of microlevel

34
 NEW MATERIALISM

situations while locating them within the broader macrolevel processes and
spaces, looking into the various ways these two are entangled and co-form
each other. They also focus on how materializations are inevitably saturated
with power relations and how power sustains itself, also through material
processes. As DeLanda clarifes,

to give a complete explanation of a social process taking place

at a given scale, we need to elucidate not only the micro-macro
mechanisms, those behind the emergence of the whole, but also
the macro-micro mechanisms through which the whole provides
its component parts with constraints and resources, placing limita-
tions on what they can do while enabling novel performance.
(2006, 34; original emphasis)

Pointing to the extensive networks of different actors—including political,

material, social, cultural, and discursive entities and forces which are always
already entangled—new materialism seems to offer an illuminating perspec-
tive from which to approach compound processes populating contemporary
politics and cultures.
What makes new materialism potentially attractive for political science
is, as Diana Coole (2013) suggests, its nuanced maneuvering between the
opposite poles of empirical realism (prevailing in this feld of academic
inquiry since the end of the Second World War) and the sophisticated
criticism of constitutive powers offered by poststructuralism, emerging as
part of the turn to what Robert O. Keohane calls “refectivism” in interna-
tional relations theory (1988). The clash of these two strands was effectu-
ated as part of the so-called “third debate” running through this feld of
studies, which mostly focused on the radical epistemological and methodo-
logical differences between positivism and a then recently emerged group of
approaches that challenged the underlying assumptions of realism, offering
instead research strategies embedded in discourse analysis.9 By no means
have these discussions been limited to the academic feld of political science
or international relations theory; they have permeated the entire branch of
the social sciences.
Working from within the domain of critical science and technology stud-
ies and inspired by complexity theory and quantum physics, Karen Barad
explains that these two paradigms—realism on the one hand and social con-
structivism on the other—provide us with quite different ways of thinking,
both of which are, nonetheless, equally anthropocentric in their respective
orientations. The former is centered on the idea of rationality pertaining to
the human (autonomous) subject producing knowledge about things that
objectively exist in the world and that can be empirically accessed, ration-
ally known, and accurately represented.10 The latter assumes that the matter
of bodies (both human and nonhuman) is an effect of the productive social

35
 NEW MATERIALISM

and cultural feld, that is, a result of human activity, ultimately derived from
the agency of language (Barad 2007). Accordingly, for social constructiv-
ism, matter as such does not matter; what matters instead are the meanings
that it conveys. As John Smith and Chris Jenks rightly note, constructiv-
ist accounts, in their preoccupation with the cultural, tend to overestimate
the effect of human authorship, which often results in recentering, rather
than decentering, the human subject as the locus of agency (2005, 147).
Unsatisfed with the extant approaches, Barad, subscribing to new material-
ism’s postanthropocentric spirit,11 calls for “a robust account of the mate-
rialization of all bodies—‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’—including the agential
contributions of all material forces (both ‘social’ and ‘natural’)” (2007,
66; original emphasis). She postulates a “nonrepresentational form of real-
ism that is based on an ontology that does not take for granted the exist-
ence of ‘words’ and ‘things’ and an epistemology that does not subscribe
to a notion of truth based on their correct correspondence” (2007, 56).
As Barad asserts, “experimenting and theorizing are dynamic practices that
play constitutive role in the production of objects and subjects and matter
and meaning” (2007, 56; original emphasis). This attention to practices, or
inquiry into the different relationalities of matter and meaning, is what lets
us more comprehensively study their effects and how they are constitutive
of the natural-cultural entities. Herein resides the signifcant potential of
new materialist ways of thinking for such academic disciplines as political
science or international relations theory, that is, scholarly felds which have
traditionally been rather unwilling to accept approaches undermining realist
paradigms (and positivist methodologies related to them), but which have
become increasingly vulnerable to constructivist critique. In Coole’s words,
in such a context, new materialism offers an interesting alterative, taking

an empirical interest in emergent materialisations without being

simply empiricist; it does not call for the abandonment of construc-
tivist investigations and critiques of power relations but seeks to
contextualise them more broadly; it is not a crude representation-
alism or uncritical return to some putative immediacy. Rather, it
recognises the way concepts and experience, meaning and matter,
emerge historically and reciprocally as embodied actors immerse
themselves in and engage with/within material and social environ-
ments. … It reopens the real to social scientifc inquiry, but without
renouncing the critical refexivity that constructivism insists upon.
(2013, 455)

Thus, new materialism is a signifcant correction of (rather than a violent

rupture with) social constructivism, constituting a meaningful attempt to
transcend the anthropocentric thinking prevalent in Western philosophy
from its very inception.12 In the study of various aspects of politics, typically

36
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considered a human domain, it can serve as a tool to shed light on how

the human is implicated in, impinged upon, and conditioned by matter. It
reveals how bodies, territories, lands, spaces, industries, plants, infrastruc-
tures, minerals, animals, microorganisms, technologies, affects, emotions,
interpretations, and so on all actively shape and participate in political life
and are in turn co-constituted by it. New materialist theorizing explores
how the renowned interest in, and detailed account of, materiality and pro-
cesses of spatio-temporal materializations can reformulate the dominant
understandings of what counts as political. It urges us to investigate the
how question of politics: by what kind of processes politics is effectuated;
what kind of effects it generates; what bodies it mobilizes and reshapes;
how it engenders the global; and how local practices and experiences are
formed, constrained, or produced by macrolevel processes and phenomena;
or vice versa—how the local sustains and materializes them. At the same
time, it investigates how human encounters with material things produce
affects13 and how these affects move (within) the more-than-human col-
lectives; it reveals the overlaps of different bodies and forces and how they
are immersed in material-semiotic contexts, and so on. As a result, as Bruce
Braun and Sarah Whatmore rightly assert in their discussion of the con-
tent of contemporary politics, it is “no longer possible to imagine either the
human as a living being or the collectivities in which we live apart from the
more-than-human company that is now so self-evidently integral to what it
means to be human and from which collectivities are made” (2010, xvii).
Such reformulation of how politics is understood leads to the situation in
which, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost point out, “the sheer material-
ity and mass of bodies—their numbers, their needs, their fecundity, their
productivity, their sustainability and so on—is becoming a key dimension
of political analysis and intervention” (2011, 24). No longer is it possible to
approach the political actuality according to the logic of either-or. For the
proponents of new materialist thinking, society is—and always has been—
both materially real and culturally mediated, which makes it possible, in
Coole and Frost’s words, “to accept social constructionist arguments while
also insisting that the material realm is irreducible to culture or discourse
and that cultural artifacts are not arbitrary vis-à-vis nature” (2011, 27).
Such thinking offers new avenues of scholarly enquiry into the materiality
and agency of inclusively understood “things” in politics without resorting
to purely realistic onto-epistemological and ethical assumptions.

Agency Undone
What makes new materialism an especially interesting approach in the study
of the shifting spatialities and temporalities of political violence and war
is its unprecedented focus on the issue of agency, a concept that has for
long been located at the core of political science and international relations

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theory. In both its voluntaristic and fatalistic accounts, in the study of poli-
tics, agency is thought of as pertaining to individual subjects (or states).
Such thinking is based on the assumption that only rational entities can act
in agential ways and assumes that agency has to be understood as inten-
tional (cf. Latour 2005). Even though this conceptualization has, since the
second half of the twentieth century, been experiencing a profound crisis as
a result of extensive criticism from thinkers associated with postmodernism,
feminism, deconstructionism, and constructivism,14 it has remained central
to the traditional renditions of both domestic and international politics. The
danger of this critical situation generated by the “third debate” within the
international relations theory, as Coole diagnoses, is that it could poten-
tially lead to a radical reappraisal of the concept of agency in the form
of either “individualistic and voluntaristic,” or its metamorphosis into an
“eviscerated” notion rendering politics “trivial” and “lacking transforma-
tive means” (2005, 127). A novel notion of agency is therefore necessary
to sustain the politically motivated belief in the transformative qualities of
politics. Such thinking remains in line with new materialist formulations
and this philosophical approach’s necessarily political character. As Felicity
Colman cogently explains, even though there is no single defnition of the
notion of “agency” within the diverse ways of new materialist thinking, a
common-sense understanding of it transpires. Agency emerges as referring
to “the relationality of the political cultural position that and by which mat-
ter and things are defned, distributed, and organized—by their relationality
to other matter and things; and which do not have a pre-existing ontol-
ogy” (Colman 2018, n.p.). Overall, new materialism seeks to reposition the
human among other actants, although the propositions of the theorists and
philosophers associated with this strand greatly differ from each other. In
the remainder of this section, I offer a brief overview of those conceptual-
izations that have stirred a great deal of discussion and inspired interesting
applications.
In a rather moderate spirit, Coole proposes to replace the traditional
notion of agency in political science and international relations theory with
that of “agentic capacities” and urges us to recognize their “irremediably
embodied,” as much as singular and situated, nature (2005, 2013). In such
an account, “agentic properties emerge and interact across the agentic spec-
trum” (Coole 2005, 128) and endure within a corporeal experience rather
than pertaining to the transcendental subject. Agency remains in the process
as an effect of constant, intensive, perceptual, and culturally mediated rela-
tions and entanglements with the world. It emerges as “provisional con-
centrations of agentic capacities that acquire more or less coherence and
duration, depending upon their context,” which “can only be grasped as
moments within the whole spectrum of agentic properties” (Coole 2005,
135). Bound to located corporeal and collective practice, agency “is a capac-
ity immanent in the social feld” (Coole 2005, 138) or the intersubjective.

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 NEW MATERIALISM

Coole’s initial account—heavily infuenced by the phenomenological phi-

losophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty—focuses on the agentic capacities dis-
tributed across animate (or rather human) entities. In her later work (2013),
however, she pays increasingly more attention to inhuman agents and
forces and how they generatively assemble with the human, even though
she decides to retain most of her earlier formulations.
In a far more radical way than Coole, Jane Bennett talks about the agen-
tial materiality of “thing-power,” signaling the possibility that “attentive-
ness to (nonhuman) things and their powers can have a laudable effect on
humans” (2004, 348). Nevertheless, as Bennett underlines in Spinozist fash-
ion, “a thing has power by virtue of its operating in conjunction with other
things,” meaning that “thing-power, as a kind of agency, is the property of
an assemblage” (2004, 354; original emphasis); thus its ontology resides
in its relational character. In Vibrant Matter (2010), Bennett’s preoccupa-
tion with things (but not disinterest in humans!) leads her to argue that
nonhuman matter is imbued with a liveliness exhibiting distributed agency
which can no longer be understood as an effect of intentionality. Similarly,
insisting on agency’s more-than-human character, Barad underlines that
it cannot be understood as “something that someone or something has”
(2007, 235) but as “enactment” (2007, 214). Starting from the philosophy
of science, Barad openly contests the human-centered concept of agency and
explains that material-discursive entanglements (or “intra-actions,” as she
prefers) entail complex coproductions of more-than-human matter, time,
and spaces, as well as their various context-specifc signifcations. This is far
removed from traditional conceptualizations according to which the human
acts on matter. Instead, all entities are thought of as agential actors/actants
in the world as they continuously (materially-discursively, spatially-tempo-
rarily) come into being (Barad 2007). Physical matter and social reality are
co-constitutive since—rather than being seen as ontologically different from
each other—each plays an agentic role in the other’s constant becoming. In
Serpil Oppermann’s words, such an approach transforms “the language of
otherness to that of differential co-emergence” (2013, 67), as nothing seems
to be ontologically autonomous. As Sofe Sauzet explains, this theoretical
move enables thinking that agency is manifest in different forms “as rela-
tions, movements, repetitions, silences, distances, architecture, structures,
feelings, things, us/them/it, words” (2018, n.p.). Employing the more-than-
human notion of agency, Bennett’s and Barad’s respective theories neverthe-
less reveal that new materialist accounts of the actual should not be read as
a lack of interest in the human. Rather, new materialism reformulates the
ontological assumptions linked to humanism, pointing to the extensive rela-
tionalities and assemblages extending far beyond the human.
New materialist philosophy radically displaces anthropocentrism and
humanism, two traditional planes on which the concept of agency devel-
oped and from where—especially in the context of political science and

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 NEW MATERIALISM

international relations theory—it was then projected onto other entities, such
as classes or states, serving as invented avatars of human cognitive faculties,
rationality, and self-consciousness.15 Thus, it is necessary to reorganize these
taken-for-granted trajectories of thinking. As Coole lucidly elaborates, “it
is not that agency has conventionally been defned as a property unique
to humans; inversely, the characteristics that have traditionally been held
to defne humans and to render them a distinctive and privileged species
have been used to defne the characteristics of agency” (2013, 457). The
brute, inert, and non-refexive material sphere, lacking agency and power,
has served as a meaningful “other,” or foil, to the fgure of the rational sub-
ject, against which he could come into its transcendental being. Disavowing
such human-centric framing of agency and replacing it with a language of
“agentic capacities” distributed across a whole diversity of material bodies
is what, Coole explains, allows us to “decouple agency from humans while
raising questions about the nature of life and of the place or status of the
human within it” (2013, 457). Such a conceptualization urges us to think
about the capacity for agency as contingent on particular confgurations of
material-discursive forces, which are nevertheless dynamic and changeable.
So even though new materialist analyses might well result in the identifca-
tion of capacious agents similar to those offered by conventional accounts,
as Coole notes, “their emergence has to be traced and not presumed, which
will likely result in their capabilities for agency being recognised as more
partial, contextual and provisional” (2013, 458).
While Coole insists that it is necessary to keep refexivity (and, perhaps,
also responsibility16) as a defning attribute of agentic capacities for ensur-
ing that such a theoretical project will remain capable of inspiring political
change, many other new materialist thinkers (such as Bruno Latour, Karen
Barad, Donna Haraway, or Jane Bennett) propose, as mentioned earlier,
to further fatten these ontologies and consider agency as pertaining to the
relationality of animate and inanimate, or refexive and non-refexive, bod-
ies. What has to be kept in mind is that—regardless of its various theoretical
renditions—within new materialism, agency is always posited as political,
that is, as Colman reminds us, “not just as a methodological critical tool that
acknowledges its own self-telling or performing, but as an ethical modality
by and with which practitioners can be attendant to the political generated
by the entanglement of matter” (2018, n.p.). This turns agency into a con-
cept that is vital not only for studying the complex, relational ontologies of
the contemporary political world, but also a tool of meaningful intervention
in the struggle for broadly defned equality and justice.

Political Violence Through a New Materialist Lens

The “material turn” within political science and international relations the-
ory, as explained earlier, has been part and parcel of the broader critique

40
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of anthropocentrism across the humanities and the social sciences. Within

the area of the study of politics (understood both domestically and inter-
nationally), the various theoretical endeavors of the proponents of new
materialist thinking have aimed at unmasking the inability (and reluctance)
of the existing epistemic frameworks to fully account for the more-than-
human forms of agency and their various contributions to the making of the
political. In line with the dominant approaches in political science, political
violence—a recurring theme of this book—is usually defned in instrumen-
tal terms as a deliberate use of force to achieve political goals. It refers
to state-sponsored violence against other states, non-state actors (guerillas,
activist groups, and organizations), and its populations and citizens. The
concept can also be employed in reference to the means used by the non-
state actors against the state. Acts of political violence comprise physical
and psychosocial measures of intimidating, or injuring, the targeted popu-
lations with an aim to coerce them into a desired behavior. The range of
strategies used for this purpose is wide and encompasses such violent means
as bombardments, shelling, shootings, arrests, torture, detention, disposses-
sion, and demolition of property, as much as the denial of human rights and
basic needs; restriction (or denial) of access to food, education, healthcare,
and sanitation; or limitation of the freedom of speech. Perhaps, given the
anthropocentric bias of the disciplines within which the political has been
primarily conceptually located, it should come as no surprise that the study
of politics in general, and of political violence in particular, has typically
been—at least declaratively—humancentric. Traditionally, the domain of
politics has been perceived as embracing human interactions, a milieu in
which human institutions operate, and a feld preoccupied with the fate
of human collectivities (nations, states, the international community, etc.).
The turn to matter, however, explicitly addresses the urgent need to resitu-
ate the debates on the political within the broader processes of materiali-
zation, encouraging interest in, and recognition of, the embeddedness of
politics in networks of more-than-human relations and forces. It urges us
to acknowledge that broadly understood things, or bodies, play an equally
agential role in the processes of becoming of politics as cultural and social
discourses do and that these meaningful contributions have to be taken into
consideration if we want to truly account for the complexities of contempo-
rary political processes, including the unfolding of political violence. New
materialist thinking can prove to be helpful in approaching these dynamic
enactments.17
Politically oriented, new materialism critically engages with the how
question of political violence (and the how question of war), positioning it
as a complex relationality of material-discursive practices which generate
meaningful and situated effects. This may be understood in reference to
Michel Foucault’s notion of a dispositif (interpreted through new material-
ist critique), that is, an apparatus defned in terms of a

41
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thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, insti-

tutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, adminis-
trative measures, scientifc statements, philosophical, moral and
philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the
unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself
is the system of relations that can be established between these
elements.
(1980, 94)

As Mirko Nicolić notes, Barad turns the Foucauldian notion of apparatus

into the group of performative material-semiotic processes of inclusions and
exclusions (2018, n.p.), situating them as “boundary-drawing practices”
(Barad 2007, 140) or “the material conditions of possibility and impossibil-
ity of mattering; they enact what matters and what is excluded from mat-
tering” (Barad 2007, 148). In the study of political violence, not only does
such an approach center on what means are employed, where, and against
whom, or how effcient they are (these pertain to the domain of strategic
studies); it also explores the complex networks of more-than-human agents
and forces which constitute the experiential content of political violence,
investigating how decisions to use political violence come into being in spe-
cifc material-semiotic and spatio-temporal contexts, how violence operates
with and on particular bodies, which natural-cultural agents it mobilizes,
and what kind of effects it generates in particular parts of the world. Such a
perspective acknowledges the inevitable entanglement of knowing in being
and acting, testifying to the “ethico-onto-epistemological” character of vio-
lence as well as—in Barad’s idiom—its “spacetimemattering” (Barad 2007,
2011, 2014), that is, the complex becoming of the ensemble of space, time,
and matter which is productive of meaningful reconfgurations of the world.
The performative, relational ontology of political violence—in contradis-
tinction to linguistic understandings of performativity—incorporates the
material and discursive, social and scientifc, natural and cultural, animate
and inanimate, human and nonhuman factors and forces, where agency
emerges as a quality of the assemblage rather than pertaining to the enti-
ties preexisting the relations. It is, in Kathrin Thiele’s account, an ontologi-
cal proposition “in which individualized things and objects are no longer
presupposed as simply ‘there,’ in which even the world itself is not simply
‘given’ and ‘out there,’ but in which everything is accounted for as an enact-
ment of the entangled nature of nature” (2016, n.p.; original emphasis).
Thus, from such a philosophical perspective, it is necessary to consider the
multiscale and multitemporal character of violence in order to truly account
for its complex and multidimensional becoming. In the following I offer a
limited, but hopefully informative, sample of such thinking and how rel-
evant and generative it can turn out to be in the context of analysis of war
and violence.

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 NEW MATERIALISM

New materialist investigations interrogate how political violence emerges

as a dynamic assemblage of different agents and forces operating at diverse
scales and how it generates meaningful material reconfgurations of the
world, locally and globally. In such an account, things and discourses alike
actively condition acts of violence; for instance, they participate in the com-
plex processes of materializing the targets of political intervention through
the use of rhetorical means as much as the agential involvement of things,
such as surveillance- and combat-enabled population-centered unmanned
systems, operated remotely from the allegedly safe space of military bases
located in sites geographically distant from those inhabited by the targeted
populations.18 The target (hence, an object) becomes “knowable” because
of the complex visualizing and mapping technology that contributes to
its materialization as something with provisional boundaries as much as
a “thing” locatable in space.19 The material operation of the technology
employed for this purpose is not given but rather constituted by a series of
other practices: legal, scientifc, technological, educational, spatial, military,
architectural, political, ideological, and so on. Hence, materialization (and
often—subsequent criminalization) of the target takes place at the intersec-
tion of different forms of knowledges and practices, which reconfgures the
world by drawing boundaries between what matters (and how) and what
does not. This is intimately entwined with power relations. For instance, the
use of such a system is certainly conditioned by the speech acts contribut-
ing to the construction of the potential “national threat,” or defnitions of
“threatening behaviors” as much as “dangerous objects,” mobilizing affects
(such as fear) and stimulating actions (such as a willingness to become bod-
ily involved in combat). Such emotional (that is, connected to affects already
qualifed in language20) associations are often related to the fact, or feeling,
of belonging to a certain ethnic community and possibly translate into loyal
affliations being at the roots of a readiness to participate in violent, often
deadly, interactions with “threatening others.”
The discursive construction of a threat, however, is premised on the
material “evidence,” coproduced by advanced surveillance systems which
actively sustain the boundary-making discourses and legitimize political
intervention (or brutal aggression), enabling, for instance, the conducting
of what is called a “shadow war.”21 These technologies—combining, for
instance, the hardware of the drone with the software enabling its remote
operation, with a number of other material devices supporting the processing
of data (producing, for example, detailed digital visualizations) and immer-
sive interaction with the persuasive screened material22—actively contribute
to the materialization of targeted violence and effectuate the spatial materi-
alization of “the target” in the frst place. This is heavily shaped by political
and ideological moves, such as—for example—transnational discourses on
terrorism (especially, but not exclusively, in the aftermath of 9/11, or in
the context of the persistent Israeli military involvement in Palestine and

43
 NEW MATERIALISM

the politics of resistance practiced by the Palestinians), identifed “threats”

to “national security,” and the justifcation of the “necessity” of undertak-
ing counterinsurgency actions23 to “prevent” the escalation of aggression.
Such framing facilitates the turning of an act of political violence into a
right and legitimate action, often carried out on behalf of the “nation.”
The targeted killing or targeted destruction (both extremely material), in
such an account, emerges as a securitization move and materializes as a
necessary policy which might, nevertheless, produce certain troubling side
effects (or “collateral damage,” if you will). Thus, this complex material-
semiotic process, taking place simultaneously at different scales and mobi-
lizing diverse technologies and forces, adds to the criminalization of specifc
bodies, communities, or spatial areas, serving as a justifcation for state-
sponsored actions undertaken against them, thus gradually contributing to
the materialization of new forms of territorially organized power.
The critical mass of spatially located material acts of political violence
steadily reshapes the demography of the region (this reconfguration can
be seen in terms of ethnic cleansing or genocide, or—in the case of the
Israeli politics in Palestine—in terms of Judaization or de-Arabization of
the particular geographical areas). It reconfgures the targeted infrastruc-
ture, sometimes resulting in an almost complete erasure of the functional
built environment, substantially affecting the material conditions of the liv-
ing (and dying) of the affected communities or forcing their relocation. It
may also disrupt the inherent spatio-temporal morphology of a community,
understood as a group of people, which—together with a bulk of more-
than-human bodies—share a common materially-socially, or historically-
geographically, constructed space. Whereas, in cases of politically motivated
targeted killing or targeted destruction, the spatially-removed operator of
the drone might suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder triggered by vis-
ceral participation in combat enabled by advanced visualization technolo-
gies,24 and the targeted individuals are annihilated, seriously injured, or
captured, the aerial systems of surveillance and destruction (together with
other technologies of war) are subsequently commodifed (and marketized
as “tested in combat”) within the global capitalist system, and materialize
as products facilitating securitization of critical infrastructures of Western
cities and their well-off inhabitants.25 At the same time, the forcibly relo-
cated (or expelled) people, displaced and traumatized by the experience of
injury, personal loss, and dispossession, while moving through the space,
suddenly materialize as a challenge, or another “threat,” for the host space
(of another state) in which they arrive when feeing violence and destruc-
tion, often engaging with different practices of resistance and survival (bat-
tling with natural-cultural forces), which are not always successful. What
kind of traces do these diffcult journeys leave on the bodily-intellectual
archives of memory, and how do these different material-semiotic experi-
ences translate into national-scale political agendas or grassroots activism?

44
 NEW MATERIALISM

New materialism is interested in the role natural forces play in these strug-
gles and in how their agencies are often mobilized for political projects.
How do the spatial performances of the migrants affect, and how are they
in return affected by, the cultural representations of otherness related to
raced, sexed, classed, and so on bodies present in particular geopolitical
and sociocultural contexts, or territories, and what kind of effects do these
entanglements generate for both these particular spaces and these particular
bodies? In this way, by paying attention to the processes of spatio-temporal
materialization, new materialism does not discount social constructions of
gender and their intersections with class and race. It is vitally interested in
considering how material bodies, spaces, and conditions contribute to the
formation of subjectivity and its various situated performances.
Physical bodies and how they move through the world inform the expe-
riences of these bodies (and others) as much as they feed the ideological
structures of language and culture, or the whole representational realm,
equally constitutive of bodies and their experiences. In its non-essentializing
approach to “matter” of the body, new materialism assumes that identities
and differences are products of complex interactions between matter inside
and outside bodies, and between the social, environmental, and spatial con-
ditions in which bodies (are forced to) exist, also as an effect of political
violence. What kind of boundaries do such material-semiotic ensembles
produce? And how do they affect understandings of national security as
frequently premised on the bodily insecurity of the irregular migrants or
sans papiers? How does the move toward securitization transform into the
insecuritization of those who are perceived as a “threat”?26 How does the
vulnerable status of the latter translate into offcial legal regulations and
interventional territorializing policies (such as, for instance, the demolition
of camps,27 ghettoization, or the walling-off of areas inhabited by mem-
bers of particular groups)? What kind of memory politics do such bodily
performances mobilize and enact? The absences that political violence gen-
erates—the ruined buildings and infrastructures, devastated environments,
massacred people, eradicated traditions—become equally agential. These
absences generate effects by shaping the interpretations of the existing mate-
rial remains, as well as of the violent contexts which have produced them.
This mobilizes other affects and intensities with a potential to be translated
into political action, although of a different kind. What kind of challenges
do the attempts at documenting political violence create? What does, in this
context, high-resolution satellite picturing enable (and how)? And whose
interests might it serve? And what does it obscure by, for instance, function-
ing within the legal regulations of particular states regarding the resolution
of satellite imagining available to potential buyers,28 functioning within a
(highly militarized and politicized) capitalist market? Such questions could
obviously be multiplied, exposing the complex entanglements of different
geographical, economic, social, and cultural contexts co-constituted by, and

45
 NEW MATERIALISM

co-constitutive of, the particular event of political violence and its meaning-
ful effects.
By no means is this narrative meant to be exhaustive. Its purpose is
to point to the deep connectedness of different processes and forces, the
intense, multiscale, entangled circulations of things and signifcations, which
produce meaningful materializations, or “spacetimematterings,” within the
political. Even though it seems to be only remotely related to the specifc
geopolitically located issues explored in this book, it nevertheless exposes
the ways in which human bodies—especially those affected by political vio-
lence—are entangled with both the material landscapes in which they are
placed and the far more reaching discourses and knowledges, as well as
technological instruments and understandings, generated within or through
them. It also reveals the complex, multiscale character of political violence
and how it is embedded in a number of accompanying material-semiotic
practices and apparatuses rather than being an isolated force operating in
its own right (more on this will follow in Chapter 2). Such an encompass-
ing and tangled understanding of the eventful nature of politics, which new
materialist ways of thinking enable, sparks new ways of “understanding
political matters and the matter of politics” (Braun and Whatmore 2010,
xii). It also encourages a constant rescaling of the analysis, from the local-
ized perspective of selected communities or individuals to global processes
and transnational circuits or environmental transformations, while paying
attention to the complex interweaving of the natural and the cultural, or the
material and the semiotic, in the always situated processes of consolidation
of political realities.
Not only does such an account of political violence go beyond the tra-
ditional “fat discourse” (Weizman 2002) of geopolitics, but it also infuses
with vitality the extant approaches to the politization of space, exposing
the knotted nature of spatial processes. Obviously, interest in these issues
is not a new occurrence in the scholarship exploring contemporary forms
of warfare and political control, and several theoretical perspectives have
already gained currency in the feld. Based on the analysis of the spatio-polit-
ical developments in Israel/Palestine, Weizman (2002, 2007) and Graham
(2004a, 2010, 2016) pioneer in offering elaborations of “verticality” as
a crucial dimension for understanding the current forms of militarism.
Detailed examinations of what is placed above and below the “territory”
may, according to verticality discourse, serve the purpose of explaining the
geographies of injustice produced on the surface. Broadening these inves-
tigations, Stuart Elden proposes to focus on “volume,” which for him is a
shift showcasing “a new level of vulnerability … of a protected territory, the
body of the state” (2009, xxii). So, while the vertical approach (Weizman
2002, 2007; Graham 2004a, 2004b, 2010, 2016; Graham and Hewitt
2013) tends to look at the territory from a predominantly aerial perspec-
tive, the interest in its volumetric qualities (Crampton 2010; Elden 2009,

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 NEW MATERIALISM

2010, 2013, 2017, 2021; Billé 2018, 2019, 2020; Hawkins 2019) enables
a more thorough, and perhaps also a more encompassing, analysis of what
happens within the (imagined) body of a state. Such a reconfguration of
thinking also implies a transition from conceptualizing the state’s territory
in terms of a bounded space controlled by a certain authority to thinking in
terms of the state’s three-dimensional material terrain with specifc metric
qualities. As Elden explains, such a reorientation allows for examination of
“the political materiality of the territory, and its complexities” (2021, 170),
paying attention to how space motivates, aggravates, or is mobilized as a
tool of political violence.
As already signaled in the Introduction to this book, vertical and volumet-
ric accounts are typically critiqued for adopting a rather “technical gaze”
(Adey 2013) or a disinterested “god-trick” (Haraway 1988) perspective,
while avoiding a more situated engagement with the virtues and potentials
of the examined space and how it shapes, and is impinged upon, the political
processes. Neither do they attempt at theorizing the agential faculties of the
vertical/volumetric space, paying minimal attention to its inherent dynamics
and ignoring the natural forces co-constituting its constant becoming. As I
aim to demonstrate in this book, new materialist ways of thinking, in such a
context, can substantially contribute to invigorating the otherwise static and
disengaged perspectives offered by vertical and volumetric accounts of polit-
ical violence (or securitization strategies), opening new conceptual paths for
a more nuanced and situated analysis of political processes. While keeping
within the bound of interrogating “the relation between the geophysical and
the geopolitical” (Elden 2017, 207), new materialism’s preoccupation with
the agential nature of more-than-human assemblages allows for a conceptu-
alization of the violent developments enabled by tangled, conjunctive opera-
tions of geophysical agents (the natural forces present on site, the climate,
the resources, the local ecosystems, the topography, etc.) and the human-
induced phenomena (pollution, urbanization, toxicity, excavation activities,
agriculture and planting, etc.). Given the fact that most of these processes
unfold at a rather slow pace, they may well remain unnoticed (and untheo-
rized) in the prevailing analyses of political violence, seemingly operating
at the margins of more spectacular events and attention-drawing occur-
rences. In such circumstances, they may also be deliberately “objectifed” in
the discourse of both domestic and international politics as happening to a
large extent beyond the immediate agency of the state (or international com-
munity). Such framing contributes to obfuscating the intentional, indeed
state-induced, character of many destructive developments recruited for the
purpose of sustaining specifc forms of territoriality. Thus, in order to fully
understand the tacit operations of certain types of political violence, it is
necessary, as Lorraine Dowler and Jo Sharp argue, to ground the “geopoliti-
cal discourse in practice (and in place)—to link international representation
to the geographies of everyday life” (2001, 171), and to remain attentive,

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in a truly new materialist spirit, “to the ways in which the material is both
shaped and placed by the representational, while at the same time shaping
and placing it” (Sharp 2021, 991). New materialist thinking seems to offer
adequate conceptual tools for such a nuanced analysis.
Pluralization of the notion of agency beyond its traditional humancen-
tric renditions and exploration of how agency is distributed across and
enacted through an assemblage (Dittmer 2014, 388) draw attention to how
space conditions “things” and “processes” that happen within it and how
it itself constantly reemerges from these complex agential constellations.
New materialism urges us to transcend thinking of space as a passive con-
tainer for politics, encouraging its conceptual interpretation in dynamic,
relational ways. This philosophical position invites attentive interrogation
of the materialities and geophysicalities of the space (Steinberg and Peters
2015), exposing, as Elaine Campbell explains, its “processual rather than
formed” and “hybridized” character, which is “contingently constituted
and constitutive of bodies, texts, practices, affects, discourses, and materi-
alities” (2019, 19). Space, when understood as metamorphous and agen-
tial, becomes “a relational emergent confguration of different elements
which is always-already-in-the-making” (Campbell 2019, 18), while its
transformations are enabled by “the contingent, creative, dynamic and
unpredictable interplay of multiple trajectories of power” (Campbell
2019, 19). Such a perspective sheds an altogether different light on the
extant vertical and volumetric analyses of space’s participation in political
processes, thus broadening the understanding of the ways in which differ-
ent “things” and their agencies participate in, or are intentionally brought
into, the political.
Along with the ideas of the thinkers presented earlier in this chapter,
in this book I aim to demonstrate that a new materialist study of political
violence in general, and slow urbicide in particular, can serve as an illu-
minating trope to reveal the quintessentially material-semiotic character
of the political. It also intends to dislocate the predominant instrumental
understandings of violence as solely embedded in the causal logic of atomic
realism. Rather, it postulates focusing on the manifold material-semiotic
practices of violence, and on all the entangled processes which co-constitute
violence, temporarily and spatially, paying attention to the kind of effects
they generate in the world in its differing scales and contexts. The case
of Palestinian spatiality discussed in this book is exceptionally telling in
this regard, as—for the purpose of implementation of its colonial policy—
the Israeli state seems not only to master the topographical knowledge of
the region and its inherent volumes and agencies, recruiting them for the
achievement of political goals; it also succeeds in constructing a represen-
tational logic which effectively occludes the violent developments that the
state deliberately orchestrates. The realization of a slow-motion colonial
strategy, partly relying on the development of specifc infrastructure on the

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one hand and mobilization of context-specifc agencies on the other, gener-

ates important—albeit delayed—effects for the Palestinians inhabiting the
targeted regions, gradually exacerbating their living conditions and stead-
ily estranging the indigenous population from its land. Interrogation of the
how question of the political violence in Palestine, as much as accounting
for its shifting temporalities, can thus be interpreted as an informed effort
at countering the intentional politics of occlusion, revealing the systematic
state-sponsored investment in the meaningful reconfgurations of Palestinian
spatiality.
Concluding this chapter, it is worth underlining that, in its insightful
investigations of the complex circulations and entanglements of bodies and
meanings stemming from committed feminist theorizing, new materialism’s
orientation remains openly political. In Coole’s words, it is meant to consti-
tute a “political-ethical intervention” (2013, 452) and aims to produce and
operationalize a politically engaged social theory, focusing on the actual
conditions of existence, positioning them in complex material-semiotic
and spatio-temporal contexts, and revealing their inherent injustices and
inequalities. As Thiele notes, the ethics of mattering expressed in Barad’s
engaged conceptualization, which is explicitly inspired by feminist theories
and politics, has to be seen as “an ethics that aims at disrupting indiffer-
ence” (2016, n.p.; original emphasis). No longer, in such an account, can
political theory ignore the bodies/things/forces and how they are situated
within, and co-constituted by, the material-semiotic spaces which they share
with other bodies/things/forces. And no longer is it possible to disregard
how they are immersed in and formed by, as well as how they participate in
sustaining, socioeconomic and political structures. These broader contexts
often shape their needs and prescribe how (or whether) these needs can be
attended to or their desires satisfed; they also structure the ways in which
the resources facilitating participation in political life, or resistance thereto,
can be obtained and effectively used. As such, within these ways of thinking,
increased attention is paid to the concept of agency, as it also refers us—in
Barad’s words—to the “possibilities of worldly re-confgurings” (2012, 55).

Notes
1 For discussion of the domination of the Newtonian paradigm within interna-
tional relations theory, see Kavalski (2012, 2015).
2 This last question is, at least to a limited extent, debated by strategic studies but
only inasmuch the employed actions and resources can effectively contribute
to the accomplishment of the defned goals. The how here refers to the practi-
cal aspects of war, that is, how it is empirically fought and how it mobilizes
resources and forces.
3 For the issue of bodily experience in/of war, see Brighton (2011).
4 An elaborate discussion of the bodily experience of war can be found in Fierke
(2004), Shapiro (2011), Monaghan (2012), and Skjelsbaek (2012).

49
 NEW MATERIALISM

5 This expression derives from the concept of “natureculture” coined by Haraway

(2003).
6 The concept of “more-than-human” implies excess rather than any kind of hier-
archy.
7 This understanding of the notion of the body relies on Gilles Deleuze’s defnition,
according to which “a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds,
a mind, or idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity” (1988,
127). They all have some sort of material existence. As such, the body is defned in
dynamic terms, through its potentials, so—again—in reference to what it can do
or what it can become rather than, statically, to what it is. This approach does not
privilege any specifc bodies (e.g., human). Instead, it argues that all bodies evince
certain capacities and agencies to enter into affective relations with others.
8 The term “ethico-onto-epistemological,” as proposed by Barad (2007), is meant
to signal the recognition of the intricate relations between and contingence of
ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies, which cannot be thought of in isolation
from each other.
9 The term “discourse analysis” in political science and international relations
theory is far from unambiguous, as it encompasses a number of approaches and
research strategies. A comprehensive overview of this broad strand of theorizing,
although limited to the understanding of discourse in rather narrow linguistic
terms (i.e., not including visuals, for instance), is offered in Milliken (1999).
A more inclusive notion of discourse, as constituted not only by text but also
visual materials, is offered by, for instance, Campbell (2003) and Hansen (2011a,
2011b).
10 For a realist operationalization of such onto-epistemological assumptions, see
Mearsheimer (1995).
11 It is worth noting here that even though Barad’s works have been exceptionally
infuential for the theorists and philosophers working within the strand of new
materialism, she never uses the label of “new materialism” in reference to her
own work.
12 For an interesting discussion on the establishing of the divide between the human
and the nonhuman in ancient philosophy, see Basnett (2018).
13 See, for instance, Bennet (2004).
14 This criticism focused on the deconstruction of individual subjectivity, offering
instead antiessentialist theories of identity, undermining the inherent autonomy
of the subject of power (or knowledge), popularizing understandings of subjec-
tifcation as tantamount to subjection (as demonstrated by Foucault [1975]),
pointing to the nature of subjectivity as a constant, reiterative performance of
ideological constructions (as explained by Butler [2011]), or challenging the tele-
ological character of history.
15 It is worth noting that these characteristics, as exposed by feminist philosophers,
have in Western culture been typically used to defne the concept of “masculin-
ity.”
16 I am not discussing this aspect of Coole’s new materialist thinking in this book
as, in her conceptualization, it mostly refers to the environmental crisis and
humans’ complicity in it. Even though this is the issue currently hotly debated
upon within the feld of political science and international relations theory, I
leave it unexplored here, as it falls beyond the scope of the argumentation offered
in this book.
17 For some elaboration of new materialist ways of thinking in international rela-
tions theory, see Aradau (2010), Barry (2013), Cudworth and Hobden (2013),
Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams (2015), Vaughan-Williams (2015a, 2015b),
and Marlin-Bennett (2013).

50
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18 For analysis of the “drone-wars” and a “networked” organization of war, see,

for instance, Duffeld (2002), MacGinty (2010), Singer (2009), Turse (2012),
Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001), and Plaw and Fricker (2012).
19 Compelling analyses of the visualization in contemporary warfare was offered
by Gregory (2010), Niva (2013), Bousquet (2009), and Denes (2010).
20 For the discussion of the “workings” of affects and emotions, see the insightful
analysis offered by Massumi (2002).
21 These instruments, as Holmqvist (2013) suggests, include targeted killings
of individuals in secret operations as well as the use of population-centered
combat-enabled unmanned aerial weapon systems (drones). Holmqvist offers a
phenomenological, thus materialist, analysis of the use of drones in contempo-
rary warfare, arguing that this kind of reading should take into consideration
aspects such as the immersive capacities of the screen used by the remote drone
operators and the vehicle’s ability to capture surveillance images of “objects of
war,” as well as its capacity for dropping bombs. On the other hand, Holmqvist
writes about human-material assemblages, which I consider as contradicting,
to a certain extent, (new) materialist thinking, especially as regards her under-
standing of human as opposite to material. In this book I approach both the
human and the inhuman as complex “material-discursive” (Barad 2003, 2007)
entities.
22 See, for instance, Holmqvist (2013).
23 For elaboration of contemporary counterinsurgency, see, for example, Ucko
(2009).
24 The discussion of traumatic experiences of the remote drone operators is offered
by Shaw and Akhter (2011).
25 For discussion of the marketization of warfare systems, see Graham (2003).
26 The issue of the highly vulnerable status of refugees has been elaborated upon
by Freedman (2018a, 2018b) and Huysmans (2006). The politics of “managing”
migration are discussed by, among others, Long (2013), Lutterbeck (2006), Neal
(2009), and Vaughan-Williams (2015a, 2015b).
27 One such example is the French-British policy toward the so-called “Calais
Jungle.” Detailed analyses of the life and death of the camp have been produced
by Ibrahim and Howarth (2018) and Djigo (2016).
28 An interesting discussion of the intersection of technologies of satellite imagin-
ing, geopolitics, neoliberal, and legal discourses is offered by Weizman (2017).

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edited by David Gauthier and Sam Skinner. Available at: https://newmaterialism
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New York: Zone Books.

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 2
MAPPING URBICIDAL VIOLENCE

Urbanity as Target
As signaled in the previous chapter, the practices of war should be under-
stood as involving simultaneous operations of diverse human and nonhuman
forces, unfolding at different scales and on different planes. The multidi-
mensional impact of war’s ravages is often diffcult to grasp and impossible
to estimate in accurate ways. Acts of warfare signifcantly affect people,
the material contexts in which they dwell, political systems, and economic
circuits; they also shape, and are shaped by, ideological discourses mediat-
ing understandings of everyday life. If aimed at, often indirectly, eradicating
the identities of communities perceived as “dangerous,” “threatening,” or
“meaningless,” war strategies tend to target the icons of cultural heritage,
serving as evocative symbols of belonging to, and emotional affliation with,
an ethnic or religious group. They also cause massive dispossessions, forced
relocations, or the protracted displacement of members of the affected com-
munities. This complexity of after-effects of war’s depredations has to be
recognized in the process of conducting any study tackling operations of
political violence. The assemblage-like nature of the practices and appa-
ratuses of war has to be kept in mind, especially in cases when particular
academic explorations focus only on specifc dimensions of the examined
atrocities and their aftermath.
Accordingly, the narrative offered in this book aspires to remain sensitive
to the diversity of entanglements involved in the experiences and practices
of war, even though it specifcally centers on the issues related to the delib-
erate destruction of the built environment, or—even more precisely—the
strategy of slow urbicide, in the context of the ethno-national and ethno-
territorial Israeli policies implemented in Palestine. My purpose is not only
to reveal this complexity, but also to point out that the deliberations on the
character, measures, and circumstances of (slow) urbicidal violence cannot
refer exclusively to abstract concepts or delineations; rather, they need to be
always carefully positioned within the political, sociocultural, and material
contexts in which they happen and by which they are actively co-formed.

58 DOI: 10.4324/9781003157687-3
 MAPPING URBICIDAL VIOLENCE

Violence against urbanity must continually be seen as connected to, and

entwined with, a multiplicity of other interlocking processes. These pro-
cesses are also complexly consequential. Their outcomes can only be ana-
lytically seized if adequately situated within thick material-semiotic realities
of war co-constituted by, among other things, ideological narratives, geo-
political interactions, technological developments, and historical and geo-
graphical circumstances.
The demolition of a city/village/neighborhood/camp is a substantially
material event, a radical reconfguration of a geographical setting, and often
a deliberate “man-made blank on the map” (Hewitt 1983, 259). As a result
of the networked practices of political violence, the materiality of the spa-
tially organized and historically layered built environment is sometimes sud-
denly turned into equally material piles of rubble—a meaningful remnant of
the former presence of the tangled life of urban community—often endowed
with a huge mnemonic potential. The act of shattering the urban tissue vio-
lently disrupts the material-semiotic morphology of an inhabited physical/
social space and disorders, at least temporarily, the communal life encom-
passing both human and nonhuman bodies and forces. Such military policy
inevitably concerns itself with urban spaces perceived as centers of power
and social capital—as well as, if approached in Lefebvrean (1968) terms,
laboratories of potential political resistance—understood in a human,
material, industrial, and cultural sense. Violent demolition of the material
architecture radically decomposes the multifarious, compound fabric of the
spatial system, unleashing further processes of metamorphosis experienced
by the affected (communities of) bodies. Effectuated both materially and
symbolically, and produced by a collection of politically informed mate-
rializations (e.g., of “threats,” “dangerous bodies,” or “insurgent activi-
ties”), the demolition of urban space produces miscellaneous effects, which
transform individual human beings, communities, geographies, spaces,
landscapes, political agendas, natural environments, movements of people,
circulation of goods and services, extensive infrastructures, redevelopment
plans, spatially and historically situated biographies, and so on. Urbicidal
violence—either fast or slow—heavily upsets the routine functioning of the
targeted community, as much as it sparks multidirectional processes unfold-
ing at different scales. This can happen in a variety of spatial circumstances
and historical contexts, as evidenced by the evolution of academic thinking
about this troubling occurrence.
My analysis relies on those understandings of urban demolition which
relate it to the circumstances of war and confict, including the interludes
between wars. Nevertheless, it also acknowledges the weight of other theo-
retical developments and concepts, which are informative for better grasping
the content of the discussed phenomenon. Given such an analytical strategy,
it is necessary to mention that the frst widely discussed use of the term
“urbicide” in scholarly investigations should be traced back to the works

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of Marshall Berman (1987a, 1987b, 1996), who applies it to the rapid and
extensive redevelopments of the urban tissue in the city of New York, moti-
vated by its speedy growth and dynamic spatial expansion. Berman speaks
about urbicide in terms of violence against urbanity which involves the
“destruction of places, sights, sounds, activities, institutions (of building)”
(1996, 1), which is aimed at annihilating parts of the physical built environ-
ment as well as eliminating certain forms of social existence. He points out
that “urbicide” pairs with capitalist reconfgurations of social (or urban) life
and has already been incorporated into the process of urban development
(1996, 18). Inspirational and illuminating for more general understandings
of violence against urbanity, Berman’s account—preoccupied with redevel-
opment enterprises—solely concerns those material-social reconfgurations
of cities which are not directly related to any ethno-national conficts,1 even
though, as already demonstrated by scholars (e.g., Fullilove 2016 [2004]),
the processes of urban renewal in the mid-twentieth-century United States
negatively affected mostly African-American communities, remaining heav-
ily racist in character. Nevertheless, Berman’s refection is situated away
from the dominant contemporary approaches to urbicidal processes, and
thus resides—at least to a certain extent—beyond the scope of the analysis
offered in this book. Still, referencing his work here seems important, as—in
contrast to other ways of theorizing urban destruction—it explicitly deals
with the “experience” of spatial damage and what it entails for urban com-
munities,2 and especially how it negatively impacts upon urban ecosystems.
If coupled with investigations of other aspects of particular instances of
violence against urbanity, such an approach enables a better understand-
ing of what is at stake in urbicide and how it reconfgures the life of spatial
communities.
Historically speaking, examples of the deliberate destruction of cities
or settlements have been relatively rare, with war being the most com-
mon context in which they have typically been carried out. By targeting
sites of communal life, the politics of demolition entirely (and deliberately)
blurs the distinction between military and civilian participation in war or
confict. There is a broad repertoire of historical examples of rubblization
of urban spaces (the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC by the Romans
being the most notorious case), yet the twentieth century offered a substan-
tial increase in the number and scale of demolished urban environments.
The destruction of European (e.g., Berlin, Dresden, Coventry, Warsaw)
and Japanese (e.g., Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) cities through carpet or
nuclear bombing during the Second World War is a signifcant and strik-
ing case of enormous devastation of urban communities. The scale of these
destructions was unprecedented, as was the lethal nature of the means
recruited for that purpose.3 Similar tactics were used by the United States
during the Vietnam War, where the environment of the entire state was
deliberately destroyed through bombing and bulldozing, as well as by the

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dropping of herbicides, terminally affecting the vegetation in the extensive

targeted area (see, for example, Thomas 1995). The destruction of housing
also extensively impacted Cambodia and Laos at that time. The strategy of
ruination was widely used in Afghanistan in the 1980s by the Soviet Union.
In 1982, the Syrian city of Hama was completely destroyed on the order
of President Hafz al-Assad (Makiya 1994, 391). Iraqi urban spaces were
demolished during Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s, while the same
tactics were used by Saddam Hussein against a number of Kurdish villages
and in areas inhabited by minoritarian Shi’ite Muslims, Assyrian Christians,
and Turkomans. The twilight of the twentieth century witnessed a deliber-
ate demolition of a considerable quantity of cities and villages during the
confict in the territories of the former Yugoslavia and as a part of Russian
destructive campaigns in Chechnya.
It seems that at the beginning of the twenty-frst century the issue of urbi-
cidal tactics reentered discussions within political science and international
relations theory, as violence against the built environment has been turned
into the common measure employed during the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Syria, and—most recently—Ukraine, leading to the tremendous devastation
of strategically important cities and neighborhoods. The spectacular and
highly mediatized fatal damage to Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Mosul,
and Fallujah has become notorious to the wider public and now stands
as an arresting example of urbicidal violence. Mariupol—shattered by the
Russian army in March 2022 within the invasion on Ukraine—counts as the
most recent example of urbicidal violence. At the same time, quite surpris-
ingly, the process of the systematic and persistent destruction of Palestinian
communities (cities, villages, neighborhoods, and camps), as a part of the
Israeli policy toward the Palestinians unfolding continually since 1947, even
though explored by a number of internationally renowned scholars, remains
somewhat less known or accessible to wider audiences. Given its spatial-tem-
poral durability, this permanent tension, regularly transitioning into open
war, constitutes a persuasive illustration of the complex and premeditated
nature of urbicidal violence. It also clearly exposes the networked charac-
ter of its convoluted operations and reveals the tangled processuality of its
after-effects. The enduring nature of the Israeli colonial project in Palestine
allows for the situating of urbicidal tactics within their historical and spatial
circumstances, as well as for tracing the continuous metamorphoses of the
content of the urbicide, which—in the case of Palestine—currently operates
at a much slower, yet equally destructive, pace, taking the form of what I
propose to call “slow urbicide.” By content I mean the dynamic entangle-
ments of the how, the why, the what, the where, and the who of this form
of political violence. Attention to the material and spatial aspects of this
confict, as well as how they connect with its other (e.g., cultural/ideologi-
cal) dimensions to form dynamic material-semiotic assemblages, may offer
an enlightening perspective on the complex issues of slow violence or slow

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urbicide. As I will demonstrate in the following pages, a new materialist

approach seems to serve this objective well.

Toward a (New) Materialist Understanding

Perhaps the most widely known contemporary materialist approach to urbi-
cide can be found in the infuential conceptualization of Martin Coward
(2006, 2007, 2009), who advocates for considering the assault upon the
built environment as a form of violence in its own right. Declared as non-
anthropocentric, this account has also been an inspiration for my own think-
ing about urbicidal violence and considerably co-shaped the perspective
offered in this analysis. This does not mean, however, that my understanding
of violence against urbanity (or urban spaces)—heavily informed by the new
materialist ways of thinking laid down in the previous chapter of this book—
is identical to that proposed by Coward, even though what the two theori-
zations undoubtedly share is an increased interest in the material aspects of
urbicidal destruction. Our respective approaches to the material, and espe-
cially to the conceptualization of its agential capacities and operations, as
well as to how it participates in the constitution of an urban community, are
quite distinct from each other, and subsequently lead us into substantially
different understandings of what constitutes the content of urbicide.
In an attempt at overcoming the anthropocentric bias pervading the
study of political violence, Coward (2006, 2009) offers an approach to
urbicidal violence which aims to transcend the dominant understandings
of this phenomenon that can be found in the extant literature of the feld.
He identifes three interpretative themes through which destruction of the
built environment is usually approached in the context of war or confict
(2009). The frst theme assumes that the destruction of buildings should be
approached as so-called “collateral damage” or a nondeliberate result of
military action. As A.P.V. Rogers explains, such destruction results from
military action and is “incidental” rather than a form of violence in its own
right. The shattering of the material environment, in such an account, is
proportional to the goals of combat and is considered a military necessity
(1996, 15). However, Coward explains, if “the destruction is neither acci-
dental nor attendant to achievement of another aim (i.e., that elements of
the built environment were targets in their own right), then it cannot qualify
as collateral damage” (see also Riedlmayer 1994, 1995). Even though it is
often the case, this understanding of destruction of the built environment
currently prevails in political science and often serves as a means of manipu-
lative rhetoric in the hands of the governments responsible for urbicidal
destruction. This conceptualization also assumes the potentially legitimate
nature of such violence.
The second theme considers the demolition of buildings as part of a
strategy of eradicating cultural heritage. This interpretation associates such

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destruction with genocide or ethnic cleansing, arguing that the damaging of

cities or villages forms part of broader projects of exterminating people or
ethnic groups. The destruction of material culture, the targeting of build-
ings qualifed as cultural heritage, is in this case seen as an element of ethnic
cleansing or of cultural genocide (see, for instance, Shaw 2007; Roberts and
Guelff 2000; Orentlicher 1999; Riedlmayer 1994). It is aimed at achieving,
in Coward’s words, “the objective of ethnic/cultural homogeneity” (2009,
25). Hence, certain buildings must be demolished because they stand for the
heterogeneity of the community or its multicultural/multireligious nature.
This interpretation focuses on the destruction of buildings that bear certain
symbolic meanings. Yet, as Coward underlines, most of the built environ-
ment destroyed during ethnic conficts does not count as cultural heritage,
consisting instead of ordinary homes or structures. Thus, “the interpreta-
tion of urban destruction as an attack on cultural heritage provides only
a partial (though striking) account of the destruction of the built environ-
ment” (Coward 2009, 28).
The third theme assumes that the devastation of buildings provides a
metaphor for political analysis. Accordingly, ruins and rubble are not
approached in themselves, that is, as “a material fabric of culture, but, rather,
as signs evocative of ideas and values” (Coward 2009, 28). Understood in
semiotic terms as referring to concepts, they frame “the horizons of the
political imaginaries of both participants and observers” (Coward 2009,
28), infuencing courses of action. Destruction of the built environment, and
especially of meaningful and recognizable structures (such as, for instance,
the Old Bridge in Mostar in Bosnia), is understood as a symbolic policy,
which may serve as a means for mediating the understanding of broader
political (military) processes.
As Coward (2009) notes, it seems that none of these interpretations suc-
ceeds in capturing the complexity of violence committed against the built
environment in its own right, while, as he insists, there is a specifc logic
to urbicide which urges us to consider its distinctiveness. Rather, they
acknowledge the demolition of buildings as a phenomenon secondary to
other policies by treating it, respectively, as ancillary to military violence, an
element of wider (i.e., more meaningful and culturally shaped) patterns of
violence, or as a sign referring to deeper concepts (2009, 34). Perspectives
associated with social constructivism or discourse theory (conceiving of
destruction in symbolic or metaphorical terms) promote the view that the
systematic targeting of city architecture is based solely on the cultural value
of the buildings or on the fact that they mean something (which refers them
to “something more” than their mere material superfciality). Concepts
such as warchitecture, cultural cleansing, identicide, or cultural genocide
aim to capture these processes (Herscher 2008; Mehrag 1999, 2001). As
Coward indicates (2009), although of immense value, these perspectives do
not do justice to the character of contemporary violence against the built

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environment and give a rather limited picture of the knotted reality of urban
destruction. Coward, therefore, signals the need to approach the violence
against the urban space from a different conceptual perspective which can
adequately recognize the material aspects of the built environment and of
its intentional destruction. By focusing on urbicidal violence in post-Cold
War politics, he proposes thinking about urban space as producing the
material “condition of possibility of heterogeneous existence” (2006, 430).
Accordingly, urbicide should be defned as “the destruction of heterogeneity
qua coexistence in and through the shared spaces constituted by the built
environment” (2006, 432; original emphasis; see also Coward 2009, 53).
Given that the material infrastructure, or what can be considered to belong
to the public space of the urban community, at least theoretically facilitates
coexistence with others (whose fundamental alterity serves as constitutive
of one’s identity), the assault upon the material conditions of an urban com-
munity comprises “a politics of exclusion aimed at establishing the fction
of a being-without-others” (Coward 2006, 434). This pertains especially to
ethno-nationalist political projects.
Remaining within post-humancentric logic, Coward, however, never
conceptualizes the agency of more-than-human matter, even though he pays
attention to the constitutive role of the built environment for the emergence
of shared spatiality as a condition for heterogeneity (2006, 429). He nev-
ertheless applies the latter term mostly in reference to human (ethnic, reli-
gious, racial, etc.) diversifcation, even though he also briefy mentions the
radical alterity of nonhuman “things” as formative of one’s own identity
(2009, 108). As he writes,

the built environment is thus constitutive of a shared spatiality

in which it is not so much that space—understood as a neutral,
measured medium—is shared, but that the relations established by
buildings which orient experiences of the built environment always
already admit of the possibility that there is an other sharing the
same building (as landmarks from which relational networks
unfold) and, thus, the same spatiality. This sharing thus establishes
a general condition of heterogeneity: of coexistence.4
(2006, 429)

As such, although constituting a signifcant attempt to transcend anthropo-

centric logic, this conceptualization continues to a great extent to be preoc-
cupied with the human (identity) aspects of state-sponsored violence. This
does not mean that it is not useful in the context of thinking about more-
than-human matter in agential terms. After all, as explained in the previous
chapter, post-anthropocentrism does not completely lose its interest in the
human, but rather perceives the human as one among many other constitu-
tive elements of the world. What I consider a certain limitation of Coward’s

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theory, however, is his—perhaps intentional—avoidance of explicit rec-

ognition, and subsequent conceptualization, of the agential capacities of
“things,”5 as well as his scant interest in the complex dynamics of the urban
community comprising more-than-human agents and forces. He also cir-
cumvents the acknowledgment of this singular material-semiotic entangle-
ment which constitutes the content of the urban environment—as much as
the content, or the how, of urbicidal violence—and leaves unexplored the
question of how the different spatiotemporal materializations of landscape/
cityscape contribute to meaningful reconfgurations of the world. Similar
shortcomings can be discerned in many other theorizations of the deliberate
destruction of the built environment. This general tendency may testify to
the fact, that—as signaled in Chapter 1—the possibility of thinking about
nonhuman matter in agential ways has been signifcantly limited, if not
entirely blocked, within the mainstream humanism-infused theorizations6
populating both the feld of political science and related areas of study.
While Coward approaches urbicide as a form of violence in its own right,
he also admits that it is “never present in a pure, singular form,” but rather
“coexists with a number of other forms of violence such as genocide or
state-sponsored repression” (2006, 427). For him, however, it is not use-
ful to reduce one of them to the other (as proposed by, for example, Shaw
20047). He prefers to think about them as separate logics, simultaneously
working within the same context of confict. Hence, this delineation aims
to propose a “useful category of analysis” where “drawing out the con-
ceptual contours of one [form of violence] implies a certain focus and an
interest in the entailments of that violence” but “does not necessarily imply
the absence of any other forms of violence” (2006, 427). Such a strategy
testifes to the more general scientifc tendency to offer abstracted defni-
tions of terms which would have the potential of universal applicability in
cases similar to each other (or, perhaps, which would be instrumental in
“materializing” these cases), offering a typology of processes and phenom-
ena classifed as being different from one another. We have to keep in mind
that within the logic of taxonomizing the scholarly (or political, artistic, or
other) work, such categories and defnitions are essentially confict based—
one is not what the other is; one is related to the other, albeit by negation.
Premised on such negativist assumptions, any kind of classifcation may, in
a powerful way, serve as a canonizing device and be used as a tool to estab-
lish a feld of study with its distinctive concepts, defnitions, methodologies,
and research techniques. This scheme (saturating Western academic envi-
ronments) can potentially have a limiting effect on what scholars working
within this feld can do in their studies once the theoretical and epistemic
categories are picked up and operationalized in their work (cf. van der Tuin
2015). Classifcations, therefore, can have silencing entailments, as anything
which does not ft within the established system risks being disregarded and
challenged. This offers a rather limited fexibility and is meant to produce

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understandings that would ft well within the existing grid, by flling in the
identifed gaps on the extensive map of the already recognized knowledge.
I am not convinced that the inclination toward offering analytical delinea-
tions of concepts and constraining their possible applications could be pro-
ductive in explorations of the tangled practices and apparatuses of war and
political violence, and especially of how they are experienced by the targeted
communities. Neither am I assured that the strategy of abstracting concepts
from their more encompassing contexts (of, for example, other forms of
violence) can offer insight into the complex assemblage-like logic of con-
fict and its eventful character. My proposition, grounded in new materialist
assumptions, is rather to consider the co-constitutive character of differ-
ent situated aspects of violence and of different context-specifc political
projects. Such an approach inquires into how urbicidal violence compiles
with the politics of genocide, ethnic cleansing, memoricide, reinvention of
the past, de-development,8 nationalism, ethnocentrism, “legalized” forms
of exclusion, intentional marginalization, spatial injustice, and many other
logics operating within, and depending upon, singular spatial-temporal situ-
ations and circumstances, and how, as such, it is a product of particular
“spacetimematterings.”9
Certainly, the fondness toward the delineation of clear concepts and
designations should be situated against the wider historical and cultural
background of academic endeavors as derivative of the more general con-
struction of the Western scientifc project exported worldwide via complex
techniques of colonial/patriarchal/capitalist domination and premised on
the suppression of other (e.g., indigenous) ways of knowing which have
served as meaningful “others” for Western culture.10 These efforts are
embodied in the strategies of offering clear-cut classifcations (of bodies,
processes, phenomena, etc.), a move that guarantees an illusion of control
over the studied material, and falsely promises production of disinterested,
detached, objective knowledge. Iris van der Tuin, a feminist new materialist
philosopher, captures the nature of this quest for the ordering of worldly
reconfgurations and precise documentation of its operations in the term
“classifxation,”11 signaling a Western obsession with control via the gen-
eration of accurate “representations” of the world. The term, in her words,
is also meant to “demonstrate how a classifcation is not a neutral media-
tor but is thoroughly entangled with the work that it does” (2015, 19) or,
in fact, the materialization of the depicted phenomena. In her insightful
analysis, van der Tuin refers back to Foucault’s (1994 [1966]) salient criti-
cism and questioning of the classifcatory, or “taxonomical,” tendency to
organize (not only) academic work in a grid-like order, which points out
that “all classifcations exist under the spell of an episteme” (van der Tuin
2015, 28). Foucault’s genealogical approach enables him to expose how the
taxonomy emerges as a conjunctive operation of language and things which
co-constitute one another through the complex play of a word (classifer)

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and a world (classifed),12 which embodies new materialist ways of thinking.

Referring to Haraway’s infuential concept, assuming the materially-semi-
otically located nature of always partial knowledge, van der Tuin evinces
that Foucault’s criticism clearly exhibits that “classifcations do not provide
Truth, but descriptively express situated knowledge” (2015, 28).
This is the kind of thinking through which I intend to approach the
extant scholarship on urbicidal violence (this expression is only meant as an
umbrella term rather than conveying any personal preference). In my opin-
ion, substantially informed by new materialist philosophy, the abundance
of different terms forged in diverse culturo-political, discursive, spatial, and
material contexts testifes to the fact that there might be no unitary, or sin-
gle, understanding of urbicidal violence, as these events are always part and
parcel of broader networks of entangled material circumstances, political
motivations, representational frameworks, and spatial arrangements. So
even though the nature of destruction, approached as an artifcially isolated
(f)act, may seem to be to a great extent universal or unanimous, in reality its
ontology stems from the different material-semiotic relational becomings,
or assemblages, of bodies (including “things”) and forces. Accordingly, new
materialism does not presuppose any single understanding of urbicide as a
form of “violence in its own right” [as Coward suggests (2006, 2009)]. By
addressing the complex material-discursive and relational ontology of vio-
lence, which is generative of meaningful reconfgurations, new materialism
underlines its assemblage-like character, its network effect, as much as its
eventful nature. By doing so, it is interested in how the deliberate violence
against the built environment in specifc material-semiotic circumstances
compiles with other discourses and other material processes (like other acts
of political violence) and what kind of material-semiotic effects it produces
in the world.

A Topology of Concepts
Adopting a new materialist approach, and making use of its methodo-
logical insights, this book argues that (slow) urbicidal violence cannot be
perceived as a phenomenon isolated from its extensive material-discursive
contexts and effects and must be accounted for as a situated process. Hence,
as I mentioned earlier, conceptualization of the deliberate destruction of
the built environment as a form of violence in its own right may not be
exceptionally productive as far as a thorough understanding of this complex
occurrence is concerned, especially if applied to—instead of being inferred
from—particular empirical cases. The destruction of cities/villages/camps/
neighborhoods is a part of an entanglement of different policies, situated in
diverse spatiotemporal circumstances, carried out through various means,
and producing highly singular effects. The intention to grasp the “essence”
of this complex bundle of processes within a single defnition or concept

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will necessary be, at least to a certain extent, reductive; thus—somewhat

contrary to its more general intention—it will never bring results capable
of doing justice to the peculiarities of the actual cases of urbicidal destruc-
tion, remaining enclosed with a rather technical and disengaged model of
producing knowledge. When reviewing the extant literature in the feld, it
is revealing that in fact the concepts and classifcations elaborated by schol-
ars working on separate instances of violence against the built environ-
ment tackle quite different aspects of this phenomenon and embody the
situated specifcities and characteristics of the analyzed events (even though
very often this situatedness is not explicitly acknowledged). Drawing on
new materialist strategies of thinking, which disavow dualistic logic and
renounce either-or reasoning, I approach them as equally informative, even
though tailored to singular political developments. In what follows I offer a
cursory overview, or a sketchy cartography, of selected concepts developed
by academics focusing on the analysis of the deliberate demolition of urban
space while taking into consideration the important material aspects of the
community and of its intentional destruction. By no means is my discussion
meant to be exhaustive. Its purpose is to point to certain continuities and
convergences of these formulations, casting light on the importance of the
physical dimension of the (urban) community and how it entangles with its
cultural and political facets, or how the space and social relations mutually
co-form each other. Such a perspective also helps us to realize what is at
stake in urbicidal violence as well as how destruction matters.
A cartographic approach to understanding urbicidal violence constitutes
a qualitative shift and complies with a new materialist research ethics that
renounces thinking in terms of dualism (in which one thing is understood as
the other of the other). Instead, it invests in mappings of intersections, inter-
ferences, and convergences, which can be very informative for the overall
understanding of the examined phenomenon. New materialist cartographi-
cal thinking is not premised on binarized fxations as much as avoiding
linear ordering, the latter being a legacy of Western investment in concep-
tualizing the transformations of the world in line with ideas of progress and
development. Rather than being grounded in the logic of negation (or of one
against the other), the cartographical approach provokes transversal and
transhistorical dialogue and is interested in genealogical historiographies
and archaeologies of knowledge. As van der Tuin suggests, it should be
seen in Deleuzian fashion as a “topology” rather than a “typology” (2015,
20; see also Deleuze 1988, 13). As such, for reasons identifed in the earlier
section of this chapter, by no means is it my intention to elaborate another
classifcation of thinking about urbicidal violence. Instead, in an effort to
disavow taxonomical strategies, my objective is to offer a deeper under-
standing of a selection of extant conceptualizations and the processes they
address, indicating how they converge, or are sometimes similar to—rather
than radically different from—each other. I also want to indicate that a

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certain way of thinking about the urban community transpires from these
theoretical propositions, and that this understanding clearly acknowledges
a community’s material and spatial dimension (and what is lost when the
latter is demolished), even though it leaves its agency somewhat unrecog-
nized. Hence, in my necessarily partial rereading of these concepts, I fol-
low Haraway’s suggestion that “taxonomizing everyone’s positions without
regard to the contexts of their development” may be problematic for knowl-
edge production processes (Haraway 1997, 304). Thus, my very limited
cartography constitutes a modest attempt at reconceptualizing, rather than
classifying, extant ways of thinking about urbicidal violence.
It is impossible to understand the horrifying experience of having one’s
home demolished without realizing what the idea of “home” stands for.
The concept of “home” appears to be absolutely crucial for human geogra-
phy and the centrality of it has been confrmed by scholars working within
such academic disciplines as anthropology, architectural and environmental
psychology, ethnoarcheology, planning, and urban studies. The fact that
it is conceived of as an element of more extensive systems (communities,
urban formations, landscape, ethnic cultures, etc.) clearly demonstrates that
this microcosm functions within broader contexts and co-constitutes, and is
co-constituted by, a number of larger-scale processes and phenomena from
which it can never be completely isolated. Thus, the destruction of home
is an event that generates consequences at different scales and signifcantly
affects all these previously mentioned broader systems. As Kim Dovey sug-
gests, home has to be seen as a relational entity, “as a principle for estab-
lishing a meaningful relationship with the environment” (1978, 27; quoted
in Porteous and Smith 2001, 26). Home is situated at the nexus of material
conditions and emotional meanings, physical comfort, and mental belong-
ing, a conglomerate of material structures and cultural and social signif-
cations and associations. The concept thus encompasses such elements as
territoriality (which also ties its physical space to larger systems, such as
neighborhood, town, village, even country), affections (signaling belong-
ing, familiarity, comfort), and spatiality (acting as a framework of every-
day routines and a system of measurement). Home also functions within
the more encompassing imaginary of nation, often operating as a tangible
embodiment of cultural phantasms and a residue of myths. It is not possible
to understand what home really means if any of these dimensions is elided
or ignored, as the “ontology” of home is deeply relational. Demolition of it,
therefore, dramatically reconfgures the micro- and the macrocosm of com-
munity life. This is also why individual homes—as well as more compos-
ite arrangements of the built environment consisting of material structures
serving as homes, institutions, symbolic sites, public and recreational places,
and various routes connecting them into a singular spatial entity (albeit tied
to other similar systems)—have regularly been turned into targets of war-
fare in which the demolition of homes has been deliberately engineered.

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Taking into consideration the varying scales of this occurrence, J.

Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith propose the term “domicide,” which
is understood as “the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in
pursuit of specifed goals, which causes suffering to the victims” (2001,
12; original emphasis), a “murder of home” (2001, 3), caused by human
agency and involving “some form of planning,” where “the rhetoric of pub-
lic interest or common good is frequently used by the perpetrators” (2001,
12). Domicide can have an extreme or local scale. The extreme cases of
intentional destruction of home, which are more linked to the theme of this
book, happen in a number of diverse circumstances, such as war, ethnic
cleansing, and strategic resettlement related to different processes, includ-
ing construction of new infrastructures, colonization, or geopiracy. For the
two authors, the signifcance of domicide is connected to the special status
that home enjoys in our lives (2001, 4), so the (willful) destruction of home
can leave “one of the deepest wounds to one’s identity and self-esteem, for
both of these props to sanity reside in part in objects and structures that
we cherish” (Porteous and Smith 2001, 5). However, this statement has
to be situated politically, as home is not just a place of dwelling, but also
stands for one’s homeland, which signals a deep attachment to both people
and familiar objects or structures, as much as to landscape, environment,
or the imaginary representations of the community to which one belongs
(Porteous and Smith 2001, 6). This complex positioning of home urges us
to consider its destruction on different planes—personal and private, mate-
rial and cultural, social and political. Thus, domicide constitutes an assault
upon the spatial entanglement of the physical, material place and emotion-
ally loaded meanings and attachments, generating consequences across a
number of political and conceptual horizons, from personal to communal
and from individual to (inter)national.
The way of thinking of home (and of its deliberate destruction) offered
by Porteous and Smith clearly signals the constitutive role that material
structures (of buildings, cities, landscape, environment) play in the life of
a community and how they shape its specifc spatiotemporal characteristics
and routines. Porteous and Smith draw extensively on other authors, whose
conceptualizations underline this formative role of physical places and solid
arrangements. As Nora Johnson explicitly states, highlighting the agential
role of physical space, “We are all profoundly affected by the places we live,
often without realizing it. Their problems and paradoxes become our own,
changing us and making us part of them” (1982, 6; quoted in Porteous and
Smith 2001, 39). David Lowenthal, in a different way, points to the fact
that “Patterns in the landscape make sense to us because we share a history
with them” (1975, 5; quoted in Porteous and Smith 2001, 40), binding the
people and the environment together in a common spatial-temporal experi-
ence in which both are involved and entwined. Similarly, Arien Mack claims
that “landscape and people are morphologically akin … they constitute in

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some primal cultural sense the nature of each other” (1991, 11; quoted
in Porteous and Smith 2001, 44). Indicating the affnity of people and the
material structures which they inhabit, Anne Winning states that “to dwell
authentically, is to be incorporated into the landscape of home” (1990, 257;
quoted in Porteous and Smith 2001, 55). Eventually, Porteous and Smith
also underline the material, corporeal dimension of home, comparing it to
“a second body” and claiming that it “shapes you and, in turn, is shaped
in your image” (2001, 54). This is also evident in the strategy adopted by
the authors of coupling domicide with memoricide, which indicates that
the erasure of the physical space which sustains and materializes memory
(individual and/or collective) undermines the identity of those affected by
these tangled processes, threatening their continuity, their ability to mobi-
lize and resist, and also, often, jeopardizing their survival. What therefore
transpires from Porteous and Smith’s argument is the concept of home as
a physical place which is endowed with culturally and socially motivated
meanings, but also as a clearly material structure which signifcantly affects
and sustains these signifcations. Moreover, the home enters into constitu-
tive relations with other buildings and material infrastructures, as much as
with the landscape and environment, forming complex dynamic organiza-
tions in which all elements affect, and are affected by, one another. And
even though nowhere do the two authors unequivocally problematize the
agential capacities of the material or the spatial, such an implicit assump-
tion seems to signifcantly mark their understanding of home (and of the
consequences of its destruction).
According to such a formulation, both home and the more extensive
organization of spatiality it forms with other buildings and material struc-
tures are essentially a lived and living space. Place is a more-than-physical
but also defnitely more-than-human reality. And while the human dimen-
sions of (urban) communities have been extensively explored, also in the
context of violence, the material aspects of these developments have typi-
cally appeared as secondary, and interest in them seemed to be superfu-
ous. Breaking—at least partly—with this tendency, the geographer Kenneth
Hewitt (1983) focuses more extensively on the nature and consequences of
the destruction of material urban tissue. Writing in reference to the massive
damage inficted on German and Japanese cities as a result of the exten-
sive area bombings by the Allies during the Second World War, and taking
into account the nuclear politics of the Cold War, Hewitt (1983)13 offers
the concept of “place annihilation,” focusing not only on the great number
of people killed and injured in these raids, but also—interestingly—on the
deliberate rubblization of cities and neighborhoods. For Hewitt, place anni-
hilation is comprised of “the destruction of inhabited settlements, especially
dense city core areas, in the continued presence of their longtime inhabit-
ants”; “large, concentrated fatalities and injury among resident civilian pop-
ulations”; the “predominance of noncombatants among the causalities and,

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specifcally, of children, students, women, the old, and the infrm”; “the
destruction of homes of civilians”; the “indiscriminate ‘wall-to-wall’ dev-
astation of civic life support and culture: shops and markets, hospitals and
schools, libraries, banks, theaters, churches, zoos and landmarks” includ-
ing those of artistic or cultural signifcance; and “practices that prevent or
disrupt emergency measures for devastated areas and for aiding causalities”
(Hewitt 1983, 276).14
Given the academic discipline that Hewitt represents, his focus is on the
destruction of place rather than on other aspects of the phenomenon that he
studies. Nevertheless, he pays attention to its complex nature combining the
destruction of resident civilians, residential communities, and neighborhoods,
which together translates into the annihilation of the urban environment, or
of what he calls “civil ecology” (1983, 257). For Hewitt, “place cannot be
fully comprehended as merely a set of spatial relations, biophysical habitat,
and impersonal socioeconomic functions. Its material attributes are indeed
essential ingredients and vital clues to its larger meanings,” even though he
still perceives these ingredients as “shaped into places by the personal works,
exchanges, and intelligent participation of resident communities” (1983,
258). This reliance on the entangled, complex character of place in Hewitt’s
elaboration is worth noting. The emphasis placed on the physical dimension
of the city, somewhat atypical for analysts situated within the feld of interna-
tional relations theory, testifes to Hewitt’s disciplinary orientation, although
nowhere in his text does he explicitly mention the agential role of these mate-
rialities, preferring to think about them in terms of matter shaped exclusively
by human agency. The important role of material objects for the formation
of a community is nevertheless implicitly acknowledged in Hewitt’s analysis,
and especially in his focus on reconstruction ventures, testifying to the deep
and persistent affliations with the materiality of (once) inhabited places, since
such investment in the material dimension of communal existence serves as
a means to resist cultural dissolution. Such a framing of the understanding
of urban existence testifes to Hewitt’s recognition of the constitutive role of
material urban structures in the processes of materialization of a communal
life, with all its rights and potentials.
Preoccupied with the constitutive role of land, or territory, for the devel-
opment and continuity of communities, Sari Hanaf (2009, 2012) offers the
concept of “spacio-cide,” tailored specifcally to understand the exceptional
nature of the Israeli colonial project in Palestine. Radically different from
genocidal policies, spatiocide, as Hanaf aptly explains, “targets land for the
purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian pop-
ulation primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people
live” (2012, 191). Spaciocide’s target is a place which is to be turned into a
land without (indigenous) people to be later resettled by the desired represent-
atives of the colonizing nation. It is meant to transfer “topos to atopia, turn-
ing territory into mere land” (Hanaf 2012, 192), thus producing uprooted,

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deracinated, and deterritorialized bodies, that is, subjects who no longer

have a tangible relationship to their original territories (Hanaf 2009, 118).
Somewhat paradoxically, this strategy of destruction constitutes a premise
for the production of new forms of (Israeli) territoriality, based on the prin-
ciple of “natural” belonging in a given geographical area. The destruction of
houses, or whole cities, villages, neighborhoods, and camps, as well as the dis-
possession of the populations inhabiting these areas, has served since 1947 as
a signifcant means of this policy, co-constituted by discursive strategies as
much as (legal) procedures introduced as part of the state of exception—all
of which contribute to the materialization of the very specifc situation of tar-
geted communities whose continuity is seriously threatened.
Spaciocide has been made possible by state-sponsored processes of land
confscation (leading to the disturbance of the Palestinian social fabric) as
well as to the specifc division of the Occupied Territories into zones (more
on this will follow in Chapter 3). This produces increased fragmentation
of both the political authorities and the space, hampering any harmonious
spatial development of the targeted communities, and turning them into
isolated enclaves, geographically cut off from the longer spatial chains of
circulation of goods, services, and people. Such a policy interrupts the pro-
cesses of spontaneous relational functioning, denaturalizing community life,
and producing an array of spatial injustices. Spaciocidal strategy has been
made possible through the nuanced operation of “military-judicial-civil
apparatuses” (Hanaf 2012, 194) controlled by the Israeli state, which sub-
stantially co-constitute the materialization of the colonial project, based on
the principle of (spatial) separation and careful management (or naturaliza-
tion) of the instrumentally used state of exception. Thus, the term proposed
by Hanaf points to “both the magnitude of the wrecking and destruction,
and the deliberate exterminatory logic of the space livability that underpins
the assault on the space, whether it is a built/urban area, landscape or land
property” (Hanaf 2012, 193). The uprooting of people from their spatial
environment—through, as I suggest, strategies of slow urbicide—gradually
leads to the eradication of community life or “to kill[ing] by geography,”
with the aim to produce “placelessness” and “cultural starvation” (Hewitt
1983, 259). Targeting the material dimension of community life, this policy
contributes to the growing spatial discontinuity of Palestinians, dissolving
their “togetherness” and unsettling—via the strategy of deracinating—their
common affnity and belonging. Quite explicitly, a deliberate assault on
space gradually translates into the controlled cultural and political eradi-
cation of the indigenous population’s practices of dwelling, dissolving its
everyday more-than-human topologies, and thus slowly destroying its
capacities for space-based organized resistance and self-governance.
“Root shock” is the term that Mindy Fullilove (2016 [2004]) applies to
describe what happens to the community when its geography is destroyed.15
By defning this psychological state, Fullilove pays attention to the enduring

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powers of a physical place in community life, the overwhelming role of

spaces that we share with others for the emotional balance and physical well-
being of individuals, indicating that the demolition of these places translates
into “the loss of a massive web of connections” (2016, Introduction) and
produces the landscape of loss and upheaval. Root shock is experienced
by those who have lost the material structure of their community, whose
homes have been destroyed and whose neighborhoods have been bulldozed.
As a medical term, it describes “the traumatic stress reaction to the destruc-
tion of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem” (2016, Chapter 1). This
clearly indicates the complex interdependency of the built environment
and the people inhabiting it, as well as the constitutive role of the material
infrastructure for the emergence of social daily routines and habits which
produce the feeling of predictability and comfort, and which testify to the
rootedness of people in the material environment. As Fullilove explains, at
the level of the individual, root shock

is a profound emotional upheaval that destroys the working model

of the world that had existed in the individual’s head. Root shock
undermines trust, increases anxiety about letting loved ones out of
one’s sight, destabilizes relationships, destroys social, emotional,
and fnancial resources, and increases the risk for every kind of
stress-related disease.
(2016, Chapter 1)

At the community level, Fullilove continues, root shock

ruptures bonds, dispersing people to all the directions of the com-

pass. Even if they manage to regroup, they are not sure what to do
with one another. … even if the neighborhood is rebuilt exactly as it
was, it won’t work. The restored geography is not enough to repair
the many injuries to the mazeway.
(2016, Chapter 1)

Such an experience, as Fullilove explains, stays with the affected people for
ever; it also affects the following generations, rippling out beyond those who
are directly involved in dispossessions or forced relocation. The destruc-
tion of the built environment, which co-constitutes the community life and
social relations and is meant to survive the individuals who inhabit it, casts
a long shadow on the future and the continuity of the affected community,
dismantling its inherent ecosystem, heavily traumatizing the whole genera-
tions, and infuencing their (in)capacity to repair what was lost. Thus, root
shock can be inherited through cultural, social, bodily, and place memory.
As Karen Till notes, “these forms of violence often work over a period of
many years, often decades, and continue to structure current social and

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spatial relations, and as such also structure expectations of what is consid-

ered ‘normal’” (2012, 6).
As evidenced by the above deliberations, the community arises from a
plethora of relationships, from which a certain type of materially-semioti-
cally understood spatiality emerges. It is flled with memories and activates
the ways in which the past is remembered and rehearsed on an everyday
basis. If it is understood as constituted by its inhabitants through ongoing
acts of making places, then it emerges as the complex nexus of material
objects, bodies, social groups, rituals, and collective memory. Human and
nonhuman lives engage there with each other through complex temporal
and spatial pathways, as well as via symbolic and material places (Till 2012).
As Till rightly evinces, “we can understand place as always becoming, as
within and beyond us” (2012, 9). Therefore, the material-semiotic urban
fabric—when harmed and restructured by acts of physical demolition, dis-
placement, division, and by social trauma resulting from state-perpetrated
violence which is often impossible to resist—is diffcult to rebuild or recon-
struct. In such a context, urbicidal violence must be understood as one that
targets the specifcally relational nature of urbanity, where the latter—as
Coward notes—“refers both to the material conditions that constitute the
town or city as such, and the way of life occurring in such material condi-
tions” (2006, 428). This statement becomes valid only if we approach the
materiality of buildings and the landscape as co-constitutive of the micro-
cosm of a community, a relational agent which qualitatively affects the rela-
tions in which it participates in the process of multidimensional sym-poiesis
(Haraway 2013, 2015; original emphasis) or making-together. Pointing to
the intensity of place-based attachment and the constitutive role of the built
environment in the community building processes, Till pays attention to the
ecologies of space, which—from my perspective—seem to be material-semi-
otic in character. As she writes, “Ecological characteristics provide structure
for individuals and social groups … The morphological qualities of place
are the material and social environments that nurture inhabitants and offer
support through familiarity, routine, aesthetically comfortable spaces, and
a sense of belonging and security” (2012, 10; original emphases). As she
further elaborates, “Taken together, these social ecologies of place include
everyday routines, social institutions, material landscapes (the fabric, taste,
sounds, and scents of places), symbolic systems of meaning and identity,
and shared memories” (Till 2012, 10).
The unsettling of thus understood spatial ecology must necessarily be a
traumatizing experience. Not only does it dramatically threaten the actual
survival of a community, but it also results in an erasure of its collective
memory, which cannot be fully sustained without the material structures
co-constitutive of mnemonic processes. Such conceptualization aligns with
memory studies scholarship, which questions the traditional understandings
of sites as abstract locations, focusing instead on the power of place that

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encourages conversations about contemporary issues, including cultural and

social memory.16 In societies traumatized by violence, as Till underlines, peo-
ple often return to particular places to revisit diffcult feelings of loss, anger,
or guilt, because they conceive of those places as having a distinct presence—
material, sensual, spiritual, psychic, and social (2012).17 This importance of
the physical or spatial dimension for community life is also evident in the
endeavors to rebuild, if possible, the destroyed places to resemble as closely
as possible what was demolished or to resettle and recreate the location after
the dramatic events that disrupted the physical and psychosocial continuity
of the site. Reconstruction projects, or recreations of similar structures in
a different place, could be viewed as an attempt to hide this discontinuity,
seen as a rupture in the place’s “metabolism of functioning” (Hewitt 1983).
While ethno-territorial projects—in their systematic, tacit endeavors to
produce specifc forms of territoriality—tend to deliberately damage urban
spaces and spatially co-constituted social relations, they also lead to an
eradication of “the right to the city” of these spaces’ inhabitants, impair-
ing their capacities for shaping their surroundings according to their needs
and effciently countering the state’s (territorial) authority. Slow-motion
warfare strategies seem to be exceptionally treacherous in this regard. In
the context of enduring conficts, gradually leading—through slow forms
of urbicidal violence or “slow wounding” (Joronen 2021)—to the erasure
of certain organizations of social relations and their replacement with the
dominant power’s more “desired” equivalents, this loss of rights seems to
be the most striking danger. This kind of unspectacular operation of state-
sponsored political violence steadily disrupts well-established spatiotempo-
ral routines and produces a whole range of spatial injustices. In order to
understand its miscellaneous consequences, however, it is necessary to bear
in mind the crucial role of material infrastructures and natural landscapes
in community-sustaining processes, drawing attention to the agential role of
materialities in producing the urban tissue and urban life, both understood
in terms of material-semiotic assemblages.
It remains equally important, however, to explore how violence against
the materially-semiotically understood urbanity severely affects human bod-
ies. As McKittrick elucidates,

While place annihilation certainly differs according to time and

place, the devastation, so clearly pointed to in the term urbicide—
the deliberate killing of the city—brings into sharp focus how
violence functions to render specifc human lives, and thus their
communities, as waste.18
(2011, 952)

This calls for realization that “multitudinous urbicidal acts … are always
inhabited with disposable ‘enemies’, impoverished dwellers, those ‘without’”

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(McKittrick 2011, 952). The politics of killing a place, or destruction of

a community, should thus be situated in the context of what Mbembe
(2003) refers to as “necropolitics,” normalizing colonial power and knit-
ting together geographic violence and human life. In the act of urbicidal
destruction, as McKittrick describes, “the execution of place and people
is bound up in the corpse, the displaced survivors, the perpetually lifeless
and disposable” (2011, 952). The more-than-human dimension of urbi-
cidal violence—understood as a form of violence that targets both places
and human bodies at the same time—can only be truly realized by bringing
into sharp focus “practices that politicize place-life and place-death differ-
ently,” empirically evidencing “the unsurvival of the weakest” (McKittrick
2011, 954) by destroying their sense of space, hence producing experiences
of placelessness and loss. Such a process has long-lasting consequences for
the targeted community, whose traditional life routines dissolve, capabilities
for place-based organization diminish, and aspirations for self-governance
fade away. Importantly, such ways of thinking expose the hidden logic of
violence against urbanity, aiming at deracination of the community’s spirit
and limitation of any forms of resistance against the state’s central (colo-
nial) authority. By reconfguring the urban community and its traditional
forms of organization, and by denying its right to produce forms of spatial-
ity ftting within the scope of their situated needs and aspirations, the state
aims to gradually produce absolute forms of territoriality with a desired
distribution of administrative power spreading over the territory as much
as the people inhabiting it. Thus, by disrupting the material-semiotic forms
of traditional dwelling, and contributing to the loss of the sense of a place
by the members of the targeted communities, the state—through a range of
different urbicidal policies—engages in an ongoing process of constructing
preferred forms of spatiality, as well as investing in the meaningful recon-
fguration of regional demographics. In the case of the indigenous popula-
tions whose experiences are discussed in this book, negation of the “right to
the city” pertaining to the inhabitants of the Palestinian-Arab urban areas
(ranging from neighborhoods, through villages and camps, to cities) should
therefore be understood as an inherent part of the broader Israeli colonial
project in Palestine. As I will elaborate upon in more detail in the next chap-
ter, this meticulously orchestrated policy is implemented both in the Israeli
heartland and the territories remaining under the Israeli occupation. At the
same time, the slow-motion strategy works to effectively occlude the state-
sponsored colonial efforts, denying the urbicidal violence systematically
troubling the concerned regions and severely wounding their populations.
Whereas my intention in this chapter was to look at what is potentially
lost when a home is demolished as a part of deliberate policy, or what dis-
solves when urban communities are intentionally targeted with violence,
in the following one I will explore in greater detail the how question of
slow urbicide in Palestine. My aim will be thus to cast light on how the

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different materialities and apparatuses are mobilized and how they agen-
tially act in the politically and geographically informed processes of the
intentional demolition of indigenous urban communities in the West Bank
and in the Naqab/Negev region. Hence, while this chapter centers mostly
on the material-semiotic nature of urban living, the following part is mostly
concerned with the material-semiotic means employed for the purpose of
restricting, or entirely eradicating, these forms of dwelling with an aim
of producing the experiences of placelessness and rootlessness among the
members of the indigenous populations inhabiting the two analyzed geo-
graphical areas.

Notes
1 It is nevertheless connected to intersecting class and ethnic differences.
2 Interestingly, Berman already points to the networked character of urbicidal
destruction—“the hopelessly tangled webs that connected landlords, bankers,
insurance underwriters, welfare departments, junkies, thieves, real estate specu-
lators, crooked politicians, ‘fnishers’ … professional arsonists and the dazed,
weeping people out on the street” (1987b, n.p.).
3 As Hewitt (1983) observes, even though the strategy of carpet bombing of cities
inhabited by civilians was then condemned by many political leaders who pos-
tulated that it should be outlawed as a military measure, they often also “tested”
the very same means in the villages of their colonial territories, albeit on a scale
of bombardment that was signifcantly smaller. However, in contradistinction to
Hewitt’s analysis, which considers the scope of these events as “trivial” (1983,
261) in comparison to the similar developments in Europe during the Second
World War, I argue that, from the perspective of the affected communities, the
question of the scale of such a policy does not appear in any way relevant. As
Hewitt indicates, the list of examples of such policies includes British punitive
air raids against peoples in Mesopotamia, Sudan, Somaliland, and the Northwest
Frontier of India as well as French airstrikes in Morocco. See also Divine (1966)
and Gottmann (1943), on whose work Hewitt draws in his study.
4 As Coward himself notes, his focus on urban heterogeneity may be vulnerable to
critique of those indicating that cities inhabited by relatively homogenous popu-
lations have also historically become targets of deliberate destruction. However,
he goes on to indicate that “such a critique fails to separate the historical and
empirical fact of homogeneity from the existential principle of publicness that
characterises the buildings that compose the built environment,” which means
that the historical homogeneity of a particular urban space “does not in any
way invalidate the notion that buildings are constitutive of a spatiality that is, in
principle, public” (Coward 2006, 430).
5 In his later work, Coward (2012) engages with Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to
alterity and Jane Bennett’s theorizations of the vibrancy of things to expose
the assemblage-like nature of globalized urbanity. Although separate from his
work on urbicidal violence, he nevertheless acknowledges the constitutive role
of material infrastructures for the emergence of the urban political subjectivity.
He focuses on questions of relationality as crucial for understanding of commu-
nity, stating that “between us in the city is neither an empty space nor simply of
human bond. Rather between us is a surface of contact, a point of articulation,
at which heterogeneous elements are assembled into complex ecologies of sub-

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 MAPPING URBICIDAL VIOLENCE

jectivity. Between us is the urban fabric from houses to large technical infrastruc-
tures” (Coward 2012, 479).
6 This applies to both liberal political theory, which situates the individual subject
in the center of the political world, as much as to dominant (neo)realist con-
ceptualizations of world politics, giving priority to sovereign states as principal
actors of international relations.
7 Shaw (2004) proposes considering urbicide an element of genocidal violence.
8 For the concept of de-development, see Roy (1987).
9 It may seem that Coward’s (2006, 2009) suggestion to transcend the anthropo-
centric analyses of violence against the built environment and consider it as a
form of violence in its own right has been an exception in contemporary politi-
cal science scholarship and draws attention to the need to take inanimate object
seriously. However, his interest in matter, at least on the theoretical level, is in
my opinion partly misleading, as it still seems to subscribe to the either-or logic,
although prioritizing the element, which has hitherto been typically crossed out
from the mainstream theorizations. Thus, differently from Coward’s recommen-
dation, my new materialism-informed account of urbicidal violence proposes to
consider materiality as co-constitutive of the practices of violence, rather than a
distinct form of them.
10 A comprehensive analysis of “epistemicide” embedded in the project of Western
science is offered by Santos (2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2014, 2018). For the dis-
cussion of the Western way of producing knowledge—while suppressing other
forms of knowing—see also Golańska and Bywalec (2022) and Golańska et al.
(2022).
11 Van der Tuin (2015) rehearses this term in the context of the problematic efforts
at canonizing feminist scholarship, pointing to the classifcatory move in the
domain of feminist epistemologies as being a repetition of the positivist tenden-
cies in Western science.
12 For an insightful analysis of the feminist ontology of language, see Kirby (1997,
2006, 2008, 2010, 2011).
13 It is important to mention that Hewitt’s analysis remains infused with the Cold
War circumstances of nuclear predicament and he explicitly admits that he thinks
of massive place annihilation as a possible scenario to be put in practice in the
case of a nuclear confict.
14 See also Rumpf (1962) and Hasting (1979), on whose works Hewitt draws.
15 Fullilove writes in the context of the American project of urban renewal, which
in the period between 1940s and 1970s uprooted a great number of African-
American communities in a signifcant number of North American cities.
16 Questions of place-based mnemonic strategies have been explored by Till (2012),
Hayden (1995), Lacy (1995), Dorrian and Rose (2003), Kester (2004), and Kwon
(2004).
17 See, for instance, Fullilove (2016), Till (2005, 2008, 2011, 2012), Adams et al.
(2001), and Kelley (1995).
18 See also Davis (2006), Sundberg (2008), and Sundberg and Kaserman (2007).
For interpretation of urbicidal policies in a colonial context, see Goonewardena
and Kipfer (2006); for racialized policies of placelessness, see McKittrick and
Woods (2007), McKittrick (2006), and Peake and Ray (2001).

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GEOGRAPHICAL WARFARE IN
PALESTINE

Lethal Geographies, Slow Violences

In his 1976 book, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre,1 Yves
Lacoste formulates a controversial claim that geography—typically seen as
a method of describing space which considers both its human and physical
characteristics—must be understood as a major tool of social organization
and control, as well as of warfare. Geographical reasoning, Lacoste notes,
has “a strategic role to play” (2012, xi) in the organization of the world at
different scales. If we want to appreciate the strictly political character of
geographical investigations, they need to be paired with a historical nar-
rative which makes possible the consideration of “a strategic situation”
and the preparation of “either a political or military operation” (2012,
iii). Given the history of colonial takeovers, it is necessary to pay attention
to the principal role of geographers in this violent enterprise. As Lacoste
indicates, “All colonial conquests were frst geographical undertakings not
only through the drawing of maps of the topography for reconnaissance
purposes but also of the territorial and historical disputes between differ-
ent ethnic groups” (2012, iv). So even though—in line with the dominant
realist understandings of scientifc objectivity—geography may appear to
be an innocent method of mapping space, in fact it intersects with ideolo-
gies and politics, serving as a potent instrument in the hands of the power-
ful.2 As I argue in this chapter, the topography-based Israeli land policies
in Palestine can serve as an illustrative example of Lacoste’s contested
views on how spatial data come to be weaponized in a state-orchestrated
military effort.
Geography, according to Lacoste, combines different ways of looking at
the world. Its strategy includes “a range of tools that helps the consideration
of the complexities of terrestrial space at different levels of spatial analysis
and in interaction, from local to national and to the planetary and back,”
and focuses on “specifc cartographic confgurations and intersections of
several spatial sets of differing sizes” (Lacoste 2012, xiv). These sets refer
to, for instance, hydrographic and geological data, climatic phenomena,

84 DOI: 10.4324/9781003157687-4
 GEOGRAPHICAL WARFARE IN PALESTINE

ecological entities, populations, economic and social structures, political

organisms spatially defned by borders, religious, and linguistic sets (Lacoste
2012, xiv). Lacoste also encourages us to think of geography in both human
and physical dimensions at the same time; it is not enough to consider ter-
ritory (its surface area, topography, resources) in isolation from the people
who inhabit and make use of that land or the confguration of authorities
extending over it (Lacoste 2012, xiv). As such, in order to truly understand
the content of geography, as well as its signifcance for warfare, it is neces-
sary to take account of the different ways in which it intersects with other
felds of knowledge; it is also of utmost importance to realize the political
reverberations of geographical inquiry and their salience for strategic geo-
political thinking, generating meaningful consequences. Thus, in such an
understanding, “geography does not amount to a mere tool for knowing
about the world; it is an instrument for action” (Gilbert 1989, 222). This
action can take diverse forms, unfold at different speeds, and produce sin-
gular contributions to policy-making processes.
When geographically mapped, territory emerges as a complex mate-
rial-semiotic entity, a combination of “world” and “word” (Kirby 1997,
2006, 2008, 2010, 2011) materializing from a conglomerate of the natu-
ral forms and forces and the cultural meanings attributed to them, as well
as techniques and tools which enable the mapping process. It functions as
a principal element of politics—after all, states are unthinkable in other
than territorial and ideological terms, where a certain space, marked by
historically shaped borders, participates in the processes of forging political
communities as well as in confronting other political organisms. Such an
understanding of the procedures of mapping space, or of turning space into
a territory, reveals how maps may serve as potent instruments of power.
As Lacoste explains, a map should be conceived as being “designed and
motivated by practical (political and military) concerns”; it assists in the
politically informed processes of dominating and controlling space. To map
“means to formally defne space along the lines set within a particular epis-
temological experience; it actually transposes a little-known piece of con-
crete reality into an abstraction which serves the practical interests of the
State machine” (2008a [1973], 620). Although Lacoste primarily means this
in terms of the power of representing space, when approached from a new
materialist point of view, the process of mapping space emerges as a com-
plex entanglement of its various multidimensional materialities and their
socio-cultural understandings.
In the context of the issues explored in this book, the potency of map-
ping the territory is recognized by Edward Said, who notes—when offering
a critique of the Oslo Accords, which in the early 1990s were drafted to
quell the violent Israeli-Palestinian war—that one of the problems of the
Palestinians was that they have long been “mapless”; “They had no detailed
maps of their own at Oslo; nor, unbelievably, were there any individuals on

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 GEOGRAPHICAL WARFARE IN PALESTINE

the negotiating team familiar enough with the geography of the Occupied
Territories to contest decisions or to provide alternative plans” (2000,
n.p.). This, for Said, can partly explain the unusual territorial arrangements
decided upon in Oslo (to the detriment of the Palestinians), which separate
different parts of Area A (under complete Palestinian control) from each
other, surrounding them with territories classifed as Area B (shared con-
trol), and Area C (Israeli control), as well as by delineating special areas H1
and H2 (for the divided city of Hebron) (Figure 3.1). This spatial organiza-
tion of the contested territory dissects Palestinian land into what Said calls
“besieged spots on the map” (2000, n.p.), hampering any efforts at estab-
lishing an independent, coherent territorial entity with a consistent political
authority extending over it. This outcome clearly demonstrates the political
importance of the processes of mapping space, even though cartography
is not the only plane on which geographical practice clearly links with the
structures of power; how the topographical and demographic characteris-
tics of specifc space can be strategically used, or mobilized, in a military
effort remains equally important. As Lacoste reminds us, the “use” of geo-
graphical knowledge for the purpose of warfare includes the

destruction of vegetation, the transformation of the physical char-

acteristics of the soil, the deliberate precipitation of new erosional
processes, the rupture of hydrological systems in order to change the
level of the table water (so as to dry up wells and rice paddies), and
also a radical change in the distribution of population (2008a [1973],
621; see also Lacoste 1972, 1973, 1976a, 1976b, 1984, 2008b).

Such developments cannot be seen as “unintended consequences of the mas-

sive scale of lethal means available for technological and industrial warfare;
they are the result of a deliberate and minutely articulated strategy, the ele-
ments of which are scientifcally coordinated in time and space” (Lacoste
2008a [1973], 622). This clearly demonstrates that geographical discourse,
as well as mapping and measuring technologies used within this feld of
knowledge, must be perceived as concerned with issues of power, while the
different more-than-human agencies of space—or materialities of terrain,
as Elden proposes (2021)—should be carefully considered in any analysis
of political processes. In that sense, geographical knowledge, as Lacoste
claims, actively participates in the execution of “geographical warfare” and,
as such, it should be cautiously scrutinized, even denounced, as contributing
to the serious destruction (of people, land, environment, community, etc.).
Its effects, for Lacoste, “are diffcult, if at all possible, to repair” (2008a
[1973], 623).
According to such a conceptual framing, urbicide should be seen as one
of the forms of geographical warfare, as political violence consisting of the
deliberate destruction—either fast or slow—of the built environment requires

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 GEOGRAPHICAL WARFARE IN PALESTINE

Figure 3.1 Administrative division of the West Bank (Oslo II Accord) and the Jewish
settlements in the area. Compiled based on datasets made available by
United Nations Offce for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,
B’Tselem, and PeaceNow.

87
 GEOGRAPHICAL WARFARE IN PALESTINE

a powerful fuency in mastering multifaceted geographical information. The

latter includes the eloquence and slickness involved in analyzing interac-
tions between physical data and human factors, each determined by the
other. Hence, as the case study of Palestine clearly reveals, it is necessary to
acknowledge the strategic role of demographers, statisticians, geographers,
architects, and planners in state efforts to deepen control over occupied
(or annexed) spaces (see Weizman 2004). One of the central tasks within
the project of colonization of Palestine has been to obliterate geographical
conditions that are indispensable for the lives of people inhabiting these
territories—the Palestinian-Arabs. Their presence on the “promised land”
seems to have been purposefully ignored by both the Zionist leaders and the
international community. The subsequent regular (although relatively slow)
colonization of these territories could not have been accomplished with-
out the accompanying systematic investment in cartographical planning,
deliberate destruction—or partial reconfguration—of the existing built
environment, and carefully designed construction of new infrastructures.
Given the complexity of this process, as both Weizman (2002, 2004, 2007)
and Graham (2004a) argue, it is necessary to realize the multidimensional
character of urbicidal violence perpetrated in the Occupied Territories and
in the Israeli heartland, which simultaneously consists of both destruction
and construction of particular infrastructures. This points to a “generative”
nature of urbicidal policy, which works for the purpose of producing spe-
cifc forms of Israeli territoriality in the concerned regions. This strategy has
been made possible due to the persuasiveness of discursive narratives aimed
at demonizing the Arab “others” and describing their cities and homes as
places where terrorist activity allegedly breeds, especially—although not
exclusively—in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Underpinned by the state-
induced rhetoric strategy of criminalization of the urban areas populated
by the Palestinian-Arabs, the meticulously planned policy consists of the
annexation of their land, the destruction of their houses and olive groves,
and the severe limitation of grazing spaces or dry agriculture facilities (a
substantial source of income for Palestinian-Arab rural communities), as
well as gradual ethnic cleansing of selected geographical areas. An equally
important (and similarly destructive) dimension relates to the construction
of Jewish settlements (including industrial ones) on carefully chosen spots
both in the Occupied Territories and in Israel proper; the development of a
complex network of Israeli-only bypass roads in the West Bank connecting
the settlements with each other and with the Israeli heartland; the erec-
tion of a dividing wall between Israel proper and the Occupied Territories
(which has an important additional role in cutting off Palestinian urban
spaces from each other and constraining their natural, spontaneous devel-
opment); the construction of ethnically segregated townships in the Naqab/
Negev region with unequal access to basic infrastructures and facilities; and
the implementation of a meticulously designed system of permanent and

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ad hoc checkpoints which severely limit Palestinians’ mobility within the

Occupied Territories and between them and the Israeli mainland. All of
these factors translate into the growing impoverishment of the Palestinian-
Arab population (in its whole diversity), seriously restricting its fundamen-
tal rights. There is a broad range of policies in place that together make up
a system of state-controlled oppression in which various more-than-human
agencies are subtly mobilized and tacitly operationalized to further con-
strain the life of Palestinian-Arabs. In the following pages I will investigate
the ways in which the more-than-human forces are recruited, or activated,
by Israeli politicians, strategists, and planners for the purpose of implement-
ing effcient urbicidal policies in Palestine, through two case studies in which
slow-motion strategies are used to produce the forms of ethno-territoriality
desired by the Israeli state. In this context, it is useful to refer to Nigel
Thrift’s formulation that violence should be seen as “an expanding series
of practices in which objects—many of them of a sophisticated kind—have
a more than incidental place and that, increasingly, violence works to an
agenda driven by the requirements of these objects” (2007, 277). Through
a closer glimpse at the practices of geographical warfare, and how they tend
to operate in the broader material-semiotic contexts of the enduring Israeli
colonial project in Palestine, my intention in this chapter is to pay attention
to the multipart composition of the acts of slow political violence and to
examine how it mobilizes, or is co-constituted by, both human and more-
than-human agents and forces.
In his brief analysis of the 2003 Middle East peace initiative, which was
intended to end the escalation of violence connected to the so-called Al-Aqsa
Intifada, Weizman (2004) notes that the “roadmap” clearly recognizes the
political salience of the role of architects and planners in generating this con-
fict. While stating that the Palestinian authority should invest in efforts to
prevent attacks (including suicidal ones) carried out by armed organizations
against Israeli civilians and dismantle their infrastructures, it also recom-
mends that Israel should stop establishing new settlements in the Occupied
Territories and disassemble those erected in breach of Israeli law. In fact,
by setting up such conditions, the agreement openly equates the activities
of each side as contributing in comparable ways to the confict (Weizman
2004, 172). Such a framing of the peace initiative seems to suggest that the
construction efforts in which Israel has been investing fnancially, militar-
ily, demographically, and emotionally since 1967 should be considered a
form of warfare targeted against Palestinian communities populating the
territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and a continuation of a strategy
of systematic colonization regularly implemented since the withdrawal of
the British from this territory. Certainly, the year 1967 must be seen as
an important caesura, signaling a substantial redefnition of the Israeli (or
Zionist) colonial project. Even though, after the swift victory in the Six-Day
War, Israel’s political elites were clearly aware of the fact that they would

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probably have to return the now-Occupied Territories of the West Bank to

Jordan, they nevertheless launched a slow-motion policy of gradual land
seizure, initially represented as a temporary project undertaken for military
(or security) purposes. The implementation of this plan eventually resulted
in the creation of the rather unconventional geography of the Occupied
Territories, hampering the future establishment of a separate Palestinian
state spanning a politically well-defned and jurisdictionally coherent space.
This policy was undertaken not only via strictly military means. Rather,
as Weizman explains, “In this process the transformation of the territo-
ries occupied by Israel since 1967 became a parallel confict carried out
with pencil lines on the drafting tables of military and civilian planners and
architects” (2004, 172). Importantly, as he further indicates, “It developed
as an ‘urban war’ in which urbanity provided not only the arena of war but
also its very weapons and ammunition. Just like a gun or a tank, mundane
building matters have been used by the Israeli state to apply its strategic and
political agenda” (2004, 172; see also Weizman 2007; Lein and Weizman
2002; Segal and Weizman 2003).
Even though “a gun” or “a tank” should also be seen as a more-than-
human agent operating in complex material-discursive contexts and gen-
erating similarly complex consequences, mobilizing aspects such as the
architectural planning of mundane family houses, industrial and infrastruc-
tural developments, the topographical characteristics of the terrain, con-
struction patterns and techniques, or natural resources (such as water) for
the purpose of conducting war appears to be a less obvious warfare strat-
egy. In such a context, these factors emerge as important political agents in
the multifaceted Israeli project of colonizing Palestine. As Raf Segal and
Eyal Weizman argue in their groundbreaking work, Civilian Occupation
(2003),3 through its carefully undertaken processes of planning and build-
ing in the West Bank, Israel is effectively implementing a political agenda
by means of well-designed spatial manipulations. Worth noting is the fact
that similar undertakings have been characteristic of the process of build-
ing territoriality in the Israeli heartland since 1948 (Leshem 2016; Jabareen
2015). This stratagem involves the meticulous exploitation of a set of con-
nections, or entanglements, among national narratives, law, (history of)
confict, and geography. It also makes use of carefully devised linkages
between geographical representations and ideological performance. These
complex entwinements, and their agential enactments, need to be carefully
investigated for the purpose of offering a nuanced understanding of the
processes accompanying the Israeli colonial presence in Palestine. In such
an account, the environment and landscape (the indispensable elements of
a particular territory) can no longer be conceived as brute, inert, or fxed
backdrops of confict but rather should be seen, as Lacoste suggested, as
“an active, operational constituent of war” (Bowd and Clayton 2013, 640).
New materialism seems to offer adequate conceptual tools to expose these

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deadly connections. Denouncing their lethal assemblage-like operations,

this perspective substantially adds to the extant scholarship exploring Israeli
policies in Palestine. The academic dialogue between these explorations and
the theoretical developments emerging around Nixon’s concept of slow vio-
lence (2009, 2011) can contribute to the shedding of new light on the ana-
lyzed phenomena further revealing state-sponsored efforts at reconfguring
the more-than-human geographies of both the Occupied Territories and the
Israeli mainland.
In the following sections, I will look at two examples of slow urbicidal
policies undertaken by the Israeli authorities in Palestine. The cases, or sto-
ries, under discussion relate to different phases of the Israeli colonization of
the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine and to geographical
areas with very different political statuses; even though these processes have
been ongoing since the late 1940s, their intensity has been sinusoidal. It is
not possible within such a short book to cover these complex “policies”
in great detail, and such an attempt is not an aim of this chapter. Rather,
my analysis will focus on the entanglement of the human and more-than-
human dimensions of these enduring initiatives, looking into the complex
character of political violence and the diversity of practices involved in slow
urbicide in Palestine. My attempt at theorizing the more-than-human agen-
cies involved in the violent developments in the two selected areas stems
from the conviction that such a conceptualization—still missing from extant
studies of such processes wrapped around the aforementioned notions of
“verticality” (Graham 2004b, 2016; Graham and Hewitt 2012; Weizman
2002, 2007; Segal and Weizman 2003) and “volume” (Elden 2013, 2017,
2021)—can substantially reconfgure our thinking about the role of space/
spatiality in international and security politics. Partly abandoning the tech-
nocratic and disengaged gaze present in such analyses (Adey 2013; Harker
2011), I am more interested in the how question of urbicide in Palestine,
exposing the material-semiotic character of these developments and look-
ing into the complex consequences they generate for the topographical and
“topological” (Harker 2011, 2014) organization of urban communities. My
focus is also on the relational nature of violence targeting the indigenous
populations in the regions under consideration, as well as on the shifting
temporalities of the violent policies launched by the Israeli state within the
scope of its colonial enterprise. I will relate the exploration of these pro-
cesses to the two core concepts around which my narrative is built: “the
right to the city” and “ethno-territoriality.”
Geographical warfare, as these examples are intended to demonstrate,
has been systematically used by the Israeli authorities in their well-planned
settlement project. The forces of nature, as much as the various instances
of natural-cultural, human-nonhuman, or material-semiotic entanglements,
have been instrumentalized in this political endeavor. In paying attention
to the specifc mobilizations of different materialities, my intention is to

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expose the slow—seemingly innocent—operations of political violence

in the region. As my case studies demonstrate, even though in Lacoste’s
original formulation of the term “geographical warfare” the landscape was
mostly viewed as a kind of enemy to be destroyed as part of the military
effort, in the case of the confictual relations between the Israeli state and
the Palestinian-Arabs the term now stands for a strategic use of landscape
and/or natural forces as tools for political violence. In this sense, the agen-
cies of landscape/climate/topography are clearly acknowledged and subse-
quently entangled with human-induced processes (e.g., pollution, toxicity,
urbanization) as well as the semiotic structures and ideology-infused ideas
that have populated the arena of the Israeli politics in Palestine since the
very inception of the Israeli state. This demonstrates the crucial agencies, or
determinations, generated by space in, as Thrift underlines, “setting up and
breeding certain forms of violence” (2007, 274). In that sense, geographical
space, with its diverse natural-cultural attributes and characteristics, cannot
be approached solely as a context; rather, it “provide[s] a medium and a
means and a momentum, as well as a measure” (Thrift 2007, 274).

Case Study 1. Cartographies of Domination in the West Bank

To fully understand the operations of slow urbicide in the West Bank it is
necessary to recall at least the most important facts and turning points in the
decades-long history of Israeli-Arab, and then Israeli-Palestinian, relations.4
In 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War on the one hand and
in the context of intense decolonization processes in the Middle East region
on the other, Israel—declared as a new independent state in May 1948—
took over most of the territory of a historical organism called Mandatory
Palestine. Even though, as signaled in the Introduction, the Zionist policy
was premised on the appealing slogan “a land without a people for a people
without a land,”5 resonating with the post-war discomfort about the terrify-
ing fate of the Jewish community in Europe, the territory annexed by the
Israeli state was by no means unpopulated. In order to take control over
the land, Israeli military forces destroyed and depopulated 531 Arab vil-
lages (Said 2000; see also Pappé 2006; Hassan and Hanaf 2009), violently
relocating a great number of the Arabs originally inhabiting this land. This
process initiated one of the biggest and most persistent waves of refugees in
the world (Abujidi 2014; Morris 1987). Except for the West Bank (which
came under the control of Jordan6) and the Gaza Strip (which came under
the control of Egypt), the whole territory of the former British Mandate
was turned into the newly established independent State of Israel. This fact
violated the decisions—even though widely contested by both sides—set
up in UN Resolution 181, recommending the creation of two independ-
ent states on the territory of Mandatory Palestine and delineating their
borders. The newly proclaimed state launched a project of (re)settlement

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and development of its (still unrecognized) territory with the aim to build a
prosperous political organism, able to fully participate in both regional and
global politics. This was executed at the cost of people already inhabiting
the land, who were brutally dispossessed of their belongings and expelled.7
The ethnic composition of the territory has been radically reworked accord-
ing to the narrative of Jewish belonging in the mythical “promised land.”
The situation took another turn in 1967 when, as a result of the Six-Day
War, Israel extended its military and political control over Gaza and the
West Bank, considered since then the Occupied Territories. Even though the
UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 stipulate that this land must
be given back, these regulations have been consistently ignored by Israel,
which was unwilling to return the newly acquired land. Immediately after
this acquisition, not only did Israel literally annex the extended territory of
East Jerusalem and its suburbs8 (earlier under Jordanian rule), but also initi-
ated a regular policy of building and expanding Jewish settlements in the
West Bank. This process contributed to redefning the land ethnically along
the lines of Jewish belonging therein and informally, yet factually, extending
Israeli territoriality over it. This project continues to seriously constrain the
natural development of the Palestinian communities. The settlement enter-
prise persistently violates Palestinians’ “right to the city,” affecting their
traditional ways of dwelling that combine human and more-than-human
aspects of communal living. These entanglements embrace not only the
long-cultivated practices of constructing and organizing housing and how
this relates to established agricultural traditions, but also includes routine
movements, daily rhythms, seasonal adaptations, and ecosystemic relations
often dictated by natural forces and the specifcities of the climate, as well as
established customs, spatial navigations, family relations, and time manage-
ment. Israeli infrastructural developments also limit Palestinian-Arabs’ pos-
sibilities for shaping the urban space according to their communities’ needs
by imposing discriminatory land regulations and implementing a policy of
systematic land seizure for what the former claim to be the public good. The
previously mentioned Oslo peace process, instead of solving the confict,
further exacerbated the territorial arrangements already in place, hamper-
ing any attempts to establish a sovereign, territory-based Palestinian state.
Obviously, this remains in line with the original goals of the Israeli policy.
As Orna Ben-Naftali et al. explain, the Israeli regime “sustains an indefnite
occupation that amounts to de facto annexation,” using the indeterminacy
of this system “to legitimize what would otherwise be clearly illegal” (2009,
31). In effect, the international regime of occupation “has been manipulated
in a manner that legitimizes the tearing apart of the fabric of Palestinian life
while advancing the political agenda of Israeli expansionism” (Ben-Naftali
et al. 2009, 32). If approached from the perspective of ethno-territorial
logic, the presence of Jews in the West Bank can only be premised on the
systematic uprooting of Palestinian ways of dwelling, the erasure of their

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traditional activities, the dissipation of their dependence on land, and the

denial of their political and physical visibility. Such a situation seriously
affects the possibilities of Palestinians to exert their most basic rights, con-
straining their aspirations to self-governance and territorial independence.
The forms of occupation largely differ in the West Bank. While in cer-
tain areas (such as Hebron) settlements are not spatially removed from
Palestinian urban spaces and should rather be seen as “two overlapping pol-
ygons, settlers literally on top of Palestinians” (Smith 2011, 319), in others
separation between the communities of Palestinians and those of settlers is
well articulated through, for instance, the material-semiotic agencies of the
dividing wall (as in Bethlehem or Ramallah). Also, the occupation’s intensity
differs across the West Bank. The Oslo system describes the juridical reality
on the surface of the land, as what is under and above the ground remains
in fact under Israel’s authority, which translates into what Weizman calls a
“politics of verticality” (2002). Conventional two-dimensional maps, typi-
cally used for delineating the political borders of a state have, in Weizman’s
words, “failed to capture its vertical dimensions” (2002, n.p.). This is also
because geopolitics, typically a “fat discourse” shaped by legacies of tradi-
tional military and political renditions of spatialities, “largely ignores the
vertical dimension and tends to look across rather than to cut through the
landscape” (2002, n.p.). This, however, does not apply to the convoluted
nature of territorial arrangements in the West Bank, in which the vertical
politics seems to substantially structure the understandings of territoriality.
Nevertheless, in order to capture the dynamics of verticality and how it
confgures communities in spatial terms, it seems necessary to complexify it
with the analysis of the shifting temporalities according to which political
power (or violence) operates. The analysis of vertical dimension of politics,
paying attention to what is above and below the territory and how these
dimensions translate into uneven geographies of oppression on the surface,
is not suffcient to do justice to the tangled operations of political violence
which are often distributed across both space and time. Neither is the con-
ceptual shift from “battlefeld” (understood as fat) to “battlespace” (con-
ceived of as multidimensional) (Elden 2021; see also Virilio 1993 [1976],
2008 [1975]) enough to elaborate a complete picture of the urbicidal devel-
opments in Palestine. The complex character of this form of violence, I
argue, can be better grasped if the vertical/volumetric analysis is paired with
investigations of the temporal dimension of these political developments.
Such a perspective has the potential to shed light on violence’s more discreet
operations, exposing those circumstances that can easily be “objectifed”
(as, for instance, “natural”) by means of the ideology-infused rhetoric dis-
seminated by the state.
Worth noting is also the fact that the complex cartographical and politi-
cal organization of space in the West Bank creates “microgeographies of
occupation” (Smith 2011) which are very different from each other. The

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strategies of (slow) destruction of Palestinian urbanity, however, work in

similar ways in these zones, although with different frequencies and inten-
sities. Rather than exploring these important divergences, the goal of my
analysis is to reveal the tangled operations of the means through which slow
urbicide is carried out in the region, as well as to pay attention to its endur-
ing attritional consequences.

Violent Cartographies
Although the building of durable infrastructure in territories under occu-
pation breaches international law, and especially the Fourth Geneva
Convention, since 1967 Israel has regularly expanded the construction
of settlements in the West Bank. Over time, under slight shifts in politi-
cal conditions, especially in relation to the Israeli political ruling forces,
a series of construction plans has been implemented. The plans of each
period refected the then-current nationalist narratives and visions of the
future informed by the politics of the day, offering up-to-date justifcations
for the need to carry out settlement activity in the regions referred to in
the Israeli state’s offcial rhetoric as “Judea and Samaria.”9 These include
Alon’s plan (1967-1970), Drobless’s plan (1977), Dayan’s plan (1978-
1979), and Sharon’s plan (1981).10 Originally, Alon’s plan was meant to
remake the borders of Israel by including the Jordanian Valley and the
Judea Desert, and justifed the establishment of settlements for security
reasons. This was perceived as a frst step to the annexation of these ter-
ritories. Within the plan, the Israeli government succeeded in establish-
ing approximately 30 Jewish settlements in the West Bank, making the
Israeli presence visible in the region (Lein and Weizman 2002, 12; see
also Benvenisti and Khayat 1987). The plans that were drafted after the
nationalistically oriented Likud came to power in 1977 further expanded
the assumptions of Alon’s plan, recommending the policy of establish-
ing Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank, while avoiding those
areas that were most densely populated by Palestinians (see Benvenisti
and Khayat 1987, 65). This strategy was meant to accentuate Jewish pres-
ence in the region, eradicating the Palestinian traces left there, and deny-
ing Palestinians their territorial belonging. Before the Oslo negotiations
started, there were 120 Jewish settlements established in the West Bank
(excluding the East Jerusalem area); directly before the Al-Aqsa Intifada,
this number had risen to almost 200 (Lein and Weizman 2002, 18). This
number encompasses both the “legal” settlements, organized with the sup-
port of the Israeli state, and the outposts established in breach of Israeli
law. The intention embodied in the settlement project was to both Judaize
the occupied areas and impair the continuity of the Palestinian land, phys-
ically diminishing the potential territory of any future Palestinian state
(Lein and Weizman 2002, 18).

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In 1984, preference was again offcially given to the settlement project

in the Jordanian Valley; however, the process continued across the whole
occupied region. Though coupled with slightly different ideological assump-
tions and nation-centered narratives, the strategy of making Jewish pres-
ence noticeable in the West Bank has, since 1967, remained essentially
the same, especially when approached from a topographical and architec-
tural perspective. In brief, the strategy exploits and politicizes the natural
agencies of the landscape for the purpose of the Zionist colonial project.
Interestingly, the discursive tactics and the material developments have typi-
cally mutually co-formed each other. Hence, the mechanisms used by the
Israeli government for land acquisition could only work as a result of the
material-discursive entanglements of the legal system, ideologically shaped
colonial objectives, military rhetoric, and the history of confict, as much as
the region’s topography and the (im)possibility of agricultural cultivation it
offers. This combination enabled the processes of slow urbicidal violence,
while keeping them to a great extent beyond the immediate interests of the
international community. Through the systematic use of a range of manipu-
lative mechanisms, Israel has managed to declare and register a substantial
part of the Occupied Territories as “state land,” offering persuasive offcial
justifcations for the seizure of Palestinians’ private property, thus depriving
them of their rights. This has remained fully in line with ethno-territorially
defned colonial policy.
Settlement building patterns in the West Bank are shaped by the dynamic
entanglements of the topographical features of this geographical region and
the availability of ideologically distorted legal mechanisms of land seizure.
These mechanisms include the requisition of land for military purposes, the
expropriation of land for public needs, the declaration of land as aban-
doned property, and the appropriation of uncultivated areas (Abu-Lughod
1982; Aloni 2016; Hareuveni 2010; Lein and Weizman 2002; Nijim and
Muammar 1984). To enhance this policy, the offcial strategy was also to
facilitate land purchase by Jewish citizens on the free market, while the
Israeli High Court also contributed to the system of dispossession, creating
“an illusion of legality” (Lein and Weizman 2002, 46). Added to this must
be “the privatized mechanism through which settlers help the state expand
and solidify its control over … land” (Aloni 2016, 5), consisting mostly of
self-declared appropriation or cultivation of the land to which the original
Palestinian owners are regularly denied access. The frequent acts of violent
re-appropriation committed by Jewish settlers are typically not penalized by
the state, further contributing to the emergence of discriminatory geography
in the region, with Palestinians being heavily disadvantaged vis-à-vis the
Jews in not only spatial, but also legal terms.
The measures applied to seize control of the land in the West Bank
shuffe legislations from different historical periods, including remnants
of Ottoman and British Mandate law partly absorbed into the Jordanian

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legal system or ad hoc orders issued by Israeli military commanders (Lein

and Weizman 2002, 48). Many of the decisions to take control of land
for military needs (which should by defnition be temporary) were justifed
by the reason that the settlements established on these territories perform
important defensive and military functions. The application of this mecha-
nism stopped in 1979, due to two High Court interpretations of cases in
which settlements established by the conservative spiritual movement Gush
Emunim were ordered to be dismantled, since the argument that settlements
served primarily military purposes and thus were only temporary was unac-
ceptable for the movement.11 As a result, a new mechanism—based on the
application of the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, subsequently incorporated
into frst British and then Jordanian legal regulations—was established as
a means of declaring the land to be state property, which, from the Israeli
perspective, solved the problem of constructing settlements on seized private
lands. This law allowed the state to take control of land that has not been
farmed for at least three consecutive years or has been farmed for less than
ten years by the same farmer (who has therefore not yet secured the prop-
erty rights to the land); the state could also control the rocky land situated
away from the villages on the basis that it was inappropriate for agricultural
use.12 The original legal formulation was meant to serve the interests of both
the inhabitants and the state, ensuring that as much land as possible was
cultivated and could therefore be taxed. Nevertheless, the tricky applica-
tion of this regulation by Israel in fact mocked its original logic. In 1979
the Israeli government conducted a detailed survey of the land in “Judea
and Samaria,” taking control of all the areas formerly managed by the
Jordanian authorities, any land with unclear property titles (unregistered
with Ottoman, British, or Jordanian authorities13), and all land uncultivated
for three consecutive years or cultivated for a period shorter than ten years.
Additionally, any property considered “abandoned” was taken over by the
state and used according to its will. Given the fact that since 1967 Israel has
systematically prevented the return of war refugees to the West Bank, the
property rights of this last category of land were transferred to the Israeli
government and subsequently passed to new Jewish settlers.
Since most of the land that could be declared state property via the
employment of these mechanisms was located on rocky hilltops (and hence,
often, uncultivated and/or perceived as strategically situated in military
terms), Israel was able to take control of these elevated spots, creating an
additional urbanized and industrialized layer of the territory. The settle-
ments were built along three strips running from north to south of the West
Bank. The strip that most affects highly urbanized Palestinian areas is the
Mountain Strip, which is situated in the vicinity of the six largest Palestinian
urban centers: Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and
Hebron (Figure 3.1). It spreads out in two chains along the routes 60 and
458—the two principal traffc arteries in the West Bank. Other strips mostly

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negatively affect Palestinian villages, often hindering the villagers’ regular

access to their land, properties, or other villages and towns. Currently there
are 132 Jewish settlements established by the Israeli government in the West
Bank (excluding the East Jerusalem area) and 141 illegal Jewish outposts
(PeaceNow 2022).14 They have been additionally expanded through the cre-
ation of “special security areas” or “natural reserves” around them, as well
as through minor acts of informal re-bordering and appropriation imple-
mented by Jewish settlers by material means such as, for instance, planting
trees and erecting barbwire fencing (Joronen 2021). Although represented
as serving public interests, in general these terrains are closed to Palestinian
entry (Feuerstein 2008), even though Israel applies a policy of varying strict-
ness regarding the issuing of access permits which corresponds to the actual
need for Palestinian labor or resources; these terrains, however, remain
informally open to the Jewish settlers.15
The settlement policy required the creation of an appropriate road infra-
structure (B’Tselem 2004, 5). Again, in order to take control of the land
necessary for the pavement of roads, Israel used both the strategy of requisi-
tion of land for military needs and that of expropriation for public use, with
a slight preference for the latter (B’Tselem 2004, 6; see also Abu-Lughod
1982; Nijim and Muammar 1984; Lein and Weizman 2002). Against the
principle of public use,16 however, in most of the cases, Palestinians have
been informally denied access to these roads as much as to the areas situated
in their direct vicinity. As activists from the B’Tselem organization note,
“the roads regime in the West Bank has never been put on paper, neither in
military legislation nor in any offcial decision” and “is based solely on ver-
bal orders given to the security forces,” which entails a great “degree of arbi-
trariness” (B’Tselem 2004, 3). Despite the unregulated status, Palestinians
are strongly discouraged (also by frequent acts of violence by settlers) from
using this infrastructure and they do not approach or cross the roads, even
when it is necessary for them to do so to access and cultivate their proper-
ties (see Aloni 2016; Feuerstein 2008; Handel 2009). They are thus forced
to use different routes (of signifcantly lower quality, including the passes
below, and bypasses of, the Israeli-only roads), which makes trips to their
land much longer and often unpredictable. In cases where bypass routes
are unavailable, based on a somewhat arbitrary system of special permits,
the legal owners of agricultural land are occasionally granted entry to their
felds located within or across the closed areas, yet not frequently enough
to secure a decent harvest. This has a negative impact on income and, sub-
sequently, on the quality of Palestinians’ living conditions. Furthermore,
the Israeli architectural developments impair mobility, further exacerbated
by the deployment of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) checkpoints throughout
the Occupied Territories, causing random obstructions in everyday mobil-
ity. To this must be added the consequences of constructing the dividing
wall, whose trajectory was in many cases dictated by the policy of including

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several Jewish settlements established in the West Bank within the fenced
Israeli-only zone (Figure 3.1). Again, this has severely impeded Palestinians’
daily existence and the quality of their urban spaces, now often squeezed
between the wall and the strip of constantly expanding Jewish settlements,
and cut off from other Palestinian communities, with arbitrary and very
limited access granted to non-residents. The town of Qualqilya may serve
as one of the most spectacular examples of the Israeli policy of physical
containment effectuated by means of the material-semiotic agencies of the
dividing wall on the one hand, and the developing Jewish settlements, on
the other.
Erected on hilltops (usually very close to, and overlooking, Palestinian
urban areas, typically located in the valleys) and connected with each other
by a network of Israeli-only bypass roads, the settlements and their accom-
panying infrastructures serve as physical barriers to spatial expansion of
the indigenous built environment. Their material agencies have the effect
of limiting spontaneous urban development, at least in certain directions,
producing diverse negative consequences. In highly urbanized areas (such as
Ramallah or Bethlehem, situated in Area A) these include serious housing
problems, the degeneration of the urban tissue through unsuitable—often
provisional—construction and overuse, excessive congestion, overcrowd-
ing, and reduced access to necessary services and infrastructures. As the
boundaries of the territories under Palestinian authority (Area A) in many
cases correspond to the limits of urbanized areas (as in Bethlehem or
Ramallah) and their lateral expansion has been physically blocked, addi-
tional construction is only possible within the already overexploited space,
often producing urban spaces with an unaesthetic materiality, visually and
physically unfriendly to its inhabitants. In urban areas situated near the
Green Line (and thus, since 2002, often next to the dividing wall) or of
strategic signifcance (such as East Jerusalem and nearby villages annexed
to Israel in 1967; or divided Hebron, Areas H1 and H2), similar processes
cause depopulation, deterioration of the urban tissue, abandonment of
properties, and severe poverty—a result of “economic and physical strangu-
lation” (Smith 2011, 324). At the same time, the newly constructed Israeli
roads premeditatedly circumvent Palestinian urbanized areas, cutting them
off from commercial chains and hindering their integration within broader
networks of exchange of goods and services, imposing on them the fate
of self-contained and self-suffcient enclaves, to a great extent physically
separated from the external world. Restrictions on mobility and isolation
from fast routes of transportation translate into the substantial impoverish-
ment of Palestinians, further limiting their possibilities of social and cultural
development, thus aggravating—albeit indirectly—the quality and usability
of their urbanized sites.
This kind of deliberate policy, which amounts to a subtle form of geo-
graphical warfare, besets indigenous urban areas, worsens their material

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characteristics, pollutes them, and causes their systematic socio-economic

“de-development” (Roy 1987). Simultaneously, it invisibilizes the exist-
ence of the deteriorating Palestinian urbanity, removing it from the sight of
both foreigners and, often, also Israeli citizens commuting in the region.17
Importantly, given the fact that complex spatial developments impede tra-
ditional agricultural routines and turn the usual rural income-generating
activities into a signifcant challenge, most of the West Bank Palestinians
currently reside within the urban areas. Cities situated next to the Israeli
mainland—such as Ramallah or Bethlehem—remain the most congested
areas, attracting a substantial cohort of the newcomers. This is mostly due
to the fact that the mobility restrictions in place in the West Bank are expe-
rienced less severely in sites geographically close to Israeli territory, which
often translates into increased opportunities for employment and physical
mobility for those possessing work permits. The condition of these spaces,
however, remains far from desirable, owing—inter alia—to the poor quality
of local infrastructures and insuffcient availability of public services (includ-
ing, for instance, sanitary and waste management systems). The politically
informed Israeli developments in the West Bank greatly contribute to the
further degeneration of the Palestinian urban areas, gradually reconfgur-
ing them in both the topographical and topological sense; they continually
incumber Palestinian communities’ growth and impair their opportunities
for spatial self-organization.
Notably, the carrying out of slow urbicidal policies—resulting in the
gradual deterioration of urbanity in the West Bank—has been enabled by
a complex entanglement of discursive and material factors mobilized for
the advancement of the Israeli expansionist project. On the one hand, this
project’s shape and strategies are premised on the material qualities of the
region, recruiting their agencies for political purposes. On the other hand,
they are sustained by—and themselves sustain—the rhetoric strategies
which praise the infrastructural development and modernizing efforts spon-
sored by the Israeli state in the region under its protracted occupation. As
Weizman notes, “the terrain dictates the nature, intensity and focal points
of confrontation” (2002, n.p.), making possible the implementation of a
settlement strategy based on visual control, or what Gil Hochberg aptly
calls “visual occupation” (2015). Thus, the agencies of the region’s natu-
ral topography co-shape specifc occupational policies, slowly and silently
contributing to the increasing fragmentation of Palestinian spatiality, while
putting it under the constant surveillance of the settlers. This is partly ena-
bled by the scenery of the region, co-constituting the ideologically shaped
apparatus of visual control and operationalizing its disciplinary panoptical
qualities. Whereas the interiors of the settlements located on elevated spots
and their surrounding areas remain inaccessible to Palestinians, their own
villages and towns, situated down in the valleys, are exposed to visual pen-
etration by settlers and IDF soldiers, creating traumatizing mechanisms of

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permanent optical invigilation. The effects of this new geography, dotted

with settlements and cut with road infrastructure, are equally vehement,
producing “a physical barrier to stife Palestinian urban development” and
preventing “the natural joining of communities and creation of a continu-
ous Palestinian built-up area” (B’Tselem 2004, 6). Such a spatial recon-
fguration disrupts what Harker calls “ordinary topologies,” or intensive
(rather than solely extensive) relations rooted in “the material, affective and
imaginative actions of bodies” (2014, 323)—a dense “time-space” in which
much happens (Harker 2014, 325) and which substantially transforms as
an effect of premeditated spatial manipulations. These processes involve the
loosening of family relations and partial dissolution of the extended socio-
cultural networks of community ecosystems.
Thus, functioning as instruments of warfare (albeit unconventional),
Israeli architectural developments in the West Bank negatively affect the
indigenous ways of dwelling, which typically combine human and more-
than-human aspects of communal living. These include customary ways of
constructing and organizing housing and the relation of this to agricultural
traditions and the production associated with livestock, as well as the spatial
and temporal routines of movement and travel, seasonal practices, family
relations, customs and celebrations, and so on. This strategy of architecture
warfare leads to the gradual eradication of certain forms of spatial organi-
zation and the successive emergence of territorial arrangements preferred
by the Israeli state—a system which obviously works to the advantage of
the Jewish settlers and which prioritizes their needs over those of the indig-
enous Palestinian inhabitants of the region. In the case of the West Bank,
as evidenced in this analysis, slow urbicide—in contrast to fast destructive
tactics—advances through construction (of Jewish infrastructures), control
(through a system of checkpoints, mobility restrictions, and visual surveil-
lance), and physical containment (through the material suppression, or
siege, of Palestinian urbanity). Premised on the mastery of topographical
data and cartographical techniques, these violent developments gradually
generate a new geography in the region, affecting its human and nonhu-
man components and visually reconfguring its original settings. The latter
process, however, is co-constituted by slow operations of another cohort of
more-than-human agents, severely impacting upon the natural conditions
of the area.

Environmental Injustice
The new infrastructural developments in the West Bank generate negative
consequences for the region’s natural environment, mostly to the detri-
ment of the Palestinians. As Jad Isaac and Jane Hilal underline, “there is an
organic relationship between environmental degradation in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory … and the political confict” (2011, 413). The policy

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of land confscation for civil settlement, as well as industrial and military

purposes, produces substantial disruption for the area, connected to the
mismanagement of wastewater (both Israeli and Palestinian), shortages in
potable water, intensive desertifcation, pollution of land, and degeneration
and erosion of soil (the last phenomenon also results from overgrazing of
the area that remains available to the Palestinian herders). The West Bank
suffers severely from water shortages on the one hand, and contamination
by untreated wastewater on the other. These problems are tightly interre-
lated and are further exacerbated by both the everyday functioning of the
occupational regime and the topographical organization of settlement pro-
jects in the area, developments which heavily shape the hydro-social rela-
tions in the region. Waste and topography emerge as important political
agents in the colonization of Palestinian bodies and spaces.
There are two shared water sources in the area: the Jordan River (includ-
ing the Upper Jordan and the streams fowing into it, the Sea of Galilee, the
Yarmuk River, and the Lower Jordan River) and the Mountain Aquifer,
an extensive system of groundwater basins transecting the border between
Israel and the West Bank. Following the Oslo Accords, Israel maintained
almost total control over water resources in the region. Palestinians, in
breach of international regulations, are banned from access to the Jordan
River waters, which have been unilaterally diverted by Israel to the Naqab/
Negev desert and other destinations. This, together with the ongoing climate
change in the whole Middle East region18 and the systematic Israeli policy
of afforestation accompanied by the strategy of uprooting olive groves for
the purpose of building new Israeli infrastructure in the West Bank, has con-
tributed to the severe desertifcation of the region, endangering its endogenic
biodiversity as well as reconfguring the typical ways the local population
makes use of these resources (Agha 2019; Issac and Hilal 2011; Mizyed
2009; Nofal and Barakat 2001). In the face of these processes, as Sophia
Stamatopoulou-Robbins underlines, in order to understand the nature of
the water problem in the West Bank, it is necessary to focus on the relation-
ship between climate temporalities and political possibilities (2018, 385). As
she insists, “Water scarcity in Palestine is not natural; it is political” (2018,
396), and the issue should be situated against the background of the realities
of occupation in the region.19
The water resources from the Mountain Aquifer are shared by Israel and
the West Bank, but around 80% of its waters are earmarked for the use of
Israeli citizens inhabiting both Israel’s heartland and the settlements (Lein
1998, 2000, 2001). This uneven distribution impedes Palestinians’ access
to water suitable for drinking, household needs, agriculture, industry, and
public uses, forcing people to partly rely on other resources, such as springs,
wells, rainfall collection, and purchasing water from tankers. Restrictions
on mobility connected to the offcial policy of ensuring the security of Jewish
settlers in the West Bank, along with the policy of refusing to issue permits

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to drill new wells and create new rainwater cisterns, substantially hamper
Palestinians’ access to these alternative water resources (Aloni 2016). This
has a negative impact on the situation of individuals, as much as the qual-
ity of their urban areas, which are practically devoid of green/recreational
public spaces (which would require regular watering). The quality of water
from alternative resources (except for water tankers)—being uncontrolled
by any offcial authorities—is also poor, which poses a serious threat to the
health and well-being of the population that relies on them.
The policy of expanding Israeli presence in the West Bank, and the
failure to secure appropriate infrastructure to serve both the settlements
and the indigenous population, generates serious environmental prob-
lems. According to offcial estimates, settlements—connected to the Israeli
water supply system—generate more than twice the average per capita
amount of wastewater produced by Palestinian communities in the West
Bank (Hareuveni 2009, 5). At the same time, more than one-third of set-
tlements are unequipped with appropriate wastewater treatment plants.
Furthermore, some of the Jewish colonies in the West Bank are in fact indus-
trial zones, where Israel has relocated several polluting businesses, adding
even more pressure to the natural environment resulting from the discharge
of untreated industrial waste, including severely polluted wastewater. Due
to gravity, the sewage generated by Jewish hilltop colonies runs unrefned
into nearby wadis, Palestinian agricultural lands, and municipal areas, as
well as contaminating nearby streams, springs, and wells, and endangering
the quality of the groundwater. Again, the topographical situation of the
region acts to the advantage of one side of the confict and causes damage
to the other, polluting crops, devastating landscapes, producing unpleasant
smells, and endangering the health and well-being of people and livestock.
The system of political control extending over the West Bank effectively
obstructs any attempts at improvement of the miserable environmental situ-
ation in the region. Added to the pollution produced by the Israeli colonies
is the fact that about 95% of Palestinians’ wastewater is not treated at all,
due to the lack of appropriate infrastructure, ending up in valleys, sewers,
and irrigation channels (Hareuveni 2009, 19).
Since Israeli approval is needed in Area C of the West Bank when a new
wastewater treatment facility is to be built, this instrument has regularly
been used as political leverage, pressuring Palestinians to agree to link the
settlements to the planned infrastructural developments, thus in a way rec-
ognizing their existence in the West Bank. Clearly, this has been politically
unacceptable for the Palestinian Authority. As a result, the process of issu-
ing permits to construct new Palestinian wastewater treatment plants has
systematically been intentionally delayed (Hareuveni 2009). By restrict-
ing access to treated water, causing serious environmental damage while
limiting the possibilities of repair, Israeli policy contributes extensively to
the aggravation of the poor sanitary conditions in Palestinian towns and

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villages, while leaving the population more vulnerable to climate change

and desertifcation. As a result, any attempts to improve the situation, if at
all viable, must be adjusted to both environmental change and the political
conditions of occupation. Realization of the effects of these two ongoing
processes calls for, in Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s words, “an epistemological
shift from occupation as injustice to occupation as hazard” (2018, 399).
Under conditions of continuous political tension, vulnerabilities stemming
from exposure to the detrimental effects of certain natural processes unfold-
ing in the region, as well as human-induced harmful developments, are dis-
tributed unequally across the members of population inhabiting the area,
with Palestinians facing by far the greatest risk.
Additionally, Israel is responsible for severe toxic pollution in the West
Bank due to its policy of establishing waste treatment facilities there, delin-
eating so-called “sacrifce zones”—geographic areas condemned to environ-
mental damage—in which to dispose of its hazardous waste.20 As Aloni
details, “Israel transfers to the West Bank various types of waste: sewage
sludge, infectious medical waste, used oils, solvents, metals, electronic waste
and batteries” (2017, 6). This policy amounts to what Stamatopoulou-
Robbins aptly calls a “waste siege,” causing a situation in which various
kinds of waste function as “unaccounted-for actors, mediating and com-
plicating life at multiple scales” (2020, ix). Obviously, Palestinians also
produce their own waste which, for lack of appropriate management facili-
ties, visibly litters urban and suburban areas in the West Bank. Garbage
piled and burnt at the edges of inhabited spaces is not an uncommon view
in Palestine. Inadequately disposed of waste, as Stamatopoulou-Robbins
notes, reenters Palestinians’ lives “through their lungs as dioxins carried
by the smoke” (2020, ix), generating delayed harm. Thus, not only does
mismanagement of waste and sewage negatively impact the quality of the
built environment (especially, the functioning of sanitary systems), but also
directly injures human bodies forced to reside in waste’s direct proximity,
exposed to its lethal agencies. Occupational policies of intentional abandon-
ment and neglect further complicate the texture of slow violence perpetu-
ated in the West Bank.

Parallel Geographies
There are important similarities in the ways that slow violence and urbicidal
policies of territorial expansion operate. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, in
the preface to his book, Nixon explicitly acknowledges that the inspiration
for his thinking comes from, among other things, engagement with Edward
Said’s writing on the Israeli-Palestinian confict, indicating the conceptual
“reproachment between postcolonial and environmental studies” (2011,
xi). As the analysis presented in the previous section indicates, the Israeli
colonial project makes use of the shifting temporalities of urbicidal violence,

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causing damage both to Palestinian communities and the natural environ-

ment of the region. The meticulously planned Israeli architectural devel-
opments in the West Bank contribute to the gradual creation of parallel
geographies, where two communities located within the same cartographi-
cal contours of a region in fact inhabit two dramatically different legal and
material planes. Such arrangements emerged as a result of a series of meas-
ures used by the Israeli government to deepen its control over the West
Bank, assured by a complex cartographical system consisting of a superim-
position of “discontinuous maps over each other” (Weizman 2002, n.p.).
This produces a complex spatiality premised on, and further exacerbating,
the existing ethnic divisions within both the Israeli state and the territories
it controls.
The policy of gradual Zionist colonization of the West Bank, which
aims to construct an extended Israeli territoriality in this area, represents
a subordination of this territory’s resources to primarily political (colonial)
ends. This bears a striking resemblance to the processes of the Judaization
of the newly established State of Israel, which started as early as 1948 and
have continued since then (Leshem 2016). According to Yosef Jabareen’s
comprehensive analysis (2015), it seems that Israel used a similar mecha-
nism of land acquisition and strategic architectural planning to accentuate
the Jewish presence in this land and to erase its Arab identity. This has
also resulted in limitation of the natural expansion of Palestinian urban-
ity in Israel’s mainland and reconfguration of the ethnic, economic, and
spatial dynamics of its territory. Since 1967, an analogous legal-territorial-
economic-military apparatus has been used in the West Bank to enable the
gradual eradication of indigenous Palestinian practices of dwelling, with the
aim of dissipating Palestinians’ “sense of place” (McKittrick 2011) as well
as—in a strictly political manner—the eventual appropriation of this terri-
tory and its incorporation within the Israeli state. This testifes to the colo-
nial, rather than occupational, Zionist presence in the region. Along these
political lines, the process of intensive development of industrial, residential,
and transport infrastructure tightly connects the West Bank with the Israeli
heartland, turning two territories with different political statuses into a sin-
gle organism. This coherence is, however, only apparent, as the system of
the Israeli-only bypass roads alienates Israeli settlers from the place in which
they dwell on an everyday basis, creating a somewhat prosthetic topography
which runs parallel to the original tissue of the region, now cut into isolated
and deteriorating enclaves. As Weizman states, such spatial organization
“entails re-visioning of existing cartographic techniques” and consists of a
certain multiplication of the territory for specifc political purposes (2002,
n.p.). In fact, it promotes slow urbicide, mobilizing different material-semi-
otic forces for the purpose of increasing territorial expansion and impairing
Palestinian self-governance mechanisms. The spatial manipulation of the
West Bank’s territoriality amounts to a “violent act of exclusion” (Elden

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2007; see also Connolly 1995; Jabareen 2015), which further contributes
to the emergence of discriminatory spatiality, perpetuating spatial injustice
(Soja 2010). The effciency of such a policy is enabled by complex, dynamic
entanglements of legal systems, ideologically shaped colonial objectives,
military rhetoric, a history of confict, and international politics, as much as
by the region’s topography and the specifc opportunities for land use that
it offers, as they have been assembled against the indigenous population.
In its urbicidal orientation, the policy of intense, cartographically pre-
meditated settlement in the West Bank, or the creation of competing geo-
graphical planes, mobilizes one form of urbanity (Israeli) against another
(Palestinian) and is deliberately aimed at the suppression, or physical
strangulation, of the latter. This clash is heavily asymmetrical, to the dis-
advantage of Palestinians, and fosters a policy that prioritizes the security
of Israeli citizens, premised on the growing insecurity of indigenous inhab-
itants. Additionally, as evidenced in the earlier analysis, infrastructural
developments also serve as an apparatus for spreading another form of
slow violence: producing environmental degradation that further threatens
Palestinians’ well-being and livelihoods, often forcing them to abandon tra-
ditional ways of life. This testifes to the exponential aspect of slow urbi-
cide, “operating as a major threat multiplier” (Nixon 2011, 3). Hence, the
Israeli expansionist project, advancing via its slow urbicidal tactics, targets
Palestinians directly (through the gradual strangulation, degeneration, and
eradication of their urban fabric) and indirectly (through the destruction of
factors that have typically co-shaped the existence of Palestinian communi-
ties, including the development of their urbanity and local agriculture-based
sources of income). The latter strategy, consisting partly in the mobiliza-
tion of agencies of the local landscape against its indigenous population,
steadily eliminates the typical ways of relational co-existence of land and
people, developed and cultivated across long periods of time. This amounts
to an intentional reversal of the ways in which societies use public space. As
Ariel Handel underlines, whereas human movement within space typically
resists the structured, rational control imposed by design and planning, in
the West Bank “the ruling power itself produces rhizomatic, changing, and
fuid space, while the users are the ones to struggle to reintroduce predict-
able features into their living space” (2009, 182), an attempt which is fre-
quently unsuccessful.
The quest for the right to shape urban life remains uneven, as the famil-
iar spaces of home and the immediate environment—so vital to the thriv-
ing of human communities—are turned into political agents inficting harm.
Thus, as a result of Israeli spatial developments in the West Bank, alongside
systematic expulsions and forced relocations, Palestinians who reside there
are doomed to what Nixon calls “a more radical form of displacement,”
which refers to the loss of land, resources, or places of belonging—a form of
uprooting which does not necessarily entail the physical transfer of people

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to a different location (2011, 19). This form of displacement is articulated

through the geographical/political/discursive reconfguration of the land-
scape and its stripping of those original characteristics that enabled habitual
forms of relational dwelling. It describes a situation in which the indigenous
population fnds itself under pressure from within, a result of materially
rich encounters with the harmful agencies of the immediate surroundings
weaponized by Israel in the colonial effort. Deracination of the Palestinians
in the West Bank is thus effectuated through a substitution of the vernacu-
lar landscape with an offcial politically informed and formalized setting
that “writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven
manner that is often pitilessly instrumental” (Nixon 2011, 17). The shifting
temporalities of urbicidal violence, therefore, operate as modalities through
which the gradual submission and eradication of Palestinian urban culture
in the West Bank is articulated and on which this discriminatory policy
heavily relies.

Case Study 2. Regularization in the Naqab/Negev Desert

In their struggle for consolidation of the Jewish presence in, and thus owner-
ship of, the Palestinian land, the Israeli authorities have invested in the asser-
tion of territoriality as a central objective of the spatial policy implemented
not only in the Occupied Territories but also within the political contours
of Israel proper. This project was launched as early as 1948 (or even ear-
lier, if less formal strategies are considered), and it aimed to methodically
design the spatial relations over which the state’s authority would subse-
quently spread. The construction of a nation-centered Israeli territoriality
has been premised on several spatial manipulations targeting indigenous21
forms of inhabitance; the objective—similarly to the case of the Occupied
Territories—was to dismantle the traditional practices of collective dwell-
ing and to gradually dissolve these communities’ internal bonds. This has
been achieved via the application of a complex assemblage of technologies,
including cartographical strategies of dividing the land, the implementation
of incentive programs dedicated to relocated communities, the reinterpreta-
tion and discriminatory application of legal regulations, the construction of
a discourse on the (il)legality of certain forms of using space, a premeditated
selective promotion of specifc hydro-social relations and agrarian projects,
and an increasing militarization of space. In this multifaceted context—co-
shaped by the dynamic enmeshment of natural features of the region and
semiotic structures affecting the dominant understandings of its landscape—
space was conceived as “a repertoire of points, lines, and areas that deline-
ated territory and exerted state interests with increasing scientifc authority”
(Krupar 2015, 92).
Several scholars emphasize that mapping technologies are in fact at
the roots of statehood.22 Thus maps—and the apparatuses involved in

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the process of their creation—must be seen as active agents, as they par-

ticipate in the procedures of constructing knowledge and sustaining power
(Crampton and Krygier 2006). Due to their agential capacities, maps—as
Sébastien Caquard and Claire Dormann note—have been “designed and
used for centuries for highly strategic purposes such as planning and execut-
ing war, locating valuable resources, collecting taxes, claiming territories,
and participating in the creation and recognition of nation-states” (2008,
51). Mastery of cartographical technologies (of surveying, measurement,
averaging, printing, distributing, interpreting, etc.) is essential for producing
specifc visualizations, understandings, and experiences of the space which
help to impose a concrete structure onto a given territory (Harley 2001;
Pickles 2004; Wood 2010). The work of such instruments, however, does
not consist in representing the territory, but actively contributes to its very
production. For these reasons, cartographic strategies tend to be employed
by state agents as meaningful tools (King 1996; Corner 2011; Pickles 2004;
Strandsbjerg 2008) for the purpose of the production of their territoriality.
As such, even though maps themselves do not provide particular spatial
constrains, they must be approached as operating within complex material-
semiotic contexts co-constituted by practices and ideas which defne the
conditions of possibility of both the cartographic tools and their products
(Branch 2017). As Jordan Branch explains, “[t]he defnition and operation-
alization of territory as spatial expanses separated by lines depends on the
ability to negotiate, measure, and draw those lines, on maps and on the
ground” (2017, 137). Certainly, the lines sketched on the maps (isomers,
isohyets, isohalines, isotherms, isobars, etc.) are less elusive than those
drawn on the ground. Their positioning results from practices of careful
monitoring and averaging, emerging as a combination of material facts on
the ground and of cultural categories or concepts used for making sense
of, and cartographically stabilizing, these dynamic materialities. Hence, the
fuency in operationalizing drawing practices contributes to the materializa-
tion, or consolidation, of certain predominant ways of thinking, such as, for
instance, that “the entire land surface of the globe should be divided among
exclusive state claims” (Branch 2017, 137), or that advantage should be
taken of every piece of arable land. Looking closely into the entanglement
of practices and ideas within the cartographical technologies, K. J. Holsti
exposes the fact that mapping enables certain forms of territoriality, which
are then constituted through various interactions between material artifacts,
meaningful ideas, and sociocultural practices (2004, 79). Mapping, there-
fore, is revealed as a powerful and consequential political tool, and—as
such—it should be approached as an instrument of possible intervention in
how people relate to, or make use of, the space (or land), or what forms of
spatiality they are able to construct. The situation of the Bedouin community
in the Naqab/Negev—unfolding in the shadow of the enduring Israeli-Arab
confict—provides an illuminating example of how cartographic strategies,

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as well as their profoundly material-semiotic effects, can be employed for

the purpose of an ethnicity-based urbicidal project.

Technologies of Drawing
The understanding and experience of territory depend upon a series of
boundary-drawing technologies which, as Frédéric Vandenberghe (2007)
observes, constitute an assemblage of material agents and human rela-
tions, illustrating how—in certain conditions—ideas materialize as power-
ful material forces. Fluent command of cartographical and meteorological
tools can enable the transformation of ideas into material realities. As
demonstrated by Weizman (2015), the ideology-driven materialization of
the aridity line in the Naqab/Negev had detrimental consequences for the
quality of life of the Bedouins who had inhabited this area for centuries.
According to meteorological defnitions, a desert starts at the threshold of
200 mm of annual rainfall. Different aridity indicators are used to identify
regions suffering from a defcit of water. The “defcit,” however, is under-
stood through an anthropocentric lens as a condition that severely limits the
possibilities of human use of the land for agriculture or livestock farming.
Such an approach considers these conditions, as well as the potentials they
create, from a Eurocentric perspective, ignoring other, less popular methods
of cultivating the land (e.g., the different practices of dry agriculture devel-
oped by people inhabiting arid areas). The aridity line—as well as its specifc
understandings and uses—emerges, as Weizman (2015, 8) acknowledges,
from a complex interplay of different factors. In a new materialist idiom, it
consists of the semiotic entanglement of meteorological data (which itself is
a result of specifc practices and technologies of monitoring, measurement,
and averaging of natural conditions in the area, as well as a material-semi-
otic effect of scientifc classifcatory endeavors), a human approach to the
land and how it can be exploited (agriculture and diverse farming machin-
eries used for it), and soil conditions and botanical characteristics (both
natural and those connected to intensive farming, synthetic agents, modif-
cation of the morphology/quality of the cultivated plants or seeds, etc.). In
addition, cartographical practice—the act of drawing the desert’s edge—is
itself a material-semiotic process, as well as a venture rich in material-semi-
otic consequences. The situation of the Naqab/Negev Bedouins is a striking
example of the kind of consequences such a form of geographical warfare
can potentially generate.
The term Bedouin (from Arabic bedû, or desert dwellers; desert was
referred to as Badiya)23 is used to describe several populations inhabiting
different locations in the Middle East and Africa. It alludes to the specifc
tribal structure of these communities and their nomadic-pastoral liveli-
hood practices. Since the twentieth century, the latter element has gradu-
ally been losing its signifcance in defning these populations, as they have

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increasingly been forced into permanent settlements and modern labor

markets (Razon 2017) driven by capitalist logic based on the principle
of property ownership (Brighenti 2010) rather than seasonal mobility.
The semi-nomadic and self-reliant character of the Bedouin communities
stands in contrast to the “modern” organization of socio-economic life
(Dinero 2010); thus, state authorities invest in eradicating such ways of
relating to the land, also through the premeditated employment of tactics
of slow urbicidal violence.
In 1946 the number of Naqab/Negev Bedouins was estimated at between
57,000 and 95,000 people (Muhsam 1966, 22; detailed registers are not
available). They currently comprise around 3.5% of the population of the
State of Israel. In the 1940s most of the Naqab/Negev Bedouins were located
in the western part of the country, where the land is more fertile, and led
a half-settled life, engaging in pastoralism and dry farming. Although after
the 1948 war most of the Bedouins left or were expelled from the territory
of the newly established state and took refuge in the West Bank, Gaza, or
North Sinai, a signifcant number concentrated in the Naqab/Negev Desert,
where they were placed by the state in an area corresponding to around
10% of this geographical region. In 1953, the number of Bedouins remain-
ing in the Naqab/Negev was estimated at approximately 11,000 people,
located to the east and the north of Beersheba where, until 1966, they were
subdued under Israeli military rule in a zone known by the name al-Siyāj
(Sayig, translated as “fence”)24 (Marx 1967, 12; Nasasra 2015; Law-Yone
2003; Lithwick 2003). The residents of the zone needed special permission
not only to move outside the restricted area but also to commute within it
(Meir 1998; Abu-Saad 2005). The site was located to the south of the geo-
graphical line defning the north boundary of the desert. The land of those
who fed or were forcibly relocated was confscated: as a result, during the
1950s, 90% of the desert and 50% of the enclosed area were appropri-
ated by the State of Israel (Falah 1989). Currently, the former inhabitants
of these lands are deemed as “illegal intruders” and are regularly harassed
by the state agencies when they mobilize to protect their remaining land
from further encroachment by the state (Marx and Meir 2005, 53; Rotem
2017), or when they opt for indigenous tradition-based practices of living.
The rights of those Bedouins who, after all the land south of Beersheba
was declared to be state land in 1950, remained in tenuous possession of
land have been systematically undermined by the state. Nevertheless, those
who still own land often try to accentuate their presence on it by regular,
albeit limited, cultivation or grazing in hope that this will protect them from
expropriation. In practice, many such attempts fail.
As Weizman notes, “the zone of dispossession in the Naqab/Negev is
coextensive with the meteorological defnition of the ‘desert’” (2017, 228). In
this context, the activity of the State of Israel in the Naqab/Negev should be
seen as a carefully calculated effort to make use of geographical instruments

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to implement a thought-out policy toward the land and the people inhabit-
ing it, or to advance the process of geographical and demographical “reg-
ularization” of space. The categorization of the land as desert (or “dead
land”) facilitated its appropriation by the state. In that sense, the drawing of
the desert’s edge (and the subsequent realization of the state-sponsored pro-
ject to “make the desert bloom,” so crucial to the Zionist ideology) was an
effect of the material-semiotic entanglement of geographical, cartographi-
cal, geological, botanical, demographical, agricultural, and military forms
of knowledge, as well as technological agents (e.g., aerial visualization,
measurements), all profoundly shaped by widespread colonial discourses.
This has been instrumentalized in the Zionist enterprise of the Jewish set-
tlement in Palestine, embracing the regularization of its space/spatiality as
well as its adaptation to the new economic, social, and cultural needs of the
settler population. The processes on the ground and in the air—along with
the natural characteristics of the monitored, measured, calculated, classifed,
and codifed geographical zone—have produced a new understanding of the
land in question and enabled the development and implementation of a pol-
icy that remains in line with the current objectives of the “ethnocratic state”
(Yiftachel 2006). The offcial rhetoric disseminated by the Israeli authorities
propels the discursive linking of the identity of the Jews to a certain terri-
tory, naturalizing the idea, as Emily McKee indicates, “that Jews’ security
rests on exclusive territorial control” (2016, 81), therefore the state must
invest in ensuring its territoriality is maintained using all possible means.
Preoccupied with the principle of Jewish ownership of the land, this policy
has targeted the Bedouin community of the Naqab/Negev with systematic
property destruction (including self-afficted but enforced demolitions25) and
forced urbanization, aimed at eradicating indigenous ways of inhabiting and
cultivating the desert, as well as challenging indigenous modes of dwelling,
maintenance of communities, and the intensive topological relations which
co-constitute them. Apart from investing in ethnicity-based efforts to change
the demographic profle of the population located in this extensive region
(the Naqab/Negev Desert constitutes over a half of Israel’s territory), this
policy endeavors to partly reconfgure the local landscape in terms of both
its human and its natural characteristics. This constitutes another facet of
the project to “regularize” the space, with the aim of better integrating it
within the prevailing Zionist—that is, nationalist and progressive—ideol-
ogy of Jewish “redemption” of the original land and the colonial/ethnicized
politics associated therewith. In what follows, I will briefy look at these two
aspects of the Israeli policy through the lens of slow urbicidal violence.

The Violence of Urbanization

The program of the “regularization” of space (Rotem 2017), delineating
how space can be used by different communities, started in the 1970s and

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was aimed at transferring the remaining Bedouin population to deliberately

designed townships. The idea behind this project was to take even more
extended control over the space of the Naqab/Negev by cleansing it of indig-
enous inhabitants and to further accentuate its formal belonging to the State
of Israel by constructing specifc, Jewishness-centered forms of territoriality
there. The broad program of evictions and resettlement was also designed—
at least formally—to serve as a means to integrate the Bedouin population
within the national market economy. In fact, however, it worked accord-
ing to the well-known logic, delineating that physical, active presence on a
particular piece of land may signal a right, or even a legal title (as is the case
in particular regulations of the 1858 Ottoman Land Law), to ownership of
this land. It must be noted that organized efforts at “managing” Bedouin
communities in the Middle East have a longer history. The authorities of
the British Mandate, and earlier those of the Ottoman Empire, had already
invested in reshaping the Bedouin lifestyle, attempting to force the com-
munity into at least partial sedentarization (Nasasra 2015). This policy was
typical of centralized governments around the world that were focused on
closer monitoring and the effcient collection of taxes within state territo-
ries (Ginat and Khazanow 1998; Ramos 1998). These efforts dramatically
intensifed in Palestine after 1948, when the Israeli authorities demanded
that each Bedouin must register with one of the identifed 19 tribes (whose
chiefs were offcially appointed by Israel, in many cases without taking into
consideration the actual distribution and relations of power within these
communities) (Marx 1967). This step was disrespectful toward traditional
ways of governing and subsequently contributed to the partial disorganiza-
tion of the internal life of the communities in question.
The intense program of urbanization launched in the late 1960s fur-
ther diminished the possibility of cultivating traditional ways of govern-
ing Bedouin communities and severely affected the customary modes of
relating to the land, both being understood as structuring dimensions of
the semi-nomadic communal life. Importantly, the project of urbanization
was premised on the careful cartographic documentation of the land (also
based on the aerial photography from the period of British rule in Palestine)
and implied the systematic zoning of the Naqab/Negev into residential,
agricultural, military, and public areas. The regularization of the region’s
geography, based on the study of the material conditions of the land and
their classifcation—or “classifxation,” as van der Tuin proposes (2015)—
according to well-established categories, has been used as a tool to declare
the uncultivated land as mawat26 (or “dead land”) and thus to consider it as
state land. This decision was based on a rather twisted interpretation of the
1858 Ottoman Land Law, while the identifcation of what counts as mawat
was enabled by a detailed geographical inspection of the region from the
air and from the ground, assisted by the agencies of visualization and meas-
urement technologies. Thus, contortions of Ottoman law were entangled

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with “the facts on the ground” or the natural conditions of the area. The
geographical categorization of the Naqab/Negev region as a desert author-
ized this strategy, allowing for classifcation of the whole area as too dry for
agrarian uses (even though the indigenous people had for decades engaged
in dry agriculture). Thus, as a result of the zoning of the land, since the
1970s the Bedouin settlements have been delegalized, left out of offcial
maps, and deemed, as Yiftachel observes, to increasing informality and tem-
porality (2006, 199), a status further aggravated by their very limited—if
any—access to even the most basic state services (such as electricity, waste
management, or health protection).
In 1965, the frst township intended for the Naqab/Negev Bedouins
was established next to Beersheba. Tel as-Sabi (Tel Sheva), however,
was designed as a conglomeration of buildings with two-room units
which were not suitable for the needs of the Bedouin community, which
is based upon extensive family relations. The conditions set by the local
authorities under which Bedouins could move to the new places were
equally discouraging, as the land on which the buildings were erected
was to remain the property of the state, while a system of 49-year leases
was to be implemented. Additionally, those who wanted to relocate to
Tel as-Sabi were asked to sign away all their property claims to land
that they had owned in the past. Even though they were lured with cer-
tain incentives (Dinero 2010; Yiftachel and Meir 1998), the Bedouins
were not willing to move to the newly established town, which remained
undeveloped and scarcely populated until 1980. A different approach
to planning was subsequently adopted to construct other townships in
the area, dedicated exclusively to the Naqab/Negev Bedouins. Rather
than offering the fnalized buildings, this time the authorities opted for
the provision of developed building plots, leaving the fnal design to the
Bedouins themselves (Marx and Meir 2005). Again, the title to construct
a house on the plot did not imply any right to own the land, so the offer
was only appealing to landless people. Rahat settlement was planned as
a collection of hamlets (33 in total) separated by stretches of wasteland
(or wadis), each theoretically dedicated to a different descent group. To
attract Bedouins, as Marx and Meir (2005, 49) underline, the state agreed
to allow a large tract of state land to revert to freehold for non-Jews,
which was unprecedented and testifed to a huge determination to force
the Naqab/Negev Bedouins into the towns.27 The layout and the loca-
tion of Rahat, however, did not contribute to consolidating the urban
community; nor did it encourage the emergence of urban spatiality. It
did not comply with the traditional practices of dwelling worked out for
decades by the Bedouin communities, and neither did the architecture of
the township attend to the needs of the extended Bedouin families. The
settlement remained quite undeveloped in these terms, serving mostly as
a huge dormitory for the population working in and around Beersheba.

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In 1980 other towns were set up, partly due to the pressure to relocate
the Israeli military bases from Sinai to the Naqab/Negev after the signing
of the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. This demanded further expropria-
tion of Bedouin land and property which, in the new political context, had
to be settled peacefully in order not to antagonize the Arab world. This
led to an agreement according to which the Bedouins had a right to com-
pensation for any lost land (at market value) and were not asked to sign
away any property claims. Even though initially designed as more compact,
the fve new towns—Ar’arat an-Naqab (Ar’ara BaNegev), Kuseife (Kseife),
Shaqib al-Salam (Segev Shalom), Hura, and Lakiya (Figure 3.2)—which
were established between 1980 and the mid-1990s eventually ended up
with a layout similar to that of Rahat (Marx and Meir 2005). This made
it harder for the inhabitants to create truly urban communities, especially
because the Bedouins themselves were excluded from planning and were
not even consulted over development decisions. As a result, the needs of
these communities for at least a partial continuation of their established
ways of dwelling were not attended to in the planning process. For instance,
in 2017 there was only one Bedouin employee out of a total of 13 offcials
(the remaining 12 all being Jewish) in the Authority for Development and
Settlement of the Bedouins in the Negev, a governmental body responsible
for the development of the Naqab/Negev Bedouin recognized settlements
(Rotem 2017, 24). Thus, even though formally urbanized, the townships
did not have any characteristics of urban space, at least as it is understood
as resulting from a collective effort of the community inhabiting it; nor did
they develop any specifc spirit typically associated with the conditions of
urbanity (as defned by Lefebvre 1968). The townships have never enjoyed
a fourishing growth. The realities of living in neighborhood of unrelated
lineages, untypical in Bedouin traditions, hampered any attempts at pro-
ducing a common and truly shared spatiality. In fact, as McKee (2016,
118) observes, the spatial distribution of Bedouin families, determined by
the architecture of the township, has led to a number of confrontations
between neighbors:

Residents trying to continue agropastoral taskscapes in the urban

township not designed for them displeased some neighbors with
the smell of their goats, or slaughtered animals in their courtyards
and let blood run into the streets. These residents were resisting the
pressures of de-cultural accommodation that push Bedouin Arabs
to relinquish cultural practices and conform to state demands that
they become urban, wage-earning subjects. But because many of the
planned township spaces did not meet residents’ expectations, they
“made do” in ways that contributed to the township’s disheveled
landscapes.
(2016, 118)

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Figure 3.2 Precipitation in the Naqab/Negev and location of the Bedouin townships
established by the Israeli government. Partly based on data made
available by the Israel Meteorological Service.

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Also, even though state agencies have been actively engaged in concentrat-
ing Bedouins in the towns, they have invested little in the development of
infrastructure and services available to these new urban communities, effec-
tively killing in advance the spirit of urbanity and thus indirectly denying the
inhabitants’ “right to the city.” Deprived of the shared history of collective
dwelling, the Bedouin inhabitants of the townships are unable to engage in
shared practices of creating a common space for which they can collectively
care.
While, since 1999, the State of Israel has offcially recognized 11 Bedouin
villages, the remaining 35 still await a governmental decision. Their inhab-
itants are considered a “diaspora” while the structures they erect in the
context of current regulations materialize as illegal, as a result of which they
suffer frequent demolition. Located mostly within the region formerly delin-
eated as Sayig, the villages are not marked on offcial Israeli maps, as the
authorities systematically deny their legitimacy, erasing them from the car-
tographical and demographical registers. This fact has far-reaching political
consequences, as without offcial addresses, people inhabiting these villages
are not allowed to vote in local elections and their councils remain unrecog-
nized; nor are they eligible for state-fnanced health services and other infra-
structural amenities. Delegalized and erased from offcial maps, the “illegal”
villages are further ignored when certain facilities (such as noisy electric-
ity grids or toxic industries28) are placed in their direct proximity, causing
damage to the livelihoods of the population and inficting physical harm
on the bodies of the inhabitants of these villages. This politically informed
practice—a classical example of slow violence—can generate atrocious but
delayed effects for the Bedouin communities in question.
The standard of living in Bedouin villages (both recognized and unrec-
ognized) is extremely poor: they lack any planning, construction permits
are not issued, there is no adequate infrastructure (including water supply,
electricity, sewage and garbage disposal, roads, health services, schooling,
and public transportation), and demolitions are carried out regularly by
governmental bodies. Israel undertakes demolitions of what are consid-
ered “illegal structures” through regular operations by several state-funded
units which document land use, open lawsuits, issue demolition orders, and
execute the bulldozing. These entities are the National Unit for Building
Inspection (established in 1988), the Unit for Enforcement in Open Spaces
(also known as the “Green Patrol,” established in 1976), the Israeli Land
Administration (established in 1960 and responsible for the management
of all lands in Israel: state lands, Development Authority lands, and Jewish
National Fund lands), and the Yoav Unit (a police unit that assists enforce-
ment bodies in locating and demolishing “undesired” Bedouin structures;
established in 2012 under the Prawer-Amidror Plan,29 it continues to oper-
ate despite having being temporarily suspended) (cf. Swirski and Hasson
2006). Demolitions are thus used as a tool of regularization or a form

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of “correction” of the “misused space.” The recent governmental plan

(2017-2021) tackling the Naqab/Negev Bedouin community resumes this
approach. While it envisions investment in the townships established by the
governments and some support for the recognized villages, it assumes that
enforcement authorities will pursue a coercive and punitive policy toward
the unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev. Such vindictive measures
affect the population of approximately 70,000 Bedouins who still inhabit
“illegal”—thus cartographically “invisibilized”—villages or other areas of
the region (while the total of the Naqab/Negev Bedouin populations is cur-
rently estimated at over 240,000 people) (Rotem 2017, 7).
Destroying one form of urban life by forcing another form of urban
organization, the policy dismantles the traditional ways of living in the
Naqab/Negev, producing (often by coercion) specifc spatial practices and
space uses, which are guided by ethnicity-based assumptions and generate
strikingly discriminatory practices. The (forced) urbanization, in fact mobi-
lized as an urbicidal enterprise, serves as a regular weapon against indig-
enous ways of dwelling grounded in a complex and dynamic entanglement
of humans and the land. It is strengthened by a scientifcally motivated car-
tographical project of mapping (and zoning) space, as well as the biased
application of legal regulations, contributing to the criminalization of the
Bedouin presence in the Naqab/Negev and framing the representatives of
this community—despite their status as Israeli citizens—as “illegal” or as
“trespassers” on their own land (Kedar 2001, 927). Based on discrimina-
tory principles and a deeply asymmetrical approach, the whole project of
forced urbanization has been used to uproot original practices of relating to
the land, to enhance control over the population, and also—eventually—to
substantially retard its traditional land-based development. In fact, forced
urbanization has served as a weapon in the process of the de-Arabization
of the Naqab/Negev through gradually eradicating the original forms of
urbanity developed and cultivated in the desert, and turning the inhabitants
into township dwellers incapable of reconstructing the traditional lifestyle
or forms of mobilization associated with it (including those aimed at coun-
tering the authority of a ruler). This violent policy of regularization has also
produced a whole range of spatial injustices, all a consequence of the eth-
nicity-based and territory-oriented politics of “making the desert bloom.”

Landscape Politics
In its endeavors to assert concrete forms of territoriality over the land, the
ethnocratic state designed a meticulous plan of how to make use of the
mawat. The “dead land” doctrine has thus been instrumentalized to legiti-
mize the extensive dispossessions but also, as Kedar et al. argue (2018), to
enable denial that dispossessions have in fact taken place. This is impor-
tant, given that the notion of indigenousness, and the aspirations of the

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Naqab/Negev Bedouins to be considered as an indigenous community, has

conficted with the Zionist idea of a modern nation-state. Both land and
its resources are the most important factors for indigenous people, as they
remain intricately entangled with their territories in the process of sustain-
ing their culture and specifc modes of dwelling. These resources, however,
are equally important for nation-states and their political (often violent)
involvement in the process of upholding their territoriality, understood as
a factual authority extending over a particular territory. Such deep attach-
ment to the land transpires in the Zionist construction of “Eretz Yisrael,”
which translates as “the Land of Israel”; even though the offcial name of
the political organism is the “State of Israel,” its location is in the particular
land. Given the fact that nations tend to be discursively represented as rooted
in concrete geographical areas, the policy of inventing these roots has been
put in place in order to consolidate the Jewish belonging in Palestine, as well
as to geographically defne the discourse on Jewish territorialism. One of the
strategies to accentuate the Jewishness of the Naqab/Negev was the policy
of assigning Hebrew biblical names to these places, linking the modern set-
tlement project to ancient Jewish genealogies (Masalha 2007). This task
was accomplished by the Committee for the Designation of Place-Names in
the Negev Region appointed for this purpose. This symbolic appropriation
of land—through (re)naming places on maps while simultaneously erasing
the original Arab designations from them—was an important dimension of
a far-reaching Israeli policy of colonizing the region, both symbolically and
factually.
The construction and sustenance of the Israeli nation-state required both
the cleansing of the land of the undesired semi-nomadic indigenous popula-
tion and the conquest of the desert. Such a framing has ftted well within the
Zionist narrative of “making the desert bloom,” an imaginary construction
nourished by archaeological evidence of the existence of fourishing ancient
cities in the Naqab/Negev. As McKee underlines, one of the central dis-
courses for Zionism was the rhetorical positioning of agriculture as redemp-
tion, “both of individual laborers and of neglected land” (2016, 30). Physical
labor has for long been conceived of as valuable for this process (Sternhell
1998; Zakim 2006). The “dead land” of the desert was, in such a context,
seen as a frontier for Jewish colonization—a conquest which was perceived
as a progressive march from dark backwardness to enlightened moderniza-
tion. Framed as a symbol of desolation and emptiness, the Naqab/Negev
was perceived as an enemy to be conquered (Zerubavel 2008). In practical
terms, given the ongoing process of constructing Israeli territoriality, the
realization of these goals called for the implementation of specifc ethnopoli-
tics constructing the indigenous Arab inhabitants of the region as primitive,
ineffcient, or even inexistent; in contrast, the Jewish settlers were depicted
as modern, knowledgeable, and progressive (cf. Dinero 2010). Such a plan
also required a denial of the fact that the land ideologically represented as

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empty and serene had in fact long been inhabited and cultivated by Bedouin
Arabs.
The conquest of the desert was not only perceived in terms of territorial
expansion; it also related to the need for substantial infrastructure building
and climate engineering, as has also been typical for other colonial enter-
prises.30 The Naqab/Negev region is not hospitable for settlers. It is host to
demanding topographical and hydrological conditions. It reaches altitudes
of 1,000 m above sea level in the southern highlands and falls below sea level
in the northern Arava Valley. Annual rainfall averages at 100-150 mm per
year in the arid north and 80-100 mm per year in the hyper-arid central and
southern parts. The natural vegetation is zonal, matching the precipitation
gradients and soil conditions (which include sand, dunes, loess, alluvium,
and limestone). As Petra Vaiglova et al. point out, in such an arid climate,
vegetation is primarily concentrated in the wadis during the wet season. The
wadis channel rainfall northwest toward the Mediterranean Sea or north-
east toward the Dead Sea. The total rainfall and runoff water amounts to
an average of 200-300 mm per year in the wadis, while the loess soil above
the dams preserves moisture during the dry season (2020, 2). The natural
conditions are therefore quite fragile and unsuitable for conventional agri-
cultural techniques. Hence, the Naqab/Negev has been considered a frontier
land since the very inception of the Israeli state, and a region where Jewish
settlement and development have been understood as crucial aspects of state
policy (Yiftachel 2006, 193) as much as a spiritual quest.
The Jewish ownership of these territories has been accentuated by the
politics of the “regularization” of the landscape. Consequently, Jewish pres-
ence on this land manifests, among other things, in intensive and extensive
plans of afforestation, artifcial irrigation, and technologically enhanced
agriculture. As Shaul Ephraim Cohen (1993) points out, “the politics of
planting” has typically been used in the Israeli-Arab confict as a tool to
display a physical presence in the contested territories and to accentuate the
belonging of this land to a specifc ethnic group. Such a strategy, as Cohen
notes (following Baruch Kimmerling [1977]), is compatible with the list of
elements mobilized “in the struggle to control territory: sovereignty, owner-
ship, and presence” (1993, 2). Thus, the process of constructing territorial-
ity—which in the case of Israel is often termed as the policy of “creating
facts”—engages the agencies of the area’s materialities: its natural atmos-
pheric conditions, specifc plant species, cultivation techniques, hydrologic
characteristics, and so on. Interestingly, the practice of planting prevents
“encroachment” or “land alienation” and can be used for boundary building
(Cohen 1993, 3). Tree planting has for long been symbolically weighty for
Judaism and was further equipped with major signifcance in the aftermath
of the Holocaust, standing for the revival of the Jewish nation (Zerubavel
1996). Additionally, it also plays a role, as Pappé (2006) suggests, in hiding
the remnants of former Arab villages “cleansed” since 1948, as the process

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of building the homeland for a nation requires a thorough reconfguration

of the history of both the region and the nation(s) in question. Such projects
are therefore multidimensional, assembling the complex agencies of non-
human actors (plants, land, climate, air) with religious, historical, social,
economic, and political phenomena. Thus, in the context of ethnocentric
politics, the belief that desertifcation can be prevented by imposing limita-
tions on grazing (traditionally practiced by indigenous populations), along
with a policy of extensive afforestation, has been mobilized against the
Naqab/Negev Bedouin community. As a result, their lands have been confs-
cated and forests planted on their former settlements, and their traditional
reliance on livestock has been severely limited by legal regulations.
In the highly ideological process of colonizing the threshold of the desert,
and of marking the Jewish presence on the territory, the Jewish National
Fund has for decades carried out a rigorous program of planting.31 This
was accompanied with the strategy of disseminating an environment-sen-
sitive discourse on the need to restore overused and devastated land, while
rhetorically subscribing—in a rather manipulative manner—to global cam-
paigns for the need to “green” the land and counter the negative effects
of climate change.32 The biggest afforestation project in the Naqab/Negev
is Yatir Forest,33 which consists of over 4 million trees; smaller projects
include Lahav and Beeri forests. Currently, there are two different affor-
estation programs in Israel, extending over signifcant areas of the Naqab/
Negev: one is a dense planting of Aleppo pine (these kinds of forest also
serve as living memorials to the victims of the Holocaust) and the other is a
low-density planting of exotic drought-tolerant deciduous species (a strat-
egy known as “savannization”). While the former requires generous irriga-
tion (which causes salinization of soil and—paradoxically—so-called heat
island effects as darker areas absorb more solar radiation), the latter is con-
sidered to exacerbate the degradation of natural conditions in the region.
It involves the removal of endemic vegetation, as well as landscaping to
create terraces to capture surface runoff which, as a result, does not end up
in the wadis, the main areas for Bedouin agricultural cultivation. Moreover,
the survival of the forest depends on irrigation infrastructure. New saplings
do not grow without irrigation, while dry years produce massive losses of
mature trees. The forests do not renew in the natural cycle and require con-
stant human intervention. Ironically, the state-sponsored program designed
to battle desertifcation ended up producing greater water shortages; the
negative consequences of this are experienced most severely by the most
fragile Palestinian-Arab communities.
The process of pushing the aridity line southward was accompanied
by a strategy of Judaization of the territory, manifesting in the creation of
new settlements built on state land and accessible only to Jews. As early as
the 1950s and 1960s, seven development towns were established (Arad,
Dimona, Mitzpe-Ramon, Netivot, Ofaqim, Sderot, and Yeroham), while the

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existing towns of Beersheba and Eilat grew substantially (Portnov and Erell
1998). Other settlement projects quickly followed. The policy of encourag-
ing the Jewish citizens of Israel to move to urban sites established in the
desert intensifed in 1970 with incentives such as government loans, provi-
sion of public housing, and tax exemptions. Due to extensive agricultural
use of virtually all land located in the north and northwest of the Naqab/
Negev region—enabled by artifcial irrigation from wetter regions (mostly
Jordanian Valley), mechanized cultivation, extensive use of new seed types,
synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides—those practicing traditional and more
sustainable forms of land use were pushed to drier areas, which are typically
more susceptible to degradation. Thus, the vast program of rehabilitating
the desert lands, or “regularization” of the naturally dry landscape, remains
at the expense of degradation elsewhere, mostly in neighboring areas from
which water has been systematically diverted. The effects of these envi-
ronmental transformations—induced by the entanglements of human and
nonhuman agents and forces—are most severely experienced by the most
vulnerable sections of Israeli society.
Intensive afforestation, agrarization, urbanization, industrialization,
and militarization—all employed in the service of the “regularization” of
the Naqab/Negev space, and all preceded by a carefully undertaken poli-
tics of cartographical planning—have generated several spatial problems.
The Naqab/Negev Bedouin communities, since being made more exposed
through relocation and space management, continue to be substantially
unprivileged in comparison with other (Jewish) inhabitants of the region.
The politics of the distribution of space rests on ethnicity-based principles,
according to which the representatives of the dominant group (that is, the
Jews) are placed above the minoritarian communities in the socio-political
hierarchy. This affects both the quantity and the quality of space placed
at the disposal of different ethnic groups. The policy is openly discrimina-
tory—while the lands of the Bedouins are systematically confscated, within
the project “Loner Farms” (havot bodedim) the state opens programs
granting several Jewish families land in the Naqab/Negev for intensive cul-
tivation. As a result of such state interventions, spatial injustices emerge.
Whereas Bedouins currently comprise more than a third of the population
of the Naqab/Negev, only 12.5% of the offcially recognized settlements are
designated for this community (see Rotem 2017); out of 136 settlements
in the region, only around 15% are recognized Bedouin communities.
Similar disproportions apply to the patterns of land administration in the
Naqab/Negev. For instance, while the populations of townships designed
for Bedouins constitute around 16% of the people inhabiting the whole
Beersheba subdistrict, their jurisdiction covers only 0.5% of this area (Abu-
Saad and Creamer 2012, 36). Additionally, the traditional Bedouin tech-
niques of low-intensity cultivation and grazing have been severely limited,
signifcantly affecting indigenous lifestyles, which typically rely on situated

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forms of human-land relationality. The Bedouin communities are now

squeezed between the northern desert edge (spotted with Jewish-only settle-
ments and covered with vast green areas) and the hyper-arid terrains in the
south (which the processes of desertifcation systematically push northward)
(Figure 3.2).
The indigenous communities are presented with the diffcult choice
of either moving to the low-quality, impoverished townships or remain-
ing invisible in the delegalized villages erased from the offcial maps and
defcient in even the most basic infrastructure. Neither of these alternatives
is attractive; both have been systematically used to dismantle the Bedouin
community or to forcibly “modernize” it. While the illegal villages offer dis-
astrous living conditions, permanent insecurity, systematic harassment by
state-sponsored demolitions, extremely poor infrastructure, insuffcient ser-
vices, limited possibilities for land cultivation or grazing, and exclusion from
offcial registers and cartographies, the unfriendly structure of the townships
conficts with and disrupts Bedouins’ traditional organization of sociality,
culture, and economy. The budgets of these urban zones are the lowest in
the entire country (Swirski and Hasson 2006, 51), while overall infrastruc-
tural conditions remain miserable. The inhabitants of these areas are to a
large extent economically dependent on the state, while traditional tribal
Bedouin governance structures have been discontinued, partly because it has
been popular to claim that the Bedouins are incapable of governing them-
selves (Swirski and Hasson 2006; Yiftachel 2006). The townships do not
resemble well-functioning urban centers and do not offer a space for culti-
vating the spirit of urbanity. As such, they limit the possibilities for effective
self-organization, as well as for demonstrating the community’s resistance
toward offcial state policies. In the Israeli “ethnocracy” (Yiftachel 2006),
in which ethnicity is the primary criterion for the distribution of rights,
citizen status is not premised on nondiscriminatory values, relying instead
on a differential model (Ben-Porat and Turner 2011; Rabinowitz and Abu
Baker 2005). It therefore seems that the process of reorganizing, or “regu-
larizing,” the space along the lines of the state’s aspirations has intentionally
produced a situation in which the Bedouins’ citizenship rights, as much as
their “right to the city”—typically associated with the right to counter state
policies and to construct urban sociality according to the inhabitants wishes
and needs—have been rendered completely meaningless. Both human and
nonhuman agencies and forces have been mobilized in the state’s efforts to
mark its presence and construct ethno-territorial authority over the vast
space of the Naqab/Negev desert.

Notes
1 The title translates into English as “The Purpose of Geography is Primarily to
Make War.” The book was originally published in 1976; for the purpose of the

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present study I engaged with its 2016 edition, supplemented with an extended
commentary by the author.
2 Yves Lacoste was, in the 1970s, a member of the stimulating intellectual commu-
nity of Université de Vincennes in Paris, where such prominent poststructuralists
as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze worked at that time. This should explain,
at least partly, the infusion of Lacoste’s ideas with the ways of thinking typical
for this infuential and internally diverse philosophical school.
3 The material the book contains was originally prepared for an exhibition dur-
ing the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin. Commissioned by the Israel
Association of United Architects, the book—meant to serve as a catalog for the
exhibition—was eventually banned by the same organization, as it was seen as
too explicit (and perhaps also mendacious) with regard to the oppressive poli-
tics of planning within the West Bank. The project was later published via a
cooperation between Babel (a Tel Aviv-based publisher) and Verso. The context
that surrounded the (non)publication of the book, however, clearly revealed the
politics behind the state-encouraged Israeli policies of architecture and planning,
illustratively discussed by Segal and Weizman.
4 A detailed account of Israeli-Palestinian relations is beyond the scope of this
book. It is, however, necessary to situate my analysis in the context of certain
important geopolitical processes which made possible the cartographic develop-
ments discussed in this chapter.
5 This formulation is attributed to one of the early Zionist settlers, Israel Zangwill,
who used this expression for the purpose of delineating the political objectives of
the Eastern European Zionist movement.
6 Transjordania, at that time.
7 The atrocities accompanying the process of establishing the Israeli state at the
turn of 1948 have been investigated by Pappé (2006).
8 Even though they were de facto annexed, the territories of East Jerusalem and
its suburbs should still be considered occupied in light of international regula-
tions. As Ben-Naftali et al. explain, the illegality of this act “was affrmed by
both [the] Security Council and the General Assembly, with the consequence
that under international law, the area is still considered occupied” (2009, 40).
As the same authors explain, even if the occupation of a territory is occasioned
by a legal use of force (e.g., war in self-defense, a narrative offcially assumed
by the Israeli state in reference to the 1967 war), it cannot confer legal title
(2009, 40).
9 For a comprehensive discussion of the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West
Bank, see Zertal and Eldar (2007).
10 Sharon’s Plan was not offcially adopted by the government, but it offered prin-
ciples for the operation of the Ministry of Agriculture, which was in charge of
managing the land.
11 The offcial explanation provided by Gush Emunim was that their settlements
in the West Bank were meant to be permanent establishments, which seriously
undermined the offcial argument that the land had been intended to temporarily
serve military purposes. In consequence, the strategy of military requisition of
land ended, even though the appropriated land has never been returned to the
original owners. Israel returned to this policy in 1994, after signing the Oslo I
Accord. This time, the confscated land was used to build a network of Israeli
bypass roads in the West Bank.
12 For a discussion of strategies of land seizure in the West Bank, see Chapter 3
of Lein and Weizman (2002). Other sources tackling this issue include Shehade
(1993, 1997), Matar (1997), Hareuveni (2010), Shalev (2012), and Hareuveni
and Etkes (2021).

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13 As Handel (2009) explains, in 1968, Israel froze the process of land registration
in the West Bank, justifying this decision by the need to avoid causing harm to
those who left the area during war, as they would not have been able to prevent
their land being registered in someone else’s name. Also, due to the wish “to
avoid tax payments and the existence of traditional communal agricultural prac-
tices, more than 70% of West Bank lands were not registered in any way before
the order was given” (Handel 2009, 197), which facilitated the process of land
confscation in the region.
14 PeaceNow gathers detailed data on infrastructural developments in the West
Bank. Up-to-date information can be accessed at the organization’s offcial web-
site: https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-data/population.
15 In 2008, there were 12 “special security areas” established around Jewish set-
tlements in the West Bank and there were plans to expand this policy. Even
though the lands that were turned into security zones were formally owned by
Palestinians, their access to them is seriously limited by physical barriers (fences)
as well as the military orders. The owners need to prove their property rights
and pressure the administration to set a schedule according to which they can
access their property (for purposes of cultivation, for instance). The settlers also
use “piratical closing of land” without governmental authorization, practically
cutting off the Palestinian owners from their property and using violence to keep
them away. In most of the cases, such illegal actions meet with no reaction from
the occupying authorities (B’Tselem 2004; Feuerstein 2008).
16 Even though international law does not allow for land seizure in occupied areas,
it nevertheless makes exceptions in cases where the land is temporarily confscated
for military reasons, or if it remains in accordance with the local law and is meant
to serve the needs, or improve the living conditions, of the local population.
17 Interestingly, according to the legal regulations currently in place in the State of
Israel, the holders of Israeli passports are not allowed to enter Area A territories,
thus they have no opportunity to directly interact with Palestinian urban com-
munities.
18 For discussion of the impact of climate change in the Occupied Territories, see
Messerschmid (2012), Mason et al. (2011), and Mason et al. (2012).
19 For a detailed exploration of water politics in Israel/Palestine, see Alatout (2008)
and Zeitoun (2008).
20 Detailed information about such zones has not been made available to the public
by the Israeli government (Aloni 2017, 5).
21 The issue of “indigeneity,” or of what kind of communities should be defned
as indigenous, is complicated. The idea of indigenous rights refers, by defni-
tion, to the rights of a community (rather than individual rights of its members).
International law does not mention such rights, as it remains conservative in its
understanding of a state’s integrity; it also refers to a state as a social contract
between the citizens and the sovereign. However, due to a surge in claims for
the recognition of indigenous rights raised by many groups around the world, in
2007, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was approved by the
UN General Assembly with the support of more than 140 nations. Four nations
voted against it (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) but
eventually withdrew their opposition. Israel did not participate in the voting.
The declaration, however, did not include any precise defnition of indigenous
people, as it was not possible to agree on that matter; the category remains fuid
and to a great extent relies on context-bound operationalizations. In the case
of Israel and the claims to indigenousness raised by Palestinian-Arabs (includ-
ing the Naqab/Negev Bedouin community), there is a dispute over who counts
as “more indigenous” in the context of the long and convoluted history of the

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region, marked by multidirectional migrations and shifts in power among differ-

ent ethnic communities. Obviously, the issue is highly politicized and it is often
a matter of political choice to use the term “indigenous” in reference to specifc
groups (of Jewish or of Arab origin). However, since I perceive the twentieth-
and twenty-frst-century expansion of Jewish presence in Palestine in terms of
a colonial project (in line with the claims of Oren Yiftachel [2012]), both in
relation to the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories and to those of Israel’s
heartland, I use the term “indigenous” in reference to the various Palestinian-
Arab populations inhabiting both the territories that have remained, since 1967,
under the Israeli occupation and those of Israel proper. For a detailed discussion
of the problem of indigenousness in international law, see Lerner (2003), Anaya
(2004), Thornberry (1991), Wiessner (1999), Abu-Saad and Champagne (2006),
and Champagne and Abu-Saad (2003). For a discussion of the Naqab/Negev
Bedouins’ indigenousness, see Stavenhagen and Amara (2012), Martinez-Cobo
(1986), and Amara et al. (2012).
22 See Briggs (1999), Branch (2014, 2017), Neocleous (2003), Steinberg (2005),
Strandsbjerg (2008), Krupar (2015), and Caquard and Dormann (2008). For
counter-mapping, see Peluso (1995), Perkins (2004), Firth (204), Johnson et al.
(2006), Pinder (2007), and Wood (2006).
23 Before 1948, the Naqab/Negev Bedouin population was better known as the Arabs
of Beersheba (arab as-saba). The members of this group preferred the term arab
rather than bedû, while the term fellahîn was used by them to denote the group of
Arab farmers. The term bedû, on the other hand, was popular among farmers to
refer to the nomadic inhabitants of the desert. For details, see Parizot (2001).
24 This happened despite the fact that most of the Naqab/Negev Bedouins obtained
Israeli citizenship in 1954, formally becoming a part of the Muslim Arab group
in Israel.
25 Many people decide to demolish their properties or structures after the relevant
order is issued by the Israel Land Authority, as they want to avoid the trauma
of the unexpected demolitions inficted on them by others (that is, the offcials
accompanied by the police and bulldozers), or because they want to save their
belongings or construction materials, which would inevitably be lost if the troops
in charge of the demolition arrived unexpectedly.
26 Crucial to understanding any move to declare a particular land as mawat is the
difference between the mawat and miri land, as articulated in the 1858 Ottoman
Land Code (articles 78 and 105). Mawat is a land inappropriate for cultivation,
or a “dead land,” uninhabited and not possessed by any individual. As Amara
and Miller explain, “[l]and was determined as mawat based on three possible
measurements: (1) the point at which a loud voice from the nearest village, town,
or inhabited place could no longer be heard; (2) half an hour’s walk from the
nearest inhabited place; or (3) 1.5 miles away from the inhabited place” (2012,
82). However, the same regulations state that if anyone revived mawat and cul-
tivated it for ten years without dispute, that person would acquire a titled deed
to the land, even though it was still formally owned by the state. Such land was
than categorized as miri. The fact that—for fear of taxation on the one hand,
and because their ownership rights were not threatened by the ruler on the other
(Kedar 2001; Swirski 2008)—the Naqab/Negev Bedouins did not register the
land they used with the authorities in 1921 (under the ordinance that everyone
wishing to cultivate mawat had to obtain state permission and thus register with
the state) worked to their disadvantage under Israeli rule. The state authorities
refused to consider their land as miri or as inhabited, as they had an interest in
declaring as much land as possible as mawat, so that it could—by defnition—be
categorized as state land.

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27 For elaboration of this issue in the context of operation of the Jewish National
Fund (JNF, or the Keren Keyemet L’Yisrael), see also Lehn and Davis (1988) or
Katz (2016). The JNF was established in 1901 to acquire land in Palestine for
Jewish settlement. Under David Ben-Gurion’s government, JNF was turned into
a semigovernmental organization to which over a million dunams of land was
transferred. This process was legalized retroactively when appropriate laws had
been passed (Forman and Kedar 2004). JNF is the largest agricultural landowner
in Israel and acts to the beneft of the Jewish population.
28 For a more comprehensive discussion of toxicity in the Naqab/Negev, consult
Almi (2003) and Tal (2002).
29 The fve-year Prawer-Amidror Plan was approved in 2011 and, in its declared
attempt to increase the economic development of the Naqab/Negev Bedouin
community, it assumed a relocation of the populations living in unrecognized
settlements to the recognized townships. The plan was protested against and
eventually halted in 2013. Unoffcial implementation of its objectives—in the
form of enforced demolitions—has continued.
30 For the analysis of colonial policies of building infrastructure and landscape
engineering, see, for instance, Lines (1991) and Scott (1998).
31 It is estimated that the JNF has, to date, planted over 250 million trees in Israel
(Pearce 2019).
32 Similar strategies have been used in other colonial contexts, framed as a policy of
“green imperialism” (Grove 1995). For analysis of Middle East region from this
perspective, see Davis and Burke (2011).
33 The Yatir Forest spreads along the border between the West Bank and the Israeli
mainland.

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 CONCLUSIONS

In contrast to the spectacular, attention-drawing occurrences of political

violence, which yield massive destruction and enormous losses in an instant,
slow urbicide tends to remain tacit and hidden, operating discreetly in the
background and accumulating its atrocious effects over extended periods of
time. Although produced at a slower pace, the consequences of such a form
of violence are, nevertheless, equally vehement, resulting in radical forms of
displacement, unrecoverable damage, and enduring trauma. New material-
ist analysis, focusing on the dynamic entanglements of material phenomena
and socio-political forces, enables a more insightful examination of these
less discernible vicious mechanisms, revealing the shifting temporalities
of political violence as well as its pernicious long-term effects. The slow-
ness of urbicidal tactics—and their reliance on carefully identifed material
processes, such as the reconfguration and modernization of infrastructure,
environmental transformations, the development of new forms of urbanity,
and new techniques of land use—can potentially advance very dangerous
ways of thinking, postulating the “objectifcation” of these processes (as,
for instance, “natural” or “inevitable”), and thus isolating them from the
socio-political contexts from which they emerge. Such a strategy may effec-
tively obscure the violent dimension of certain political decisions and obfus-
cate the implication of state in them; it can also contribute to denying their
methodical nature, ignoring their detrimental effects and disregarding any
claims for social justice formulated by the affected communities.
On the one hand, the common strategy employed by Israel for the pur-
pose of discursively framing its settlement project in Palestine in specifc
ways has relied on the rhetoric of modernization and development (both
constructed as entirely positive phenomena). On the other hand, it has
underlined the need to effectively counter the effects of climate change
(ironically so, given that many of the state’s interventions, such as “green-
ing the desert,” have in fact led to increased environmental degradation
and depletion of water resources in other parts of the country). A detailed

136 DOI: 10.4324/9781003157687-5

 CONCLUSIONS

examination of the more-than-human dimension of political developments,

or how the political tends to rely on the premeditated recruitment of mate-
rial agencies and forces, contributes to creating a more complete picture,
and a more nuanced understanding, of contemporary acts of political vio-
lence, exposing their intricate material-semiotic character and highlighting
their deliberately induced consequences. It also demonstrates how these
destructive assemblages operate within the broader ideological, colonial,
symbolic, fnancial, and material global circuits and how they are mobilized
for the advancement of specifc political agendas. New materialist ways of
thinking thus expose how what is understood as the political embraces a
number of forces and phenomena, both natural and cultural, virtual and
actual, material and semiotic, and so on, exposing the increasing politiciza-
tion of everyday practices, natural agencies, and human-induced processes,
and their mobilization for the accomplishment of the goals laid down by the
state. Such semiotic technologies substantially help in justifying the policy of
undertaking specifc infrastructural developments on the territory controlled
by Israel, effectively limiting the possibilities of open contestation of—and
organized resistance toward—state-imposed policies. By means of objectify-
ing certain (even though partly human-induced) processes as “natural,” the
state gives itself the right to intervene, including in violent ways, with an aim
of ensuring its broadly defned security and survival.
The new materialist approach can assist us in the process of unmasking
these complex entanglements and manipulative instrumentalizations, while
paying careful attention to the dispersed agential materialities assembled
with sophisticated semiotic technologies for the purpose of the Israeli pro-
ject of colonial expansion. It also exposes how an assault on the landscape,
or reconfguration of the land’s characteristics, simultaneously constitutes
an assault on human communities (cf. McKittrick 2011), whose lives are
always already co-determined by these more-than-human factors and cir-
cumstances. In the conditions of occupation or ethnocratic discriminatory
politics, adaptation to the environmental changes poses an important chal-
lenge for the affected populations, which is a question still poorly explored
in the extant scholarship. So, while scholars have demonstrated increasing
interest in climate transformations as possible causes of confict across the
world in general and in the Middle East in particular (Barnett and Adger
2007; Weizman 2015, 2017), research on how people living in conditions of
protracted confict, or under occupation, frame these conficts as they simul-
taneously struggle to adapt to the effects of climate change remains undevel-
oped (Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2018). Analyses drawing solely on concepts
of “verticality” (Weizman 2002, 2007; Graham 2004a, 2004b, 2010, 2016;
Graham and Hewitt 2013) or “volume” (Crampton 2010; Elden 2009,
2010, 2013, 2017, 2021; Billé 2018, 2019, 2020; Hawkins 2019) are not
fully capable of acknowledging the shifting dynamics of the voluminous
space, often leaving its complex more-than-human agencies unaccounted

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 CONCLUSIONS

for. As Bruce Braun underlines, critical efforts must be undertaken if we

want to be able to “continually distinguish between nature’s innovative
force and the mechanisms that seek to capture this force in the service of
capital and state” (2015, 1). New materialism may provide us with concep-
tual tools to approach these compound material-semiotic phenomena and
to expose the mechanisms which are used to politicize new agents (such as
waste, topography, or water resources) for the purpose of slow warfare.
While this kind of philosophically informed approach calls for a nuanced
and multiscale analysis, such explorations must always remain situated in
particular cultural and geopolitical circumstances. Relating to the issues dis-
cussed in this book—that is, the intentional destruction of the built envi-
ronment and its surroundings—this perspective clearly indicates that when
landscape/cityscape is destroyed, so is the community which dwells in it,
and the thus produced damage is diffcult—if indeed possible—to repair.
As discussed in this book, the Israeli enterprise of accentuating the Jewish
presence in “the promised land” recruits several material-semiotic technolo-
gies adjusted to the current needs of the ongoing colonial project. It is worth
noting—following Shaul Ephraim Cohen—that the policy of establishing
the state’s presence in Palestine, which manifests in the construction of
Jewish settlements both in the West Bank and within the Israeli mainland,
as well as eradication of their indigenous counterparts, would not serve as
a successful method of colonization without all the accompanying strategies
of asserting territoriality. Settlements occupy a relatively small amount of
land and require both investment and continuous occupation (Cohen 1993,
2). Therefore, to truly display ownership of the contested land, other, less
obvious, technologies—such as the politics of planting, climate engineer-
ing, and infrastructural development—must be employed for the purpose of
implementing this meticulously engineered colonial project. The “slowness”
of such enterprises may be misleading, removing them from the immediate
scope of interests of the broader public while obscuring their premeditated
character. Hence, the elucidation of the complex unfolding of state-inficted
atrocities aspires to reveal and counter the strategy of invisibilizing violence,
thus partially undermining the manipulative policies of denial or negation.
This seems to be a necessary step on the way to consolidating organized
resistance, as well as doing justice to the diffcult situation of those who
are continually discriminated against or ignored in the process, and whose
familiar surroundings are turned into politicized agents inficting harm.
Such a perspective sheds light on how the singular lives—co-constituted by
the landscapes in which people dwell and the “taskscapes” (Ingold 2000)
in which they engage on an everyday basis—matter politically and must be
accounted for in broader analyses of what is considered the political.
Slow urbicide may operate in the background of Israeli-Palestinian con-
fictual relations, but its after-effects continue to substantially structure
the daily lives of the affected communities. As already alluded to in the

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 CONCLUSIONS

introduction to this book, Thom Davies (2019), employing Rob Nixon’s

concept (2009, 2011) in his investigations, critically refects on the general
invisibility of slow violence, drawing attention to the fact that those who
are targeted with such violence are very well aware of its implicit, silent
processes and experience them bodily on a daily basis. This is also true for
indigenous Palestinian-Arabs—those inhabiting the Occupied Territories
and those located on the Israeli mainland. Exposed to the chronic oper-
ations of slow urbicide, they clearly see and feel their material and psy-
chological effects, a result of the constant condition of being under siege
(Smith 2011). Added to these must be the traumatizing consequences of
dispossession, degeneration of the urban tissue, state-inficted demolition,
gradual impoverishment and de-development, and lack of access to basic
resources and services, as well as the effects of the constant invigilation by
an ideologically-materially formed surveillance apparatus which intervenes
aggressively in the everyday functioning of indigenous Palestinian commu-
nities. These circumstances increase the conditions of fragility, fueling fur-
ther precaritization of particular groups of people (cf. Butler 2006, 2010;
Harker 2012; Harris and Nowicki 2018; Joronen and Griffths 2019; Lewis
et al. 2015; Joronen and Rose 2020), creating socio-political landscapes in
which vulnerability is not distributed evenly among the people inhabiting
the same area or territory.
Given the systemic nature of the political violence targeting the Palestinian-
Arabs and their land, it seems necessary—following Henrik Vigh’s point of
view (2006, 2008)—to turn to consider crisis as context of living of many
indigenous populations in Palestine rather than solely approaching individ-
ual crises in the context. As Vigh explains,

Crisis is normally conceived of as an isolated period of time in

which our lives are shattered. It defnes the loss of balance and the
inability to control the exterior forces infuencing our possibilities
and choices. The phenomenon is seen as a temporary disorder, a
momentary malformation in the fow of things. Yet, for a great
many people around the world crisis is endemic rather than epi-
sodic and cannot be delineated as an aberrant moment of chaos or
a period of decisive change. For the structurally violated, socially
marginalised and poor, the world is not characterised by balance,
peace or prosperity but by the ever-present possibility of confict,
poverty and disorder.
(2008, 5)

The continuous and chronic nature of the asymmetrical war in Palestine has
not yet been adequately covered in the literature within the academic felds
of international relations theory and political science, with authors tending
to treat the situation more in terms of an (international) crisis, positioned

139
 CONCLUSIONS

as a sudden rupture of social routines and habits, rather than a permanent

condition. In such a context, my analysis constitutes an attempt at partly
reorienting these ways of thinking by looking at the deliberately induced
environmental problems and spatial manipulations in the region—all of
them leading to a serious reconfguration of usual intensive and extensive
“ordinary topologies” (Harker 2011)—as an important context shaping the
living conditions of the Palestinian-Arabs in the West Bank and the Bedouin
communities in the Naqab/Negev.
Urbicidal violence, to use Emma Laurie and Ian Shaw’s expression
offered in a different context, “burns in the background of daily life … it
is an existential climate by which localized subjects and worlds condense
into being” (2018, 10). Such conditions might possibly lead to the devel-
opment of a “chronic” (Pain 2019) form of “collective spatial trauma”
(Pain 2019, 2020)—a psychological effect of enduring violence against
spatiality, which gradually reconfgures traditional life routines and prac-
tices of dwelling. Working in silence and across a long period of time,
such violence is, as Rachel Pain notes, “characterised by the appearance of
normality” (2019, 388), a part of the daily struggle for the reconstruction
of predictable spatiality. As Veena Das underlines, in such circumstances
confict and violence can become so embedded in the fabric of social life
that they gradually become indistinguishable from it (2006, 80), which
forces people to construct their everyday practices in the unfriendly, frag-
mented worlds with little opportunities for their productive reconfgura-
tion. Slowly, violence descents into the ordinary (Das 2006), structuring
the lives of those inhibiting the crisis and forcing its gradual routinization.
As Pain elaborates, “With chronic trauma, we are never post-violence, but
both violence and trauma wind on as material, embedded, everyday reali-
ties” (2019, 390). Instead of moving though a critical situation, people
fnd themselves caught in a prolonged condition of crisis. The persistency
of a traumatizing environment corresponds to violence’s slow operations
spread over a long period of time. Importantly, with no closure of violence,
there is no opportunity for healing and repair. In the context of the uncon-
ventional urbicidal policies employed both in the West Bank and in Israel
proper, it is thus reasonable to suggest—following the conceptual devel-
opments offered by Karen Till (2012), Rob Shields (2012), and Rachel
Pain (2019)—that the after-effects of chronic trauma could manifest at
the urban or community scale, producing a traumatized and vulnerable
spatiality mobilized to gradually work against the indigenous population.
This form of violence can thus be characterized by its peculiar “latency,” a
notion that refers to its shifting temporalities, “involving periods of appar-
ent dormancy punctuated with times of more visible violence” (Cahill and
Pain 2019). Such a conceptual elaboration enables an approach to urbi-
cidal policy as a constant, ever-present process, which creates conditions
of chronic exposure to both violence and to its pernicious after-effects.

140
 CONCLUSIONS

This triggers the emergence of what Shields calls “communities in shock”

(2012, 15), struggling—often unsuccessfully—to counter the politics of
spatial oppression methodically inficted upon them by the “ethnocratic”
(Yiftachel 2006) state.
In Palestine, in both cases discussed in this book, slow urbicidal tactics
are deliberately employed by the Israeli authorities in an asymmetrically
organized project of asserting the state’s territoriality over “the promised
land” of Palestine. This strategy consists in mobilizing one form of urban-
ity against another. At frst glance, both the settlement enterprise in the
West Bank and the state’s efforts to “regularize” space through enforced
urbanization in the Naqab/Negev may appear as “urbanizing” rather than
urbicidal. As such, their violent nature remains hidden behind the ideas of
modernization, development, or enhancement of space management. On a
rhetoric level, such actions are motivated by the principle of the “common
good,” while their negative consequences tend to be framed as “collateral
damage.” The intentional dimension of these material-semiotic processes,
or the vehement force of destruction by construction, is concealed within
the offcial (Zionist) dogma, infused with the rhetoric of progress, infra-
structural advancement, and economic growth. These complex efforts pro-
duce uneven geographies of displacement and exclusion, where urbanity
becomes both the target and the weapon of destruction. But if we consider
urbanity as a specifc arrangement of space—embracing humans, material
objects, territories, symbolic associations, routine navigations and uses, and
so on—then it emerges as a crucial site for community-building processes,
a laboratory of collective social activity. Such an understanding exposes the
human implication in matter, and vice versa—it reveals how, in their daily
functioning, humans are impinged upon by material agencies and forces
(Coole 2013). Urban space may serve as an illuminating example of these
entangled relationalities. Given such a construal of the concept of urbanity,
the new materialist perspective allows us to realize that the physical struc-
ture, or materiality of the city/camp/village/neighborhood, not only refects
or serves as a vehicle for social and cultural meanings but it can also actively
shape, solidify, affect, and condition social practices and discursive associa-
tions. In that sense, identities and physical spaces merge with each other into
a dynamically operating material-semiotic assemblage. A new materialist
approach facilitates understanding of how this complex entanglement struc-
tures, and is structured by, everyday practices and actions, and why—serv-
ing as a microcosm of spatially rooted communities as well as a site for their
activities, which potentially contest the power of centralized authority—it
becomes a possible target of deliberate state-sponsored violence.
The denial of “the right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968)—via demolition
of spatiality, understood as a collection of mutually co-formative relations
between the social and spatial dimensions of community life (Soja 2010,
4)—may thus be conceived of as a state strategy of suppressing grassroots

141
 CONCLUSIONS

resistance. As James Scott observes, in its violent assertion of territoriality,

the modern state, by defnition, attempts to simplify its classic function of
“prevention of rebellion” (1998, 3). Moreover, the state’s efforts toward
standardizing the spatiality—or transforming “what was a social hieroglyph
into a legible and administratively more convenient format”—enlarge the
state’s capacity for more thorough reengineering (Scott 1998, 11) of its ter-
ritory (or land, and how people make use of it). In such a context, if the pur-
suit of “the right to the city” is understood both as fghting for the right to
shape the urban space in a way that attends to the needs of the inhabitants
and as a continuous struggle for reappropriation of the space encroached
upon by the state, then the deliberate state-sponsored decomposition of
urban spatiality—through physical demolition, intentional neglect, or pre-
meditated de-development—results in the production of geographies whose
oppressive structures are diffcult to contest.
Deliberate violence against urbanity should therefore be seen as an ele-
ment of the state’s endeavors to take control over space, which is espe-
cially vital in such colonial enterprises as the Zionist settlement project in
Palestine. These actions rest on, and emerge from, the dynamic assemblages
of ideological narratives and material rearrangements. Such processes, as
elaborated upon in this short book, have been extensively practiced in Israel
and the Occupied Territories, typically causing the estrangement of the
indigenous population from their traditional landscape, turning them into
trespassers, and criminalizing their customary routines and habits related to
their reliance on their land and its vernacular characteristics. As a result of
substantial spatial reconfgurations, the affected communities, whose “right
to the city” becomes virtually emptied of content, are unable to maximize
what Mark Purcell understands as the use value of their space (2002, 103).
Rather than engaging in a collective production of spatiality that would
attend to the needs of its inhabitants, they remain subordinated to carto-
graphically orchestrated geographies of exclusion, resulting in alienation
from their traditional habitat, while their customary reliance on the land
and the conventional modes of dwelling associated therewith are gradually
deracinated. Slow urbicide contributes extensively to the advancement of
these discriminatory processes, deepening spatial injustices.
Considering the concealed operations of destructive tactics, the detailed
examination of (slow) urbicide appears to be important and timely, as nar-
ratives on the devastation or erasure of urban spaces generate knowledge
about a crucial moment in the life of a community, namely its destruction.
Given that the history of war is usually written by the victorious party,
the documentation of urbicide offers an important counter-narrative that
reveals alternative perspectives on history and how it is coped with and
remembered. It draws attention to the experience of the devastated commu-
nities, revealing stories that are frequently silenced in hegemonic memorial
accounts. The salience of exploring the experience of urbicide consists in the

142
 CONCLUSIONS

focus on a “dark spot of the community’s history”—a historical moment,

which is typically not well documented, as scholars tend to rather exam-
ine reconstruction, renewal, urban planning, and design. This corresponds
to the more general construction of Western culture—as Ryan Bishop and
Gregory Clancey (2003) argue, the omission of the catastrophic moments
in the history of urban communities is a legacy of the Enlightenment; mod-
ern urban social science tends to avoid this topic, as the annihilation of
urban places conficts with notions of progress, order, and modernization,
which has long worked against any analysis of urban space as a scene of
catastrophic death. Such a strategy typically contributes to the erasure of
the experiences of affected communities, relegating them to the background
of offcial historical narratives. The slowness of urbicidal violence seems to
further aggravate this effect. Thus, also for these reasons, accounting for the
shifting temporalities of urbicidal violence in Palestine remains important, as
it reveals the complex operations of tangled destructive policies, leading to
the gradual material uprooting and psychological exhaustion of the indige-
nous populations. It also enables a countering of the tendency to bracket the
periods and causalities of violence to times of escalation, thus drawing atten-
tion to what typically remains out of sight for the wider public and politics.
As George Yancy and Judith Butler warn, when it is “unseen,” vio-
lence becomes “naturalized” (2015), and the fact that we are no longer
able to notice its insipid, covert operations may make us partly com-
plicit in it. It is therefore necessary to expose how harm is repeatedly
dispersed in spatial and temporal ways, which makes it often invisible
and unaccounted for; it is of utmost importance to disclose the hidden
forces through which systematic violence is operationalized and how this
process frequently recruits both human (including ideological) and more-
than-human (including natural, physical, and topographical) agencies and
capabilities. The tacit, slow, and invisible workings of urbicidal policies
in Palestine partly acquire their damaging capacities through their silence,
which enables denial. The lack of adequate narratives to capture these
“unspectacular” violent processes (Nixon 2011) contributes signifcantly
to their operational effciency. In such a context, exposition of the shift-
ing temporalities of the urbicidal policies employed in Palestine poten-
tially allows us to draw attention to their delayed after-effects, as well
as helps us to understand the complex material-semiotic dynamics of the
Israeli colonial project in Palestine. In this context, if the dismantling of
original spatialities, leading to the gradual eradication of resistance to the
ethnocratically organized state, is at the heart of urbicidal practices in
Palestine, then efforts aimed at documenting and elucidating the mecha-
nisms of these violent developments should strive to confront the denial of
violence. This remains important, as negation—or covert objectifcation
of the continuous unfolding of vehement forces—creates conditions for
violence to be silently perpetuated.

143
 CONCLUSIONS

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 INDEX

Abujidi, Nurhan 1 Branch, Jordan 13, 108

acts of warfare 58 Braun, Bruce 37, 138
Adams, Nicholas 2 Brighenti, Andrea 13
Adey, Peter 9 Brighton, Shane 31, 32
agency 20, 38; human-centered concept B’Tselem organization 98
39; more-than-human forms 41, 64; buildings, destruction of 2, 3, 62;
pluralization of 48 interpretative themes 62–63
agential realism 34 Butler, Chris 12, 17
agentic capacities 38, 40 Butler, Judith 143
Al-Aqsa Intifada 89, 95
Aleppo pine 120 Calais Jungle 51n27
Aloni, Adam 104 Campbell, Elaine 48
Alon’s plan 95 Caquard, Sébastien 108
alterity approach 78n5 cartographical technologies 108
Amara, Ahmad 125n26 cartographical thinking 68
anthropocentric philosophical chronic urban trauma 9
landscape 3 civil ecology 72
Arabs of Beersheba (arab as-saba) Clancey, Gregory 143
125n23 classifxation 66, 112
Arab Spring 1 Clausewitz, Carl von 31
aridity line 109, 120 Cohen, Shaul Ephraim 119, 138
collateral damage 62, 141
Barad, Karen 34–36, 39, 42, 49, 50n8, collective spatial trauma 140
50n11 Colman, Felicity 38, 40
Barkawi, Tarak 32 colonialism 6, 12
Bedouin 109 conservative spiritual movement 97
Bedouin community 108, 122; contemporary materialist approach 62
situation of Naqab/Negev 109–111, contemporary warfare 51n19
113, 117, 121 conventional two-dimensional
bedû 125n23 maps 94
Ben-Naftali, Orna 93, 123n8 Coole, Diana 23, 35–40; new
Bennett, Jane 39; theorizations of materialist thinking 50n16
vibrancy of things 78n5 Coward, Martin 1, 3, 20, 62–65, 75,
Berman, Marshall 2, 60, 78n2 78n4, 78n5, 79n9
Bishop, Ryan 143 crisis 139
boundary-drawing practices 42 critical security studies 32
Braidotti, Rosi 34 critical war studies 32

147
 INDEX

Das, Veena 140 geography of (in)justice 18

Davies, Thom 8, 11, 139 Graham, Stephen 2, 46, 88
dead land doctrine 117, 125n26 greenery management 7
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous green imperialism 126n32
Peoples 124n21 Green Patrol 116
“de-development” 100 Gush Emunim 97, 123n11
Defensive Shield 1, 7
DeLanda, Manuel 34, 35 Hanaf, Sari 6, 72, 73
Deleuze, Gilles 50n7, 123n2 Handel, Ariel 106, 124n13
discourse, inclusive notion of 50n9 Haraway, Donna 4, 34, 67, 69
discourse analysis 35, 50n9 Harker, Chris 9, 101
discourse theory 34, 63 Hewitt, Kenneth 71, 72, 78n3
dispositif, notion of 41 Hilal, Jane 101
Dittmer, Jason 4 Hochberg, Gil 100
domicide 70 Holmqvist, Caroline 51n21
Dormann, Claire 108 Holsti, K. J. 108
Dowler, Lorraine 47 home 21, 69, 71; intentional
drawing technologies 109–111 destruction of 70
human-centered concept of agency 39
Eastern European Zionism movement humanism-infused theorizations 65
123n5 human-material assemblages 51n21
Eckardt, Wolf von 2
Elden, Stuart 13, 14, 46, 47, 86 IDF see Israeli Defence Forces
environmental injustice 101–104 illegal intruders 110
epistemicide 79n10 “imagined communities” of
Eretz Yisrael (“the Land of Israel”) 118 nationhood 13
ethico-onto-epistemological 4, 19, indigeneity, issue of 124n21
42, 50n8 indigenous 125n21
ethics of mattering 49 indigenous rights, idea of 124n21
ethnocracy 16, 122 international relations theory 19, 20,
ethnocratic discriminatory politics 137 35, 38, 72, 49n1
ethno-nationalism 6; conficts 2, 20, 60 Iraqi urban spaces 61
ethno-territoriality 14–16, 89 Isaac, Jad 101
ethno-territorial politics 3 Israel Association of United Architects
ethno-territorial projects 76 123n3
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) 98
fast urbicide 10 Israeli ethno-territorial project 6
fellahîn 125n23 Israeli High Court 96
feminist new materialism 4 Israeli Land Administration 116
fat discourse 46, 94 Israeli policy, in Palestine 14, 61, 103
Ford, Richard 13 Israeli political ruling forces 95
forest, survival of 120 Israel Land Authority 125n25
Foucault, Michel 41, 123n2;
genealogical approach 66 Jabareen, Yosef 105
Fourth Geneva Convention 95 Jenks, Chris 36
French-British policy 51n27 Jewish National Fund (JNF) 120,
Frost, Samantha 37 126n27, 126n29
Fullilove, Mindy 73, 74, 79n15 Johnson, Nora 70
Jordanian legal system 96–97
Gaza Strip 92 Jordanian Valley 96
geographical reasoning 84 Jordan River 102
geographical warfare 11, 86, “Judea and Samaria” 95, 97; seize
91, 92 control of land in 96

148
 INDEX

Kaldor, Mary 33 Mountain Aquifer 102

Kedar, Alexandre 117 Mountain Strip 97
Keohane, Robert O. 19, 35
Nakba (or catastrophe) 7
Lacoste, Yves 84–86, 90, 123n2; Naksa 7
geographical warfare 92 Nancy, Jean-Luc 78n5
land alienation 119 Naqab desert (Palestinian-Arab
landscape: agencies of 92; geographical/ population) 23n7
political/discursive reconfguration of Naqab/Negev Bedouins 109, 110, 113,
107; spatiotemporal materializations 114, 117, 121, 125nn23–24, 125n26
of 65; regularization of 119 National Unit for Building Inspection 116
landscape politics 117–122 nation-centered Israeli territory,
Laurie, Emma 140 construction of 107
Lefebvre, Henri 12, 14; “the right to natureculture 50n5
the city” 16–19 necropolitics 77
linguistic turn 34 Negev desert (Jewish population) 23n7
“Loner Farms” (havot bodedim) 121 new materialism 38, 45, 48, 90,
Lowenthal, David 70 138; agency of 37–40; political
violence 40–49; war as practice
Mack, Arien 70 31–33
Mandatory Palestine 92 new materialist investigations 43
mapping space 84–86 new materialist philosophy 39, 67
mapping urbicidal violence: new new materialist theorizing 37
materialist understanding 62–67; new materialist thinking 37, 41, 48,
urbanity as target 58–62 50n16
Mariupol (Ukraine) 61 The New Western Way of War
Marx, Emanuel 113 (Shaw) 31
masculinity concept 50n15 Nicolić, Mirko 42
material architecture, violent Nixon, Rob 8–10, 91, 104, 106, 139
demolition of 59
material-discursive 4, 51n21; practices 41 Occupied Territories 1, 2, 7, 9, 14, 18,
material evidence 43 23n2, 86, 88, 89, 107, 139; as state
material-semiotic processes: inclusions land 96; unconventional geography
and exclusions of 42; intentional of 90
dimension of 141 Operation Desert Storm 61
material turn 40 Ophir, Adi 18
mawat 112, 117, 125n26 Oppermann, Serpil 39
Mbembe, Achille 12, 77 Oslo Accords 85, 102
McKee, Emily 111, 114, 118 Oslo peace process 93
McKittrick, Katherine 2, 5, 76, 77 Oslo system 94
Meir, Avinoam 113 Ottoman Land Law of 1858 97, 112
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 39
Middle East peace initiative 2003 89 Pain, Rachel 9, 140
Miller, Zinaida 125n26 Palestinian urban centers 97
Milliken 50n9 Pappé, Ilan 16, 119, 123n7
Ministry of Agriculture 123n10 parallel geographies 104–107
miri 125n26 PeaceNow 124n14
Moore, Adam 15 place annihilation concept 71
“more-than-human” concept planting, politics of 7, 119
50n6; agencies of space 86; political-ethical intervention 49
dimension of political developments political theory 3, 31
137; dimension of urbicidal political violence 41; acts of 41;
violence 77 experiential content of 42; networked

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practices of 59; relational ontology socio-cultural-material landscape 3

42; spatially located material acts 44 Soja, Edward W. 8, 18, 20
politics of space 12–14, 18 sovereignty 12
Porteous, J. Douglas 70, 71 space 20, 48; politics of 12–14, 18;
post-anthropocentrism 64 regularization of 111
post-humancentric logic 64 spacetimemattering 42, 46, 66
Prawer-Amidror Plan 116, 126n29 spaciocidal strategy 73
“promised land” 14, 88, 93, 138, 141 spacio-cide concept 72
Purcell, Mark 19, 142 spaciocide’s target 72, 73
spatial justice 18
Qualqilya, town of 99 spatial relations 12
spatio-temporal contexts 19, 42
rebellion, prevention of 142 Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia
refectivism 19, 35 102, 104
regularization of space 111 State of Israel 105, 110, 112, 116, 118
Riedlmayer, Andreas 2 state power 12
“the right to the city” 14, 16–19, 23n6, Strachan, Hew 31
141, 142 survival of architecture and urban
roadmap 89 life 2
Rogers, A.P.V. 62
“root shock” 73, 74 Tel as-Sabi 113
territoriality, nature of 4, 13, 14
Sack, Robert 13 territory, concept of 12, 13
sacrifce zones 104 Thiele, Kathrin 42, 49
Said, Edward 8, 85, 86, 104 “thing-power,” agential materiality
Sassen, Saskia 13 of 39
Sauzet, Sofe 39 “third debate” 35, 38
savannization 120 threat, discursive construction of 43
Sayig 116 Till, Karen 9, 74–76, 140
Scott, James 142 tree planting 119
Segal, Raf 90, 123n3 Tuin, Iris van der 66, 68, 79n11, 112
settlement policy 98
shadow war 43 UN General Assembly 124n21
Sharon’s Plan 123n10 Unit for Enforcement in Open
Sharp, Jo 47 Spaces 116
Shaw, Ian 8, 140 UN Security Council Resolutions 93
Shaw, Martin 31, 79n7 “unspectacular” violent process 143
Shields, Rob 140, 141 urbanization 8; violence of 111–117
al-Siyāj 110 urban space 17, 141; demolition of 21,
slow-motion warfare strategies 76 59, 68
slow urbicidal policies 91; cartographies urbicidal policy 88, 140
of domination in West Bank 92–95; urbicidal tactics, slowness of 136, 141
regularization in Naqab/Negev urbicidal violence 3, 59, 62, 140;
Desert 107–109 cartographic approach 68; mapping
slow urbicidal violence 6, 11, 14; see mapping urbicidal violence;
ethno-territoriality 14–16; “the right more-than-human dimension of
to the city” 14, 16–19 8; multidimensional character of
slow violence 8–10 88; in post-Cold War politics 64;
slow wounding 76 temporalities of 8
Smith, John 36 urbicide 2, 3, 5, 59, 60, 64;
Smith, Sandra E. 70, 71 contemporary materialist approach
social constructivism 34, 36, 63 62; documentation of 142

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Vaiglova, Petra 119 building patterns in 96; traffc arteries

Vandenberghe, Frédéric 109 97; Zionist colonization of 105
verticality 9, 46; politics of 94 Western anthropocentric philosophy 32
Vibrant Matter (Bennett) 39 Whatmore, Sarah 37
Vigh, Henrik 139 Winning, Anne 71
violent cartographies 95–101 World Congress of Architecture, Berlin
visual occupation 100 123n3
volume concept 9
Yancy, George 143
“war on terror” 1 Yatir Forest 120, 126n33
Weizman, Eyal 5, 7, 51n28, 88–90, 94, Yiftachel, Oren 16, 125n21
100, 105, 109, 110, 123n3 Yoav Unit 116
West Bank 102; Israeli developments in
100, 101, 105; new infrastructural Zionist colonial project 14–15, 96
developments in 101; settlement Zionist settlement project 142

151