How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadelphia: Universi... more How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 280 pp. 4 illus. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-8122-4498-4.The Privatization of Israeli Security by Shir Hever. London: Pluto Press, 2018. 256 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-7453-3720-3.Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola by Jon Schubert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. 270 pp. 5 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-5017-1369-9.Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem by Dana Hercbergs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 284 pp. 46 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8143-4108-7.Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone by Mariane C. Ferme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 336 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-52029-438-7.Sporadically Radical: Ethnographies of Organised Violence and Militant Mobilization Edited by Steffen Jensen and Henrik E. Vigh. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 290 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-8-76354-602-7.
This article calls for a greater emphasis on issues of politics and anti-politics within critical... more This article calls for a greater emphasis on issues of politics and anti-politics within critical debates about transnational security governance in the metropolis. While scholars have documented the growing popularity of policy ‘models’ and ‘best practices’ in policing and urban security planning, we know little about what makes these schemes attractive to the officials who enroll in them. I take the government of Maharashtra’s decision to ‘learn from Israel’ following the 2008 Mumbai attacks (26/11) as an invitation to re-evaluate the relationships among policymaking, politics, and depoliticization. Focusing on references to Israeli security know-how as a ‘best practice’ by Maharashtra state officials, I explore how an association with Israel was used to negotiate the conflicts and controversies that followed 26/11. The article has two aims: first, it addresses how transnational policy schemes work anti-politically within particular local contexts. Second, it locates counter-terro...
Catherine Charrett's The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections focuses on the succ... more Catherine Charrett's The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections focuses on the success of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and the European Union's responses to this unforeseen event. More specifically the book takes up the EU's refusal to treat Hamas a 'normal' political actor and legitimate, democratically-elected representative of Gazans. In doing so, Charrett seeks to break free the free from the oppressive stranglehold that the Hamas taboo continues to impose on Palestinians' political horizons and the complicity of EU diplomacy therein. In doing so, The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections is provocative, insightful and challenging in multiple ways. This article focuses on a few of the book's central insights and provocations and then situates these within ongoing thinking about how to theorize and narrate empire and global politics otherwise. The article further outlines how the book engages with questions about the politics of truth, academic speech and pedagogy on Palestine and beyond. It argues that Charrett's efforts to unsettle Hamas taboo and oppressive constraints of academic writing have wider significance in higher education in terms of what can be spoken of in the neoliberal university, how it can be articulated and by whom. Keywords Gaza • Palestine • Israel • European Union • Settler colonialism Catherine Charrett's The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections centers on the success of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and the European Union's responses to this unforeseen event. More specifically the book takes up the EU's refusal to treat Hamas a "normal" political actor and legitimate, democratically-elected representative of Gazans. Crucially, however, The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections interrogates the ways in which "Hamas was made to be a taboo," rather than taking its status as such as a given (Charrett 2020, p. 139, emphasis added). In doing so, Charrett seeks to break free from the oppressive stranglehold * Rhys Machold
A pivotal work of our time, Violence Work provides a much-needed corrective to contemporary liber... more A pivotal work of our time, Violence Work provides a much-needed corrective to contemporary liberal debates surrounding police's "brutality", "privatization" and "militarization" and associated impetuses for its "reform" that pushes us to consider other pathways forward, taking insight and direction from the long and robust history of abolitionist organizing. Our conversation and probing lines of inquiry here seek to enrich and think alongside this much-needed centering of violence at the core of police work, yet in such a way that equally avoids accepting state and colonial power as already all-powerful totalities.
<jats:p>How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadel... more <jats:p>How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 280 pp. 4 illus. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-8122-4498-4.</jats:p><jats:p>The Privatization of Israeli Security by Shir Hever. London: Pluto Press, 2018. 256 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-7453-3720-3.</jats:p><jats:p>Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola by Jon Schubert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. 270 pp. 5 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-5017-1369-9.</jats:p><jats:p>Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem by Dana Hercbergs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 284 pp. 46 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8143-4108-7.</jats:p><jats:p>Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone by Mariane C. Ferme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 336 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-52029-438-7.</jats:p><jats:p>Sporadically Radical: Ethnographies of Organised Violence and Militant Mobilization Edited by Steffen Jensen and Henrik E. Vigh. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 290 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-8-76354-602-7.</jats:p>
Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowle... more Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on domi- nant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counter- insurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reduci- ble to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial his- tories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work involved in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics.
As part of European policy debates on counterterrorism, there have been increasing calls to draw ... more As part of European policy debates on counterterrorism, there have been increasing calls to draw on Israeli expertise in protecting European cities. While transnational collaboration is, in essence, neither positive nor negative, European policymakers need to consider the full range of costs and consequences it is likely to have.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a 'laboratory' ... more Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a 'laboratory' for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel's perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. I argue that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. I further call into question its polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel's settler colonial project. I take these concerns as an opportunity to reassemble the policing/security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond.
This article intervenes in discussions about the circulation of policing knowledge and the politi... more This article intervenes in discussions about the circulation of policing knowledge and the politics of expertise. As part of a broader conversation about transnational reconfigurations of state power, critical scholars have drawn attention to the influence of global policing “models” and “private” experts in shaping policy. They show how such figures and forms of knowhow symbolically enforce urban order and dispossess marginalized communities under conditions of neoliberal crisis. While incisive, these approaches can unduly portray expert authority as boundless and unassailable. This article argues that a sustained theoretical engagement with questions about controversies and failure opens up fruitful avenues to unsettle the perceived smoothness, inevitability, and omnipotence of experts in relation to politics and governing. Drawing on insights from actor-network theory (ANT), it situates deference to global experts as interventions that seek to enact and police the terms of “reali...
Israel's dominant position within the homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism field is n... more Israel's dominant position within the homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism field is now quite widely acknowledged within academic literature and beyond. While existing accounts of Israel's HLS industry have made a number of critical contributions to understanding its rise, they fail to readily address how Israeli HLS approaches have come to be understood as mobile and universal strategies to be applied worldwide. They also negate the extent to which Israel's security ‘solutions’ are (re)invented as they move geographically. I argue that Israeli claims to HLS dominance are realized through their encounters beyond Israel/Palestine in ways that stabilize their practices and technologies as global exemplars. Building on policy mobilities scholarship, I suggest that bound up with the development of an Israeli HLS ‘model’ is the constitution of an audience, which is central to giving these approaches their global appeal and respective political force. In developing the...
Given the centrality of land, territory, and sovereignty to settler colonial formations, it is un... more Given the centrality of land, territory, and sovereignty to settler colonial formations, it is unsurprising that geographers and other scholars working on such topics are increasingly finding settler colonial studies fruitful in their research agendas. However, work on settler polities in political geography has historically been marked by the present absence of this framework, which has been consequential in terms of circumscribing the kinds of political analysis that geographers can offer. It also limits the nature, depth, and scope of radical critique of violent domination by skirting certain questions about the core drivers of dispossession and responsibility for them. This article examines political geographical engagement (or lack thereof) across each of four themes: population management/governance, territory/sovereignty, consciousness, and narrative, paying particular attention to works which challenge the present absence of settler colonial theory in political geography. We argue that analyzing settler colonial formations as such is essential to conceptualizing their workings and linkages or disjunctures with other forms of empire. Yet this focus also has broader political stakes related to geography's complicity with racialized state power, violence, and empire, as well as and efforts to decolonize the discipline.
Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowle... more Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on domi- nant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counter- insurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reduci- ble to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial his- tories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work involved in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics.
This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 20... more This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 2008 terrorist attacks (26/11). The event was widely cited as a major turning point in the securitisation and militarisation of Indian cities. It also produced significant political upheaval, which in turn generated calls for a major institutional overhaul of the governmental architecture for handling terrorism. This article takes the political and policy repercussions of 26/11 as an intervention into critical debates about the (para-)militarisation of policing and the politics of urban security. Here I shift the focus from the disciplinary and divisive effects of policies towards an emphasis on their spectacular and theatrical dimensions. If we are to make sense of the ‘militarised’ focus of the policy response to 26/11, I argue, we need to take seriously its populist, aspirational qualities.
How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadelphia: Universi... more How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 280 pp. 4 illus. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-8122-4498-4.The Privatization of Israeli Security by Shir Hever. London: Pluto Press, 2018. 256 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-7453-3720-3.Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola by Jon Schubert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. 270 pp. 5 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-5017-1369-9.Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem by Dana Hercbergs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 284 pp. 46 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8143-4108-7.Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone by Mariane C. Ferme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 336 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-52029-438-7.Sporadically Radical: Ethnographies of Organised Violence and Militant Mobilization Edited by Steffen Jensen and Henrik E. Vigh. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 290 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-8-76354-602-7.
This article calls for a greater emphasis on issues of politics and anti-politics within critical... more This article calls for a greater emphasis on issues of politics and anti-politics within critical debates about transnational security governance in the metropolis. While scholars have documented the growing popularity of policy ‘models’ and ‘best practices’ in policing and urban security planning, we know little about what makes these schemes attractive to the officials who enroll in them. I take the government of Maharashtra’s decision to ‘learn from Israel’ following the 2008 Mumbai attacks (26/11) as an invitation to re-evaluate the relationships among policymaking, politics, and depoliticization. Focusing on references to Israeli security know-how as a ‘best practice’ by Maharashtra state officials, I explore how an association with Israel was used to negotiate the conflicts and controversies that followed 26/11. The article has two aims: first, it addresses how transnational policy schemes work anti-politically within particular local contexts. Second, it locates counter-terro...
Catherine Charrett&#39;s The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections focuses on the succ... more Catherine Charrett&#39;s The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections focuses on the success of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and the European Union&#39;s responses to this unforeseen event. More specifically the book takes up the EU&#39;s refusal to treat Hamas a &#39;normal&#39; political actor and legitimate, democratically-elected representative of Gazans. In doing so, Charrett seeks to break free the free from the oppressive stranglehold that the Hamas taboo continues to impose on Palestinians&#39; political horizons and the complicity of EU diplomacy therein. In doing so, The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections is provocative, insightful and challenging in multiple ways. This article focuses on a few of the book&#39;s central insights and provocations and then situates these within ongoing thinking about how to theorize and narrate empire and global politics otherwise. The article further outlines how the book engages with questions about the politics of truth, academic speech and pedagogy on Palestine and beyond. It argues that Charrett&#39;s efforts to unsettle Hamas taboo and oppressive constraints of academic writing have wider significance in higher education in terms of what can be spoken of in the neoliberal university, how it can be articulated and by whom. Keywords Gaza • Palestine • Israel • European Union • Settler colonialism Catherine Charrett&#39;s The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections centers on the success of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and the European Union&#39;s responses to this unforeseen event. More specifically the book takes up the EU&#39;s refusal to treat Hamas a &quot;normal&quot; political actor and legitimate, democratically-elected representative of Gazans. Crucially, however, The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections interrogates the ways in which &quot;Hamas was made to be a taboo,&quot; rather than taking its status as such as a given (Charrett 2020, p. 139, emphasis added). In doing so, Charrett seeks to break free from the oppressive stranglehold * Rhys Machold
A pivotal work of our time, Violence Work provides a much-needed corrective to contemporary liber... more A pivotal work of our time, Violence Work provides a much-needed corrective to contemporary liberal debates surrounding police's "brutality", "privatization" and "militarization" and associated impetuses for its "reform" that pushes us to consider other pathways forward, taking insight and direction from the long and robust history of abolitionist organizing. Our conversation and probing lines of inquiry here seek to enrich and think alongside this much-needed centering of violence at the core of police work, yet in such a way that equally avoids accepting state and colonial power as already all-powerful totalities.
<jats:p>How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadel... more <jats:p>How Rivalries End by Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 280 pp. 4 illus. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-8122-4498-4.</jats:p><jats:p>The Privatization of Israeli Security by Shir Hever. London: Pluto Press, 2018. 256 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-7453-3720-3.</jats:p><jats:p>Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola by Jon Schubert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. 270 pp. 5 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-5017-1369-9.</jats:p><jats:p>Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem by Dana Hercbergs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 284 pp. 46 illus. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8143-4108-7.</jats:p><jats:p>Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone by Mariane C. Ferme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 336 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-52029-438-7.</jats:p><jats:p>Sporadically Radical: Ethnographies of Organised Violence and Militant Mobilization Edited by Steffen Jensen and Henrik E. Vigh. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 290 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-8-76354-602-7.</jats:p>
Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowle... more Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on domi- nant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counter- insurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reduci- ble to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial his- tories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work involved in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics.
As part of European policy debates on counterterrorism, there have been increasing calls to draw ... more As part of European policy debates on counterterrorism, there have been increasing calls to draw on Israeli expertise in protecting European cities. While transnational collaboration is, in essence, neither positive nor negative, European policymakers need to consider the full range of costs and consequences it is likely to have.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a 'laboratory' ... more Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a 'laboratory' for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel's perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. I argue that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. I further call into question its polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel's settler colonial project. I take these concerns as an opportunity to reassemble the policing/security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond.
This article intervenes in discussions about the circulation of policing knowledge and the politi... more This article intervenes in discussions about the circulation of policing knowledge and the politics of expertise. As part of a broader conversation about transnational reconfigurations of state power, critical scholars have drawn attention to the influence of global policing “models” and “private” experts in shaping policy. They show how such figures and forms of knowhow symbolically enforce urban order and dispossess marginalized communities under conditions of neoliberal crisis. While incisive, these approaches can unduly portray expert authority as boundless and unassailable. This article argues that a sustained theoretical engagement with questions about controversies and failure opens up fruitful avenues to unsettle the perceived smoothness, inevitability, and omnipotence of experts in relation to politics and governing. Drawing on insights from actor-network theory (ANT), it situates deference to global experts as interventions that seek to enact and police the terms of “reali...
Israel's dominant position within the homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism field is n... more Israel's dominant position within the homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism field is now quite widely acknowledged within academic literature and beyond. While existing accounts of Israel's HLS industry have made a number of critical contributions to understanding its rise, they fail to readily address how Israeli HLS approaches have come to be understood as mobile and universal strategies to be applied worldwide. They also negate the extent to which Israel's security ‘solutions’ are (re)invented as they move geographically. I argue that Israeli claims to HLS dominance are realized through their encounters beyond Israel/Palestine in ways that stabilize their practices and technologies as global exemplars. Building on policy mobilities scholarship, I suggest that bound up with the development of an Israeli HLS ‘model’ is the constitution of an audience, which is central to giving these approaches their global appeal and respective political force. In developing the...
Given the centrality of land, territory, and sovereignty to settler colonial formations, it is un... more Given the centrality of land, territory, and sovereignty to settler colonial formations, it is unsurprising that geographers and other scholars working on such topics are increasingly finding settler colonial studies fruitful in their research agendas. However, work on settler polities in political geography has historically been marked by the present absence of this framework, which has been consequential in terms of circumscribing the kinds of political analysis that geographers can offer. It also limits the nature, depth, and scope of radical critique of violent domination by skirting certain questions about the core drivers of dispossession and responsibility for them. This article examines political geographical engagement (or lack thereof) across each of four themes: population management/governance, territory/sovereignty, consciousness, and narrative, paying particular attention to works which challenge the present absence of settler colonial theory in political geography. We argue that analyzing settler colonial formations as such is essential to conceptualizing their workings and linkages or disjunctures with other forms of empire. Yet this focus also has broader political stakes related to geography's complicity with racialized state power, violence, and empire, as well as and efforts to decolonize the discipline.
Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowle... more Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on domi- nant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counter- insurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reduci- ble to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial his- tories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work involved in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics.
This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 20... more This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 2008 terrorist attacks (26/11). The event was widely cited as a major turning point in the securitisation and militarisation of Indian cities. It also produced significant political upheaval, which in turn generated calls for a major institutional overhaul of the governmental architecture for handling terrorism. This article takes the political and policy repercussions of 26/11 as an intervention into critical debates about the (para-)militarisation of policing and the politics of urban security. Here I shift the focus from the disciplinary and divisive effects of policies towards an emphasis on their spectacular and theatrical dimensions. If we are to make sense of the ‘militarised’ focus of the policy response to 26/11, I argue, we need to take seriously its populist, aspirational qualities.
Catherine Charrett's The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections focuses on the success of H... more Catherine Charrett's The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections focuses on the success of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and the European Union's responses to this unforeseen event. More specifically the book takes up the EU's refusal to treat Hamas a 'normal' political actor and legitimate, democratically-elected representative of Gazans. In doing so, Charrett seeks to break free the free from the oppressive stranglehold that the Hamas taboo continues to impose on Palestinians' political horizons and the complicity of EU diplomacy therein. In doing so, The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections is provocative, insightful and challenging in multiple ways. This article focuses on a few of the book's central insights and provocations and then situates these within ongoing thinking about how to theorize and narrate empire and global politics otherwise. The article further outlines how the book engages with questions about the politics of truth, academic speech and pedagogy on Palestine and beyond. It argues that Charrett's efforts to unsettle Hamas taboo and oppressive constraints of academic writing have wider significance in higher education in terms of what can be spoken of in the neoliberal university, how it can be articulated and by whom. Keywords Gaza • Palestine • Israel • European Union • Settler colonialism Catherine Charrett's The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections centers on the success of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and the European Union's responses to this unforeseen event. More specifically the book takes up the EU's refusal to treat Hamas a "normal" political actor and legitimate, democratically-elected representative of Gazans. Crucially, however, The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections interrogates the ways in which "Hamas was made to be a taboo," rather than taking its status as such as a given (Charrett 2020, p. 139, emphasis added). In doing so, Charrett seeks to break free from the oppressive stranglehold * Rhys Machold
For instance, the shock in the Egyptian-Israeli rivalry of 1948-1970 could not be explained witho... more For instance, the shock in the Egyptian-Israeli rivalry of 1948-1970 could not be explained without addressing the Cold War interventionism of superpowers.
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