A Cartography of the Unknowable: Technology, Territory and Subterranean Agencies in Israel’s Management of the Gaza Tunnels

Abstract

This article evaluates the potential for agency exercised by the subterranean volume in geopolitical conflict. Joining recent geographical conceptualisations of territory as a volumetric assemblage with calls for an elemental geopolitics, it argues that the density of the underground layer creates a convoluted technopolitical problem that obfuscates the state's means of directly observing, visualising and knowing the topological space of territory. To illustrate this, a methodological approach based on the relational ontologies of actor-network-theory (ANT) and assemblage theory is applied to an empirical study of the geophysical sensing techniques used by Israeli engineers, scientists and military to manage cross-border tunnels built by the Palestinian militant group Hamas before and after the 2014 Gaza war. The soil conditions, settlement patterns and infrastructures in the Gaza-Western Negev region have necessitated experimentation with complex and multiple forms of scientific and political expertise in attempts to locate the invisible tunnels, alongside a shift towards increasingly oblique techniques of cartographic representation of the subsurface. The contingency of these efforts has unsettled the State of Israel's confidence in its ability to manage geopolitical risks through techniques of territorial control. This case raises poignant questions about the extent of the capacities and limitations of technological solutions and geopolitical practices to secure territory when confronted with the geophysical agency of the underground. Introduction: Material Agency and Geopolitics The elemental properties of the Earth in a particular place exert influence on the strategic efficacy of the military, and by extension the political agency of the state. Put differently, the materialities and processes of the physical environment play an active role in shaping geopolitical processes (Adey and Anderson 2011; Barry 2013a, 1-2). Shaw notes that the ''relationship between violence and the environment has persisted since the dawn of humanity.. . all that has changed is the scale, intensity, and technical CONTACT Ian Slesinger

Securing the subterranean volumes: Geometrics, land subsidence and the materialities of things

“…Such a turn towards the subterranean conceptualises the sub-surface as an area with distinctive material properties, such as height, depth and shape. In this vein, recent work has revealed that the subterranean area, like other volumes, is never divorced from state and corporate strategies of control, exploitation and exclusion (Barry, 2013; Kama and Kuchler, 2019; Slesinger, 2020). In the natural resource industries for example, corporate and state entities commonly exercise their power over subterranean volumes through volumetric practices (Bridge, 2013; Kama, 2020; Kama and Kuchler, 2019).…”

“…Drawing inspiration from this conceptualisation of the geopolitics of land subsidence, I argue that, while political actors make efforts to ‘secure the subterranean volume’, the sub-surface elemental materials and human activity ‘collectively generate a more-than-human agency’ (Slesinger, 2020), or what Valdivia (2015) termed subterranean frictions , against the state’s security assemblage. In short, this paper suggests that, although the subterranean area is mapped and rendered intelligible by geoscientific technologies, underground materials are continuously challenging to control.…”

Territory incognita

“…This overlooks the dependence of states on the subterranean, as Melo Zurita and Monroe (2019: 40) demonstrate in their study of the ‘uncooperative volume’ of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, where the horizontal spread of the Spanish was checked by their lack of vertical access to aquifers. Gormally et al (2018: 73) also conceive territory as a ‘geosocial challenge’ rather than simple extent, in respect to the required administrative capacity for implementing underground carbon storage (see also Slesinger, 2018; Valdivia, 2015). While there has been increasing interest in the geological power of humans signalled by the Anthropocene, it is the ‘radical indifference of geology to human life’ (Yusoff, 2017: 107), its ‘utter matter’ (Macfarlane, 2019: 4) and unfathomable otherness, which is more salient and perturbing, revealing the ‘limits to our ability to “govern” the rhythms and singularities of earth systems’ (Clark, 2017: 229).…”

Situating Border Control: Unpacking Spain's SIVE border surveillance assemblage

“…Allied with recent work on material politics (e.g. Barry 2014;Slesinger 2018) and post-humanist political ecologies (e.g. Sundberg 2011;Boyce 2016), therefore, a central analytical starting point to this paper is that neither the material nor the (bio)physical elements that form part of the borderspace should be considered stable foundations upon which (geo)politics takes place.…”