Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear

Abstract

This examination of Palestinian experiences of life and death within the context of Israeli settler colonialism broadens the analytical horizon to include those who 'keep on existing' and explores how Israeli theologies and ideologies of security, surveillance and fear can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures. Drawing from everyday aspects of Palestinian victimization, survival, life and death, and moving between the local and the global, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduces and defines her notion of 'Israeli security theology' and the politics of fear within Palestine/Israel. She relies on a feminist analysis, invoking the intimate politics of the everyday and centering the Palestinian body, family life, memory and memorialization, birth and death as critical sites from which to examine the settler colonial state's machineries of surveillance which produce and maintain a political economy of fear that justifies colonial violence.

Documenting the complex relationship between self-efficacy, resiliency, and workplace empowerment: a case study of humanitarian workers in Palestine

“…This means, however, that negative experiences (for example, "moral stress") may arise from conflict with supervisory staff regarding beneficiary needs, organizational goals, and ambiguity of positive impact on beneficiaries (de Waal 2010; Nilsson et al 2011). For Palestinians, impact and meaning may not only be related to providing community benefit but also how effort relates to the longer history of Palestinian struggle against a colonial settler-regime growing in power since the late 1800s (Fast 2006;Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015). Secondly, we examine how these two constructs may be related to feelings of impact and meaningfulness in the humanitarian workplace environment.…”

Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine

“…The ongoing legalisation of land appropriations (Joronen ), the use of permit regimes (Berda ), and the demolition of homes often related to colonial planning and rezoning (Chiodelli , ) are all, as I will show below in detail, clearly indicative of how Israel uses administrative processes for spatialising settler colonial violence, particularly in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While there is a broader agreement within the existing literature on the prevalence of Israel's use of settler colonial means of governing (Pullan and Yacobi ; Shalhoub‐Kevorkian , ; Veracini , ; Zureik ), critics have claimed all too often Palestinian spaces have been framed through, and so sidelined with those of the Israeli occupation (Allen ; Harker ; Joronen ; Kotef and Amir ; Stamatopoulou‐Robbins ). As it has also been argued within the literature critical of governing‐ and governmentality‐centred approaches (Death ; MacKinnon ), focus on the control, government, and conducting of others tends to ignore the “real‐world messiness”, therefore setting aside “the practice, implementation, agency, experience and resistance” of the ones governed (Rosol :75).…”

Criminology, Gender and Risk: The Dilemmas of Northern Theorising for Southern Responses to Intimate Partner Violence

“…Such assumptions offer a comfortable and comforting vision of women as uniform, fearful, vulnerable subjects (Walklate forthcoming). Moreover, they smooth out and silence the everydayness of women's experiences of violence (Kelly 2011;Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016a), and their situated experiences of culture (Machado, Dias, and Coehlo 2010). Arguably, all of these assumptions are rooted within Northern theoretical presumptions about the nature of fear, risk, vulnerability and gender and how these concepts might be related to one another.…”