Occupations in context – The cultural logics of occupation,settler violence,and resistance

Abstract

Occupation is both a legal and an affective category, at once a regime of power and a structure of feeling that shapes the logics of rule while transforming space, place, nations, and communities. Our special issue outlines the need to understand the universal logics of occupation that operate through law, infrastructure, humanitarianism, and governance, while also foregrounding the uneven translations and histories of occupation across contexts. Through this dialogue, we hope to address the limits of existing cultural or legal frameworks and move toward context-driven modes of understanding the varied and flexible nature of occupations and the forms of life they preclude and produce. This special issue includes a deep and thorough analysis of how sites, politics, and populations intersect and diverge, thus contributing to an understanding of the multiple iterations of wars, violence, occupation, racism, and settler colonialism. Together, the articles underscore how resistance politics across multiple sites is based on collective commitments to claim identities and dignities, regain homes and mobilities, and struggle in pursuit of aspirations of freedom and self-determination.

While scholars have shown how international legal categories such as human rights, genocide, and refugeeship are constructed and vernacularized (Merry, 2006) as they are taken up by social and legal actors on the ground in various ways, we present here a contextual and site-specific analysis of occupation, and ask whether or not it travels uniformly as a legal or an affective category, or how it is adopted or rejected by dispossessed communities. The configuration of how a particular site interacts with the legal framework of occupation cannot be decided a priori. Such differences across sites are important to consider for solidarity projects, since recognition of the political contingencies that shape legal categories and claims, and their possible implications, can provide a critical foundation for building global alliances. This special issue brings together a series of ethnographic analyses of how occupation as a category of cultural analysis operates in particular cultural sites, with attention to the complex ways in which the category takes form and assumes meaning and significance based on particular social, political, and economic contexts, including the site’s engagement with international bodies and their interventionist projects across time.

Empirical analyses of occupation have shown how modern regimes of occupation were historically shaped by legal and political technologies of colonial power and control (Reynolds, 2017). Ilana Feldman shows that Gaza was governed, under both Egyptian and British rule, by what she terms “tactical government”: a form of rule that “shifts in response to crisis, that often works without long-term planning, and that presumes little stability in governing conditions” (2008a: 3). Her emphasis on files and documents – for example, daily police records (Feldman, 2015) – demonstrates what they reveal about the historical connections among colonial policing, surveillance, and the punitive containment of dissent, rebellion, and vagrancy (Berda, 2018; Khalili, 2010). Khalili unpacks the “horizontal circuits” through which violent technologies of domination traveled from colony to colony and between colonies and metropoles, with special attention to Palestine as “an archetypal laboratory and a crucial node of global counintersurgencies” (2010: 416). Yael Berda (2013) describes surveillance and security as colonial techniques of control for “managing dangerous populations” and demonstrates interrelationships among surveillance, emergency, and law. Tracking the expansion of Israel’s military bureaucracy into an “administrative weapon of population control” (Berda, 2013: 32), her work highlights roles of documentation and data management as technologies of civilian population management. Goldie Osuri (2017: 2428) reveals the limitations of West and non-West binaries in conversations on imperialism since these reductive frames of analysis, she argues, erase contemporary modes of coloniality within “(post)colonial nation states,” and undermine discussions of Kashmiri sovereignty.

Scholars of occupation also underscore the histories, legacies, and politics of humanitarian projects, including how humanitarianism can offer a potential framework of rights and redress but also entrench the power of occupying regimes. In her analysis of the “humanitarianism problem,” Feldman (2008a) examines the complicated terrain of humanitarian action in Gaza after the Nakba in 1948, tracking the ways in which humanitarian interventions carried out by international agencies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) created and sanctioned categories such as natives or refugees, distinctions that legally determine whether or not certain populations are considered eligible for humanitarian aid. While these interventions enabled communities to actively claim identities as refugees and displaced populations to gain “visibility” in international circuits (Feldman, 2008b), such distinctions codified a new bureaucratic and legal apparatus and shaped how differently positioned groups interacted with each other over the longue durée (Feldman, 2009).

Through excessive “adhocism” and focus on short-term relief, humanitarian projects frame their interventions as neutral and apolitical even as they work to depoliticize people’s long-standing rights over territory or statehood (Bhan, 2013; Feldman, 2010; Varma, 2018). Humanitarian interventions have often reduced displaced Palestinians to victims by focusing solely on their suffering instead of foregrounding their political rights to their homes and territory (Feldman, 2009: 26) – leading many Palestinians to label the massive presence of international bodies such as UNRWA a “second occupation” (Bishara, 2017: 351). Documenting the ways in which international refugee regimes distance themselves from political contexts, Robinson shows how Kashmiri refugees in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) in Pakistan failed to elicit support from humanitarian organizations because their forced displacements were considered a political rather than a humanitarian issue (Robinson, 2013). This situation shifted following the 2005 earthquake, when a wide array of international organizations intervened in response to what was considered a “natural” disaster. In a phenomenon Robinson calls “humanitarian jihad,” such foreign interventions spurred relief projects and established a post-conflict tourism industry, which further erased the everyday struggles for rights and self-determination in AJK (Robinson, 2014) . Likewise, Purnima Bose examines how the US government’s humanitarian interventions focusing on women’s entrepreneurialism and canine rehabilitation in Afghanistan end up presenting war as a benign and compassionate mission to civilize the natives (Bose, 2020).

Other ethnographers have examined peacekeeping missions, aid, disaster relief efforts, and humanitarian interventions as modes of occupation operating through national and transnational markets and neoliberal regimes of labor and commerce “that rationalize the use of force in the name of humanity and the accumulation of capital” (Al-Bulushi, 2014; Bhan, 2013). Humanitarianism can be used to whitewash crimes against humanity in occupied contexts and further the projects of empire building through discourses of “participatory militarism” (Ali, 2010). Mona Bhan (2013, 2014) outlines how discourses of heart warfare or corporate social responsibility have been actively deployed by the Indian military and corporations to exert greater control over Kashmiri civilian populations, inducting them into regimes of militarized labor and livelihoods. Saiba Varma (2018) shows how medical humanitarian efforts in Kashmir have used trauma frameworks to transform “unruly subjects” into “docile subjects.” Discourses of healing and compassion are also instrumentalized to sanction “settler humanitarian projects” that rely on the elimination of indigenous communities or the erasure of their socio-cultural distinctiveness (Maxwell, 2017).

Ethnographic studies have examined the ways in which occupation transforms natural and built environments through distinctive modes of planning and architecture (Braverman, 2009; Mbembe, 2003; Weizman, 2012), through walls, camps, prisons, and territorial boundaries (Bornstein, 2008; Duschinski, 2009; Navaro-Yashin, 2012), and through new scientific and biomedical surveillance technologies (Braverman, 2010). Through carefully designed strategies of “force saturation” and “area domination,” military occupations transform everyday lived space into border zones that are constantly monitored and surveilled (Kanth and Ghosh, 2015: 35). Weizman (2012: 5–6) shows, for instance, how occupations have “architectural properties” in that they are sustained through a “continuous spatial reorganization” of streets, roads, highways, housing, walls, and enclosures that “shrink and expand the territory at will,” enabling certain movements while impeding others. Likewise, Bishara (2015: 34) demonstrates how Israeli control over roads “operates for Palestinians as a politics of disorientation” as Israeli soldiers strictly manage and make impossible Palestinian mobility by arbitrarily changing routes and erasing Palestinians from the landscape through road signage and infrastructure. Occupations can also operate through “‘frictionless’, high technology mechanisms” such as mobile phones and wireless internet, that “enclose” digital space and enable occupying regimes to exercise “[maximum] control with [minimal] responsibility” (Tawil-Souri, 2012: 27).

Scholars have emphasized questions of matter and materiality (Braverman, 2016; Navaro-Yashin, 2012) and resource sovereignty and access (Bhan, 2018) within contexts of occupation, foregrounding the roles occupying states play in transforming landscape features into tourism spectacles or pilgrimage sites in order to establish “divine right” over them and render them inaccessible to occupied populations (Bhan, 2018; Bhan and Trisal, 2017; Braverman, 2019; Mamdani, 2015). A clearer articulation of the intersections between space and law, or the worlding of law (Braverman et al., 2014), enables us to view how occupation and attendant legal regimes remake space, transforming familiar and intimate physical worlds into unfamiliar and carceral spaces. Hardly an inert entity, space can be reconfigured to enable “the physical, biological, and cultural destruction” of occupied populations (Woolford and Gacek, 2016: 400). The appropriation and fragmentation of space and the introduction of new regimes of mobility and immobility reorient people's understandings of home, intimacy, and familiarity (Peteet, 2017). At the same time, the renaming of places, roads, and historical landmarks forges new social and physical orders in an attempt to legitimize settler colonial interventions and unravel the historic continuities between particular places and people (Navaro-Yashin, 2012).

Scholars of occupation have examined the everyday forms of political subjectivity, collective agency, and popular resistance that emerge under conditions of occupation, with special attention to legal consciousness (Kelly, 2006), human rights activism (Allen, 2013), and everyday legality (Duschinski et al., 2018). Tobias Kelly (2008: 353) examines how what passes as “ordinary” in contexts of occupation is deeply shaped by and implicated in violence, while Lori Allen (2008) shows how resistance might mean “getting by” during prolonged periods of state violence and military abuse of power rather than totally succumbing to it. Focusing on the post-2008 unarmed resistance or intifada in Kashmir, Ganai (2019) analyzes the power of metaphors to shape political resistance narratives and forge political consciousness and identities. In her ethnography of everyday protest, Sharma (2020: 3) demonstrates how the “double interminability” of life under occupation “ordains that the inhabitants continue to perform an unending labour to assert a form of life where dying seems preferable to the idea of withdrawing from the struggle.” Through her focus on a working-class neighborhood, she shows how contributions to the resistance vary according to geography and location (Sharma, 2020). In the Palestinian context, Griffin (2015) demonstrates how post-Oslo resistance deprioritized leader-based movements in favor of grassroots organizing, in which Palestinian Freedom Rides in buses became explicit symbols of mass resistance to regimes of immobility while enabling protesters to make connections to internationally recognized symbols of apartheid and anti-racism resistance politics.

Scholars have also documented gendered forms of resistance that include both individual and collective modes of defiance (Junaid, 2019; Pandit, 2019) and a reassertion of their humanity (Misri, 2019). Despite their routine subjection to punitive measures that involve brutal torture, disappearances, mass blindings and or extrajudicial killings, men and women under occupations use tactics to resist through protests, specific forms of body movements, and “silence” or “restrained anger” (Peteet, 2017: 117). Kashmiri feminist scholars have extensively analyzed how occupation erodes the safety of homes, blurring distinctions between private and public spaces and transforming the ways in which women engage in political mobilization (Kaul and Zia, 2018: 34). Zia (2019) documents the extensive work of the Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Kashmir to track the struggles and resilience of Kashmiri women, many of them “half widows,” whose husbands have been disappeared by the Indian military. Public mourning rituals become sites of gendered resistance and grieving mothers become embodiments of defiance rather than passive victimization (Malik, 2018). Peteet (2017) focuses on how Palestinians who refused to leave their homes during the blockade of Gaza attempted to construct everyday normalcy despite increasing constriction of space, while Sarah Ihmoud (2019) analyzes how a group of Palestinian women, the murabitat, defy criminalization and harassment to continue their daily practice of traveling to the Al Aqsa compound (the Haram) for prayer and reflection to defend the holy grounds from Israeli incursion and increasing settler control. Interpreting this collective praxis as a strategy of “Palestinian feminist resistance, world-making and belonging,” Ihmoud (2019: 513) demonstrates how state surveillance and violence target women’s bodies and how women, in turn, engage in murtaba as an embodied strategy of “staying in place” and thus enacting popular sovereignty (Ihmoud, 2019: 538–9; see also Bishara, 2017).

As this body of scholarship indicates, occupation is both a legal and an affective category, and this dual nature heightens its possibilities and also its limitations as a framework of ethnographic analysis. Palestinian scholars have raised questions about the efficacy of legal language and the limits of occupation law, specifically, and international law, more broadly, in making sense of and responding to Israel’s “elimination politics” (Feldman, 2019) in Palestine. In a recent review essay, Ilana Feldman (2018) considers how historical scholarship since 2017 has grappled with complex issues surrounding the use of occupation language to analyze the legal and political realities in the West Bank and Gaza. This body of scholarship demonstrates several ways in which the language of occupation has the effect of legitimizing Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza. Occupation language necessarily frames Israeli presence in the territories as a temporary legal and political arrangement regulated by a clear international legal regime (Pappé, 2017), obscuring how Israel has for decades evaded international legal regulation, including strict legal prohibitions on civilian settlements (Erakat, 2019). Occupation language also provides a framework for Israel’s denial of the fact of occupation (Shafir, 2017) and focuses attention on legal questions associated with Israel’s responsibilities towards occupied populations, such as proportionality of force, rather than focusing attention on the legality of the occupation policy itself (see also Kauanui, 2018 on Hawaii). Judicial institutions operating under conditions of occupation, including both military and civilian court systems, contribute to the maintenance of state power by providing venues for individuals to seek redress for state harms while ultimately ensuring the operationalization of impunity for state perpetrators, the criminalization of dissent, and the legalization of the state’s apparatus of control (Duschinski and Ghosh, 2017; Duschinski and Hoffman, 2011; Geva, 2017, 2019; Hajjar, 2005). As Feldman summarizes, “Cases such as this reveal the limits of the law as a mechanism for effecting a serious change in occupation policy, let alone as a means to bring an end to an occupation” (2018: 1609). Citing Sfard’s insight that law “formalizes the systems of control and colonization, anchors them in an organized framework, and gives them legitimacy” (Sfard, 2018: 379), Feldman continues:

The work of human rights lawyers to contest individual actions within this system helps shore up the system. As an occupation administrator told a gathering of human rights defenders, “without human rights organizations, there is no occupation … your actions allow the occupation to go on” ([Sfard, 2018:] 21). Cognizant of this fact, Sfard devotes considerable space in The Wall and the Gate to reflecting on the complicity of his field in sustaining the occupation and asking whether human rights work should be undertaken at all. (Feldman, 2018: 1609)

As part of her broader critique of the rule of law framework, Noura Erakat identifies a “legal trap” in human rights advocacy – for example, how a narrow concern with a legal issue such as Israel’s regulation of work permits obscures the violence associated with the broader regime of racialized population control (Erakat, 2019: 622). Is it possible to use international law effectively, or more effectively, to address the violence of occupation and the meaning and power of occupied peoples’ struggles for justice? Or, as Erakat asks, is it possible to overcome the legal trap in legal terms (2019: 622)?

Keeping in mind the potential limits of legal frameworks and interventions as mechanisms for overcoming occupation policy, some Palestinian scholars have turned towards settler colonial frameworks to analyze Israel’s occupation as a settler colonial regime that seeks to compartmentalize, exclude, and ultimately eliminate Indigenous populations while converting Indigenous land into settler property (Barakat, 2018). This turn – which, for studies of occupation in Palestine as elsewhere, may be considered “a turn to where we already were” (Tuck, 2014, quoted in Rowe and Tuck, 2017) – has opened up new opportunities for drawing connections across comparative sites of settler violence while also bringing ethnographies of occupation more into conversation with Indigenous studies, feminist studies, queer theory, and critical race studies (see Sturm, 2017 on the anthropology of sovereignty and settler colonialism). Drawing on comparisons with settler eliminationist policies in South Africa and Algeria, Peteet’s (2017) work demonstrates how Israel has shifted its policy over time, from a classical apartheid model of forced labor in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli occupation in 1967 to a more recent approach of using foreign migrant labor while heightening its military constriction of space following the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. This shift has amplified the vulnerability of Palestinians by entangling them in the permit regime. Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015) analyzes Israel’s security policy through the lens of settler colonialism, demonstrating how Israel’s biopolitical governance, shaped by a “security theology” that operates through surveillance technologies and a “political economy of fear,” informs the most intimate contours of life and death in the settler colony. Such works reveal how Israel, as an occupying state, has resorted to settler colonial logics to erase pre-existing claims on land and territory. Scholars of settler violence in Palestine as elsewhere are increasingly pointing to how closer attention to processes of historic colonization and logics of settler colonialism need to remain centerstage in conversations about occupation, both when the term refers to a modality of resistance as in the Occupy movements, and when it is a set of legal and political strategies deployed by nation-states to exterminate or eliminate people and expropriate their land and resources (Barker, 2012; Wolfe, 2008).

Given these themes, this special issue examines the overlapping and intersecting logics of occupation and settler colonialism, asking if and how the modalities of violence shift or are experienced differently by populations across multiple sites. Through diverse case studies based in Palestine and Kashmir, the special issue demonstrates the need for context-driven analyses of occupation and settler colonialism, recognizing that the frameworks scholars use reflect shared understandings of the commonalities across sites as well as attention to the specificities of political organization and historicities of scholarship in particular sites.

Maryam Griffin’s article, “Transcending enclosures by bus: Public transit protests, frame mobility, and the many facets of colonial occupation,” documents the strategies Palestinians have used to resist Israeli state’s “strategies of immobilization” that have fragmented Palestinians while also curbing the “circulation of political thought.” She describes the way Palestinians have used protests centered on buses to reclaim mobilities in a context where settler buses have definitively shaped the “racial dimensions of settler colonialism” through a complex web of checkpoints and permit regimes. The Freedom Bus Rides enable Palestinians to draw from US histories of racial segregation while also allowing them to “counter social isolation” due to the fragmentation of space and communities. Griffin’s article focuses on the care needed to develop a language of resistance in occupied territories but also develop a “grammar” of Israeli rule that is attentive to the intersections of apartheid, colonialism, settler colonialism, and occupation. Indeed, a “tactical focus on transportation,” she argues, “provides a literal and symbolic vehicle to move among descriptor terms in order to transmit accounts of the Palestinian struggle beyond the Israel border-enclosures.” What do activists and engaged scholars achieve by using terms such as colonialism, apartheid, and colonialism interchangeably, she asks? In her carefully argued piece, she shows the power of forging solidarities across borders through the deployment of globally recognized conceptual categories such as apartheid and settler colonialism, and the need to reveal the global matrix of domination. Yet she also raises critical questions about how, and to what extent, these categories travel or translate across contexts, and with what effects. For instance, she asks if in the Palestinian case, the term apartheid, while generative of international solidarities, may potentially undermine more radical demands for decolonization or deoccupation.

Randa Wahbe’s article, “The politics of karameh: Palestinian burial rites under the gun,” uses the framework of Zionist colonialism to underscore the significance of race along with territory in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and its necropolitical violence against Palestinian dead bodies criminalized as terrorists. Drawing on notions of Zionist colonialism, Wahbe considers race as a key driver of violence against Palestinians and analyzes racialized bodies as “territories” for conquest. In her analysis, dead Paslestinian bodies become a locus of control and colonization, their reduced humanity reinforced by Israel’s denial of the Palestinian right of burial. Even as Israel attempts to control Palestinians “through death,” the kin of Palestinian martyrs who demand the return of the dead bodies uphold karameh, or the dignity of their dead, to resist the necropolitical violence of the Israeli state. To “retrieve” bodies,” she argues, is a “reclamation of dignity,” an act of resistance that continues to haunt the Israeli state long after the martyrs are dead.

While the Palestinian dead constitute grounds to stage resistance, Bhan and Bose explore how the counterinsurgency logics of an occupying regime recruit dogs as force multipliers in a war against Kashmiri civilians. “Canine counterinsurgency in Kashmir” demonstrates how dogs become vectors of militarized violence, the “first line of defense” against recalcitrant Kashmiris demanding their right to self-determination. Bhan and Bose outline how neoliberal values of pet-care in India merge with right-wing Hindu ethics of animal welfare to demonize Kashmiri Muslims as civilizationally inferior and therefore undeserving of human rights, including their fundamental UN-protected right to determine their political future through a plebiscite. The “bestiality” of an occupying regime is materialized through the flesh-tearing abilities of street dogs and erased in Indian discourses that celebrate them as national patriots and loyalists. Going past essentialist descriptors of dogs as inherently violent, the authors show how the logics of occupation “shape to a large extent the nature of dogs and their capacity for violence even as canine physicality (their teeth and power to lunge) [are] appropriated by the military as weapons of control.” However, rather than being passive recruits, dogs often refuse to conform to the roles scripted for them by the military, siding instead with Kashmir’s “subversive” populations.

Ghosh and Duschinski argue that India’s modes of counterinsurgency warfare in Kashmir produce an everyday legality of indefinite incarceration that intermingles the systems, techniques, and jurisdictions of criminal process, administrative detention, and military warfare. Tracing the conditions of permanent emergency in the region, they argue that the complete and prolonged suspension of fundamental liberties operates through a dense and shifting grid of repeated preventive detention orders, multiple criminal cases, and secret intelligence profiles, which are intermediated through police files and bureaucratic paperwork that circulate within and across a variety of discursive registers and jurisdictional locales – police stations, courts, district officials, and prisons. “In the counterinsurgency logic of permanent emergency and political containment,” they argue, “the criminality of the custodial body is materialized and produced through the repetitive cycles of paperwork … such that the more an individual contests by fighting, either in the courts of law or the courts of public opinion among a local, national, or international audience, the denser the paperwork becomes.” The grid of indefinite incarceration operates as what Ghosh and Duschinski term “paperwork warfare,” an instrument of legal terror masked by the banality of bureaucratic power that sustains the occupation across time.

Taken together, the contributions examine the ways in which race, place, law, death, and animality become contested terrains of debate and negotiation, revealing the multiple affective and legal registers through which violence is inflicted but also resisted. The articles contribute to what we argue is a context and site-based analysis of occupation and the ways in which it intersects with counterinsurgency warfare, necropolitics, legal terror, and settler colonialism.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Mona Bhan

Haley Duschinski

Author Biographies

Mona Bhan is the Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University. Her work explores the role of economic and infrastructural development in counterinsurgency operations and people’s resistance movements to protracted war and conflict. Her areas of specialization include border wars and counterinsurgency, militarism and humanitarianism, race, gender and religion, environmentalism and climate change, occupation and human rights, space and place, and water and infrastructure in Indian-occupied Kashmir. She is the author of Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? and the co-author of Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene. Bhan is also the co-editor of Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, an edited collection that foregrounds voices of Kashmiri scholars, and explores the social and legal logic of India’s occupation of Kashmir. In 2013, she co-founded the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, a feminist collective committed to combining academic and advocacy work on Kashmir. Bhan is co-editor of HIMALAYA, the flagship journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, and on the editorial board of AGITATE, published through the University of Minnesota Libraries. Her writings and interviews have appeared in several media and print outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, TRT, Kindle, Open Democracy, and Outlook.

Haley Duschinski is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. She is a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in law and power; occupation and resistance; and human rights and international justice in Kashmir. Duschinski co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) as well as special issues of Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law on comparative studies of occupation (2018) and HIMALAYA on war and suffering in Kashmir (2020). Her research has appeared in academic journals such as Social & Legal Studies, Political & Legal Anthropology Review, Cultural Studies, Race & Class, Memory Studies, Anthropology Today, Interventions, and Anthropological Quarterly, among others. She is a founding member of the Critical Kashmir Studies scholarly collective and an active member of the Kashmir Scholars Advocacy and Consultative Network (KSCAN). She presented expert testimony on Kashmir at the US congressional hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in November 2019.

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