Introduction
A professor of ours once told the story of an instructor who, on the first day of a course on international politics, began by quoting Thucydides, from his History of the Peloponnesian War, that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. The instructor declared that this is international politics, then walked out of the room to signal there was no further conversation to be had on the topic. We begin with this anecdote because, in a way, this volume reinforces that notion, of the rule of power in late modernity. However, as the chapters in this volume will describe, power expresses itself in many different ways: settler colonialism, neoliberal governance, liberal peacebuilding, institution-building, foreign aid and its inflections of power in terms of security and political economy. But in another way, this book challenges this sort of Thucydidean power politics inasmuch as it recognizes that the âweakâ do not simply âsuffer what they mustâ but actâas social and political agentsâin terms that we refer to as the resistance that co-constitute power. This volume explores some of those ways in particular in Palestine today.
Some observe that the rule of power in late modernity relates critically to the power and politics of life and death. Achille Mbembe (2003) calls this ânecropoliticsââthe subjugation of life to the power of death. This has unique effects on the colonized indigenous because in the era of necropower, as Mbembe describes, weapons are deployed âin the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living deadâ (40). Mbembe identifies this as a key element of late-modern colonial occupation, and argues that the âmost accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestineâ (27). And he describes three major characteristics in relation to the working of the specific terror formation he calls necropower: territorial fragmentation, vertical sovereignty, and splintering occupation. 1 This rule of power and the local dissent discussed below takes Mbembeâs description as a critical point of departure.
Expressions of Power in Palestine: International Governance
The logic and effects of international governance is one critical way to observe and understand the rule of power in Palestine. This volume considers expressions of the rule of power in two particular ways: settler colonialism and neoliberalism. First is settler colonialism. Power is expressed through the ongoing settler colonial present in Palestine (Salamanca et al. 2012). In this volume, we understand settler colonialism as a global, transnational phenomenon that is as much a thing of the present as a thing of the past (Veracini 2015), distinct from other forms of colonialism in several ways. One critical feature is that, unlike colonial agents such as traders, soldiers, or governors, settler colonizers âcome to stayâ (Wolfe 1999) with the intention to permanently occupy. Settlers are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity, asserting sovereignty over indigenous lands (Veracini 2010). In this way, settler colonialism is not just an event but a structure âthat persists in the ongoing elimination of indigenous populations and extension of state sovereignty and juridical control over their landsâ (Barker and Lowman, n.d.).
Wolfe (2006) underscores another key feature of settler colonialism, that it is inherently eliminatory (387). And while settler colonialism has typically employed the organizing grammar of race, Wolfe argues that, regardless of what settlers may say, the primary motive for elimination is access to territory. âTerritoriality is settler colonialismâs specific, irreducible elementâ (388). This logic of elimination animates both the negative goal of the dissolution of native societies and the positive goal of constructing a new colonial society on expropriated land. As Wolfe puts it:
settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. (388)
As Veracini (2010) observes, this marks a critical distinction between settler colonialism and other forms of colonialism, in that settlers want indigenous people to vanish (while making use of their labor before they are made to disappear). The âpeaceful settler hides behind the ethnic cleanserâ who enters a ânew, empty land to start a new life.â Indigenous people ânaturally and inevitably âvanishâ; it is not settlers that displace them.â In this way, âsettler colonialism obscures the conditions of its own productionâ (14).
The ânaturalâ and âinevitableâ vanishing of the indigenous population points to what Wolfe (1999) emphasizes, not the indispensability but the dispensability of the indigenous person in a settler colonial context:
The primary object of settler-colonization is the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labour with it. Though, in practice, Indigenous labour was indispensable to Europeans, settler-colonization is at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement. The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct â invasion is a structure not an event. (163)
The role of land is central in settler colonial struggles. In Palestine, the legacy of settler colonialism is that it has destroyed in order to replace and has renamed in order to erase. 2 And yet not simply to replace but a process of replacement that âmaintains the refractory imprint of the native counter-claimâ (Wolfe 2006, 389). Settler colonialism endeavors to recast indigeneity onto the settler, requiring the elimination and erasure of the native population. This is another key feature: settler colonialism seeks its own end in that it trends toward the ending of colonial difference in the form of a supreme and unchallenged settler state and people. However, as Barker and Lowman (n.d.) point out, âthis is not a drive to decolonize but to eliminate the challenges posed to settler sovereignty by indigenous peoplesâ claims to land by eliminating indigenous peoples themselves and asserting false narratives and structures of settler belonging.â
The second expression of power this volume considers is the neoliberal political and economic order defining appropriate behavior in late modernity, seen most clearly in Palestine in the state-building project. 3 Over the last twenty-five years, since the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the rule of power has been displayed through institution-building agendas and commitments, expressing itself in terms of humanitarianism, foreign aid, and dependency, as well as political economic and security sector terms. A critical feature of this volume is how the chapters consider the ways settler colonialism and neoliberalism interact with each other to express a very specific kind of power that rules in Palestine today.
There has been a robust conversation in recent years identifying the role of neoliberalism and the liberal peace thesis in contemporary state-building, peacebuilding, and development. In his essay âInternational Peacebuilding and the âMission Civilisatrice,ââ Paris (2002) notes the liberal bias in peacebuilding with its resemblance to old imperial modes of global governance: âOne way of thinking about the actions of peacebuilders is to conceive of liberal market democracy as an internationally-sanctioned model of âlegitimateâ domestic governanceâŠas the prevailing âstandard of civilizationâ that states must accept in order to gain full rights and recognition in the international communityâ (650).
One feature of the liberal peace project in particular explored by Vivienne Jabri (2010) is its characteristic as interventionist, cosmopolitan, and largely in the hands of Europeans and North Americans. She argues it contains a disciplinary, governmentalizing effect that results in a dispossession not simply of ...