Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)

__Waste Siege__ offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank―including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel―rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet. "In 1995, with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, Israel transferred responsibility for waste management in the West Bank to the nascent Palestinian government. While electricity, water, roads, and telecommunications remained largely controlled by Israel building new waste infrastructures and controlling the movements and effects of Palestinians' wastes became central to efforts to demonstrate the Authority's ability to be state-like. Waste Siege asks what is made possible, and what other ways of being are foreclosed, in the rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout of decades of struggle to live a livable life among waste. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade highlights the significance of the presence of multiple governing authorities in the West Bank-including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and political groups, as well as Israeli control-shows how all of these actors rule Palestinian lives by waste siege"-- Provided by publisher Cover Contents Preface Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation Map INTRODUCTION 1 COMPRESSION: How to Make Time at an Occupied Landfill 2 INUNDATED: Wanting Used Colonial Goods 3 ACCUMULATION: Toxicity and Blame in a Phantom State 4 GIFTED: Unwanted Bread and Its Stranger Obligations 5 LEAKAGE: Sewage and Doublethink in a “Shared Environment” CONCLUSION Notes References Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z