Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine

Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine

Link to book on publisher's site: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30769

Book description: The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war.

Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.

February 29, 2024 3:00p-4:30p 

Hybrid Zoom/ 1957 E st. NW Washington, DC 20052 Room 505

Sign in to Google to save your progress. Learn more
Last Name
First Name
E-mail address
Affiliation
Clear selection
Submit
Clear form
Never submit passwords through Google Forms.
This form was created inside of The George Washington University. Report Abuse