Hagar Kotef
SOAS University of London, Politics And International Studies, Faculty Member
- Critical Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, Politics and Post-Colonial Theory, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, History of Political Thought, Political Theory, and 9 moreIsrael/Palestine, Activism, Cultural Studies, Gender, Imperialism, Postcolonial Theory, Settler Colonial Studies, Political Geography and Geopolitics, and Israel Studiesedit
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The paper unfolds a history of natives who, we argue, became settlers: Jews who lived in Palestine before the Zionist era. We trace their movement between natives and settlers against the backdrop of the rise of the Zionist project in... more
The paper unfolds a history of natives who, we argue, became settlers: Jews who lived in Palestine before the Zionist era. We trace their movement between natives and settlers against the backdrop of the rise of the Zionist project in Palestine and through this historical detailing also make a claim regarding the structure which is settler colonialism. Our case study runs counter to the idea that the category of settlers necessarily emerges through movement. Though settlers are very often defined as geographical outsiders, our case study concerns people who were transformed from natives into settlers without moving. The argument has conceptual, as well as political bearings. Conceptually we aspire to contextualize and problematize the settler/native binary, by showing it as a product of a never-complete process. Politically, returning to the moment of Jews in Israel who were not-yet settlerized is important for our current political moment, when the two states solution is gradually abandoned. It shows how modes of being-in-the land that bypassed the settler logic were negotiated, examines why they failed, and also opens a path for re-negotiating them.
Highly securitized sites, such as airports, are increasingly using screening methods designed to purge racial profiling from their practices. In these contexts, not only are profiling methods seen as unlawful, but are also perceived as... more
Highly securitized sites, such as airports, are increasingly using screening methods designed to purge racial profiling from their practices. In these contexts, not only are profiling methods seen as unlawful, but are also perceived as ineffective from a security perspective. Instead of basing security screenings on a perceived 'dangerousness' of social categories, these new screening methods aim to rely on automatic and objective criteria. This paper examines the shaping and effects of these security procedures, claiming that this redesigning of security technologies in accordance with practices which are presumably scientific, measurable and objective, has resulted in the creation of new categories of 'threatening' persons. Specifically, we show how the category of 'normal' has become central to security sorting and how, therefore – unintentionally yet necessarily – these procedures and technologies have become apparatuses of social normalization. People who deviate from given norms are thus singled out as potential security threats and are subjected to extended security probing, if not to outright violence. Tracing the effects of the increasing centrality of normalization processes to the management of securitized sites, this paper examines this reconfiguration of (ab)normality and explores the consequences of the securitization of social deviance. This paper offers a local analysis of one commonly-used airport security technology: full-body scanners. To follow on Salter's (2008b: xi) claim that 'airports have long been laboratories for new strategies of both technological and social control', the scanner provides a small theoretical experiment in thinking about state security – or perhaps a quite concrete case study thereof. In Foucauldian terminology, the scanner serves here as
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My contribution to a spacial issue of CI on Israelis Studying the Occupation
On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army while he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW) in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have... more
On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army while
he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW)
in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bullets
at a Jewish-Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, the
enveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similar
shootings that soon followed, possible. Situating the actions of AAtW within a much
wider context of securitization—of identities, movements, and bodies—we examine
strategies of resistance which are deployed in highly securitized public spaces. We claimthat
an unexpectedmatrix of identity in which abnormality is configured as security threat render
the bodies of activists especially precarious. The paper thus provides an account of the new
rationales of security technologies and tactics which increasingly govern public spaces.
he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW)
in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bullets
at a Jewish-Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, the
enveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similar
shootings that soon followed, possible. Situating the actions of AAtW within a much
wider context of securitization—of identities, movements, and bodies—we examine
strategies of resistance which are deployed in highly securitized public spaces. We claimthat
an unexpectedmatrix of identity in which abnormality is configured as security threat render
the bodies of activists especially precarious. The paper thus provides an account of the new
rationales of security technologies and tactics which increasingly govern public spaces.
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This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The... more
This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial) and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we see that European freedom-as-movement emerged on the backdrop of two imperial contrasts: (1) images of nomadism (in the contexts of America, and later Africa and the Middle East), which are only marginally considered in this paper, and (2) an assumed stagnation, that presumably prevailed in the East. Yet surprisingly, the image was often evoked to say something about Europe itself, rather than about its “others.” Therefore, it also reveals the corporeal dimensions of a concept of freedom that has underlaid a long liberal tradition. The crushed and squeezed feet of girls in China thus marked both a gendered and an imperial divide between those who can move freely, and therefore rule, and those who cannot rule because of their lack of mobility; yet at the same time, it undid this division by allowing the East and its stationariness to permeate Europe through a multiply foreign body: feminized, racially alien, and geographically distanced.
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Looking at one site, the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory, this article seeks to understand the mechanisms by which violence can present itself as justifiable (or justified), even when it materializes within... more
Looking at one site, the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory, this article seeks to understand the mechanisms by which violence can present itself as justifiable (or justified), even when it materializes within frames presumably set to annul it. We look at the checkpoints as a condensed microcosmos operating within two such frames. One is the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ (the checkpoints became a primary technology of control in the period following the beginning of the peace process), and the other is regulatory power (disciplinary and biopower), which in the Foucauldian framework presumably sidelines the violent form which sovereign power takes. We argue that the checkpoints, which dissect the Palestinian occupied territories into dozens of enclaves and which are one of the most effective and destructive means of control within the current stage of occupation, can be seen as more than obstacles in the way of Palestinian movement; we suggest that they also function as corrective technologies that are meant to fail. It is with this failure that violence can appear as justified. In order to show the operation of this embedded failure, we examine one mechanism operating within the checkpoints: ‘the imaginary line’. The imaginary line is both a component within, and an emblem of a mode of control that constantly undoes itself in order to summon violence. Since it is never visibly marked in the physical space, the imaginary line is bound to be unintentionally crossed, thereby randomly rendering Palestinians as ‘transgressors’ of the rule and thus facilitating eruptions of violence by the soldiers stationed at the checkpoints. This article proposes an analysis of this hidden demarcation of space in order to question the different relations between subjects and power which it both assumes and constitutes.
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Theory moves. It moves the very grounds on which a subject can presume to know the world by opening up experience itself (as opposed to what constitutes experience) to conceptualization. 1 And if theory, conceived as " philosophy turned... more
Theory moves. It moves the very grounds on which a subject can presume to know the world by opening up experience itself (as opposed to what constitutes experience) to conceptualization. 1 And if theory, conceived as " philosophy turned in on itself, " begins with the removal of a transcendental ego then it is also the opening up of thought to bodily movement—an orientation toward the productivity of language and corporeal experience in any form of conceptualization. 2 Materialized as such, theory can also move us not only to think differently but also to feel and be otherwise. Theory itself can also be moved from one situated site of reflection to another, unevenly dragging with it its conditions of production and normative values, to become what Edward Said called " travelling theory, " with all the epistemological complications and prolific and unexpected encounters that follow. 3 Hagar Kotef has given us a book about the place of movement in liberal theory that is also itself a kind of political theory in motion. Two books wrapped up into a remarkable whole that moves between, on the one hand, close readings in early liberal thought (mainly Hobbes and Locke) and, on the other, a conceptual mapping of the contemporary machinery of colonial occupation in Palestine/Israel; a movement between historical text and contemporary political technology that locates the problematic of physical locomotion at the heart of both early liberal dilemmas and their continued recapitulation in late colonial regimes. If one of the aims of the project is to rethink relations between the abstract and the concrete, then the regime of movement in the occupied Palestinian territories appears not as a " case-study " but as the very substance of the theoretical analysis. Instead of applying a set of theoretical categories to a political reality, Kotef reverses the optic: she tries to read theory from Palestine/Israel; a move that calls into question the very distinction between " reality " and " theory. " The effect is generative even when it is disjunctural. Yet this move between liberal thought and political technology, and its grappling with the urgent but fraught
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Hagar Kotef's enquiry into 'the politics of motion' is timely, excellently written and surely a must read for researchers not just of surveillance/control societies and of Israel-Palestine (the book's regional focus), but more broadly for... more
Hagar Kotef's enquiry into 'the politics of motion' is timely, excellently written and surely a must read for researchers not just of surveillance/control societies and of Israel-Palestine (the book's regional focus), but more broadly for scholars in cultural politics. Yet, this is not a book only for professionals. An enquiry into the politics of motion – as Kotef explains in the introduction – is an enquiry into forms of citizenship and non-citizenship and therefore, although not all sections are fully accessible, the book is stimulating reading for broader audiences attempting to comprehend how fetters on movement have to do with the kind of persons we are. In this sense Movement and the Ordering of Freedom is an important contribution to the growing interest in political subjectivity. Rather than keep spiralling around narratives of oppression that help very little to understand how to deterritorialise our oppressive existential territories, Kotef's cultural politics diverts from these conservative trends in the radical writing about Israel-Palestine. Kotef's book also has a unique value, which is to task the rescuing of traditional political theory to explain aspects of our present predicament. This appreciation has little to do with nostalgia. Wrongly, too many post-structuralist scholars in the social sciences and the humanities find no reason to maintain the philosophical dialogue with the past as one more vivid source of thought. Kotef's therefore provides a welcome contribution to contemporary political theory. The main argument of the book is that by looking into the liberal tradition in political theory we might be able to explain the relation between the kind of beings we are and the kind of regimes of movement that characterise our potentialities – these two systems are two interrelated faces of the same social formation. As Kotef states, 'Regimes of movement are thus never simply a way to control, to regulate, or to incite movement; regimes of movement are integral to the formation of different modes of being' (p. 15). Kotef unfolds and demonstrates this main argument by discussing four propositions (see summary on pp. 3–6): (i) subject-positions and the
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Hagar Kotef has written an insightful, thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging book that brings a fresh theoretical perspective on the intersections between borders, mobility and liberalism. Her proposition is that freedom and violence... more
Hagar Kotef has written an insightful, thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging book that brings a fresh theoretical perspective on the intersections between borders, mobility and liberalism. Her proposition is that freedom and violence are two sides of the same liberal coin that manifest in the long-standing governmental effort to control human movement. In a compelling and wide-ranging analysis that moves from Hobbes and Locke to Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories, Kotef maps the development of liberal accounts of freedom. These, she holds, have always encompassed an embodied will and capacity to move, but have also assumed that certain kinds of unruly movements ought to be controlled via systems of enclosure and restraint. Ultimately, Kotef argues, that the liberal freedom to move—so often championed as reality for some and aspiration for others—demands our engagement with the forms of violence enacted in its name. Freedom for some implies dispossession, displacement and exclusion for others in ways that are constitutive of the liberal tradition itself. The point, she argues, is not to abandon aspirations for freedom of movement, but rather to more fully account for what is entailed in genuinely alternative 'principles of mobilities' (p. 135). Movement and the Ordering of Freedom makes an impressive contribution to a literature spanning Border Studies, Mobility and Migration Studies, and a range of interdisciplinary efforts to come to terms with the spatial and architectural dimensions of power and govern-mentality. Much work within these fields has pointed to increasingly polarised hierarchies of human mobility where the facilitation of some forms of movement is implicated in the containment of others. The strength of Kotef's book is to anchor these dualities and apparent paradoxes not so much in the present era of neoliberal globalisation but in a much longer tradition of liberal thought. Indeed Kotef argues that a specifically liberal impulse to contain certain types of movements (in the name of order, civilisation and enlightenment) was present well before the state capacity existed to do so in the form of effective border controls. It was the unruly movements of indigenous populations, for instance—a form of movement (nomadism) perceived to lack order or to enable 'improvement' —that was targeted as part of civilising and colonising missions. The vagrancy of the poor was also contained in ways that enabled and served to justify the liberal freedoms of an elite. The value of Kotef's analysis is that it allows us to see contemporary expressions of liberal governance that sometimes appear as products of their time—as reactions to specific 'crises' for instance, or as outcomes of specific technological developments—in terms of a much longer historical tradition. In this respect the book has a striking political impact: Kotef demonstrates the degree to which the liberal impulse to freedom and violence is embedded in the political cultures of liberal democracies and she draws our attention to what is at stake in challenging the liberal 'regime of movement'. While Kotef's empirical focus rests on the containment of movement in the occupied Palestinian territories, her broader project is