Table of Contents for Elastic Empire
Introduction
The Introduction develops the conceptual foundation for the elastic workings of US empire in Palestine through the entanglements of aid, law, and war. This conceptual framework is developed through three interrelated points. First, it analyzes the operation of imperial power in a putatively postcolonial world. Second, it argues that US empire is best understood as a topological formation that projects security and war power through opaque arrangements and blended genres of rule—in this case contracted relationships of aid—that render Washington's counterterrorism regime intimately embedded in the lifeworlds of those afar. Third, examining legal infrastructures of the US financial war on terror, it establishes how the tethering of US terrorism law to aid flows blurs the lines between war and relief. Together, these points establish the contours of the argument made in this book that the story of aid is also a story of war.
1.War Through Law
Chapter 1 examines the evolution of the US material support ban from the 1990s to the present and the centrality of Palestine to its development. It argues that the 1990s, and the Oslo Accords in particular, constituted a critical period in which the legal foundation for US material support law was established. More broadly, it shows how the material support ban serves a key mechanism through which elastic imperiality operates. Codifying into legal practice a preemptive model of punitive governance that authorizes state violence on bodies conscripted as threats-in-waiting, this body of law expands the scope and reach of the prosecutorial web of the US security state.
2.Elastic Sovereignty
Chapter 2 examines empirically how the US security state operates in Palestine through the interlacing of law, aid, and war. Tracing how terrorism financing law travels through an assemblage of aid actors, intermediaries, and contracting agents operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it shows how the US security apparatus is exported into Palestine via aid flows, enrolling civilian aid agents in the undertaking of policing surveillance functions on behalf of the United States and creating new regimes of exclusion and modes of fragmentation across multiple scales. Examining in empirical detail how elastic imperiality works, this chapter shows how Palestinians are objects of empire, though in ways often unrecognized, while at the same time holding open the promise and possibility of how the topological ties that bind can, and often do, come undone.
3.Work of the List
Chapter 3 zeroes in on the political work of terrorism lists, delving further into their political and material implications for the racialized bodies and landscapes on which they touch down. This chapter examines how the technology of the terrorism list in Palestine is part and parcel of the amalgam of counterinsurgency forces that work on and through Palestinians to fragment, pacify, and render them more easily governable in the long arc of dispossession. Drawing on extensive ethnographicwork, this chapter centers on the punitive regimes of policing and surveillance terrorism listsinaugurated in Palestine, but also on how Palestinians refuse the security logics they impose.
4.Afterlives and Reverberations
Chapter 4 examines a different iteration of US empire in Palestine: its afterlives and reverberations in the wake of the official "end" of US aid to Palestinians during the Trump era. Rather than ameliorating pressure on the Palestinians, this period saw the intensification of the counterterrorism paradigm across donor aid practice more broadly. This chapter shows how the securitized practices, technologies, and norms the United States long promoted and normalized in Palestine have lived on, metastasized, and, perhaps most significantly, established a new aid-governing norm for Western-aligned donor intervention in Palestine. It considers what remains living and breathing in absence—what kind of violence is embedded in a world that cannot be returned.
5.Asphyxiatory Violence
Chapter 5 tracks a culminating moment in the long war traced in this book. It chronicles the story of six Palestinian organizations designated as "terrorist organizations" by Israel's Ministry of Defense in October 2021. It examines how Israel's classification enacts asphyxiatory violence on the designated through a gradual process of constriction, one that progressively erodes conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation. The visual and temporal registers that slow, debilitating processes of asphyxiation evade, this chapter argues, make blacklisting practices, sanctions regimes, and terrorism designations an increasingly preferred method of warfare, most notably for liberal settler–colonial powers that seek to manage the field of visibility for their crimes.
Conclusion
The Conclusion returns us to questions regarding the optics and redistributions of contemporary warfare and late modern empire. It explores how the US counterterrorism powers have been emboldened and expanded by the Biden administration even as US wars are proclaimed to be winding down. Particular attention is paid to how Washington's counterterrorism regime has been further ensconced into resuscitated US aid flows to Palestinian refugees through the United Nations for Relief and Works Agency. Tracing how US wars are proliferating through contracted security arrangements, sprawling surveillance and intelligence infrastructures, and in emergency counterterrorism laws increasingly normalized and global in scope, the Conclusion argues that far from waning, US war capacities are being redistributed through more opaque arrangements that make these wars even more difficult to track. This book, it argues, is one attempt to put these wars back on the map.