Lisa Bhungalia, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Lisa Bhungalia (LB): Elastic Empire tells the story of how aid is also war, which I examine through an ethnographic accounting of how the embedding of US counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into civilian aid flows to the West Bank and Gaza Strip has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed. In so doing, I wanted to tell a story of the US security state often not told—not one of tanks and bombs but instead one taking shape through the interlacing of aid and law.
I had not, however, originally intended to write this book. Rather it presented itself to me somewhat unexpectedly, now many years ago, during a conversation with an interlocutor in Nablus. Not long into our conversation, my interlocutor, who I thought worked in a nearby UNRWA camp, revealed that he had left his UNRWA job and now worked as part of an oversight team for a USAID-funded project in the West Bank. The new job “pays well,” he told me, “but we have to sign the paper.” Embarrassed the reference had been lost on me I inquired, “the paper?” “Yes,” he repeated. “We all have to sign it. You know, to say that we aren’t terrorists.” The “paper” and passing references to it became a recurring theme in a number of interviews I conducted across the West Bank in subsequent weeks. I finally decided to look more decisively into the paper and why exactly it was so important to those with whom I was speaking in Palestine. Some rather cursory research on the subject took me straight back to Washington. The paper—or anti-terrorism certification—is connected to Executive Order (EO) 13224, signed into force by President Bush in the aftermath of September 11th. This marked the beginning of Bush’s declared “war on terrorism financing”—a war that has metastasized the world over in the decades since. It was this encounter in Nablus that set into motion a series of questions that would preoccupy me for years and served as the foundation for this book.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
LB: Elastic Empire is part of a cross-disciplinary conversation about the shape-shifting nature of border, enforcement, and legal regimes as states bend and flex across extraterritorial domains to creatively refashion jurisdiction and excise certain bodies from political space. The concept of elastic empire, as I develop it in this book, both draws on but also expands in new directions an analysis of the elasticity of state and imperial power as they manifest in global counterterrorism and enforcement regimes (and their uneven application). The main protagonist in this story is US counterterrorism law, its transnational workings and intimate embeddings into the material, social, and political worlds of those far away, through contractual relationships of aid. Tracing transnational operations of the US security state, I examine how the tethering of US terrorism laws and blacklists to civilian aid flows and monetary transactions around the world gives rise to a highly flexible and versatile mode of sovereign power, or what I call the elastic workings of sovereignty, that bends and fixes in particular sites and onto certain bodies.
In foregrounding these “quieter” articulations of imperiality, I want to tell a story of US empire not often told. It is not one of spectacular, episodic displays of military force and violence as exhibited so forcefully in the early aughts, nor one of lethal, kinetic violence being unleashed on starving Palestinians as they queue for food aid at US-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution sites (also kill zones). Rather, this is a quieter accounting of US power but one that nevertheless indelibly transfigures the lives of those caught in the crosshairs. US empire, I argue is not only “in the details,” as Catherine Lutz has argued, but also in the hazy, liminal, undeclared (and in this case “humanitarian”) spaces in and through which US power often takes hold. This constructive blurring is at the heart of elastic sovereignty.
The EO that presented itself to me in Nablus is connected to a much broader legal labyrinth of counterterrorism laws, infrastructures, and blacklists that prohibit and criminalize material support to individuals, groups, and entities the United States designates as “terrorist”—or “otherwise associated” with an entity classified as such—transposing, in turn, expansive regimes of surveillance, sanction, and punishment far beyond the sites and domains where the US claims jurisdiction. Bush’s order, and the broader counterterrorism regime to which it is connected, presented itself everywhere in Palestine. This law-war architecture sowed division between universities and the municipalities in which they are situated; it disrupted the contiguous development of water infrastructure and roads; it emerged in Gaza’s greenhouses and prohibited collaboration among Palestinian health providers; it stymied youth democracy projects, and spurred boycotts. It produced particular kinds of landscapes while preempting and disallowing others. Tracing the transnational operation of US terrorism law as it embeds into aid flows, Elastic Empire demonstrates how the US security state operates 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. In so doing, this book contributes to a growing conversation about the evolving technologies of late-modern war, contemporary imperial formations, and the entanglements of humanitarian interventions and violence, especially as the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror have become increasingly indeterminate.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
LB: I have long been interested in the relationship between humanitarianism and violence, and in many ways, Elastic Empire speaks directly to this longstanding interest. At the same time, this book travels along a somewhat different trajectory: it traces the evolving technologies, tactics, and instruments of post-9/11 warfare dwelling centrally in the landscapes and geographies where US shadow wars are carried out. Yet, even as Elastic Empire focuses on the context of Palestine, the story it tells also exceeds this site. The global counterterrorism architecture explored in this book (a composite of ever-expanding terrorism blacklists, sanctions regimes, counterterrorism laws, and enforcement technologies) constitutes a key feature of our contemporary politico-juridical order. Today most states and supranational institutions host their own respective terrorism lists and have passed emergency laws criminalizing an expansive array of activity deemed to be associated with material support for terrorism, giving rise to new regimes of global security law, as Gavin Sullivan has explored.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
LB: It is my hope that this book will appeal to a broad readership crosscutting geography, anthropology, law, and Middle East and Palestine studies, as well as offer something to those interested in the evolving character of post-9/11 warfare, sovereignty, and violence. Equally, I see this book as but one contribution to a growing body of critical transdisciplinary scholarship—what Madiha Tahir elsewhere has called “empire studies from below”—which derives theory and analysis of contemporary warfare and imperial violence from and within the sites, landscapes, and bodies on which this violence is meted out.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
LB: My next project extends my research on extraterritorial sovereignties and global security regimes through a transnational study of contemporary sanctions and security watchlists as these operate in the banking and financial sectors. A multi-sited ethnographic study that traverses the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, it traces how sanctions and blacklisting practices travel and embed in global financial circuits, banking systems, and payment infrastructures, infusing state security regimes into financial circuits that transit the globe. I am also developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases.
J: The world has changed somewhat significantly since the publication of your book. This includes, not least, Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, massive dispossession and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and a second Trump presidency. How does Elastic Empire speak to this moment (or not)?
LB: My book was published just a few months after Israel began its genocidal war in Gaza, which has occurred in tandem with the escalation of Israel’s military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. For some, it might seem that a story that foregrounds a “quieter” war waged through aid infrastructure, law, and bureaucracy diminishes in the context of more overt and spectacular displays of genocidal military violence as meted out on Palestinians over the last two years (and well before). Equally, in Gaza right now, humanitarian aid, as Mark Griffiths observes, “is not obstructed through a convoluted bureaucracy of lists and designations” (though the latter was central to Israel’s latest attempt to dismantle UNRWA); rather aid is physically blocked at the borders by Israel. “Violence here,” as Griffiths rightfully suggests, “is not asphyxiatory”—a concept I develop in my book to capture the specific economies of violence enacted through the point of the terrorism list. Rather violence, in the current context, both in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, is immediate, overt, and spectacularly destructive.
At the same time, Elastic Empire, I hope, offers two relevant lessons for the current state of things. First, it presents a detailed accounting of violences that have long been integral to the humanitarian aid regime in Palestine. There cannot be a return to the status quo without a reckoning of the violence that has always been inherent to and produced by the foreign aid system. Second, the counterterrorism regime on which I focus in this book has far from diminished; rather its tools and instruments of repression have only been further fortified the world over. In short, the slow but long war that I trace in this book, I worry, is all too relevant. Elastic Empire, I hope, can serve as a guide for navigating the transnational dynamics, forces, and contracts that have long sustained Israel’s project of settler colonial dispossession while equally holding open the possibility of how the ties that have been integral to upholding regimes of repression can also come undone.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 14 to 20)
ELASTIC EMPIRE
This book examines the shape-shifting nature of sovereignty and enforcement regimes as states, and in this case, the United States, distend into global space, folding geographically distant populations into their ambit of power while dually exempting them from political life (they remain subjects, not citizens). The concept of elasticity, even if not termed as such, has captured the attention of geographers and border scholars alike to theorize the creative refashioning of state jurisdiction and shape-shifting border regimes as states bend and flex across extraterritorial domains, de-linking legal and territorial borders to creatively refashion jurisdiction and excise certain bodies from political space. Here we see a double move: the casting out of enforcement regimes across transnational sites and domains and the production of spaces of enforcement “‘on the inside’ absent the law.” The border moves, collapses, extends, and proliferates with different bodies and to different ends.
[……]
The concept of elastic empire, as I develop it here, draws on and expands in new directions an analysis of the elasticity of state and imperial power as it manifests in global counterterrorism and enforcement regimes (and their uneven application) rather than through an analysis of the border as it relates to state immigration and enforcement regimes per se. The main protagonist in this story is US terrorism law, its transnational workings and intimate embeddings into the material, social, and political worlds of those afar through contractual relationships of aid. The descriptor “elastic” is utilized to hold at the fore of analysis relations of connectivity that remain across global space, even if transmogrified through different institutional forms and administrative and civilian constellations.
Following the law, Elastic Empire traces how the tethering of US terrorism law to civilian aid flows and monetary transactions around the world gives rise to a highly flexible and versatile mode of sovereign power, or what I call the elastic workings of sovereignty, that bends and fixes in particular sites and onto certain bodies. Here jurisdiction exceeds territory, akin to Stuart Elden’s imperio—a boundless, limitless power containing no spatial boundary—that offers a useful entry point for considering how imperial power tethers and affixes to mobile subjects scattered across global space. Equally, it is important to qualify that imperio does not operate in a limitless and even- handed manner across space. Rather it manifests in a highly uneven fashion: at times the security state projects a hyper- intensified presence (and regime of punishment) vis- à- vis hypervisible subjects; other times it is entirely absent. The workings of the security state ebb and flow differentially. This differential, punctuated, uneven presence and absence pivots on and is correlated to the racialized coding of particular subject populations as suspect/safe, dangerous/trustworthy, familiar/queer. The accounting of elastic imperiality undertaken in this book tracks the sovereignty configurations and constellations produced through imperio or imperial geographies of US war-making, militarization, and encounter and informed by racial economies of threat and disorder resulting less in an “everywhere war” and more a punctuated mode of warfare and imperial presence.
In foregrounding these quieter articulations of imperiality, Elastic Empire tells a story of US empire not often told. It is not one of spectacular, episodic displays of military force and violence as exhibited so forcefully in the early aughts. Rather, this is a quieter accounting of US power but nevertheless one that indelibly transfigures the lives of those subjects caught in the cross hairs; it is one that emerges in the interstices and infrastructures of daily life, in a library, a greenhouse, in the halls of foreign municipal councils, in local elections and in Gaza- bound milk and biscuits. US empire, I argue, is not only “in the details,” à la Lutz, but also in the hazy, liminal, and in this case “humanitarian” spaces in and through which US power often takes hold. This constructive blurring is at the heart of elastic sovereignty. The insidious work elastic geographies do is to obfuscate the “facts of domination.” This is the story, my book contends, of how late modern empire works. Tracking the work of the US security state from within Palestine over the course of nearly a decade, Elastic Empire constructs a different theoretical apparatus of war and empire—it tells us something significant about the shape- shifting nature of imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.
Equally, Elastic Empire moves beyond a singular focus on the topological workings of the US security state, and US aid specifically, to make a broader claim about evolving techniques of population management under conditions of late modern settler–colonial rule and evolutionary tactics of late modern war. The Oslo Accords (1993–2001) introduced significant changes to the political and economic structures governing Palestinians’ lives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While the trappings of a “self-rule” government were set up in the form of the Palestinian Authority (PA), on the one hand, a nongovernmental sector boomed on the other, with the work of both sustained by foreign aid flows subject to Israeli political calculation. Even though the Oslo peace process has officially collapsed, the political arrangement it enacted remains. Accordingly, questions of who rules and how governing power is asserted over the Palestinian population today do not yield easy answers. Power and authority blend and merge: a Palestinian police uniform signals Israeli coordination; a newly paved USAID road likely means a settlement has been accommodated; and a development expert in Ramallah is a reminder of the foreign imprint on the making of Palestine.
Thus, the predicaments facing Palestinians today are exceedingly complex. The post-Oslo period has seen the growth of a governance apparatus that has extended the reach of Israel’s security regime through institutions of “self-rule,” development, and humanitarian relief, while undermining and obstructing collective modes of politics and political mobilization through, among other things, the production of new kinds of individualized, professionalized, self- regulating colonial subjects. Perhaps most disconcerting for many in Palestine, and indeed the subject of much internal discussion, are the ways that Palestinians have themselves come to participate in the reproduction of a regime of governance that has done little to alter their status as subjects under protracted settler– colonial rule and indeed much to sustain it.
Palestine, then, speaks more broadly to evolutionary tactics of late modern warfare and liberal counterinsurgency, which aim to reshape, reconstitute, and pacify populations through various war, policing, and interventionary practices “geared at governing the political aspirations of target societies.” In the transition from colonial modernity to the postcolonial era, as Vivienne Jabri argues, the postcolonial subject has, in each moment she has made a claim to politics, come “face to face with global operations of power that seek to control and govern.” Such is true of the Palestinian colonial condition. An expansive foreign aid regime has developed over the course of three decades in Palestine to build the institutional foundation for a putative Palestinian state, on the one hand, and provide critical humanitarian relief for a population besieged on the other. That regime is itself, as Jabri might argue, part and parcel of a war infrastructure that has banished politics. Not lost on Palestinians is how almost any activity, behavior, or act of speech that challenges their subjugated position within the current political order is scripted as a security threat and equated to terrorism. Put differently, Palestinians have suffered a double dispossession not only in terms of the ongoing loss of material resources (land, territory, water, homes), but so too of capacity for politics and political subjectivity. As subjects targeted by liberal interventionary forces, Palestinians are reduced, per Jabri, to a “division between culprits and victims, where the former come to be defined as the enemy [here those imbued with the terrorist moniker] while the latter constitute . . . a mass to be protected or rescued.” Within this schema, as Jabri suggests, there is not a “right to politics, which assumes agency and distinct subjectivity framed in the contingencies of social and political life, but a life lived as mass, simply one element in a category inscribed elsewhere and by others.”
The deepening securitization of aid, this book demonstrates, is part and parcel of the refinement and evolution of liberal warfare and counterinsurgency. Here we see not only the exercise of a brutal sovereign power—although this certainly persists—but so too the calibration of Palestinian life and the delimiting of Palestinian political capacities through the infrastructures of aid on which Palestinians are largely reliant. The various processes traced throughout this book—the collection of personal information, mapping of coordinates of land plots, development of internal policing and reporting systems, intelligence gathering and the forging of alliances and divisions between various social groups—are all involved in ever- more sophisticated methods of identification, mapping, controlling, dividing, and making legible this population that has time and time again refused whole sale defeat.
In tracing these developments, Elastic Empire illustrates how strategies of population control and management do not only extend to the prison or the checkpoint or take shape exclusively in the form of separation walls and settlements; they are also being worked through the moral technologies, humanitarian infrastructures, and systems of monitoring that have become the means for administering a population living under protracted military rule. As such, war can and should be understood as occurring not simply in the meeting of two adversaries on a battlefield but, perhaps more sinisterly, through the humanitarian regimes that have become the means for governing the displaced, the refugee, the poor, and the “vulnerable.” Accordingly, Elastic Empire demonstrates how regimes of war and violence are reproduced through mechanisms, infrastructures, and institutions purportedly designed to promote stability and peace. More broadly, it lends insight into the multiple forms of violence that exist within our concept of war—not only the spectacular and the crisis- laden, but also the mundane, bureaucratic, routinized, and largely concealed.