Necropolitics in Palestine: a socio-spatial analysis of practices of suspended death and grassroots resistance.

This doctoral research examines the colonial spatial and social
configurations of death in Occupied Palestine. The research
has two key objectives: 1) to analyse the settler-colonial
mobilisation of suspended death as an instrument that targets
Palestinian social and political life; and 2) to critically examine
forms of Palestinian grassroots resistance to necropolitical
formations (e.g., in collective mourning rituals).
My focus will begin with archival and legal research to
reconstruct a historical account of British and Israeli practices of
detaining dead Palestinian and Arab bodies as a tool for social
division. I will document the ways that detaining the dead has
been practiced by colonial forces in Palestine since 1945. I will
then deploy visual mapping, 3D modelling, and geolocation
analysis to examine clandestine sites - commonly known as
"Cemeteries of Numbers" - where deceased Palestinian and
Arab bodies are still detained by the Israeli military. This part will
consist of ethnographic fieldwork informed by Palestinian
grassroots initiatives that seek to locate and retrieve these
bodies. My involvement will be conducted at a safe distance,
comprising remote and field investigations into such sites and in
their geopolitical, spatial and social contexts.
This conceptually and methodologically innovative project will
contribute to wider geographical debates on colonialism and
decolonising by producing a detailed, site-specific study that
investigates the wider phenomenon of colonial necropolitics, a
mode of governing whose prevalence has grown significantly in
the "postcolonial" world.