Periodic Report Summary 1 - FABRIC OF LIFE (Power networks and fractured modernities: a political history and geography of electrification in Palestine-Israel) The project objectives are to: (a) document, analyze and produce an innovative history of Palestine/Israel in which infrastructures play a central socio-political and economic role in directing, organizing and shaping space and everyday life; (b) address the actual theoretical and empirical lacunae on electricity and road infrastructure in both Middle East Studies and social science research focusing on infrastructure; and (c) develop a conceptualization of infrastructure that destabilizes and reconfigures existing boundaries between technology and society, the material and the symbolic or the human and non human and how this particular assemblage is territorialized in Palestine/Israel.Since the beginning of the project, significant attention has been paid to develop an appropriate theoretical and methodological framework that is capable of historicizing, politicizing and materializing the study of infrastructure. This task has been guided by two fundamental considerations. On the one hand, the framework should be able to inform, and be informed by, the complexity and richness of the empirical case study. And on the other, it should be able to address and meet the proposed theoretical and empirical objectives. To do this my focus has been on creating a constant dialogue between the findings obtained from fieldwork (including archival research, interviews and review of the pertinent technopolitical reports) and an evolving analytical framework shaped by the knowledge produced through readings, discussions, dissemination and the feedback generated in this process. The main result achieved so far has been the construction of a flexible and interdisciplinary framework to explore the assemblage of infrastructures (roads and electricity) and to take into consideration how the triad of infrastructure, space and population is produced through, but also productive of a variety of socio-economic and political rationalities. As such, the project has been focused on considering the political uses of infrastructures and its transformations starting from the British Mandate in the early decades of the 20th century, through the structural plans of the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund of the 21st century. Exploring debates and disputes over production, distribution, control, regulation, and access, has made it possible to reformulate core questions about power and sovereignty and their various instantiations in Palestine/Israel. In doing so, the study has engaged with the history and geography of those configurations of power and reciprocally, uses electricity as a lens onto their structure and functioning. More specifically, the project has paid particular attention to historical dimensions as well as discursive and material practices of infrastructure development. As such, it has engaged in a comprehensive study of actors (human and non-human) that include power grids, engineers, consultants, state institutions, entrepreneurs, donor agencies, NGOs, producers, consumers, etc. while simultaneously considering how these technologies enroll spaces and populations in larger processes of globalization and political economy. To do this a substantial amount of empirical and archival material has been collected through interviews and three main archives, including the British National Archives (Public Record Office) in London, the Israeli Electricity Corporation in Haifa and the Jerusalem Electricity District Corporation, the Israeli State Archives and the Hebrew University archives in Jerusalem. The expected final result is the publication and dissemination of a timely and rigorous study about the ways infrastructure come to matter socially, politically, economically and spatially both symbolically and as a set of materials in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Taking electricity and roads as object and subject of analysis, this research will reveal the role of infrastructures in shaping and producing space while also using these networks as a window into the actors and broader forces that constitute them in the case of Palestine/Israel. In doing so the study seeks to redress the neglect of infrastructure in existing accounts about Palestine/Israel where the development and governance of these power networks are largely marginal and often feature as passive residues of different historical–political processes. Indeed, electricity and roads, like water, have been since the early days of the British Mandate a crucial site of contestation and a key factor in determining the history of the region. An interdisciplinary analytical focus on how these large socio-technical systems are constructed and governed will offer a powerful way of thinking about these networks as a complex assemblage of actors, agents and processes that connect to, and drive, much debated processes of colonialism, modernity, statecraft and uneven development. In doing so, the project hopes to fill a significant gap in Middle East studies, and particularly on scholarship focusing on Palestine-Israel, by incorporating insights from science and technology studies, postcolonial studies and political economy to adding valuable knowledge on the political relevance of material and technical ‘things’. And more specifically, how technology and power are constituted materially and symbolically in this region. Furthermore, the study of electricity grids and road networks provides a necessary empirical and theoretical counterpoint to the predominant focus on water in traditional infrastructure studies while adding to a comparative understanding of the similarities and differences with other infrastructures and the particular ways in which these networks are constructed, developed and managed. Concurrently, by providing an analytical study of infrastructures, the project will generate new knowledge about and insight into the Palestinian/Israeli case. In pursuing these themes, this project not only offers an innovative reading of the past and present colonial histories and geographies that shape this region. It also represents an attempt to resist and complicate dominant accounts of occupation and development in the Palestine/Israel context and to make a vital contribution to a broader scholarship in critical urban studies and settler colonialism.
