Most farmers in the Anbar province of Iraq do not know about Order 81, one of 100 conditions of US withdrawal signed by Paul Bremer, which opened Iraq’s agricultural market to large agribusiness. Among other things, the Order entitles multinational corporations to patent indigenous seeds and prosecute farmers who save or harvest them, but most farmers never got the chance to break such a law. Since 2003, their lives were caught in a triangle of (counter)insurgency, displacement, and soil contamination that dispossessed Iraq of food sovereignty and implanted multinational corporations into the center of farming life. Most farmers report that by 2012 they were entirely dependent on fertilizers, seeds, and pesticides introduced by foreign companies after the US invasion, and that by 2014, most Anbari farmers lost unlimited access to their own land. Their explanation: conducted chaos. This paper explores chaos, not as a concept but as an imperial mechanism, one that frontiers space and opens zones of free market enterprise, without accountability to an emplaced local population or the regulatory obligations of state control. The case of Anbari farmers is one of many in which war opens new dependencies and new markets; and the case of agribusiness is just one thread of a broader imperial tapestry in Iraq. Positing that chaos and control are integrally linked, this paper asks: How does chaos influence the corporate value of a frontier? Is chaos a delay or accelerant in corporate expansion? How does Chaos function differently than the panoptical control of other colonial projects? I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork during 2014-2015, when I lived, travelled, and farmed with Anbari men. Incorporating the insights of Laleh Khalili, Naomi Klein, and Antonius Robbens, I consider what scholars like Foucault might think about a dearth of subjection, a dearth of disciplinary control, in the game of colonial domination.

What does it mean to secure a settler-colonial frontier, and with what possibilities and limitations on the politics of the colonized? Since the year 2000, Israel has militarized West Bank cities and routes in ways unprecedented since the beginning of the military occupation in 1967; in seeking to theorize a “colonial present” in the Middle East, scholars have profitably compared this (partly privatized) securitization to the security practices in American theaters of occupation since 2001. This paper explores Israeli colonization not only in militarized spaces like military checkpoints and raids, but in the civilian, commercial contexts that point to this occupation’s distinct settler character. Some 50,000 Palestinians work in Israeli settlements and industrial zones. How are their bodies, utterances, and general economic and political prospects, policed and constrained, by Israeli security forces as well as civilianized settlers? How does this rely on longer historical processes of dispossession, which, in this case, leave indigenous people living amidst the settler society, drawn on for their labor but also abandoned and walled out? And what claims to sound, space, publicity, and perhaps politics, are Palestinians able to make against and through such limitations? This paper is based on a year and a half of ethnographic work, comprised of participant-observation and interviews. Following informal workplace political debates and contested media spheres, including uses of humor and playfulness, the paper outlines some distinct forms of critical practice that Palestinians have developed amidst heavily policed commercial contact with Israelis. It then considers these contact practices in light of what seem to be quite different strategies: growing boycotts of Israeli commerce by organized Palestinian movements, from local urban activists to allies abroad. While many have focused on the international registers of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, I explore both the gaps and resonances between these everyday and more organized engagements at multiple scales. In the process, the paper puts historical theories of large-scale settler colonial processes into conversation with a detailed ethnography of political contestation through commercial spheres.

In the spring of 2010, the U.C. Berkeley campus was captivated by a debate in the student government about a resolution that sought to get the U.C. Regents to divest from two U.S. based companies—General Electric (GE) and United Technologies (UT)—which manufactured weapons used by the Israel military in Operation Cast Lead. Drawing on debate recordings, statistical data representing what was said during the debates and who said it, the literature emerging from the debates, and ethnographic observations, this paper asks how Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) initiatives, which seek to hold the state of Israel to account until it complies with international law, function in American institutions of higher education specifically, and within neoliberal moral economies more broadly. Twenty-eight hours of debate were recorded covering the span of three public hearings at which over 250 students, faculty, and community members voiced their positions concerning the divestment initiative. These public hearings were the longest, sustained debate about university divestment from Israel in a public forum in the United States, and they spurred similar initiatives across campuses nation wide revealing similar rhetorical strategies and discourse patterns. Situating these debates within the Habermasian public sphere, this paper focuses on how certain discoures were made possible and others foreclosed, as well as how this dynamic changed over the course of the three hearings. I argue that although the divestment initiative took a hyper-rational approach to make a specific claim—that war crimes were committed by the Israeli military in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009, and further, to highlight the complicity of two U.S. based weapons manufacturers which university had direct-investment holdings in—it was clear that by the second divestment hearing the terms of the debate had shifted and the conversation was curtailed away from war crimes and weapons manufacturers and towards the affective responses of students about the resolution. Testimonies concerning how students claimed to feel about divestment, their emotional wellbeing, and their anxieties about their identity took center stage while initial discussions about war crimes and corporate investments were buried. In conclusion, I offer thoughts on how discourse about Israel/Palestine is generated or inhibited in the United States public sphere and what discursive limits does looking at these divestment debates reveal about the institutional, interpersonal, and psychological barriers to structural change and also, perhaps, political transformation?

This paper looks at two different military operations in which the attacking armies perceived that their enemies used human shields: the US-led first siege of Fallujah (Operation Vigilant Resolve) and the Israeli assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 (Operation Protective Edge). Various criteria have been outlined by the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to define the tactic of human shields. These criteria include the use of protected persons or structures or the choice of a battlefield full of civilians and civilian objects to render certain areas immune from attack. However, in both of these operations the militants in Fallujah and Gaza were severely limited in their choice of a battlefield due to the military siege around them. This observation throws into question whether the militants in Fallujah and Gaza deliberately used civilians and civilian structures to gain a military advantage, or if they were constrained to fight from densely populated civilian areas. If the later, how then do we explain this reoccurring perception of human shields in counterinsurgency and urban warfare contexts? My paper looks at the way soldiers, military leaders, and politicians communicated this perception to the public. I rely on interviews that appeared in journalistic reports or histories written on these operations. I also look at speeches made by politicians. Using Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement as a framework for discourse analysis, I analyze the perception of the use of human shields during these operations as a spontaneous sense making process that shifts the blame for civilian casualties to the enemy. I argue that this use of language is ideologically structured through these soldiers’ and politicians narratives of the origins of the conflict, of the moral superiority of their national cause, and the rhetoric of their mission. These narratives and rhetoric create the content for moral disengagement mechanisms. The result is an interpretation of battlefield events that is relative to ideology and battlefield trauma, which then gets presented to the public as truth. Moral disengagement theory helps to elucidate the ways in which imperial attitudes structure moral discourses and influence our perception of moral events. It is further relevant to understanding the process discussed by Edward Said in which “discrepant experiences” with imperialism/colonialism produce competing narratives of battlefield events and of entire conflicts.