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The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war.
Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.
"Into the well-studied terrain of contemporary Palestine and Israel, Lisa Bhungalia has produced a book of stunning originality. Through wide-ranging and incisive analysis, she explains how ever more highly securitized models of foreign aid adversely affect Palestinians. Aid, she argues, is war by other means." —Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture
"Elastic Empire offers a riveting portrait of the quiet administration of violence. Lisa Bhungalia maps US shadow wars carried out through the daily work of aid and state terror in Palestine. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the intimacies of US empire and the topological tentacles of counterterrorism law." —Alison Mountz, author of The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago
"Washington's military and diplomatic support for Israel has understandably been the main reason for outrage among campus protesters across the US in the context of the ongoing war on Gaza. In the book Elastic Empire, we learn about more subtle forms of violence. It is not only with weapons and vetoes at the UN Security Council, but also through aid, that the US inscribes its imperial influence on Palestine." —Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment
"Elastic Empire reveals critical forces, trends, and movements for thinking about aid and war in the present day. As aid takes the form of war itself, acting as a form of asphyxiatory violence in its own right, Bhungalia emphasizes the way that Palestinians continuously find new modes of relationality that allow them to survive in the face of over a century of settler-colonial dispossession." —Charles Finn, Antipode
"In her book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine, Lisa Bhungalia sheds light on how aid provided by the US contributes to sustaining the status quo of Palestinian oppression under Israeli occupation." —Jacqueline Tong, Palestine Book Awards
"Elastic Empire traces the longer chain of events, broader legal regimes, humanitarian structures, and security logics that have enabled the horrors of Israel's genocide to continue month after bloody month. More immediately, it allows us to understand that the US humanitarian assistance to Gaza does not serve as an antidote to Israel's mass violence and destruction against Palestinians—or as a potential bifurcation of US policies—but rather that these are two sides of the same security strategy." —Negar Razavi, Journal for the Anthropology of North America
"Elastic Empire provides a nuanced capture of how the local and the global are inextricably intertwined and how such entanglements translate U.S. empire into a tangible everyday experience for Palestinians. Bhungalia's work provides a timely and necessary understanding of how war continues to live in the absence of war. Through such explorations, Bhungalia offers a rich pretext to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and the shifting frames of war in Palestine through the policies and practices of U.S. empire." —Iman Ali, Review of Middle East Studies
"Elastic Empire is a formidable contribution to the fields of Palestine studies, geography, anthropology, empire studies, and legal studies, as well as bio-necropolitical theory. The metaphors of elasticity and topology work to spatialize empire as a society of control. Aid operates as a carceral form, constraining speech, associations, and political expression—in effect redrawing networks of sociality and literal geographies of mobility, contact, and affiliation." —Jasbir K. Puar, Journal of Palestine Studies
"In times of visceral violence, Bhungalia reminds us of the long-enduring forms of 'softening' violence that emerge without an 'event' which we can point to, but that occur and dispossess nonetheless." —Vivian Hong, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford
1. War Through Law
2. Elastic Sovereignty
3. Work of the List
4. Afterlives and Reverberations
5. Asphyxiatory Violence
Conclusion