Events, Lectures

Security Society in Gaza: Police Encounters under Egyptian Rule

Please join us for a talk by Ilana Feldman on Tuesday Febuary 16th, in Olin 102 at 6:30pm

Help us explore the dynamics of policing and security in the Gaza Strip during the period of Egyptian Administration (1948-67). Drawing on a rich and detailed archive, it tracks a range of police encounters. Many such encounters were mundane, including investigation of petty crime. Many were evidently repressive, including the surveillance of political activity and speech. All were part of a broad security milieu that helped to define governance, political action, and life possibilities in Gaza in the years after the loss of Palestine. The analytic lens of “security society” illuminates how policing both operated as a mechanism of governance and control and provided opportunities for action and effect. Criminality, politics, and propriety were all matters of concern for the police and the Gazan public.

 

Ilana Feldman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-67 (Duke University Press, 2008)  and Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule (Stanford University Press, 2015); and co-editor (with Miriam Ticktin) of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010). Her current project traces the Palestinian refugee experience with humanitarianism in the years since 1948, exploring how this aid apparatus has shaped Palestinian social and political life.

This Talk is Sponsored by  Bard’s Anthropology,and Middle Eastern Studies department, along the the Human Rights Project

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