Between mobile corridors and immobilizing borders: race, fixity and friction in Palestine/Israel

This article looks at the question of ‘national’ borders in racial capitalism through Israel's high-tech border industry. It asks how this border has become a model for the ever-growing global homeland security industry and who helped it become an ‘exportable commodity’. Abstract This article w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International affairs (London) 2022-01, Vol.98 (1), p.183-207
Main Authors: Manchanda, Nivi, Plonski, Sharri
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Borders
Capitalism
National security
Race
Racism
Security services
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Summary:This article looks at the question of ‘national’ borders in racial capitalism through Israel's high-tech border industry. It asks how this border has become a model for the ever-growing global homeland security industry and who helped it become an ‘exportable commodity’. Abstract This article wrestles with the question of ‘national’ borders in racial capitalism. We do so through an examination of border and capitalist corridors. We focus particularly on the Israeli border, branded and then sold to the rest of the world by the epistemic community of border-makers and interlocutors. In tracking the Israeli border and showing the implication of the experts and their markets, we ask how the border reflects and is refracted through a global order organized by the twin dictates of racism and capitalism. We are especially interested in how racialized processes of bordering, ostensibly governed by national exigencies, are transplanted on to other contexts. Two points emerge from this: in the first instance, we ask who and what enables this movement of the border. And in the second, we interrogate which logics and practices are transplanted with the border, as it is reproduced and seemingly fixed in a new place. We examine the violent ontologies that give shape and reputation to Israel's high-tech border industry, which has become a model for the ever-growing global homeland security industry. We ask: has Israel's border become an exportable commodity and who are the actors who have enabled this ‘achievement’? Related to this, what sort of occlusions and structural violence does the fetishization of the Israeli border rely on?
ISSN:0020-5850
1468-2346
DOI:10.1093/ia/iiab206