Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear
Wednesday 14 September 2016, 20:00 CREA Amsterdam
In her lecture Shalhoub-Kevorkian will speak about her latest book. In it she examines Palestinian experiences of life and death within the context of Israeli settler colonialism and broadens the analytical horizon to include those who ‘keep on existing’. She explores how Israeli theologies and ideologies of security, surveillance and fear can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures. Drawing from everyday aspects of Palestinian victimization, survival, life and death, and moving between the local and the global, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduces and defines her notion of ‘Israeli security theology’ and the politics of fear within Palestine/Israel. She relies on a feminist analysis, invoking the intimate politics of the everyday and centering the Palestinian body, family life, memory and memorialization, birth and death as critical sites from which to examine the settler colonial state’s machineries of surveillance which produce and maintain a political economy of fear that justifies colonial violence.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a longtime anti-violence, native Palestinian feminist activist and scholar. She is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is also the director of the Gender Studies Program at Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa. Her research focuses on femicide, state crime, child abuse, and other forms of gendered violence, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization, and trauma in militarized and colonized zones.
The lecture is part of Securitizing Worlds: a Critical Look at the Israeli Global Security Industry is organized by gate48 (Critical Israelis in the Netherlands) and made possible with the support of the Leonhard-Woltjer Foundation, SECURCIT (European Research Council); NICA (Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis), UvA, Stichting Haella and CREA.