Global Palestine: Frontier Geographies of a Region in Flux

The magnitude of recent destructive events in Palestine has rapidly destabilized the Middle East region and the global liberal order of power. The war on Gaza has spread to several Middle Eastern countries – Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran – and has undermined the legitimacy of international courts, the rule-based international system, and freedoms of speech and assembly in many Western liberal democracies. This project examines these global and regional proliferations of Palestine through their 'frontiering'. It explores how various global and regional relations have intensified at the settler colonial frontier in Palestine, while also demonstrating how Palestine, as a space of heightened securitization, militarization, environmental violence, and circulation of technological innovations, creates and intensifies frontiers elsewhere.

Empirically, the project focuses on three key frontiers of making the ‘global Palestine’: innovation capital, destabilization of democracy, and ecologies of security and militarization. It investigates their global journeys through concrete processes and frictions emerging on the ground, demonstrating the close entanglement of innovation capital with colonial frontier expansions, the destabilization of democracy with tactics of the messianic far-right, and the widespread environmental damage with distribution of security and military technologies. Methodologically, the GLOPAL project develops frontier-making as an approach capable of grasping complex globally related phenomena with a multi-sited research methodology that goes beyond metaphoric analyses of frontier expansion, one-directional core-periphery models of colonial subjugation, and linearly traveling theories. Conceptually, the notion of the frontier is developed to offer a ‘milieu concept’ suitable for approaching various related events and sites as they unfold at the thresholds (territorial/relational, global/local, unbounded/earth-bound, connected/disrupted, fluid/friction, etc.) present in landscapes of frontiermaking. 

Altogether, the project offers a novel approach for thinking political geographies on a planet divided by present colonialities, connecting various sites around the world while critically elaborating on existing geopolitical trends and their entanglement with the economy, environment, democracy, and conflicts.