This project continues my examination of nationalism's physical manifestations in landscapes and things, utilizing my years of personal experience monitoring Israel’s checkpoints to consider the recent transformation of the Israel-West Bank border. Drawing on interviews with top military officers, state officials, and human rights activists as well as a series of participatory observations, I have argued that this transformation is the result of four major processes: reterritorialization, bureaucratization, neoliberalization, and de-humanization. This project was published in an important radical geography journal, Antipode, and has already been quoted extensively by surveillance and borders scholars.

In summer 2010, I provided an hour-long interview on this project for the Open University's Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) (hosted by Dr. Jef Huysmans: podcast and transcript available from Open University). I was also invited to present this work in several major surveillance and border conferences, such as Identinet in the United Kingdom and MIMED in Jerusalem.

While visiting Israel/Palestine in summer 2011 for the purpose of researching zoos there, I revisited a few Israeli checkpoints and interviewed several checkpoint activists. This fieldwork provided grounds for a new article forthcoming in Social & Legal Studies, this time exploring the very possibility of resistance to occupation.

Publications:

(2012). Checkpoint Watch: Reflections on Israel's Border Administration in the West Bank, Social & Legal Studies 21:297-320. [SSRN].

(2011). Civilized Borders: A Study of Israel's New Border Regime. Antipode: A Radical Journal
of Geography 43(2): 264-295 [publisher] [SSRN].

(2008). "Checkpoint Gazes." In Acts of Citizenship, Isin, Engin and Greg Neilsen (eds.) (Zed Publishers). [SSRN].