A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web


Book Description

This book deals with the contemporary history of the imprisonment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons since 1967, and, since the 2000s, in Palestinian facilities. The prison experience is widely shared in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It endurably marks personal and collective stories. Since the Occupation of the Palestinian Territories in 1967, mass incarceration has spun a prison web, a kind of suspended detention. Approximately, 40 percent of the male population has been to prison. It shows how the judicial and prison practices applied to Palestinian residents of the OPT are major fractal devices of control contributing to the management of Israeli borders, and shape a specific bordering system based on a mobility regime: such borders are mobile, networked, and endless. This history of confinement is that of the prison web, and of the in-between political, social, and personal spaces people weave between Inside and Outside prison. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, oral and written sources, archives, and extensive institutional documentation, this political anthropology book deals with carceral citizenships and subjectivities. Over time, imprisonment has had profound effects on personal experiences: on masculinities, femininities, gender relations, parentality, and intimacy. Woven like a web, this story is built around places, moments, people, and their testimonies.




Palestinian Political Organizations in Israeli Prisons


Book Description

Palestinian Political Organizations in Israeli Prisons examines the evolution and changes within the Palestinian Prisoners Movement and the structural opportunities and constraints that inform collective resistance today. Drawing on observation-based fieldwork and over 40 interviews with ex-prisoners and additional interviews with lawyers and advocates, this book presents a sociological account of Palestinian prisoners in Israel - an important reflection of the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Oslo Accords, the peace agreements between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel, transformed not only Palestinian politics but the entire prison environment. By exploring issues including the specific characteristics of women's resistance, the effects of the Islamicization, new hunger strike strategies, consumerism within the prison, parenting children, and escapes, Palestinian Political Organizations in Israeli Prisons offers a fresh analysis of political resistance in Israeli prisons. Applying a social movement approach and drawing comparisons to other politically motivated prisoner groups, the book traces the effects of changes from the Oslo Accords through to today, including the Second Intifada, the split between Hamas and Fatah, the co-option of the Palestinian Authority, and increasingly systematic prison management, explaining how these factors have affected life for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons and influence conflicts today.




Threat


Book Description

Palestinian prisoners charged with security-related offences are immediately taken as a threat to Israel's security. They are seen as potential, if not actual, suicide bombers. This stereotype ignores the political nature of the Palestinian prisoners' actions and their desire for liberty. By highlighting the various images of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Abeer Baker and Anat Matar chart their changing fortunes. Essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyze the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners. These contributions deal with the prisoners' status within Palestinian society, the conditions of their imprisonment and various legal procedures used by the Israeli military courts in order to criminalize and de-politicize them. Also addressed are Israel's breaches of international treaties in its treatment of the Palestinian prisoners, practices of torture and solitary confinement, exchange deals and prospects for release. This is a unique intervention within Middle East studies that will inspire those working in human rights, international law and the peace process.




The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society


Book Description

The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society presents a multidisciplinary overview of capital punishment’s influences, processes and outcomes across society. A global range of philosophers, social scientists, legal experts, political theorists and historians critically analyse the trajectory of the death penalty in both retentionist and abolitionist countries, underscoring how state killing remains a crucial issue worldwide.




Wild Thorns


Book Description

In this tense modern literary classic, acclaimed Palestinian author Sahar Khalifeh depicts the humiliation, bitter resignation and determined resistance of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. First published in 1976, Wild Thorns was the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of everyday life under Israeli occupation. With uncompromising honesty, Khalifeh pleads elegantly for survival in the face of oppression.




Starve and Immolate


Book Description

Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe. Bargu chronicles the experiences, rituals, values, beliefs, ideological self-representations, and contentions of the protestors who fought cellular confinement against the background of the history of Turkish democracy and the treatment of dissent in a country where prisons have become sites of political confrontation. A critical response to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Starve and Immolate centers on new forms of struggle that arise from the asymmetric antagonism between the state and its contestants in the contemporary prison. Bargu ultimately positions the weaponization of life as a bleak, violent, and ambivalent form of insurgent politics that seeks to wrench the power of life and death away from the modern state on corporeal grounds and in increasingly theologized forms. Drawing attention to the existential commitment, sacrificial morality, and militant martyrdom that transforms these struggles into a complex amalgam of resistance, Bargu explores the global ramifications of human weapons' practices of resistance, their possibilities and limitations.




Power Born of Dreams


Book Description

What does freedom look like from inside an Israeli prison? The walls of the cell are etched with the names of the prisoners who came before. A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: "You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories," stories of family, of community, of Gaza, of Palestine. Mohammad Sabaaneh brings uses his striking linocut artwork to help the world see Palestinian people as human, not as superheroes or political symbols.




Letters from Prison


Book Description

Hailed by Terry Eagleton in the Guardian as "definitive," this is the only complete and authoritative edition of Antonio Gramsci's deeply personal and vivid prison letters.




"We Are in Tombs”


Book Description

"Staff at Scorpion Prison beat inmates severely, isolate them in cramped "discipline" cells, cut off access to families and lawyers, and interfere with medical treatment, according to the report, "'We Are in Tombs': Abuses in Egypt's Scorpion Prison." The report documents cruel and inhuman treatment by officers of Egypt's Interior Ministry that probably amounts to torture in some cases and violates basic international norms for the treatment of prisoners"--Publisher's description.




The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice


Book Description

The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice focuses on the growing worldwide movement aimed at decolonizing state policies and practices, and various disciplinary knowledges including criminology, social work and law. The collection of original chapters brings together cutting-edge, politically engaged work from a diverse group of writers who take as a starting point an analysis founded in a decolonizing, decolonial and/or Indigenous standpoint. Centering the perspectives of Black, First Nations and other racialized and minoritized peoples, the book makes an internationally significant contribution to the literature. The chapters include analyses of specific decolonization policies and interventions instigated by communities to enhance jurisdictional self-determination; theoretical approaches to decolonization; the importance of research and research ethics as a key foundation of the decolonization process; crucial contemporary issues including deaths in custody, state crime, reparations, and transitional justice; and critical analysis of key institutions of control, including police, courts, corrections, child protection systems and other forms of carcerality. The handbook is divided into five sections which reflect the breadth of the decolonizing literature: • Why decolonization? From the personal to the global • State terror and violence • Abolishing the carceral • Transforming and decolonizing justice • Disrupting epistemic violence This book offers a comprehensive and timely resource for activists, students, academics, and those with an interest in Indigenous studies, decolonial and post-colonial studies, criminal legal institutions and criminology. It provides critical commentary and analyses of the major issues for enhancing social justice internationally. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.