Bioplanning: Practices of governing and resistance. A Foucaultian analytic of planning and resistance to planning practices in the occupied Palestinian West Bank following the peace process

Abstract

Over the last twenty-five years of the Oslo era, Israel continued its interventionist colonialism that led to nearly irreversible political, economic, and cultural transformations within Palestinian society in the West Bank. The temporary peace agreement has become permanent, and is considered by experts on the Palestinian cause to be the most recent episode of foreign powers functioning within the limited space of the West Bank, leading to the exhaustion of Palestinians as the powers’ means of exercise. While Israel’s methods of land seizures and control of natural resources have been examined, the town planning discourse has not been sufficiently deployed as a means to understand the process of subjugation and resistance. The main question this research raises is how the antecedent powers used town planning propositions, laws, and institutions to control issues of life and death, leading to Israel becoming a biopower in the West Bank, which, supported by the Palestinian Authority’s self-proclaimed sovereignty over isolated Palestinian localities, constitutes a system of governmentality. Based on the work of Michel Foucault, the problematisation of the present era must be placed within a historical framework. Hence, this project combines poststructuralist planning theory and Foucault’s modern power theory to provide a theoretical framework with which to analyse planning discourse as a form of governmentality. Through accessing archival data and utilising Foucault’s genealogy as the primary tool of investigation, the research concludes with presenting the nature of power and resistance, and how these shape the present subject.1

1 The researcher uses the term ‘subject’ to refer to individuals and groups shaped by power and resistance.