Governmentalizing Palestinian futures: Uncertainty, anticipation, possibility

Abstract

This article explores a particular futural logic prevalent in Israel’s practices of governing Palestinian life in the West Bank: the governmentalizing of possibility through anticipation and uncertainty. We draw on long-term fieldwork focused on different West Bank contexts – checkpoints, farmland access and house demolitions – where governing functions via prospective futures that call people to anticipate and become attuned to lived uncertainty. Empirically, the article demonstrates the ways that Israel’s governmental techniques instrumentalize threatening and ominous possibilities to manage the conduct of Palestinians by means of military orders, permit restrictions and bureaucratic processing. Conceptually, the article theorizes the governmentalization of futures as dynamic on two distinguishable planes – the everyday and the existential – that shape Palestinians’ anticipation and attunement as they relate to multiple and crucial domains of life: dwelling, livelihood, reproduction and mobility. The argument is thus made that futures are governmentalized where subjects are situated in conditions of uncertainty in which they anticipate the threatening possibilities ahead – namely, the unpleasant eventuality that ‘could happen’. Anticipation in this arrangement, we further argue, can progress Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine.