Point of the List: Terrorism Law, Sanctions, and Asphyxiatory Violence in Palestine

Terrorism lists, sanctions, and regulatory regimes to govern financial flows in accordance with counterterrorism laws have become a key feature of the contemporary politico-juridical order. Today most states and supranational institutions have passed legally-binding terrorism financing measures that criminalize an expansive array of activity deemed to be associated with material support for terrorism giving rise to new regimes of global security law. This talk examine examines the modalities of violence this body of law and the practices of sanction it activates produces when infused into civilian and humanitarian aid flows, an investigation undertaken in three parts. First, drawing on over a decade of research conducted in Palestine, it examines how the tethering of US counterterrorism laws and infrastructures to humanitarian aid flows has proliferated the sites and means through which an expansive regime of policing, surveillance, and punishment is exercised over Palestinian life. Then drawing on research conducted with six Palestinian human rights organizations designated as “terrorist organizations” by Israel’s Ministry of Defence in October 2021, it analyzes how the terrorist designation enacts what I call “asphyxiatory violence,” a modality of violence that progressively erodes conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation. Finally, it turns to use of the terrorist designation by Israel to undermine and eventually collapse institutional bodies providing crucial, life-saving support to Palestinians, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Taken together, these snapshots of counterterrorism blacklisting practices and sanctions in action and the violences they produce at the granular scale of everyday life presents us with different theoretical apparatus of war and empire – one enacted not by tanks or bombs but instead through the point of the terrorism list.

Lisa Bhungalia is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and core faculty member of the Middle East Studies Program. Their research examines evolving modalities of late-modern war, empire and transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African region. Their first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine, published by Stanford University Press in 2024, traces the deepening entanglements of aid, law, and war in Palestine with attention to the surveillance and policing regimes produced through the embedding of counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into civilian aid flows. They are also developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases. Their research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, and Palestinian American Research Center, among other bodies, and their book, Elastic Empire, was awarded the Middle East Studies Association 2024 Albert Hourani Book Award, the Middle East Monitor 2024 Palestine Academic Book Award, and the American Association of Geographers Glenda Laws Award. Their other published work has appeared in Politics and Space, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Society and Space, Environment and Planning A, Middle East Report, and Jadaliyya, among other venues.