To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth: On the Automation of Settler Colonialism in Palestine

dc.contributor.advisor Shapiro, Michael J.
dc.contributor.author Musleh, Ali Hisham
dc.contributor.department Political Science
dc.date.accessioned 2023-02-23T23:56:37Z
dc.date.issued 2022
dc.description.degree Ph.D.
dc.embargo.liftdate 2025-02-10
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/10125/104588
dc.subject Political science
dc.subject settler colonialism
dc.subject technology
dc.subject weapons
dc.title To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth: On the Automation of Settler Colonialism in Palestine
dc.type Thesis
dcterms.abstract How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state.Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.
dcterms.extent 341 pages
dcterms.language en
dcterms.publisher University of Hawai'i at Manoa
dcterms.rights All UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.
dcterms.type Text
local.identifier.alturi http://dissertations.umi.com/hawii:11553
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