Political weapons: military technologies, territory and Israel’s geopolitical management of security in the 2014 Gaza war

Download Statistics

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Slesinger, Ian Bradley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9802-8938 (2019). Political weapons: military technologies, territory and Israel’s geopolitical management of security in the 2014 Gaza war. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Preview

Slesinger2019PhD.pdf
Text - Accepted Version
Available under License All rights reserved.
Download (18MB) | Preview

Abstract

This thesis applies a hybrid materialist epistemology that borrows from Object-Oriented- Ontology and Actor-Network-Theory to call for a more precise understanding of the political agency of military technologies in relation to the state, which avoids the corollary errors of subordinating technologies to human control, or reifying them with hegemonic power. Israel’s conflict with Gaza – particularly the 2014 Gaza War and its context – is applied as a case to evaluate the more-than- human complexity of geopolitical phenomena in which the state enrols military technologies to stabilise itself as an object. However, these technologies become excessively entangled with human agencies and the elemental in complex and volatile ways. Three empirical studies work through the territorial volume of Gaza-Israel to illustrate this: 1) Surficial applies the Israeli military’s use of ‘statistical’ artillery in urban warfare in Gaza to consider the unruliness of technologies’ political agencies that arise from their ambivalent capacities; 2) Subterranean narrates the limitations faced by Israeli techno-scientific attempts to locate cross-border tunnels when confronted with the combination of Hamas’ insurgent strategy and geophysical materialities underground; 3) Aerial evaluates the role of the Iron Dome missile defence system within the security atmosphere of the Western Negev to illustrate how technologies transcend and confound human intentionalities in governing security. These case studies demonstrate that to produce more sophisticated explanations of war, geopolitics must attend more closely to the specificities of place to account for the formal, practical and everyday interrelations between human, geospatial and technological factors that constitute a given conflict. Technologies’ imbrication in conflict must be also considered through the dynamic contestation and negotiation between their material agencies, their limitations and the enrolment of their underlying ontological capacities with divergent human political desires.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):