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The Tigers of Jinbah: Smugglers and border entrepreneurs in the southern West Bank and Israel (2005-2010)

A talk by Cedric Parizot, CNRS and Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme, Aix en Provence

Friday, May 18, 2012
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
UCLA

This paper studies the networks smuggling Palestinian workers from the West Bank into Israel during the post Intifada period. Relying on ethnographic data collected from 2005 to 2010, Cedric Parizot first shows that these activities do not merely derive from the adaptations of a powerless Palestinian population confronted to the hardening of the Israeli mechanisms of control at the border, but rather from a re-appropriation of the economic opportunities created by this very system of constraints by highly inventive “border entrepreneurs”. Second, by taking into account the multiplicity of actors (Palestinians and Israelis) involved in this “border economy”, as well as the nature of the relationships they maintain with the Israeli authorities, he shows that they de facto participate into the regulation of Palestinian movement. This perspective brings us to reconsider the functioning of the Israeli mechanism of movement control in the West Bank as a heterogeneous apparatus (dispositif) encompassing multiple State and non-State, formal and informal actors whose actions are not coordinated yet well synchronized.

Cédric Parizot is an anthropologist of politics at the Institut d'Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman - IREMAM (CNRS) Aix en Provence.

Research focus:
- Mobility and borders in the Israeli-Palestinian spaces
- Electoral processes among Palestinians in Israel
 

Sponsor(s): UCLA International Institute, Program on International Migration, Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecture Series in the Department of Sociology