Decentring Geopolitics
How can this problem be addressed? To counteract the tendency towards stereotypical representations of place, Robinson (2003: 279) suggests that what is needed instead is a method for “learning from the complex and rich experiences and scholarship of different places.” What this means in practice is a broadening of the epistemological palette, which works at the limits of and goes beyond geopolitics.
This is not a rejection of geopolitics as a mode of analysis, but rather an attempt to think about violence in different ways. This necessarily entails a more modest geopolitics, situated within an expanded field of intellectual and political endeavors concerned with power-infused spaces and spacings. Such an approach does not ignore or downplay the role of violence and particular types of political process in shaping various places and lives throughout the world. Rather, it endeavors to situate and link such processes within a broader array of geographies.In the context of Palestine, Taraki (2006) makes a similar argument for more sustained work in the social and cultural realm that is nevertheless contextualized within the ongoing Israeli occupation.
The political reality must be the basic backdrop against which we examine the routines of life and the small dramas of daily life. (Taraki 2006: xii)
A preoccupation with Palestinian political economy and political institutions has precluded a serious study of social and cultural issues. (Ibid: xxvii)
This chapter takes up Taraki's challenge by using the family as a theoretical frame to understand different practices of violence, resistance, and endurance. Studying family relations and practices can offer a range of important insights into social- spatial processes of violence and power relations that animate, inter alia, nationalisms, colonialisms, and economic change (Joseph and Rieker 2008). This remains true even as family compositions and practices in certain places have changed significantly in recent decades.
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