Introduction
In the past 15 years, there has been a significant increase in the amount of geographical scholarship that has sought to understand spaces and practices of violence and conflict (e.g., Flint 2003; Gregory and Pred 2007).
The temporality of this interest roughly coincides with the September 11, 2001 attacks in the USA and the subsequent US-led “war on terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. As Pain (2014: 532) has recently noted,[G]eographers' emphasis has been on the impacts of the threat and fear of global terrorism on international relations and domestic governance, including the state terrorism that some western governments perpetrate or support as part of their response. There is relatively little empirical attention to the experiential, emotional and everyday dimensions of global terrorism.
Pain’s work demonstrates how geographical studies of violence and conflict might learn much from engaging with longer standing feminist scholarship on other kinds of harm, such as domestic violence or the structural violence embedded in labor markets. This chapter follows her lead by asking how studying the family, a key assemblage through which many - but not all - children and young people’s lives are lived, might open up new understandings of violence and conflict. The case study of Palestine is examined, since it is an enduring site of colonial violence and conflict. As the chapter will argue, exploring family relationships and spaces amid violent conflict and colonialism foregrounds practices of endurance and resistance, which in turn move beyond understandings of families as only forms of heteropa- triarchal violence (See also ► Chap. 13, “Violent Geographies of Childhood and Home: The Child in the Closet” by Kathrin Horschelmann in this volume).
The chapter begins with a brief introduction to geographical literatures on family. To explore the relationship between families and violence, the chapter then turns to the empirical context of Palestine. Reviewing geopolitical approaches to this space, the chapter makes an argument for adopting other epistemological approaches that move beyond stereotypical representations of place. The second half of the chapter puts such an approach into practice by examining how Palestinian family practices and relations may embody colonial violence while also enabling Palestinians to endure and resist this violence.
2