On Archiving Surveillance
Pooja Satyogi and Tarangini Sriraman in Conversation with Yael Berda and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh
Paperwork at Srinagar High Court, Kashmir. June 2019. Image provided by Shrimoyee Ghosh.
In this conversation Pooja Satyogi and Tarangini Sriraman bring together Yael Berda, a sociologist and lawyer, and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh, an anthropologist and lawyer, to speak on the theme of “archiving surveillance.” The conversation circles around concepts and arguments that figure in Yael’s book, The Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank and a long-form article co-authored by Shrimoyee in the journal, Critique of Anthropology titled, The grid of indefinite incarceration: Everyday legality and paperwork warfare in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Background: In our conversation, we —Pooja and Tarangini—seek to unpack the theme of “archiving surveillance” through categories like regimes, spaces, jurisdictions in the territories, Israel/Palestine and Kashmir, and inquire into what renders them occupied. What resonated across both Yael and Shrimoyee’s work was an engagement with fluid bureaucracies and a “permanent emergency” that manifested itself through disparate regimes of files and decrees, rule-bound and illegible systems and jurisdictions of law through which Kashmiri and Palestinian subjects moved. We spoke to them about the polymorphous nature of the relationship between checkpoints and permits, preventive detention and the constitution, encryption and inscription. We inquired into the meanings ascribed by Yael in a term like “administrative memory” and the promise it holds in working out the complex genealogy of emergency decrees in Israel and the “occupied territories.” Similarly, we were keen to draw out Shrimoyee’s thoughts around what she termed “hyperlegality” in outlining the bureaucracy of preventive detention in Kashmir. We were also invested in seeking answers to where personal and impersonal authority fell in propelling seemingly contradictory practices of proscribing movement.
If in Yael's writing, Palestinians filed petitions to get a travel ban removed or secure an entry permit into Israel, in Shrimoyee's work, Kashmiris petitioned police and court authorities to quash First Information Reports and detention orders filed against them. We wished to find out more about the agency of these petitions themselves and those who filed them, as well as the power of cross-border movement.
Pooja: Yael, what is at stake in the articulation that the bureaucracy of the occupation, and the permit regime specifically, is based on administrative memory of colonial rule? What you have in mind here is not just organizational practices and political dispositions, which you quite categorically lay out, but race as a signifier of populations. Are you reflecting on a possible distinction from the argument of colonial continuity, or did you have something more specific with reference to the invocation of memory as a metaphor?
Yael Berda: Thinking memory, particularly collective memory and how it shapes both our present and politics, has a lot to do with the Israeli and Jewish experience. Collective memory is always talking through the Holocaust, right? What is interesting to me about administrative memory is how different it is from collective memory. Collective memory is this orchestrated thing, where you have either propaganda or it is happening through agents of the state, or it’s happening through educational systems. But administrative memory—that’s not being orchestrated.
There are two sides to administrative memory—one is to juxtapose it with collective memory of the orchestrated type, which is such an integral part of the nation state project of “making state people” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation, through schooling and categories of thought. This first part focuses on the power of organizations and practices, which can be entirely different from the declared goals of the state. We can see this if we look at legislatures and court decisions. The other side is that administrative memory is patchy, non-linear, and dependent on the present.
You know, you have these memoirs of bureaucrats and they say, “Oh, I used the emergency laws yesterday. And what I did was I cut out the words ‘His Majesty,’ and instead of it, I pasted ‘the military commander.’” And this is literally the way that the emergency defense regulations were created. This is 1963, four years before the occupation. They were already using the emergency defence regulations used by the British colonial mandate in Transjordan to make what will become the emergency defense regulations. Is this memory material? How much, you know...it’s the materiality of memory in the most physical sense. Rather than continuity, this bureaucrat is patching together something that doesn’t exist in the present to remake it.
What I’m trying to say with administrative memory is that you can never only invoke the law, or you can never just take the forms or the maps as they are, because bureaucracy and its memory contains the politics that brought it about. The politics of emergency and racial hierarchy are inscribed in practices and forms. Inside administrative procedures, forms, articles, check points, military courts—with which people often think instrumentally or think of them as instruments—are the politics of coding and inscription that created them in the first place. And so to me, by referring to administrative memory, I am giving a container. I am giving a description that allows us to understand how this history sits or is within these material elements. I think continuity does not capture the way history gets inscribed and encoded in these material means.
And so that is why I use the idea of administrative memory, which is the opposite of collective memory, because it is not a conscious thing or a programme; it is exactly that unconscious thing.
In an interview with Meir Shamgar, who was the military advocate general in 1963 responsible for orchestrating the legal and administrative plan of the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and other territories in 1967, I asked how he had used the emergency defense regulations against the Palestinians, since the British, too, had used the same regulations against him in 1944, leading to his deportation. His answer, after a rather long pause was, “It was what we knew. We grew up, you know...we learned law in the mandatory school of law at Hebrew University. And this is what we knew.” I said to him, “That’s your answer? Can it be more mundane than that?” But that’s exactly what you have. You have this available material possibility. And then the types of history and politics that are encoded in that are ignored—or denied—in order to use them. And so to me, that’s what an administrative memory does. And I think it’s more powerful than thinking of it as continuity.
Tarangini: Is it possible to say then that colonial emergency laws tended to produce more systematic effects compared to the bureaucracy of the occupation, which perpetuates uncertainty?
Yael: The emergency defense regulations open up the space for administrative power and discretion, and they form a series of bureaucratic responses that can only rarely be challenged because they are technical, logistical, and usually an arbitrary response to an emergency. They, then, become part of the system, and the history of their origin is erased. In other words, emergency laws set a path because of the type of executive power and organizational logic they enable, which usually takes the form of a proliferation of untraceable executive decrees.
But the executive power itself is not really organized because it can do a lot of contradictory things. And it does so because that contradiction produces uncertainty, which is helpful for slowing down and monitoring the population. It also allows for a dispersed authority, which means there is less responsibility on everyone. Dispersal allows for bureaucratic disorganization and corruption to become self-referential, and this allows for the continuous control of populations.
Simultaneously, what makes the bureaucracy powerful is precisely the dispersal of authority because violence cannot be attributed to one person or one body even as bureaucrats do become sovereigns here. I am much more interested in examining how bureaucratic sovereignty works in daily life, how it is different from modern state bureaucrats and their discretion, what bureaucratic sovereignty looks like. So, the laws are really—a container.
Tarangini, Pooja, Yael and Shrimoyee (top left to right) in conversation over Zoom.
Tarangini: Shrimoyee, would you see what is happening in Kashmir as comparable in terms of this bureaucratic uncertainty and is there a similar retention of administrative memory?
Shrimoyee Ghosh: Kashmir and Palestine are somewhat different because of their legal and constitutional arrangements. On the one hand, we see this ability to creatively copy-paste and create a repertoire of strategies that can be drawn on from colonial memory. This then mutates in various ways, adapts to new technologies, emerging contexts, new threats. What the Public Safety Act (PSA), a preventive detention law and dossiers in the Kashmiri context bring attention to is, also, how counterinsurgency war allows for legal jurisdictions to enable extra-ordinary power. Such power is made of multiple emergency laws, emergency zones, emergency bureaucracies, and jurisdictional authority itself is splintered. And so military logic, policing bureaucratic logic, and legal constitutional logic are like moving parts that interlock to reinforce Indian control over space and territory. Jurisdictional complexity in the Kashmir case has also something to do with the way in which mechanisms of physical violence and spatial violence work together to create the specific form of emergency regime or occupational logic. This sometimes expresses itself through micro practices of bureaucratic discretion or through porous legal jurisdictions.
Yael: Yeah, I just wanted to say, Shrimoyee, that I actually call that the bureaucratic toolkit of emergency and I think states develop toolkits as repertoires that they can use.
One of the things that you can really see in the British Empire is the circulation of this repertoire of emergency. It grows and becomes all about mobility and confinement, confinement and mobility, of different degrees. So, we have blacklists, to classifications of suspects, to registration practices of foreigners, interrogation centers for people entering from different borders (like the British Indian border with Burma), to confinement to one’s village or province, to colonial exit barriers. Flexible bureaucratic possibilities also include decrees, documents and other material technologies like checkpoints or search teams. A commander makes use of a set of tools, which increases the uncertainty. But it does have a limit. You can know what it is like and people living through it can tell you what that repertoire is. What they do not know is that it is being used on other populations as well. But people are very aware of what types of tools are used against them, which makes it interesting because the best people that can tell you about the bureaucracy are not necessarily the lawyers, but the population that is experiencing it. That’s why it is so important to understand bureaucratic systems from the point of view of the victims, even when they lack information and so much of the institutions are opaque to them. At the end of day, they know the system from their lived experience, even if they do not understand the reasons it does what it does. I think.
Pooja: For Yael, the bureaucracy of occupation is both flexible and fluid. It is flexible because it allows "constant exceptions" to what is created by exceptions in the first place (p. 112). Fluidity, she argues, increases the scope of authority over population movement. Shrimoyee, you also say that a permanent emergency is fluid but then very quickly, you add that its fluidity needs to be read with densely interlocking relations among bureaucrats, police, intelligence, prison authorities, and the judiciary. I want to hear more about how fluidity works with densely interlocking relations.
Shrimoyee: I think the fluidity is in part referring to the porosity or the ability for the categories to move across, what within the law or legal imagination would be, distinct jurisdictional spheres. For instance, we see classifications from the military and martial law terminology for “neutralizing” “anti-national elements” and “enemy combatants” and “intelligence sources” become part of the shared vocabulary of police dossiers and administrative orders. Often, these turn up in a person’s criminal record and the criminal justice system through police cases. The expansions of executive authority, and the permanent suspensions of rights and the indefinite incarceration that it enables, are produced through the intermingling and the diffusions of jurisdictional authority, leading to the questions—who has the power to authorize law and who can put a person in jail? Are you in a sub jail, covered by the prison manual, and under judicial supervision, or in a police lock up, when many of the District police lines double up as both? How about if you are in your own home which can overnight by notification become a special jail, as happened to Farooq Abdullah, the former Chief Minister after the abrogation of Article 370. Who is responsible for the custody of your body when you’re in a “Joint Interrogation Centre” run by a secret chain of shared command? So the expansions of executive, policing, military authority, and the inescapable inevitability of the bureaucratic apparatus, go hand in hand with this kind of diffusion and fluidity of judicial and legal authority, and categorizations.
In her work on colonial counterinsurgency wars in 18th Century Wayanad, Bhavani Raman argues that contrary to the norm and exception kind of binary that is mobilized around emergencies, the law is neither suspended nor formally in its place, rather it is splintered. And within that splintering, it is as if categories, people, files, and information can move across jurisdictions—policing jurisdictions, administrative jurisdictions, military classifications and secretive intelligence jurisdictions, constitutional law—in ways that they do not under ordinary law, in non-emergencies. So, fluidity, as I argue, and splintering, as Raman shows, is tied to the idea of hyperlegality, where the system is dense, provisional and circular and at the same time structured and rule bound, tied to certain forms, documentary forms, procedures and hierarchies.
Pooja: I was quite intrigued by your use of geometry in thinking hyperlegality, but it was not always clear when a grid also became a circularity and/or a revolving door? Do these imply differences in movement? What work do these geometric forms do for the articulation of hyperlegality?
Shrimoyee: Right. So the metaphors probably sound mixed because it’s such a complex system. It is excruciatingly slow; in some instances extremely rigid. It is a revolving door in that it operates through denial and deferral and circulations of paperwork, and the circulations of those bodies trapped in it. The subject is perpetually waiting at checkposts, trying to get the right permissions, acquiring a copy of a detention order or FIR, going to the right jurisdictional authority. At the same time it has at its disposal a repertoire of punitive legal techniques for political containment and there is this oscillation. It can trap you in an instant, in a raid, a sweep, in a cordon and search, since it is always an emergency, you are always a threat, and there is an immense power to switch between those two modalities: the punitive and the procedural, which the fluidity tries to evoke. It’s a shapeshifting, interlocking grid, with moving parts, if that makes sense.
The grid comes constantly up in the field because it is the “counterinsurgency grid,” right? So, the whole of Kashmir is mapped into various military jurisdictions, with policing and intelligence and administrative jurisdictions overlaid upon and interlaced through it, and it’s called the counterinsurgency grid.
Yael: You know, I think that actually it is two things. It’s the fluidity that the state has in moving between different possibilities to capture the population. The flexibility is also in the possibility of constantly having excess law and surplus emergency laws that the state can move from one to the other, or use them in tandem. The circularity and the revolving door might be more about the experience of being in it. And in that sense, you do have both. And it’s more than a grid. It’s like the net, right?
Tarangini: So, since we’re talking about bureaucracies and how messy they are, I thought I would ask you, Yael, a question about the fragmented bureaucracy of the occupation and how it emanates from a lack of an institutional framework. Of course, you’re saying that it also has to do with an absence of law itself. But we also, while reading Living Emergency, got a sense of how there is no institutional history. I mean, no linear institutional history, right?
Yael: No, no. Absolutely not. No, there isn’t. Yeah. So what’s interesting about it is that this repertoire exists at different points in the history of governing Palestinians of different types. And we can get into that in a minute because I think there is a history of the bureaucracy of the occupation, but it's never an institutional one because it's different institutions operating at different times.
Tarangini: Exactly. So it’s not a cohesive or coherent institutional history that is comparable to what you, again, discuss as a Weberian bureaucracy (even though we can hardly read the latter as an internally consistent one). But I also wanted to talk to you about something else which pertains to bureaucracies, i.e. norms such as signing. And you’re talking about how signing as a bureaucratic norm does not index authorship of a decision—on a side note, Matthew Hull makes a similar case in his Government of Paper. You indicate that this blurring of norms is a big departure from how a bureaucracy would work elsewhere. So I just wanted to ask you, are these things related then? This unfixity—this lack of fixity of norms—is emanating from an incohesive institutional history, or from an equally messy institutional history. Would you make a connection between these things?
Yael: Yes. And more than that, I think it’s interesting because we all think of this Weberian template of bureaucracy, which is like, you know, speed, knowledge of the files, hierarchy of office, all this stuff, you know, the very calculability of results. I mean, there’s this image of the rational, bureaucratic, Weberian, rational, legal bureaucracy that is also a complete and entire invention, right? It has to do with how Weber was translated by the Americans. Weber’s translation by Talcott Parsons created this idea that the three forms of legitimation, or authority, traditional authority, charismatic authority and rational legal authority, otherwise known as rule of law, are linear and progressive historical stages. But they are not. So even Weber himself knew that bureaucracy was much more messy than the ideal types that he talks about. But within that, I think what’s really interesting—I call it hybrid bureaucracy—is a bureaucracy that combines features of what we call rational legal bureaucracy, with other forms.
What’s interesting about colonial bureaucracy is that it operates on the basis of racial hierarchy. So contrary to having, you know, one law, or the perception, or declarative aspiration at least of impersonality or, you know, a universal outcome for each applicant, what you have is actually a system that is not trying to organize the outcomes, but is actually trying to differentiate and create different practices for different populations. And so that’s one difference that is really entirely distinct from the model, right? The difference between racialized colonial bureaucracy in societies with pronounced racial hierarchies, like Israel/Palestine is that they are vastly different from the Weberian model (though not necessarily from the bureaucratic reality in modern liberal states).
And then you have this idea of stability and emergency law. Emergency law enables you to respond to the emergency and create practices that are not a rule, by resorting to different local plans via different departments. They can also work on the same thing based on contradictory goals or decisions contradictorily. I found it always fascinating that the person signing the document never took responsibility. It never meant anything. Like as a lawyer, I’d say, “Oh, can I talk to so-and-so?” And they’d be like, “Why do you want to talk to so-and-so?” And I’m like, “Oh, because they signed this document so they probably know something about it.” And they would literally laugh at me like, “Oh my gosh, you think this is the way it actually functions?” Like, “Who is this silly woman and what does she want from us? She thinks there is actually a relationship between means and ends, between signing an official document and taking responsibility for its content.” I mean, it was almost...like a joke to think that there was a connection between the person that was authorizing an administrative action and the responsibility for the action.
Tarangini: Shrimoyee, I had a question for you regarding the circulation of files and paperwork within the bureaucracy of the counterinsurgency. You speak about the place of paperwork within what you term “hyperlegality,” which you read as “the deliberate incubation of hybrid and complex legal avenues and bureaucratic classificatory logics,” right? So I wanted you to talk about exactly how you would treat different types of paper. For instance, would you classify executive orders, administrative orders, dossiers, files as paperwork or disaggregate these genres? And would you see these as being shot through with different intensities? Also, do these various kinds of paper relate distinctively to everyday violence and sovereignty?
Shrimoyee: In our article titled “The grid of indefinite incarceration,” Haley Duschinski and I read the file as an archive of hyperlegality. It becomes a site at which the absent, disappeared body of a particular illegally detained individual Public Safety Act (PSA) detainee is inscribed into the legal, political, military logic of managing an insurgent population. You can observe how this takes place through the iterative patterns that keep appearing across individual files in a particular set of ways. It looks like this—the same official typologies are drawn from military intelligence. You have multiple and repetitive, identically worded police documents indexing criminality and threat to public order. What we can’t miss is the ways in which the constitutional court repeatedly steps in to quash these orders individually as aberrations, when in fact the sheer volume of these cases indicates the violations are systemic, normalized and intentional.
Think of the use of pellet shotguns in Kashmir as a crowd control measure. They are used to open fire at protesting crowds to mark and maim the bodies of protesters. The scars of pellet injuries become an instantly recognizable marker. So at every checkpost, adolescent downtown boys are asked to lift up their T-shirts, to allow authorities to identify if they are “habituals” or “stone pelters,” or “anti-social elements.” These are profiling terms routinized through preventive policing and databases, and which have entered general circulation and become everyday language. The file allows us to glimpse the violence that the bureaucratic classificatory logics render invisible, and also simultaneously perform on physical bodies of the subject population.
Public Safety Act files at a human rights lawyer’s office in Srinagar, Kashmir. June 2019. Image provided by Shrimoyee Ghosh.
So for me, the PSA file actually really allows you to unpack this relationship between physical violence and spatial violence, the sovereign and the everyday in the organizing logic of occupation. By moving across these jurisdictions, it is a discursive and material artefact, getting thicker by the day. Paperwork is both marked by its alternating absence and constant proliferation holding the body in eternal suspicion and suspension. It ensures that the body is never produced or materialized before the law.
Within such a politically violent surveillance context, we chose ethnographically to work with the file and to access the individual stories, to talk through the file, to tell the story of the files themselves. While this was safer for us and the respondents, it also promised a certain bureaucratic anonymity and documentary masking of the people who were implicated and enmeshed in these stories, and already under immense state scrutiny and threat of violence.
Tarangini: So, Yael, your work tells us that the bureaucracy of the occupation comes with a system of classifications. Such a system both labels the Palestinian a security threat and issues permits to her/him. So, to invoke Matthew Hull again, this would conjure a non-correspondence between the classification and the document. You're talking about how it is all too feasible for a person to be deemed a security threat but still be issued a permit, right?
Yael: Right. This also references the great conversation between Matthew Hull and Akhil Gupta (responding to Hull) in the HAU Journal in 2013, where Gupta explains how all bureaucracies have a problem of classification between the person or thing, the document and the law—but in colonial situations the distance between classification and its subject/object grows because the bureaucrats have a deficit of cultural knowledge about the world they are governing. This is a very different type of explanation from what the ontologists that follow Ian Hacking, etc. are saying.
Tarangini: So I was wondering, you don’t refer to other paradigms in which this unfolds. So I am tempted to ask you, does this say something about Israeli exceptionalism? So do you see this as being, in some senses, peculiar? Is there a peculiar cultural story to be narrated here of the classificatory state of Israel which is not true for other cultural locations?
Yael: No. I’m not arguing for Israeli exceptionalism. I was actually trying to say I can't really use the Israeli case to make a generalization because of the particularities of the occupation. Because it really is, you know, the longest standing colonial remnant and all of these things. But it doesn't mean that some of these traits are not more generalizable to other systems. And, for instance, that thing that you were talking about, where there's a non-correspondence between the document and the classification, following Veena Das—this would be a little bit like it’s a triangle between the document, the legal reality or classification, and the person themselves, right? Because, I mean, you have the person too. And all three have to correspond together. And so, many times you’re going to have one of them that gets murked up.
Look, so, okay. I think what is particular to Israel is this culture of informality, where there’s this constant feeling that there’s the law and then there’s what we can actually do. There is a constant disparity, a known and accepted one, between what is legal and what is expected from bureaucrats. And this disparity is racialized—here is more distance and more leeway when there is racial hierarchy—or there’s the classification and then what can actually be done. Everything is constantly up for grabs, depending on who you are, right? And this is something that Shrimoyee was just referring to when we were speaking about identities at the beginning of our conversation. What she was saying is, “Of course, you know, they’ll let me through. Of course, I’ll get to see the files. I’m considered one of them.” Right? So, same with me. When I would ask questions and I would try and figure out information, nobody would ever think that I was critiquing the system at the time just by myself being Jewish, and Israeli, and a blond woman, made me, you know...I was not suspected as someone that would be critiquing the system, and therefore I could access information. However, if I was a Palestinian lawyer, everything, you know...It would be like, “Oh, there’s a rule and you can’t pass it.”
And is it an Israeli exception? No. I think any place that has pronounced racial hierarchies is going to operate the same way. I think that this is about having pronounced racial hierarchies, of which groups can have access to information, rules that apply and don’t. The rules are geared differently towards those who are the objects of exclusion. However, again, it’s not even, and you never reach a blanket “No.” It’s not a total project. And I think that that’s what makes it extremely confusing. I think also Ranabir Samaddar speaks about this difference when he writes about colonial constitutionalism in South Asia. There’s the people that are within the legal regime and then there’s the people that are outside the legal regime and that violence can be applied to. Scholars in other cultural locations have written about this relationship between classification, race, and law, and where you are in that triangle. And so that would make more of a difference. So I don’t think it’s exceptional.
Shrimoyee: The “enemy within” or the suspect population which challenges the state is not entitled to the same rights and rule of law. I want to reiterate the point about fluidity while pointing to something else. Part of the fluidity is precisely in the ways in which Kashmir is constituted as a permanent emergency through Indian constitutional mechanisms. It’s a legally saturated zone of exception. So when a Kashmiri detainee is challenging his detention, it is through the Indian constitutional scheme of Article 21 and the habeas corpus jurisdiction. It’s not as if preventive detention applies only in Kashmir, because, you see, it’s institutionalized in the Indian Fundamental Rights chapter itself.
When I say counterinsurgency law constitutes a special kind of jurisdiction, it is neither martial law nor ordinary law, but something that draws on military logics of pacification to eliminate the enemy within—the ungovernable rebellious communities and types. Still, nothing in Armed Forces Special Powers Act, for example, allows for checkpoints, or curfews itself. And yet it is a counterinsurgency law which enables both the cordon search —military crackdown style operations—directly targeting civilian lives and properties, and this intense bureaucratic regulation of their lives through the ID regime. The law has carved out a space of permanent, complex emergency in which all systems stemming from law apply and no systems of law apply at the same time.
Yael: I just want to say something more about suspicion. So I think that suspicion works differently than we think. Like, we think there’s classification of population and that there’s classification of suspicion and they’re separate. I actually think, and this is in my upcoming book, Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire, that there’s racial classifications. I call them “demographic classifications” like race, gender, religion, caste, region. Then there’s several levels of suspicion such as doubtful loyalty, enemies of the state, loyal subjects. And there's this continuum that upends the other categories. So, suspicion is interlinked with these different kinds of classifications. I'm talking about British colonial times.
And I think that this happens, too, in Israel-Palestine where certain populations are considered continuously suspect. There are those who are permanently suspect because of their affiliation, for instance, with Hamas or with other Islamic entities, or because of their particular village, or because of their different affiliations with other groups that are deemed as terrorist groups. Instead of it being an extra classification, it works in tandem with other types, constituting what I call the axis of classification in my new book. So you’ll have age. You’ll have, of course, masculine young men who are immediately suspect, and then young men with particular affiliations, young men from particular areas. But that suspicion is also fluid.. And so, in that sense, it’s only a gray zone for those that are outside of the suspicion at that moment but the rest of Palestinians are going to be part of the suspect population most of the time.
Tarangini: I wanted to flag something about the constitution that Shrimoyee said and bring that to you. I wanted to ask you where the Israeli constitution features in the story of occupation. Because there’s a way in which, of course, you talk about the permit regime as not being statutory—as coming through in the form of decree after decree, not even systematic guidelines. But where does the constitution figure in terms of pushing back this non-statutory extralegal regime? As far as the Indian Constitution is concerned, there are provisions both for citizens and non-citizens. In the case of Palestinians, does the Israeli constitution have provisions for them as non-citizens?
Yael: Okay, so first of all, Israel doesn’t have a constitution. What we have is certain laws that have been recognized as a constitution, and a judicial constitution, which is a bunch of constitutional rights recognized by the Supreme Court in lieu of the constitution. It applies mainly to citizens and not to non-citizens. It can apply sometimes to non-citizens, but it doesn’t apply to Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza because they are outside of the jurisdiction. I know this sounds crazy, and it is, but this is part of the way it works. Now, Palestinians do have standing in front of the Supreme Court and most of the law about Palestinians has been created through decisions of the Supreme Court. However, when it comes to freedom of movement, Israel thinks of the permit regime as a system of privileges. Palestinians have no right to move or enter Israel. So you can’t say “My right has been violated,” because you don’t have a right for mobility or entry. It can get more complicated when there’s permit regimes within the West Bank. For instance, there were periods where the West Bank itself was separated between the north and south, or there’s separation between the Gaza strip and the West Bank preventing mobility. When parents get separated from their children, they can claim they have familial rights and circumvent the permit regime. It’s impossible to challenge the permit regime in an Israeli court because it isn’t based on law, but on decrees and bureaucratic regulation.
In my own cases (80 roughly), I was working with people that were denied entry for security reasons into the Supreme Court, because what we claimed was that they were falsely classified as security threats and prevented from going to work. Now, there is a constitutional law in Israel that guarantees freedom of occupation, as in work. And through that, we would claim all kinds of things. But what we were really claiming was just trying to get the Shin Bet [Security Service] to say “We don’t care about this case,” and just letting them go. So, even when we went to the Supreme Court, it was really about bureaucracy. So, I’d bring in on a Friday morning (Saturday being our rest day), like, 12 cases, knowing that they would all arrive on the desk of somebody at the prosecution, like the Attorney General’s office. They would receive this whole packet of stuff on a Sunday morning. And they’d be like, “Oh, I can’t deal with this. It’s too much work.” And then they call up somebody at the Shin Bet and say, “Oh, are there any of these people that you could just have, like...that we don’t have to write, you know...answers for?” And in that way we’d get like 50 percent of it cut off. This means that 5 or 6 of those who petitioned the court would get a permit of some sort. But not because they have rights. And in that sense, it really is different than Kashmir where you do have some sort of standing. And Palestinians just don’t. Like, they just don’t exist. They have no space—legal space—to exist on account of this bureaucratic grid.
Shrimoyee: Whereas I would say that the constitutional history of Indian state formation, which we discuss, is enmeshed in the Kashmiri grid. Kashmir was entrenched as a constitutional exception through Presidential Orders and Article 370, and now post the abrogation, its status has been reduced to that of a Union Territory via constitutional provisions of President’s rule invoked for emergencies. Of course it’s also a “disturbed area” for purposes of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and so, Kashmir continues to exist in a state of emergencies, within emergencies. But also, there are variations, and calibrations within the territory, especially because there is the international border at play. So, in Kashmir, you have this Ingress and Egress Movement (Control) Order from the 1948 war, which literally says that you need a permit to go from place A to place B. And it’s used to criminalize “infiltration” and border crossings between Indian and Pakistan held Kashmir, even civilian crossings. But then you have cases, for example, of Kashmiri militants who went for arms training to the other side of Kashmir, were given amnesty by the Indian government to return, had formed families there, were then stopped at the border or were trying to cross back illegally because the Pakistan embassy didn’t issue them the documentation. And border guards tore up their documentation at the entry point. And now you have families that are separated. You have women that are stateless, maybe in an abusive marriage, stuck here. It’s like the partition never ended, and the transfer of populations never took place, the territorial inside and outside never got legally demarcated.
And then you have this border zone. All along the Line of Control (LoC), you have three-tiered fencing, and you have land and people within those tiers of fencing where there’s literally a gate, and a lock, an overnight curfew, and an ID and permit regime. There are different events and phenomena which occasioned the expansion of the permit regime, the scale up of the Border Security Forces and the annual pilgrimage of the Amarnath Yatra. Kashmiris are not allowed, even if they live on that route, to travel that route. They have a special permit and checkpost regime set up, all standing for microsystems that enable emergencies within emergencies. And I’m sure it’s the same in Palestine. Because when you say it’s a sprawl, it’s exactly that. You need to go to one office to get curfew pass, another to get the Amarnath Yatra pass, and a third office to do a background check for a job. All of these sites including the police station become modes of controlling mobility to the final point of actual incarceration. That's the relation between constitutional demarcation, and these other “provisional” security measures.
Cover image of Living Emergency (2017) by Yael Berda.
Pooja: In your book, The Living Emergency, you say that the permit regime was enacted as a reaction to political changes on the national level, which included new economic plans, the shifts in labor policy, and power struggles between different authorities or emergency solutions for internal operations. Could you explain what these new economic imperatives were to which the permit regime was deemed to be an answer? Is it possible to imagine that a labor question is disguised as a security question through the permit regime?
Yael: The permit regime happens when two things are happening at the same time. One, Israel is going through this very strong neoliberal phase from 1985 towards the early 90s and there are “peace negotiations.” At the same time, Israel does rely on Palestinian workers, but with the 1987 Intifada, there are problems for the flow of labor. Israel mulls over getting labor from overseas, under Operation Open Skies both in the hope of replacing Palestinian labor and preventing their entry into Israel. The early permit regime, therefore, worked with a global economy of labor in mind. This does not, however, work out.
The second point is that although the Oslo Accords (1993) fell apart, an important segment of it, the Paris Protocol, which put in place labor quotas, endured. This Protocol declares Israel and Palestine as one taxation zone. It is not the permit regime that starts regulating Palestinian workers because that began very early on in the occupation. Already in 1970, there is a decision to not integrate both economies and Israeli labor unions are demanding that Palestinian workers be regulated so that they do not bring down the wages of Israeli workers. This was not enforceable then because there was no permit regime. So, the permit regime is, in some ways, a labor regime, but it is not instituted for that reason. What happens is that it becomes a form of labor policing. I have discussed colonial management of Palestinian mobility after 2005 in a recent article that I have co-written with a student, Walid Habbas.
In an interesting twist, in the first lockdown following COVID-19 about 40,000 Palestinian workers were allowed to sleep in Israel. This was incredible because citing security reasons, Palestinian workers could not legally stay back in Israel between 1 and 5 am. It was through the lobbying of power construction bodies which maintained that the Israeli economy would collapse without Palestinian labor that they were allowed to sleep in Israel for two months. It seems that the economic might be trumping security, but what this really means is that there might be more mobility for Palestinian labor now, but terrible work conditions continue to exist.
Tarangini: Yael, you imply that the permit regime is a shifting volatile regime tied up with the global economy at a certain point in time and that it was acting on security-related anxieties. While those security anxieties never faded, they intensified with the Intifada. At a point in your book, you talk about how the regime, especially when it is seen as impinging on laboring Palestinians, creates this abject dependency of Palestinian labor on the permit regime. What is less evident in your book is that the Israeli state is dependent on the permit regime. So, for instance, it’s very clear that the Shin Bet and the civil administration are not particularly sympathetic to the Israeli employers who apply for permits that allow Palestinian workers to pass. But at the same time, the Israeli state seems to be parasitic on the permit regime for various reasons.
Yael: So for me, the most important finding was, basically, I think that the Shin Bet didn’t design the permit regime, but what happened was they relied on it in the following way. So in 1995, the Israeli military leaves Palestinian cities under the Oslo accords. And up till then, the Shin Bet had eyes everywhere—physically had human agents. And leaving the cities meant that they had to leave a lot of the other forms of intelligence gathering. Now, this is before surveillance technologies that they have today, right?
Actually Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari has a beautiful way to describe it. And he describes that in the early years of the Intifada, the Shin Bet were eyeless in Judea. There’s this point where they feel that they don’t see. They can’t see. State isn’t seeing. Okay, so what do they do when they can’t see? Suddenly you have this apparatus that is extremely powerful because people depend on it for their work and mobility. And then what they start doing is they start exchanging permits for information. And the permit regime becomes a method of massive recruitment of thousands and thousands of people. I can’t tell you the amount of people that I alone have talked to that have described having that conversation with the Shin Bet people saying, “Oh, you help us and we’ll help you. If you give us information, then you’ll get a permit. And if you don’t, you won’t.” And a lot of times, the classification of the security threat can come because they’re trying to recruit you. After being eyeless, the Shin Bet thought it was a great opportunity to get people to work as informants who agreed because they got permits. Renewing it every three months kept them on the hook. It’s not, like, some high-level intelligence. It can be extremely low-level.
And I have this example in the book because it’s very powerful. So one person describes coming in for an interrogation and then having his interrogator say to him, “Who gave you that pretty needlepoint of Al-Aqsa that is on your wall in the living room?” Al-Aqsa is a mosque of the Temple Mount. Now, the person that is being interrogated is in a crazy state of fear. How does the interrogator know what kind of needlepoint he has on his wall? And how would he know that it was a gift? I mean, it makes them totally omnipotent, all powerful and everywhere, right? But what they did was they asked his neighbor who is an informant. And then the question is, “Tell me what is on Yousef’s wall.” This allows for ubiquitous power governing your life without doing a lot of work for it. And so this blanket of informers, that’s something that Shabak (the Hebrew acronym for General Secret Service—Sherut Habitachon Haklali) becomes incredibly dependent on. Now, it’s totally illegal from an international point of view. Article 31 of the Geneva Convention does not allow you to recruit informants or to demand information because of their dependency. So, I mean, this is, like, total violation happening every day. And it’s always the laborers that are targeted because they’re the most vulnerable, because they’re relying on the permit in order to work. And so you have that thing that’s happening.
Shrimoyee: Can I just pick up on something that Yael said? So, in Kashmir now, there’s a whole bureaucracy around compensation of people who have lost relatives to the counterinsurgency. This allows informational inroads into the population—schools, sports, permit regimes have all become sites through which the police bureaucracy seeks to persuade people to share information.
There have been compensation processes around destroyed houses, “collateral damage” in armed encounters, civilian killings, disability caused by pellet gunfire or in custody, loss of limbs due to unexploded munitions. All of that is mired in a bureaucratic mesh of multiple layers of police certification, background checks, administrative discretion, with authorities pretending all the while that this is not an armed conflict but just internal disturbances.
Pooja: The word ideology also comes up in your article on more than one occasion. I kept wondering how you make the categorical distinction between legal and bureaucratic paperwork. But what you also do is that you add ideology to this. Could you elaborate on what ideologies of inscription and those of encryption mean in your text. Then I had a second question, which is that one of your interlocutors is Nick Cheesman, who in his 2015 work, Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order works with the conceptual framework of “authoritarian inequality.” And there I wondered what might be the distinction between permanent emergency and authoritarian inequality. The reason I say that is that for Cheesman this authority is depersonalized. Whereas if you go to Yael’s work, this authority is often personal. And I kept thinking, how is this authoritarian inequality working with permanent emergency?
Shrimoyee: So, first the personal/depersonal question. So I think paperwork and bodies circulate at different points and jurisdictional scales. This is particularly true for power within the grid where the intensities and affects of legal and bureaucratic authority are particularly visible. Depending on what node you are talking about, the same authority can be both intensely procedural and impersonal, and yet also extremely arbitrary and authoritarian, oscillating between intimate, paternalistic, depersonalized and objective registers.
So one place I observed this was when I was watching court proceedings in the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir. When the PSA file has moved, for example, to the Constitutional habeas corpus court—the High Court—in one sense, the proceedings are almost completely depersonalized. The judge is looking at the file, the paperwork. It’s about whether the reply has been filed, whether the administrative board has carried out its file review, filed its objections, whether the state has confirmed the detention order within the stipulated time period. And the outcome of the case is already decided. The preventive detention order is going to be held illegal, and it’s going to be quashed in almost identically worded order. This is what happens. And I think one study says a vast majority of preventive detention orders are routinely quashed. So in that sense, it’s highly depersonalized, and in another very literal sense, because the hearing is about the absent, illegally detained body of the detainee, it’s the paperwork that stands in for the flesh and blood person who is elsewhere.
But elsewhere, you saw this play out differently. For example, the lawyers went on strike, in the period that I was doing my ethnographic work in the courts, and there were only a few lawyers who were appearing before the court, and a few families pleading right there in the courtroom. And the judge would then ask them, in these kind of chastising but kindly tones, you know, “Why is your boy doing this? He’s an unruly character. Why don’t you control him? Why don’t you get him married?” So here what you see being deployed is a paternalistic, scolding, humanitarian, highly personalized counterinsurgency logic of persuasion, you hear it when police officers say, “Oh, We’re trying to rehabilitate and reform these boys, or bring them to the right...” And of course, there are these large-scale amnesties, right? So after a period of volatility, there will be like a thousand of police cases, FIRs quashed altogether, and then the police talk about bringing the misguided youth back to mainstream. I think the depersonal and the personal forms of this kind of exercise of power are always provisionally coexisting.
We can talk about this personalized and paternalistic modality of counterinsurgency persuasion also in terms of a provisional policing. One way this happened was a practice observed during the 2019 crackdown—which had its origins in colonial policing—which entailed getting elders from the village to collectively gather and sign bonds taking responsibility for their good behavior in the future. At other times, government servants, politicians, students, educators and journalists were coerced into signing these bonds, stating they wouldn’t write anything contrary to the official state position.
Notice to litigants in the Srinagar High Court by the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Association protesting the illegal detention of their office bearers and appointing a special panel of lawyers to handle Habeas Corpus Petitions during the mass arrests following the Abrogation of Article 370. October 2019. Image provided by Shrimoyee Ghosh.
Pooja: Shrimoyee, drawing on the distinction you make between legal and bureaucratic paperwork, could you say more about what you mean by ideologies of inscription and those of encryption?
Shrimoyee: The legal and bureaucratic paperwork overlap and intersect at various points in the itinerary of the Public Safety Act (PSA) file, which makes it such a good graphic object to unpack. This is not always the case where the case file does not travel across the constitutional, criminal justice and administrative bureaucracy, but here in the PSA case file, it is possible to see the disjunctures and points of ideological congruence, observe the archival logics, the genre conventions, and the normative commitments of the institutions its circulating through. In this context the ideologies of inscription would be the ways in which the body is reduced to writing into the file, to being materialized, produced and fabricated through the file. For instance, a person is only in custody if the paperwork says he is, otherwise he does not exist even if he has been at the police station for weeks. The ideology of inscription makes visible and legible the graded and the highly calibrated, indelible markers of threat and suspicion.
Encryption is the illegibility and the crucial element of secrecy, which is also part of such writing ideologies in this context of the juridicalization of the political. For instance, a First Information Report (FIR, case file) is both a visible marker of criminality in the PSA Dossier, which is a secret document and not accessible to people detained. It is, however, reproduced in large part in the PSA order. The paradoxical effect here precisely is that since a person’s name is often not written in the FIR, the FIR does the work of both obscuring identity, but also pulling a person out of a crowd.
Tarangini: Shrimoyee, I wanted to get you to speak a little bit about the complex origins of preventive detention laws, as such. Because I feel like you seem to be gesturing towards a separate genealogy of preventive detention as far as it comes to the mainland, and the counterinsurgency wars in Kashmir. There seems to be a complex story of origins of preventive detention in counterinsurgency wars in Kashmir.
Shrimoyee: When the Indian Constitution’s jurisdiction is extended to Kashmir, through what's called the Basic Order of 1954, where the Indian Constitution’s Fundamental Rights first are made applicable in Kashmir, they insert a sort of exceptional provision, Article 35C, which says that none of the Fundamental Rights chapter will apply to preventive detention laws in Kashmir in India. So even those limited rights under Article 22 of the Constitution,—namely, that you have a right to a review of your preventive detention case by an Advisory Board and can’t be detained for longer than three months on a single order, didn’t apply to Kashmiri detainees until 1978. A preventive detention order, which can be the basis of limited rights for negotiating in the Indian Constitution, was not applicable in Kashmir. Besides, there was no right of habeas corpus in Kashmir until 1978. And thereafter, of course, we know that once the insurgency starts and the counterinsurgency starts, and there are enforced disappearances, and complete impunity, there’s no habeas corpus actually judicially available. But at least on paper, it is judicially available after 1978, with the “normal” Constitutional restrictions that apply to preventive detention laws in India.
So in that sense, there are interlocking histories. But when we tell the history of emergency in India, we always tell it as the Emergency of 1975 sort of being the low point where the Supreme Court said there can be no judicial review over habeas corpus. And for twenty five years, Kashmiris, you had no habeas corpus constitutionally, through an article of the Indian Constitution.
Tarangini: Okay, so last question that I have for you. So, Yael, in your work, Living Emergency, you explain quite compellingly the effects that being classified as a security threat can have in terms of resulting in this profound sense of isolation. You use the term “atomization” here. But you also talk about how for the Palestinian subjects, movement itself—as evidenced through petitions to secure permits—becomes a mode of resistance. Just the act of moving despite all of this is tantamount to resistance. But what is kind of befuddling for me is that, in the book, you narrate several stories of Palestinian workers who approached you needing to travel out of laboring necessity. Are you saying that acts of crossing which are impelled by laboring necessity, are also imbued with an agential power? But I can’t help feeling that you are speaking about a resistance that is in excess of this—maybe you're also saying that the agency of moving across borders is also the agency of refusing to die.
Yael: Yeah, first of all, there’s beautiful work by Helga Tawil-Souri and Rema Hammami about how continuing to go through the checkpoints, continuing to live, is a form of Palestinian resistance. But I think that I’m talking about something beyond that. So imagine being the Palestinian who is denied entry and is petitioning the Supreme Court against the Shin Bet. “We write. We’re petitioning against the Shin Bet, against the civil administration.” And people had a deep fear. They had a deep fear because they felt that if they lose, they could be permanently classified as “denied entry.” So it kind of closes all the personal possibilities for the personalism and for making it through. And to me, I saw obtaining the permit through these channels as a way to say, “You are not going to call me a security threat. You are not going to get to tell me who I am with my politics and my life.” And I found it incredibly powerful. Like, at a certain point I almost felt like it’s terrible work in the sense that you constantly lose. You’re losing all the time. But there was something about meeting people.
And we’d meet in Area C, where it was legal for me to arrive and it was legal for those people denied entry to arrive. And so I kind of set up shop at this famous restaurant called the Everest, where the people allowed us to just kind of take over a table. And we’d bring in a printer, and we’d bring computers, and we’d get everybody to sign the affidavits, because otherwise you couldn’t have people sign. And I think I described this at the end of the book. On Saturday mornings, people would arrive with their families and it would become a ritual. Early on, you would quietly wait your turn to write your affidavit where you recount the story of why you claim you are not a security threat. Of course, you don’t know why you’re being told that you’re a security threat. So the affidavit is basically saying “All those things that I don’t know that you’re thinking about me, they are not true because this is who I am.”
And so it becomes almost like a biography, like an autobiography to the court. And in a sense, it’s a terrible thing to have to do. But it’s also a liberating and emancipating thing to do because you’re standing up to being classified ridiculously when there is nothing you can do about it. And so afterwards, people would kind of tell their story, and suddenly the crowd would begin to talk and everybody would begin to tell their stories to each other. And it became kind of like this gathering around the affidavit of the bureaucracy, of getting the petitions in. You’d have the sense of like this shared, like, “What is this crap anyway?” Like, seeing basically the bureaucracy for what it was.
Pooja: In this securitized political economy of labor, how are Palestinian women located? I understand that women might simply not have the resources to take on the permit regime, but I am curious to know if women, too, become security threats in the same way. Would it be fair to read your ethnography as being primarily about Palestinian men?
Yael: First of all, there are much less women who are security threats. So, in terms of samples, it was difficult to research. Also, I wanted to work on the construction sector because it is a very strong sector and women are not part of this labor economy. In my new book, Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire, as well, I do not research women because it does become difficult to generalize and here I am going back to thinking with Sociology as my discipline. The way I was doing the research was by representing people and there is no question that in terms of resources, if there is a woman who is denied entry, then it is not going to be perceived as important enough to challenge like the man who is perceived as a security threat. Most of the women that are classified as security threats are political activists, directly. And that is a different story and that I decided entirely to omit, as it has a different logic. I wanted to stay with the mundane and the daily.
But I think you are right. And there is something underlying with dealing with gender for me. I struggle with articulating how this bureaucracy is viewing women. I do not understand it in the same way, like there is something about the coming together of suspicion and the masculinity, which I comprehend much better because of work that I do with Palestinian men.
Tarangini: Shrimoyee, if you want to look at your own work, wouldn’t you also agree that when you’re narrating a story of militarized constitutionalism, there seems to be a void of women, too? When you’re talking about property regimes, citizenship, you are talking about women but when you’re talking about the circulation of files, as with preventive detention, there seems to be an absence of women. However, I am familiar with how mothers in Kashmir have formed associations to search for their missing sons.
Shrimoyee: Women go in search of missing men and they act as interlocutors and often agitators at police stations. They’re often the first line of community defense when men from the locality are about to be abducted by state officials. They’re gathering and archiving the papers. Mainly the mothers of the disappeared who formed the Association of Parents of Disappeared—the kind of forgotten figure that anthropologist Ather Zia writes about in her work—is very often a Habeas Corpus petitioner. A bunch of mothers and “half widows” got together to navigate these dense paper trials. They collated High Court files, Inquiry Reports, official chits and permission slips to keep track of their many fruitless visits to innumerable prisons, police stations and bureaucratic officials over the years. So, while the subject of the file is often young and male, those that search, remember and haunt the grid are often women.
Pooja: Perhaps we could bring this conversation to a close by thinking about how we write our ethnographies and the senses of the political in which we are located. Yael, I was quite struck by points of resonance between your work and Ilana Feldman’s Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule (2015). For instance, Feldman articulates Gaza as a security society, and extends Partha Chatterjee’s argument in The Politics of the Governed, where he makes the distinction between civil and political society. Your own expression is Schmittian, where a “security theology” becomes “the regime of justification that underlies the bureaucratic apparatus of the permit regime,” with its “miracle” (Palestinian males) being rendered security threat in perpetuity (2012: 8-9). The contexts are different—Gaza under Egyptian rule for Feldman and Permit Regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the contemporary in your work—but in so far as the generative conditions are geared towards producing uncertainty and suspicion uninterruptedly, I wondered why an engagement with the works of Palestinian scholars like her was missing in your work.
Yael: At one level this is a discipline question. In sociology, there are a lot more things that have to be explained that are a given for anthropologists precisely because of anthropology’s relationship with colonial history. Both colonial history and its legacies are kind of a taken for granted thing with the anthropologists, I think. The burden with sociologists is that they have to be convinced that there is even that resonance with coloniality. To this day, I have to face challenges like: “Why am I using the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘hierarchies of race’ when I’m talking about the way the regime separates between populations?” It is something that has to be articulated rather than understood. And I think Feldman works from the place where colonialism is part of the history and then she is building on those concepts.
Cover image of Yael Berda’s book in Hebrew titled The Bureaucracy of the Occupation.
Now, a second thing is that I was trying to understand how the permit regime was created. I was trying to find the smoking gun that creates it, that makes it. A difficult articulation might also be that from a Palestinian perspective, one does not need to explain why the apparatus is an apparatus of segregation and subjugation. Because that is a Palestinian person’s life. Because it is Zionism, it is a settlement project and it is trying to eliminate Palestinians. This is a given. I wrote my book in Hebrew and called it The Bureaucracy of the Occupation because I was and am trying to talk to the Israelis. My effort is to talk to them in a way that they can hear me, and that they can listen. One of the ways that I am hoping that they can listen is by not taking the stance that knows ahead of time why this permit regime is put in place, but trying to understand it from the ground up. One of the decisions that I make there is not to engage with the literature that is coming from the Palestinian perspective. And that was a very difficult decision. But it was a fruitful one in the sense that there was a lot of attention that was given to it within the Israeli establishment and even within the military. And to me, that is worth doing because it is something that nobody else can do. Now, it is a controversial and complicated decision to make. There is really just one truth at the end, which is that there is this regime that is here to prevent the return of the Palestinians to their homeland.
I think that there is a journey that people have to make to get out of their spaces of denial in order to be able to see that reality. And the question is, how much hope do we have in that journey—the possibility of that journey? And what role do we take in guiding the people that are in various stages of willingness to see? And in that sense, making your work relevant is a lot about the amount of hope and the amount of trust that you are going to extend the public you are writing to. And that is a constant question. I oscillate between saying, “It is worth it and we should be talking to all these people in denial,” and saying “It is absolutely not worth it. Why am I putting in any time? Let us opt to build alternatives since there is no saving what is being done.”
There is no possibility of saving or reforming the system as it is. What we need is a regime change.
Yael Berda is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Hebrew University Mouth Scopus in Jerusalem. She is the author of Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the West Bank and she is currently working on a book manuscript titled Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire.
Shrimoyee Ghosh is a lawyer and legal anthropologist who is Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru in India. Shrimoyee’s work focuses on questions of rights and justice, and the law’s relationship to everyday forms of subjectivity and violence. She has worked with local coalitions and organizations on a number of human rights documentation and litigation efforts in Kashmir, Mumbai and New Delhi.
Pooja Satyogi is Assistant Professor in the School of Law, Governance, and Citizenship at Ambedkar University in Delhi. She is an anthropologist and a political scientist and her interdisciplinary work spans the fields of surveillance and security studies and considers the relationship between law and policing. She is currently finalizing her book manuscript, which is entitled Intimate Public Spaces: Policing “Domestic Cruelty” in Women’s Units, Delhi.
Tarangini Sriraman is joining Goldsmiths, University of London as a Wellcome Trust-funded Research Fellow. She is a political scientist turned historian focused on state forms and histories of identification from the margins. She is the author of In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India. She is currently working on a project involving the medical humanities and discourses of alcohol in colonial India.
Commissioned by Rishav Thakur and edited by Tara Giangrande.