Occupied Intimacies: Borderization in Palestine, Georgia and Western Sahara

This research project is about the everyday lives and intimate social relations of people living under military occupation. Historically, occupation – the placement of a territory under a foreign sovereign power – has been a temporary state related to war or change of governance. However, today, several military occupations seem almost permanent in their protraction and their very natures (‘occupation,’ ‘invasion’, ‘administration’, ‘liberation’) are often disputed and highly politicised.
We will investigate and compare three examples of such on-going occupations: the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, and the Russian occupation of the Georgian territory of South Ossetia, which go back to 1967, 1975 and 2008 respectively. In all three territories, people are placed in prolonged states of liminality. Dominance is also exercised through a complex of tactics and strategies that seek to legitimise and consolidate the occupation through the creation and recreation of physical, bureaucratic and symbolic borders and boundaries. We conceptualize this as a continuous process of borderization. This analytical lens will allow for a dynamic understanding of how, concretely, contemporary occupations affect and direct people’s daily lives and their possibilities to form and maintain intimate relations.

This project within political anthropology takes everyday life as its focus, using ethnographic fieldwork as its main method, and shows the links and interaction between micro- and macro-politics. It asks the overall question:
How do practices and experiences of borderization compare and contrast in Palestine, Western Sahara and Georgia, and what does this tell us about occupation as a contemporary form of political dominance and its effects on everyday intimate relations?