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WASTE SIEGE: THE LIFE OF INFRASTRUCTURE IN PALESTINE Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020 (xv + 222 pages, notes, references, index) $28.00 (paper)
Infrastructures often mediate relationships between states and populations, and can be considered reliable barometers of state power and its distribution. But as Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine demonstrates, the overlapping jurisdictions and "murky indexicality" surrounding waste in Palestine complicate this linearity, offering a unique vantage point for exploring questions of capitalist excess, violence, ethics, and governance (8). Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins tracks waste management across scope and scale to explore how Palestinians navigate the convergence of Israeli occupation, humanitarian intervention, and stalled statehood. Waste Siege's overarching proposition is that unprecedented varieties and volumes of waste in the West Bank constitute an "emergent, yet overlooked, form of siege [that] shapes politics and ethics for Palestinians in unexpected ways" (ix). The result is an innovative and methodologically rich text that skillfully links conditions of life under twenty-first-century settler colonialism to larger discussions of global environmental crises.
Stamatopoulou-Robbins sets the tone of the book with a clear break from nationalist and state-centric thematics that often frame discourse on Palestine, centering instead "improvisations," or everyday adaptations that Palestinians employ to mitigate the effects of waste siege (20-21). For example, chapter 2 follows Palestinians who purchase used Israeli goods from Jaffa's flea markets to resell in Jenin's rabish (rubbish) market, transforming "Israeli castoffs into commodities" (72). Chapter 4 also takes a contemporary phenomenon-noticeable quantities of discarded bread in urban centers-as its jumping-off point. Never throwing bread away, residents of cities like Ramallah and Bethlehem instead workshop ethical ways to discard unwanted loaves, for example, stacking them on public walls for passersby. As Stamatopoulou-Robbins points out, participation in bread's recirculation is widespread yet operates through unspoken communal consensus. As a result, cast-off bread can be seen as an infrastructure itself, mediating urban life while also circulating ideals of community connected by shared ethical sensibilities.
Both chapters complicate simplistic depictions of life under occupation by exploring "halfway" or "good enough" approaches to dilemmas presented by waste siege (170). Likewise, Stamatopoulou-Robbins' focus on improvisations seamlessly integrates...