Description
It is now widely accepted in academic literature that in spite of its political salience, infrastructure rarely appears as an object of public inquiry: as famously argued by Edwards (2004: 185), “we notice [infrastructures] mainly when they fail, which they rarely do”. Accordingly, much of the existing scholarship seeks to problematize the political neutrality of infrastructural arrangements and interrogate their power-laden effects. By contrast, in this paper I discuss dynamics which seeks to render contested infrastructure as non-political for privileged segments of the public. I empirically focus on infrastructures governing mobility in the occupied West Bank. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine, and utilizing insights from studies of naturalizing colonial power through the interplay of material, spatial and discursive practices, I show how the racialized and criticized mechanisms of the Israeli control, such as segregated roads and checkpoints, are turned into mere features of the everyday life for the Israeli settlers. I argue that this is achieved by reframing them as matters of convenience that facilitate middle-class lifestyle rather than artefacts of settler-colonial regime. While conceptually developing notion of depoliticization of infrastructure in the context of colonial dominance, the paper thus also works towards better understanding of how the Israeli occupation becomes entrenched and unnoticeable for the Israelis.
