A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web - Stéphanie Latte Abdallah

Palgrave Macmillan (The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy), 2022, 416 p.

This book deals with the contemporary history of the imprisonment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons since 1967, and, since the 2000s, in Palestinian facilities. Widely shared in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, incarceration endurably marks personal and collective stories, and has spun a prison web, a kind of suspended detention. Approximately 40 percent of the male population has been to prison. This book shows how the judicial and prison practices applied to Palestinian residents of the OPT are major fractal devices of control contributing to the management of Israeli borders, and shape a specific bordering system based on a mobility regime. This history of confinement is that of the prison web, and of the in-between political, social, and personal spaces people weave between Inside and Outside prison. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, archives, and extensive institutional documentation, this political anthropology book deals with carceral citizenships and subjectivities; masculinities, femininities, gender relations, parentality, and intimacy. Woven like a web, this story is built around places, moments, people, and their testimonies.