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Architecture as event space: Violence, securitisation, and resistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Michael J. Shapiro
Michael J. Shapiro*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
*
*Corresponding author. Email: shapiro@hawaii.edu
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Abstract

Central to the conception of this article is the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi's dictum, ‘There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program … no architecture without violence.’ Shaped as well by Eyal Weizman's conception of ‘forensic architecture’, the focus of the investigation is on Israel's architecture of security and on the corresponding Palestinian architecture of resistance. Emphasising an encounter of cartographies that reveals the way Palestinians make life livable in response to the architectural violence they face, the analysis continues with reference to Yari Sharif's analysis of architectures of resistance and with a reading of a feature film, Hany Abu-Assad's Omar (2013) in which the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine is one of the film's primary agent/protagonists. The article surveys popular culture texts, focused on crime and espionage to analyse a range of security practices and breaches that amplify the analysis with attention to security issues in individual households, multiple-person dwelling arrangements, architectural locations throughout cities, and buildings housing governmental security agencies. That trajectory of architectural sites lends a micropolitical analysis to the macropolitical level of governmental policy and modes of resistance to it.

Keywords

Politics of AestheticsArchitectureEvent SpacesSecurity
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of International Security , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , October 2019 , pp. 366 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2019 

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References

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2 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics, trans. Burchell, G. (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 3Google Scholar. The method that Foucault describes in those lectures forms much of the rationale for the approach in my recent monograph on war crimes: Shapiro, Michael J., War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice (Cambridge: Polity, 2015)Google Scholar.

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19 See the interview, ‘Eyal Weizman on global politics and forensic architecture’, Theory Talks # 69 (21 December 2015), available at: {http://www.theory-talks.org/2015/03/theory-talk-69.html}.

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