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Full-Text Articles in Law
Wild Legalities: Animals And Settler Colonialism In Palestine/Israel, Irus Braverman
Wild Legalities: Animals And Settler Colonialism In Palestine/Israel, Irus Braverman
Journal Articles
This article examines the underlying biopolitical premises of wildlife management in Palestine/Israel that make, remake, and unmake this region's settler colonial landscape. Drawing on interviews with Israeli nature officials and observations of their work, the article tells several animal stories that illuminate the hierarchies and slippages between wild and domestic, nature and culture, native and settler, and human and nonhuman life in Palestine/Israel. Animal bodies are especially apt technologies of settler colonialism, I show here. They naturalize and normalize settler modes of existence, while criminalizing native livelihoods and relations. Utilizing the terra nullius doctrine, creating biblical landscapes by reintroducing extirpated …
Anticipating Endangerment: The Biopolitics Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman
Anticipating Endangerment: The Biopolitics Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman
Journal Articles
The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of national and global lists of threatened and endangered species. This article draws on interviews with prominent list managers and observations of their assessments to explore the scientific practices of list-making in the context of species conservation. Delving into the complex calculations of risk and threat that take place in the process of ranking nonhuman species based on their probability of extinction, the article explores the threatened species list as a biopolitical technology of catastrophe governance. My focus on two prominent lists — the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and NatureServe’s …
Captive: Zoometric Operations In Gaza, Irus Braverman
Captive: Zoometric Operations In Gaza, Irus Braverman
Journal Articles
“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-animal relations in Gaza, especially at times of siege and war. My article draws on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis to relay how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion into Gaza of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization …
Hyperlegality And Heightened Surveillance: The Case Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman
Hyperlegality And Heightened Surveillance: The Case Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman
Journal Articles
My contribution to the Debate "Thinking about Law and Surveillance" focuses on the project of governing nonhuman species through care, briefly pointing to how law and surveillance are interwoven in this context and to how conservation's biopolitical regimes are increasingly becoming more abstract, standardized, calculable, and algorithmic in scope. I argue that conservation’s focus on governing through care lends itself to heightened modes of surveillance and to hyperlegality - namely, to the intensified inspection and regulation of both governed and governing actors. I start with some preliminary explanations about my atypical use of the terms surveillance, law, and biopolitics.
Governing The Wild: Databases, Algorithms, And Population Models As Biopolitics, Irus Braverman
Governing The Wild: Databases, Algorithms, And Population Models As Biopolitics, Irus Braverman
Journal Articles
This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspects of the in situ – ex situ divide and its increasing integration: database systems and population management models. Specifically, I highlight those databases and software programs used by zoos in ex situ conservation settings, and the parallel, traditionally distinct, in situ databases and risk assessment models. I then explore the evolving technologies that integrate wild-captive databases and population models and, in particular, emerging metapopulation and meta-model approaches to small population management. My central argument is that, while still viewed by many as separate, the in situ …