Acceso usuarios
Alexander Koensler
When insurgencies and riots are explored as discursive practices which shape, produce and reify categories of reality, often the frames of normative politics blowup, revealing a space made of ambiguities, disjuncture, and interstitial zones. In much of the current literature on riots and popular resistance, instead, uprising is considered less unproblematically as a natural effect of a given reality. Often, such analyses remain trapped in dichotomous categories of "state" and "people", sometimes represented as monolithic, personified entities.
In this paper I problematize this assumption. In line with literature on social constructivism and on ethnicization to certain extend, Slavoj Zizek argues that descriptions of reality do not naturally and immutably refer to things, but things begin to resemble their description. In a similar vein, I try to show that riots and protest do not simply articulate interpretative categories of reality, but seem also able to "produce" them. At this regard, first and foremost, it is the ethnographic attention to micro-political interactions that highlights the need for more careful attention, a need to embrace the uncertainty of open classifications and the lack of analytical closure. This will be shown through a case study of "insurgent building" in the Israeli Negev desert: a specific form of protest that can lead to riots and violence. "Insurgent building" refers to the use of concrete and other building materials in symbolic constructions on contested land. These constructions are built by Arab-Bedouin citizens and human-rights activists, yet with the expectation that they will be eventually demolished by the Israeli police shortly after. I consider insurgent building as a lens through which better to understand how politics of claims are channeled into clear-cut binary categories that ultimately contribute to the obfuscation of the multi-layeredness on the ground. For example, what at a specific level look as an expression of complex intra-group conflicts between different Arab-Bedouin groups can be re-interpreted through insurgent practices as an inter-group conflict around a clear-cut "Bedouin" vs "State" dichotomy? In sum, this interest in how normative categories hide multiplicity, I believe, contributes to new insights into the relationship between reality and symbolization of conflict articulations in the Israeli-Palestinian space. Rather than simply reacting to given circumstances of the land conflict in the Negev, insurgent building is a very unusual practice of protest located beyond the people-state opposition and becomes also an instrument that contributes to the production of the very normative categories of the Bedouin-state conflict.
Quand les insurrections et les émeutes sont analysées comme des pratiques discursives, qui forment, produisent et réifient des catégories de la réalité, les cadres des politiques normatives explosent laissant apparaître un espace contenant des ambiguïtés, des dysharmonies et des zones se chevauchant. Le plus souvent, dans la littérature habituelle consacrée aux émeutes et à la résistance populaire, le soulèvement populaire est considéré comme un effet naturel d'une réalité donnée. Le plus souvent de telles analyses restent prisonnières des catégories dichotomiques d'État et de peuple, parfois présentées comme des entités monolithiques. Dans cet article, j'essaie de montrer que les émeutes et la protestation ne sont pas simplement articulées sur des catégories interprétatives mais sont également capables de les "produire". Ce que j'illustre à travers le cas de la "construction de la révolte" dans le désert israélien du Néguev, une forme spécifique de protestation qui peut conduire à des émeutes et de la violence.
