Innovation as erasure: Palestine and the new regional alliances of technology

Antti Tarvainen, Benoît Challand

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

This article explores the growing connections between the Persian Gulf states and the heavily militarised Israeli innovation ecosystem. The Gulf actors now play an increasing role in support of Israel as a globally expanding ‘Start-up Nation’, and are involved in transforming Palestinian land into a regional frontier of technology in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli-Gulf cooperation and its impact on Palestinians, however, has not been thoroughly researched. Drawing from fieldwork among Palestinian and Israeli innovation elites, we map these growing connections between Gulf state actors and Israel and analyse how the occupied Palestinian territories are further enmeshed in complex networks of financial capitalist and settler colonial security interests. Theoretically, the paper advances the critique of the contemporary settler colonial frontier, venturing beyond its usual Eurocentric and binary geographies. We conclude that ‘innovation’ is both (a) the terrain of expanding structures of Israeli colonisation and (b) the site of productive ambivalences and novel forms of resistance in an evolving regional and global reality.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere12663
JournalTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Volume49
Issue number2
Number of pages15
ISSN0020-2754
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2024
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2023 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers).

Fields of Science

  • capitalism
  • Gulf
  • innovation
  • Palestine
  • security
  • settler colonialism
  • 5203 Global Development Studies

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