This intervention draws on two recent fieldwork experiences conducted in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), at the intersection of research and professional practice. One was carried out with a Palestinian family living and working on a farm within a framework of protective presence, the other within an Israeli human rights organization working with Bedouin populations. These field sites are complemented by the observation and analysis of encrypted messaging groups used for the daily documentation of acts of violence, security incidents, and restrictions on movement.
From this situated perspective, a practice-based approach to securitization is analyzed not as a set of abstract technologies, but as a lived spatial and political regime organizing mobilities, affects, and hierarchies of life (Mbembe, 2020).
The oPt can be understood as an advanced testing ground for securitization practices (Weizman, 2007), embedded in longer historical trajectories of spatial control and territorial governance. In this context, state and military apparatuses converge with heterogeneous settler groups, some organized as paramilitary formations, giving shape to indirect forms of coercive governance that sustain colonial logics of territorial control. Rather than homogenizing actors or practices, this intervention examines how these heterogeneous modalities of securitization intersect on the ground.
Palestinian bodies are structurally differentially exposed to surveillance and violence, yet remain central actors in practices of vigilance, documentation, and everyday adaptation that operate within, against, and through everyday regimes of securitization, producing and circulating situated knowledge of the territory. Local and international actors engaged in protective presence are likewise exposed to intimidation, injury, and threat, occupying an ambivalent position as both deterrence and targets. Together, these embodied and relational practices reveal how violent securitization does not only produce domination, but also generates spaces of friction and adjustment, in which actors seek to mitigate risk and recompose minimal, fragile forms of everyday security by partially diverting and reworking the very logics of securitization.
The discussion moves across securitization as spatial violence, surveillance as the production of suspect bodies, and the normalization of exception as an ordinary mode of governing territories, focusing on how frictions emerge through concrete practices of presence, documentation, and protection.
Albane Buriel is a researcher-practitioner specializing in arts, education, and training in contexts of conflict and violence. She conducts field-based ethnographic research at the intersection of protective presence, securitization, and territorial transformation, with experience in the occupied Palestinian territories and other conflict-affected settings.