Entry:
Juridical Space - an excerpt from Ursula Biemann’s documentary, X-Mission - is, for the most part, an interview with Ismaël Sheikh Hassan - a volunteer for the Nahr el-Bared Reconstruction Commission for Civil Action and Studies. Ismaël gives a brief history of the Nahr el-Bared camp in Lebanon. The camp houses Palestinian refugees, and recent government intervention has pushed the population to the outskirts of the original camp. The government has only allowed for resettlement in specific areas of extended camp in order to maintain control of the area, and inhabitants have had their neighbourhoods dismantled and their private spaces razed over and invaded.
Rationale:
This video invites the viewer to challenge their conceptions of borders and boundaries, and the ways in which the state is able to maintain control via the use of these delineations. In the video, Ismaël Sheikh Hassan explains how, by marking the old Nahr el-Bared as a ‘strict military zone’, the Lebanese Armed Forces effectively repossessed the land previously registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. In doing so the state effectively erased the sovereignty of the Palestinian people over the area - disallowing them to return to the camp to retrieve their belongings or to rebuild and resettle. This video helps the viewer to understand how borders and boundaries operate to enable state violence and control over land and its inhabitants, bringing to mind the transnational feminist concepts of the logics of containment and the politics of mobility, and making visible the ways borders affect the agency of refugees and their right to space and place.
Keywords: refugees, borders, state, control
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