Everyday agency and transformation: Place,body and story in the divided city

Abstract

How do we identify and understand transformative agency in the quotidian that is not contained in formal, or even informal structures? This article investigates the ordinary agency of Palestinian inhabitants in the violent context of the divided city of Jerusalem. Through a close reading of three ethnographic moments I identify creative micropractices of negotiating the separation barrier that slices through the city. To conduct this analytical work I propose a conceptual grid of place, body and story through which the everyday can be grasped, accessed and understood. ‘Place’ encompasses the understanding that the everyday is always located and grounded in materiality; ‘body’ takes into account the embodied experience of subjects moving through this place; and ‘story’ refers to the narrative work conducted by human beings in order to make sense of our place in the world. I argue that people can engage in actions that function both as coping mechanisms (and may even support the upholding of status quo), and as moments of formulating and enacting agential projects with a more or less intentional transformative purpose. This insight is key to understanding the generative capacity of everyday agency and its importance for the macropolitics of peace and conflict.

Keywords

Agency corporeality East Jerusalem narrative place the everyday

Introduction

Veena Das writes about ‘doing the work’ of the everyday in order to make it inhabitable (e.g. 2007: 216). This article takes an interest in the work of the everyday conducted by Palestinian inhabitants in East Jerusalem. Inspired by Das’ close studies of the everyday as the site for human beings to take their place in the world, make sense of it and forge themselves as ethical subjects that hold keys to transformation, I investigate ‘ordinary agency’ (Das, 2007; Walker, 2010) in the violent context of the divided city of Jerusalem. I reflect on some moments and sites for day-to-day strategies for dealing with violence and insecurity and identify creative micropractices of negotiating the wall/security barrier that slices through the city and the lifeworlds of its Palestinian inhabitants. I ask what possible politics emerges from this work. Thus the article grapples with an emerging key question in peace and conflict research as well as in the larger field of international relations (IR): how do we access and understand agency in the quotidian that is not contained in formal, or even informal structures? It is argued that such ordinary agency is connected to social and political transformation and must be taken into account in order to make sense of the macro dynamics of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

My aim is twofold: first, to suggest a conceptual grid through which the everyday can be grasped, accessed and understood; and second, to give some examples of how this conceptual approach to the everyday can help unpack expressions of ordinary agency and their transformative potential. Three concepts will drive the analysis: place, body, story. They are certainly mundane concepts, but in their everydayness they are rich and invite us to a close and multi-layered reading of events and agents that make up the micropolitics of the everyday. Place encompasses the understanding that the everyday is always located, and grounded, in materiality. Body takes into account the embodied experience of subjects moving through this place. Story refers to the intersubjective narrative work conducted by human beings in order to make sense of our place in the world and make meaning beyond the individual embodied experience.

I use this grid (further presented below) when analysing three ethnographic moments informed by the agency of inhabitants in East Jerusalem in their encounters with the contested frontiers in the divided city. The most prominent of these is the seven-metre security barrier/wall that is being built by Israel, in effect isolating East Jerusalem from Palestinian neighbourhoods on the West Bank side. Proponents as well as protesters of separation politics tend to conjure up static images of cemented borders and zones. The imposing materiality of the concrete structure of the wall seems to support such an understanding, yet this article’s reading of the violent fabric of everyday life of Palestinians in East Jerusalem instead brings forth the inherent contingency of the separation politics. It takes into consideration moments when agential subjects challenged and negotiated visible and invisible frontiers through activities that took place beyond formal political spaces. These activities were not politically or socially organized and would pass below the radar of most investigations of political agency, but to the agents they were loaded with meaning and communicated to others. They will here be unpacked as moments of significant and possibly transformative agency that challenge some basic understandings of the ‘static’ macro conflict.

A focus on agency’s transformative potential is not intended to diminish the difficult structural conditions of life in annexed East Jerusalem (e.g. Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2017), but rather to argue that the penetrative nature of this violence into the everyday calls for a much more finely tuned search and understanding of the work of agential subjects. Consequently I challenge the ‘representational hegemony’ in Middle East research, which tends to cast the Palestinians in either victim or hero stereotypes with little subjectivities beyond collective representations (see Harker, 2011; Richter-Devroe, 2011: 34). I place this text alongside existing research concerned with the everyday of Palestinians under occupation, such as Allen’s ground-breaking work on the struggle for normality in the midst of violence during the second intifada, which she names the practice of ‘getting-by’; Harker’s fine-tuned analysis of family life under occupation (2011); as well as the important work on gendered agency by Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015) regarding pregnant and birthing women in East Jerusalem and their challenge against the demographic policies of the Israeli state, and by Richter-Devroe (2011), who analyses women’s resistance against both the occupation and patriarchal control through their practices of ‘having a good time’.

I hope to bridge such research on the Israel/Palestine conflict to the vivid debate on the everyday in peace and conflict studies as well as in the broader field of international relations. The article will now enter into dialogue with research that aims to rescale focus from state or international agents to locally grounded agents. The key theoretical concepts of the article are then presented, before moving on to the site of East Jerusalem and engaging with the specific literature that has explored the everyday of life under occupation. Three ethnographic moments from fieldwork in East Jerusalem are then unpacked and analysed. The article ends with some concluding reflections on the transformative potential of ordinary agency in the everyday, and the analytical purchase that studies of everyday practices have for making sense of macropolitics.

Agency in the everyday: Beyond the ‘local turn’

Over the last few years a shift has occurred in peace and conflict research and IR towards local experiences of peace and security dynamics. Proponents of the so-called ‘local turn’ have argued that it is in local settings that potential for peace is located and that a ‘bottom-up’ perspective is necessary to understand macro transformations towards peace and new social orders (e.g. Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013). As part of these efforts, interest is growing in the everyday – the mundane realm of the in-between, ‘the seen but unnoticed’ (Featherstone, 1992: 159). The everyday is here theorized as conceptual site in which micropractices and agents are entangled in informal and/or intimate ways. While this study focuses on micropractices in families, in streets and neighbourhoods, it is important to also point out that I do not understand the everyday as a particular level of analysis; the entangled and organic micropractices that I am interested in are part of people’s ongoing work in the making of lifeworlds, a work that goes on in all sorts of places and ‘levels’ of society. There is an everyday in government offices or space stations as well.

The everyday is thus an enmeshed fabric woven by ongoing events, practices and relations. Through this interactive work, ethical ideas and practices are formed and agential subjects emerge (Das, 2007: 216). Such a conceptualization of the everyday sees agency as a central driver, an agency that is grounded in the lived space, always embodied, and contingent on our relations with others in the place we share. It involves ‘the capacity of social beings to interpret and morally evaluate their situation and to formulate projects and try to enact them’ (Ortner, 1995: 185). Subtle forms of agency that are not explicitly overt and purpose-driven are noted as key in this process. The work of ‘weaving’ the fabric of everyday is seldom spelled out and it is true that often ‘actors know tacitly about how to “go on” in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression’ (Giddens, 1984: xxiii). Such agency may shift and slide from unintentional and ad hoc to intentional and organized.

Attendance to what goes on in the quotidian, before, beyond or alongside the explicitly political, unmoors the concept of agency from the concept of resistance. Frames of resistance tend to diminish agency to a reactive response to domination (Ortner, 1995). To instead think of agency in terms of the Arendtian notion of ‘making something new’ (Arendt, 1958) means taking on board a core argument by Arendt, which is that human beings possess an ‘exhilarating capacity to generate new relations and new realities’ (Honig, 1995: 149). The generative capacity of ordinary agency in the everyday has been noted in a number of ethnographic studies. For example, Walker (2010) discusses micro-agency of vulnerable people in Sri Lanka’s war-torn communities, employed in subtle ways to make a life in the midst of insecurity and poverty. An analysis by Richter-Devroe (2011: 44) of three Palestinian women’s strategies to ‘have fun’ under the hardship of occupation shows that individual, non-organized agency can transgress power structures and create ‘alternative cultural spaces’. Al-Mohammad and Pelusi (2012) read the precariousness of everyday life in the Iraqi city of Raqqa and closely trace the intersubjective caring for others that makes this unstable lifeworld inhabitable. Autesserre (2015) studies professionals engaged in peace interventions and demonstrates that the everyday realm does not have to be equated with powerlessness or marginalization, and that informal agency is a driver also among agents with formal power.

These explorations of the generative, agential work in the everyday are helpful in order to address the crucial question for IR concerning how the micro is connected to the macro. The rich tradition of feminist IR research has for decades sustained an interest in the making of peace and war beyond formal structures, insisting on the need to zoom in on how ‘ordinary people constitute war’ and disclosing how private and intimate social relations are connected to international relations (Sylvester, 2013; see also e.g. Enloe, 2010; Tickner, 1992). Building partly on these insights, Solomon and Steele recently staked out a theoretically ambitious research agenda on a ‘micropolitical approach to IR’ in which they rethink connections between micro and macro through the concepts of affect, space and time (2016: 2). Their focus is on the highly contingent, shifting affective processes that define ‘politics of the street’ and importantly connects these processes to other scales of politics, arguing that ‘micropolitics lenses reveal sites that promise to reshape how we view global politics and our place in it’ (Solomon and Steele, 2016: 3). Yet their empirical examples – the Arab Spring protests at Tahrir Square and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations – are both overt demonstrations and leave the reader with a sense that the ‘in-between’ of the everyday is slipping through their fingers.

While this article shares conceptual points of departure with Solomon and Steele, it suggests that we need to go beyond these moments of eruption of politics onto the public stage in which citizens are ‘coming together in speech and action’ (Arendt, 1958). In order to understand transformation, we need to take seriously a ‘descent into the ordinary’ (Das, 2007) and identify how agency in the everyday is performed before, beyond or alongside such moments that Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and Arab Spring protests signify. How can we capture the intimate and fleeting moments of transformative agency that oscillates between the private and public, between the unconscious and the conscious?

Place, body, story: Unpacking the everyday

Below, a conceptual framework for studying ordinary agency in the everyday is suggested. Place, body and story are the conceptual vehicles used to understand how agency in the ordinary is played out and how ethical subjects emerge in shifting spaces and times. I build this conceptualization on a diverse body of work spanning feminist research, critical geography and the anthropology of violence.

Place

The anchoring of the everyday to place is based on a simple but central observation: the everyday always takes place somewhere. Place is material; it is constituted of the walls and the stones, the crossings, the grid of streets or fields, our dwellings and the things that we use there. We can detect how the material geography of a place constructs meaning and how meaning at the same time shapes the place; in East Jerusalem (in focus for this article), the development of, for example, roads, the security barrier and other infrastructure has a direct impact on people’s lives in a manner that ’dispossesses spatially and socially’ (Long, 2011: 268). The materiality of place shapes the ‘intimate geographies’ in which social, political, economic and cultural relations are constituted. Moments of safety and insecurity are pinned to the material world, feeding into the production of certain social imaginaries and subjectivities. Objects, things, matter. Some of these things may be large, like the wall; others small and seemingly insignificant, like a broken mirror in the yard of a house overtaken by settlers. They hold intense meaning and generate strong emotions that work in ‘directing attention and motivating action’ (Meynell, 2009: 9).

The construction of places always has a temporal dimension. Patterns of interaction in places may sediment over time. Or they may suddenly break up, or slowly dissolve. Places are thus not fixed but always contingent in time and can be conceived of as specific moments of spatial dynamics created through spatial relations of power (Massey, 2007). This has bearings on the understanding of the ‘frozen’ Israel/Palestine conflict and the narrative construction of the security barrier as something permanent. The division of Jerusalem may seem overpowering in its material manifestations: the concrete wall, the checkpoints, the circulation of military and police vehicles. Nevertheless, as I will show below, the wall can never achieve complete separation and, as Pullan poignantly points out, it may seem sturdy and permanent, but is in fact made of cinder blocks that are erected in a matter of hours and can just as quickly be dismantled (Pullan, 2011).

Body

To bring ‘the body’ into the analytical framework acknowledges the physical experience of moving in and through particular places. It is through our bodies that we know place. Such an understanding resonates deeply with the phenomenological emphasis that subjects and their experience are always embodied as well as always emplaced in a specific material and historical circumstance (Merleau-Ponty, 2014). In early anthropological writings on the body, Mauss (1973) argued that social order is carried in and through the body and performed in our daily lives through the ‘techniques of the body’, thereby demonstrating ‘how meaning is produced across mundane and minute rituals in the everyday life’ (Narvaez, 2006: 59). When reading place and body together, we can see how these rituals become ‘fixed’ to the material as we invest places with meaning and emotions (Therborn, 2006: 517). As I will discuss below, the embodied encounters with the materiality of the wall in East Jerusalem were recounted to me in terms of bodily sensations and emotions: the tired feet from waiting in line at checkpoints, the trickle of nervous sweat as the guards searched through suitcases with one’s used underwear, the headache after a sleepless night following a house search; the body as an intimate sphere, violated in searches. Bodily sensations were also prominent in how people chose to recount the impact the wall had on their everyday lives: it ‘suffocated;’ it made the air hotter; it was ‘dark’. Stories of nostalgia from before the wall came up were also underpinned by bodily sensations – of how the air was sweeter, the evening wind cooler.

Further, corporeal experiences were also talked about as expressions of specific knowledge and expertise. For example the goings-about in the everyday contained knowledge of the temporal patterns of ‘flying checkpoints’, of who mans the checkpoint on what day, and how to dress to avoid attention. In places of shifting violence and insecurity these embodied rituals – in Mauss’ sense – may not seem habitual, but rather makeshift or unplanned. Reading these embodied practices closely reveals that in their very inconsistency and unpredictability they produce place-specific and, for example, gender-specific knowledge necessary to cope with and possibly transgress the obstacles of the everyday. Such mundane expertise on danger and how to avoid it holds a powerful agential subjectivity. They may be identified as corporeal moments of signalling and enacting who we are in intersubjective relations (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Goffman, 1971) and, as such, inseparable from possibilities of transformative agency.

Story

The next conceptual mover has to do with the way human beings tell stories to and about each other as a means of making sense of the world and forging oneself as a subject (Butler, 2001: 34; Das, 2005: 218). Stories are one of our prime occupations and a central feature of how we go about our everyday lives. In this way stories order and create meanings and identities through a particular rendering of events and experiences, and thus organize a coherent relationship between the past, present and future (White, 1990). As Arendt notes, the narrative weaving of actions and events into a meaningful story can often, in retrospect, bring out the political and ontological significance of the everyday processes (Arendt, 1958: 184).

Stories are told to others and are therefore never isolated but intersubjectively constituted. They provide a sense of belonging; personal, embodied experiences are enfolded into and related to collective narratives that hold ethical and political meaning. The stories are generated from the events and experiences in the present, which are given multi-layered meanings as they are tied to earlier experiences and historical events in a particular place. Through stories, the meanings of places are articulated. The emplaced narratives that I take an interest in here emerge from the embodied experience of moving through the particular place of East Jerusalem. The material world is made meaningful through ongoing ‘work’ of social practices and narratives, which at the same time imagines, produces and upholds the material world (Jansen, 2013: 23) – in this case the divided city, which becomes ‘meaningful and habitable through the legends, memories, and dreams that accumulate in and haunt places’ (Collier, 2013). Hence ‘stories about place produce a second, metaphorical geography’ (Collier, 2013). The stories emerging from the everyday in East Jerusalem may be mundane, disparate and seemingly insignificant, yet they are more or less overtly knitted into a narrative weave that connects them to the prominent Palestinian, nationalistically infused narrative of collective suffering, resistance and stoicism, captured by the imaginary of the concept of ‘sumud’ (e.g. Allen, 2008; Richter-Devroe, 2011). Story-telling is thus central to the way politics operates (Andrews, 2014: 355) and narratives are only meaningful through their capacity to make interconnections between different selves and agents. They are inextricably part of the enmeshed fabric of the multi-layered everyday. To search for stories, and listen to how events and moments in the everyday are recounted, discloses the ethical work of agents in the everyday that is conducted in relation to the collective narratives of the conflict.

Methodological approach

To undertake a reading of the ordinary everyday comes with methodological challenges, and to employ the multifaceted grid of place, body and story demands research methods that are also multifaceted. The ethnographic moments presented and discussed below have been experienced through ‘being-in-the-place’ (Richardson, 2003; see Merleau-Ponty, 2014), which may be described as an organic process of making connections, tracing webs of relations, embracing chance meetings, letting the social maps of the ordinary everyday unfold (see Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2016). With regards to place, to read the material dimensions of place means to be physically present, note structures and pay attention to objects. With regards to body, the researcher also needs to gain an embodied experience herself of the material place in a reflexive process. Thus, to spatially analyse a place, such as East Jerusalem, means being there, reflecting upon one’s own embodied experience. It means drifting through the spaces of the divided city and being one of De Certeau’s walkers, whose ‘bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write’ (De Certeau, 1984: 93). In this way the researcher can pay attention to ordinary things: ladders, Facebook updates and homework (see Jansen, 2013). With regards to story, the tradition of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology that pays minute attention to detail is here helpful and fits into the engagements of the ‘walker’ (Garfinkel, 1984; Morrison and Macleod, 2014). Sometimes stories emerge not through talking, but through gestures (Walker, 2010). Sometimes silence is more pregnant with meaning than speech. Sometimes you don’t ask questions but listen to ‘snippets’ of narratives that emerge in mundane conversations and exchanges (Malkki, 1995). In formal interviews, it is important to understand their performative function, as the act of storytelling is also a site for meaning-making and a site for the interviewee to communicate particular messages or frames of understanding. An interview is in itself an agential act by the person interviewed, who decides to participate for a number of reasons. Thus the researcher needs to listen to, and through, several layers of narrative construction.

The fluid approach of being-in-the-place depends upon the three key elements of communication, observation and reflexivity (Jansen, 2013: 33). Its validity rests on the ability of the researcher to enter into dialogue and take the personal experience as a valid point of reference (e.g. Daigle, 2016; Enloe, 2010). While the methodology may resemble anthropological fieldwork, it does not make any claims of immersion. Instead it builds upon shorter but repeated visits, a serial ethnography that allows the hermeneutic circle of experience and analysis to develop over time. The research presented here builds upon three research visits in Jerusalem in 2013, 2014 and 2017. In addition to ’being-in-the-place’, 33 interviews were conducted, most of which were recorded and transcribed.¹ Sometimes the interviews were conducted in English, but most often through translations by my research assistant, whose emic positionality was an important addition to my own outsider perspective. From this material, three ethnographic moments have been selected that capture central elements and themes derived from analysing all of the research material. There are always ethical issues embedded in research in precarious contexts, and all interviewees were briefed on my aims with the study and offered anonymity in order to ensure that their security was not compromised (all names in this article are fictitious).

East Jerusalem read through place, body, story

The densely populated streets and hills of East Jerusalem are situated at a major fault-line of the larger conflict. In 1948, when the state of Israel was created, the city of Jerusalem was divided into two parts and the eastern part, mostly populated by Palestinians, came under the jurisdiction of Jordan. At the end of the 1967 war, the eastern part of the city was annexed by Israel and has remained so since then. Israeli law considers East Jerusalem to be inseparably part of a ‘united and complete’ Israeli capital, but the annexation has never been recognized internationally and the population has not been granted Israeli citizenship (Pullan, 2011: 17). The goal in international peace negotiations for a two-state solution is for East Jerusalem to be the capital in a future Palestinian state and placing the Old City, including the highly charged religious sites, under international administration.

The construction of the Israeli security barrier is a defining feature of the conflict. In East Jerusalem, the only place where it runs through urban, densely populated neighbourhoods, the barrier is in the shape of a concrete wall. Israel claims that the barrier aims to hinder terrorism; the number of suicide raids into Israel from the West Bank has been drastically reduced, yet the wall has not prevented a number of small but deadly attacks against Israelis in the form of stabbings, shootings or rammings by cars (see e.g. Reuters, 2015). At the same time the barrier hinders a territorially meaningful Palestinian entity. It connects Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but disconnects Palestinian territory into a mottled map of isolated patches. The trajectory of the wall means that inhabitants in the large and growing Israeli settlements on West Bank territory (in effect affluent suburbs) can commute to and from the city centre along new highways. For inhabitants in East Jerusalem, however, the wall has, on the contrary, led to a territorial segmentation and severely affected the everyday lives of the inhabitants. It snakes through Palestinian neighbourhoods, sometimes traversing West Bank territory, sometimes cutting out parts of East Jerusalem from the city, and sometimes forming loops, in effect caging in certain neighbourhoods. Its effects are socio-economic, structural and demographic (Sabella, 2007). Inhabitants are cut off from their work places, schools and universities, and suffer from a lack of basic services and infrastructure. Families and network of relations are disconnected, and they are under further constant pressure from house demolitions (Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 2015; Braverman, 2007; Human Rights Watch, 2017).

Crossing through checkpoints to get to and from West Jerusalem (where many work) or into the West Bank are everyday moments of high insecurity. In addition, house searches are a regular feature of everyday life, as well as so-called ‘flying checkpoints’ – a vernacular concept basically meaning checkpoints quickly and unpredictably set up in a street or road. Palestinians must at all times be able to show their Jerusalem ID (and may be arrested if found without one). The checkpoints and searches are thus tentacles of the conflictual border, serving the same purpose of containing and excluding Palestinian inhabitants, often analysed as a form of biopolitical control in order for the Israeli state to maintain sovereignty, which builds upon the incessant disruption of the everyday and the enfolding of extraordinary acts of violence into the ordinary (Amir, 2011; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Tawil-Souri, 2010). These everyday insecurities follow a temporal rhythm. The shuffle of bodies to and fro through the checkpoints mostly takes place in the mornings and evenings. Nighttime is usually the time for eruptions of clashes between frustrated youth and police, with stones and teargas as routine ingredients (see e.g. Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 2015). Thus life in East Jerusalem is spatially and temporally layered with instances of violence and insecurity as part of quotidian routine.

In this volatile context, I was interested in exploring ordinary agency and how inhabitants may emerge as subjects with a transformative capacity through the act of conducting their everyday lives. During fieldwork I encountered numerous instances of everyday actions that were mundane, part of the routines of life and, as such, easy to bypass, as they were far from any organised political agency. Yet they were all resourceful negotiations with a transformative capacity. The examples below have been selected because they demonstrate three different strategies for dealing with the constraints and violence of the divided city. The article now proceeds to these three instances of potentially transformative ‘ordinary agency’. The above conceptualization of place, body and story will guide the reading of the ethnographic moments.

Homework and dinner

My first example takes us to a kitchen in the neighbourhood of Ras Al-Mud, perched on one of the hills above the Old City. After family dinner in the Sheikh household, schoolbooks are put on the table and homework begins. Every night the father, Hamid, works on maths with his 9-year-old. The house is the home of an extended family, whose relations stretch into a web of intimacy and connections that connects these quiet streets. When I look out across the toffee-coloured ancient city, the sky seems vast. When I turn in the other direction, the cement wall rises some 50 metres from the house and abruptly cuts off the road and divides the neighbourhood – and the family. Hamid, who is doing the homework with his son, is not actually physically in the house. He has no Jerusalem ID and therefore no right under Israeli law to be here. He lives a couple of hundred metres away on the other side of the wall and the homework and dinner conversations are conducted via Skype.

Nawal, his wife, is struggling on her own, raising three children and working full-time as a school administrator. She says their marriage suffers: when we see each other we argue, she says. ‘It is painful, we have so little time, no time to talk about nice things, just planning, worrying about work, the children …’, ‘I would like to go out just the two of us, but where to find the time. And the kids, they don’t listen to me, they need their father …’ She breaks off her narrative and shifts her story about marital problems to a collective mode: ‘But still, they will not break us’, she says in a voice that is now steely.

Earlier, the grandmother, who also lives in the house, takes me for a stroll along the dust road that ends in the wall. It came up in just a few hours, she says, as we stand staring at the structure. She misses her daily walk down the road to see her family, tend to her elderly mother. She is angry, at the soldiers who have taken over a house in the street: they are young, they party, just children really, but they have guns, they enter our house to look for someone without an ID. I am full of anger, she says, and then she also switches to the collective mode: ‘We cannot hold it much longer, we will explode’ – making it clear that she is not talking about her family but about a broader Palestinian ‘we’.

This ordinary family’s strategies for coping with quotidian challenges and insecurities revolve around the spatial separation that the wall has created and their corporeal experiences of being ‘cut off’. The moment when they turn on the computers in the evening is an act of exercising parenthood, doing the homework, maintaining family ties across the wall by using Skype. Such moments are usually not considered in writings on political agency. Yet, it is a moment of defiance of the overall policy of separation as they virtually transgress the material border of the wall – a moment that the agents place in a politically meaningful narrative. They tell the story of their everyday place making as part of a narrative of opposition; thus the mundane project of family life is linked to a larger collective struggle, and the everyday is constructed as a site of protest.

Climbing the wall

For my second story, we move a few kilometres north, along the wall, close to the Qalanya checkpoint. The wall dips down into a little valley and in the beginning of evening light five young men are walking away from the wall. They stroll along leisurely, carrying a long ladder and some ropes. They come from work – the work of providing an alternative route across the wall between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The next day I meet Ammar to find out about this business. He crosses the wall a couple of times a week on the sly. For years he has been doing it, sneaking across the wall in his movements between the East Bank and Jerusalem. He goes searching for work – any work: construction work in Jerusalem, helping out relatives in the restaurant business in the West Bank, or, if he is lucky, finding work as a dancer, which is his real profession. So how is it done? ‘I find the guys, they are in mobile contact with co-workers on the other side who provide a ladder on the other side. They know which parts of the wall at that time are safe from patrols. When I want to go back, I phone this special number.’ He is one of hundreds, maybe thousands, crossing the security barrier in this manner every week. New York Times (2016) claims that around 30,000 Palestinians cross the security barrier ‘illegally’ every year.

Ammar does not hold a Jerusalem ID and has already been in gaol four times for being caught without one in ‘flying checkpoints’. His lifeworld comprises both sides of the wall: his work and his family, childhood memories and stories of the violence of the 1967 annexation when his family were forced to move to neighbouring Hebron in the West Bank. That is where he was born and where spent his first two years before the family returned to East Jerusalem. ‘The wall yes well, it is there. No denying it. But the wall cannot keep away the scent of Jerusalem. I love this scent. I cannot live without it! I will go to gaol again and again just so that I can smell it. I love it like the scent of my son’s hair’, he says, making a show of hugging his 2-year-old who is perched on the table between us. Ammar opens his hands. They are raw from slipping down the rough rope, knocking against the wall. He points to his ribs: one is broken after a fall. He seems proud of how he uses his body as the tool to defy the wall, and proud of his expert knowledge of the shifting times and spots for making the crossing. Ammar’s marked body tells of the lingering moment of danger, enfolded into his story of deft movements across the divided city. They are narrated as something heroic and meaningful beyond the individual struggle of making a living. The phrase ‘breathing the air of Jerusalem’ holds a meaning beyond the corporeal experience and makes a claim of belonging in this place.

Defying the flying checkpoint

My third and final example starts with a Facebook update. Suhad, who worked for me as translator, showed it to me on her mobile phone. It was everywhere on social media this morning, she said, as we drank tea and planned the day ahead. The shaky mobile phone video had been filmed in the historic lanes of the Old City. I could see tourists stepping aside as a young woman was shoved and pushed down the crowded lane by three policemen. One policeman (the female one) hit her in the small of the back and pulled off her hijab, making her hair tumble out. All the time the young woman was shouting. Suhad explained that the woman had been arrested at a flying checkpoint and that she shouts for witnesses to see her maltreatment. Half an hour later, after some phone calls, we are in the woman’s home, in the volatile neighbourhood of Silwan directly bordering the Old City. Dawha is seated in a plush u-shaped sofa, bandaged arms crossed. Her husband brings us juice and coffee. She tells what happened after the events of the video. She said that she had been handcuffed, taken to the police station, left overnight, then released. Her bandages partly cover the bruises from the handcuffs.

Did she plan to defy the police? No, she says, explaining that she just really needed to work, and thought that she could probably talk her way through the checkpoint. It was a judgement call and it went wrong, she says. She recounts it as an unplanned event, filmed by someone and put on the Internet, where it went viral, at least among the social media-active young generation of Palestinians. Nevertheless, entwined in this moment of violence, which clearly was beyond her control, there is also a story of agency. In another video that she shows me, she is exiting the police station and eloquently making a speech concerning her legal rights to the dozen or so relatives and others waiting outside.

Dawha’s individual agency is not part of any formalized structure, yet certainly holds political meaning and intention. It says something of how agency may oscillate between formal and informal. Being beaten and put in gaol was lifted from a personal experience into a shared intersubjective experience through social media. The specific gendered violence of tearing off her hijab may be one reason why the video generated such great interest. The loaded meaning of the female body made it a potent site first for humiliation and, in return, for collective protest and indignation. Her attempt to defy the checkpoint did not actually succeed, as she was detained, but nevertheless she emerged as a political subject through the intersubjective dynamics of social media. Instead of resulting in containment and exclusion, the act of violence at the flying checkpoint turned into a moment of defiance and a story of potential transformation. It seemed that politics was born out of her everyday movements through place: going to work and encountering the flying checkpoint.

Implications for transformative agency in the everyday

The threads of place, body, and story form the intricate weave of ordinary agency in the everyday that I take an interest in. The ethnographic moments recounted above tell something of how place matters, how people’s experiences of place is embodied, and how these experiences are made meaningful as part of collective storytelling. They foreground the physical presence of the wall and the corporeal knowing of how to cope with danger spots; the ways of transgressing boundaries that can only be gained through moving through the city and dealing with the consequences of material objects. The place is understood and constructed through corporeal experiences, and the examples support an understanding of the ‘body as an effective agent and thereby as the very basis of human subjectivity’ (Crossley, 1995: 44–45). The political purchase of reading the everyday through the body adds to Solomon and Steele’s investigations into affect as a generator of broader collective configurations (2017: 10). A phenomenological understanding of embodied experiences as the prime site for subject formation accesses the non-discursive, tacit realm of the corporeal in which human beings make sense of the world. This is a reading that takes the individual subject as a key driver of micro–macro dynamics. At the same time, the telling of stories turns tacit, everyday experiences into a coherent intersubjective narrative that goes beyond the individual body (Arendt, 1958). Further, it brings material place into the analysis and shows how the construction of the everyday is firmly emplaced. Through the body and through the story, place is socially produced as a web of meaning-making processes. Place emerges as the site where human experience and consciousness can take on a material presence, as individuals and communities develop moral and meaningful relationships (see Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003: 13).

The examples of agentive resourcefulness in the everyday of East Jerusalem that I have here analysed may be considered too trivial to be of relevance to the dynamics of the contracted macro conflict or dismissed as coping mechanisms that do not challenge the status quo of the asymmetric conflict. In answer to such criticisms, I think there are some vital points to be made. Returning again to Solomon and Steele’s article on micropolitics and their claim that this realm is meaningful to study in itself (2016: 18), I agree that it is a crucial undertaking for research to much more deeply understand what it is like to inhabit places imbricated with insecurity. The ordinary agency depicted in this article was employed by people in order to have a family life, find work and regain dignity after being subjected to violence. I also argue that the instances I have discussed here emerge as moments of transformation, however brief and incomplete. The Skyping family defied the politics of division and separation. Ammar managed to avoid the checkpoints, make a living and provide for his family. And Dawha, who was physically hindered by a flying checkpoint, could use social media and turn the moment of violence and isolation into one of transgression. None of these practices were part of collective action nor related as part of organized political struggle, yet they held meaning beyond the fleeting moment. Through these acts and practices that told of both creativity and courage, the subjects took hold of and moved through their physical place in the world. Importantly, the stories told above are stories of interrelational care, which is at the core of how ethical subjects are formed (Arendt, 1958; Das, 2005). It resonates with Al-Mohammad and Pelusi’s observation that ‘in the entanglements and relations of lives with other lives in the everyday, lines of care and concern emerge, are fostered, and also frayed’ (2012: 44).

Nevertheless, it may be pertinent to pause here for a moment of self-reflection. In my eagerness to address the long-standing underestimation of agential acts in the everyday, I may instead overestimate them. The moments I analyse could be read as ‘nothing more’ than coping mechanisms that inadequately resist the violence of the occupation, and even uphold it. Allen, who has conducted in-depth fieldwork on the mechanisms of ‘getting by’ among Palestinians – defined as ‘processes and stances that constitute neither outright confrontation nor submissions’ (2008: 460) – is uncertain of the transformative potential of these practices: ‘Palestinians’ adaptation may ultimately be a self-defeating form of accommodation. Or it may not’ (2008: 460). Shalboub-Kevorkian expresses similar uncertainty. Her study shows the extraordinary agency of pregnant and birthing women in East Jerusalem, who face pain and danger in order to ensure residency for their new-borns. While she claims that their actions lay ‘the foundation for anti-oppressive gendered relations’ (Allen, 2008: 1202) and that their agential moves ‘challenge the maze of geopolitical violence’ (2008: 1194), she also warns that such coping mechanisms may fall short of being transformative and instead ‘normalize the pathological’ (Fanon cited in Allen, 2008: 1197).

Keeping these caveats in mind, I suggest that people can engage in actions that function both as coping mechanisms (and may even support the upholding of status quo) and as moments of formulating and enacting agential projects with a more or less outspoken and intentional transformative purpose. To the subjects, these acts and practices were both taken for granted as part of the routine labour of coping with the occupation, and loaded with multiple meanings, both intensely personal and political. They were recounted as part of a larger narrative of collective steadfastness and resourcefulness – ‘sumud’ – and thus enfolded within larger, collective political narratives. To return to Veena Das’ conceptualization of such moments in the everyday, they exemplify an ever-ongoing ‘slippery relationship between the collective and the individual, between genre and individual emplotment of stories’ (2007: 3). They thus give us a glimpse of the generative force of human beings emerging as ethical subjects in their own life. This force generates a precarious sort of agency, which all the time runs the risk of failing, yet it is precisely such moments that studies of political transformation must take into account. In the micropolitics of the everyday, in the agential relations of ‘lives with other lives’, the power of the macro order is negotiated, contested and potentially transformed. The process may not result in an overt transformation that is easy to pin down, but rather in something more subtle and shifting. The fragility and contingency of human affairs, which Arendt’s work so consistently acknowledges, is here key. When studying the texture of the mundane everyday, we can notice overlapping and contradictory patterns of power and begin to grasp how the macro conflict plays out at the level of subjects and community (see Natanel, 2016). Jerusalem, as the self-proclaimed capital of Israel and as the Palestinian intended capital-to-be, contains the macro conflict in its micropolitics. Certainly, the divided and contested city is intersected by more borders than ‘just’ material ones, having to do with cultural practices, identity formation, divisions of labour, control over administration and infrastructure (Klein, 2014: 203). Long after the physical wall is removed, ‘mental maps and virtual checkpoints’ will remain (Klein, 2014: 215) – borders that may be as tangible as material ones. Again, the everyday is the privileged site for the embodied, narrative work that goes into upholding and dismantling both material and mental borders, and thus far more important for macropolitics than previously acknowledged in IR research. It might be that the true transformative power of these agential acts here discussed is that they offer new imaginations. In the case of the divided city of Jerusalem, they challenge the division both materially and symbolically. In fact, the wall emerges as highly contingent.

Further, it seems that organized and non-organized political actions are not separate realms. Their relationship is porous and at times they merge in a co-constitutive process. Events and performative work in the everyday can politicize the inhabitants, and these quotidian events and work in turn may be politicized. A task lies ahead for research on ‘the local’ to try to trace connections between this ordinary agency – of ‘making the world inhabitable’, in the words of Das that opened this article – and organized political work. In the case of Palestinian political activity, it would mean linking research on ordinary agency with research that analyses more overt forms of political agency – for example, Strömbom’s conceptualization of Palestinian resistance as counter-conduct strategies (2017), and Pogodda and Richmond’s suggestion that the shifting grassroots activism and emerging political motivations hold the potential for ‘everyday state formations’ (2016). To make this link is a crucial undertaking for future research that attempts to connect the agency of the ‘in-between’ to macropolitics, and captures the making of politics before it bursts upon the public stage. A micropolitical analysis can thus reveal something crucial about the experience of the present insecure lifeworlds of Palestinians in East Jerusalem that may be crucial for understanding future political ruptures. If such close readings had been integrated in international relations or peace and conflict research, would the events of, for example, the Arab Spring have been so startling?

This analytical work comes with the methodological challenge of using fluid approaches of reflecting, observing and communicating in a rich everyday that unfolds in never-ending layers and paradoxes. The gaze from outside may find such multi-layered complexity frustrating and the everyday discouragingly opaque and slippery to study, even irrelevant. It is true that to the people whose lives we get a glimpse of above, and indeed to all of us, agential acts come and go as more or less intentional, more or less serendipitous ingredients in the thick weave of life. The meaning they hold may linger, change, or fade into oblivion. This said, the readings of the everyday in East Jerusalem have disclosed an ordinary agency that performs an ongoing, interrelational work of care, through which human beings emerge as ethical subjects. This is the basis for political and social transformation.

Conclusion

My point of departure for this article was the need to better grasp how violence and insecurity is coped with in the everyday and to understand the everyday as a potentially transformative site. It has suggested a way to analyse ‘ordinary agency’ in the everyday, suggesting that the three concepts of place, body and story can be used as movers for a multi-layered reading of events and agents in the everyday and an investigation into how everyday emotions, emplaced stories and lived experiences are shaped by, and shape, politics. Through the conceptual grid of ‘place, body, story’ it asks: What does it mean to live in the proximity of the separation barrier in East Jerusalem? What can we learn from the everyday of importance for macropolitics? How do these events and practices in the everyday construct possibilities for transformation?

I have argued that the value of noticing and understanding the everyday and its ordinary agency is at least twofold. First, it deepens our knowledge of what it is like to live in and with insecurity and to understand the resourcefulness it generates. The analysis has brought forth inhabitants of East Jerusalem as agents that continuously engage in micropolitics of care in order to deal with the structural constraints in their everyday. The reading of three ethnographic moments through my analytical grid has given access to such strategies: doing maths homework over Skype and having family dinner; amassing knowledge, networks and skills to find ways of climbing across the wall in search of an outcome; a mobile phone film on social media turning humiliation and violence into a moment of defiance. Such stories complicate and thicken the macro narrative of the Palestine/Israel conflict and disturb static understandings of the border and the divided city. An imagination is brought forward of the wall as porous and contingent, a story that in itself holds an alternative vision. Second, it means that we can begin to chart the connections between ordinary agency and more overt work for political and social transformation. A starting point will be to make sense of how oscillations in agency occur in time and space, shifting from unintentional to intentional, from informal to formal and back again. Everyday agency may seem mundane and uneventful, but in fact holds a generative capacity.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received funding from the Swedish Research Council for the research of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Johanna Mannergren Selimovic is Associate Professor and a Senior Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm. Her interest lies in critical peace and conflict research with a focus on memory politics, everyday peace, transitional justice and gender. She has published in journals such as Security Dialogue, Memory Studies, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Third World Quarterly and International Feminist Journal of Politics.

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