Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (review)

The environment is an incoherent imaginary. Highly racialized in its moralistic deployment of good and bad (McKee 2015), clean and dirty (Butt 2020, Resnick 2021), worth preserving or wasted (West 2006, Wolfe 2006), its terms produce colonial schemas and maps that demarcate who is and isn't deserving of global aid. Improbably suggesting shared culpability for the asymmetric effects of late capitalism's ongoing destruction (Fortun 2001), colonial environmental imaginaries create geographies of charity in the wake of producing what Katherine McKittrick (2013) and others have called uninhabitable geographies. Yet, the incoherence of "the environment" is a resource for racial capitalism, particularly when settler colonial markers of progress require that some people, land, and communities remain stuck in the past in order to facilitate the "modern" march forward (Solomon 2019). Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins's Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine works within the incoherence of environmental imaginaries, revealing how their dissonance produces meaning, time, and place in Palestine. Subtended by the toxic materialities of what Rob Nixon (2011) has called environmental slow violence, Stamatopoulou-Robbins's ethnography of infrastructure offers a different analytic to describe the siege on Palestinian lives: a waste siege.

This ethnography asks the reader to see the "disorienting patchwork of military installations" (19) as well as unpredictable yet inevitable encounters with the state (i.e., Israel) and something "state-like" (i.e., the Palestinian Authority) as critical to how waste moves in and through Palestine. From Palestinian domestic waste practices and experiences with disposable commodities to calculations of risk and time in Authority-managed landfills to the "doublethink" required for Palestinian Water Authority officials to seek foreign or Israeli aid, this book argues that governing waste in Palestine is as much a question of sovereignty as it is a problem of toxic besiegement. While waste accumulation is an intractable problem of a larger global capitalist order, Waste Siege asks us to think about the management of meaning and matter living under siege.

Working in tension with and against the analytic impulse to see waste as an empirically obvious, lively, or, even, agentive object, Stamatopoulou-Robbins asks us to think through the terms under which waste becomes (or, arguably, already always is) a condition of—and simultaneously exceeds—colonial power. In Palestine, the author argues, waste is not only something in need of infrastructural management; it is itself infrastructural, producing new conditions of management, including managing occupation. The language of "siege" often describes a military strategy that "encircles from without." But by seeing waste itself as infrastructural and a siege in its own right, the concept includes that which emits from within: "Waste siege is constituted as much by movement and flow of waste as it is by encirclement…People cannot escape even if they leave the place where the waste first found them" (7). Siege, then, describes the conditions of living with, alongside, or in proximity to an intractable problem that, according to Stamatopoulou-Robbins, "makes accountability [for waste] more opaque" (8). As the chapter titles and organization of the book suggest, siege has many features: compression, inundated, accumulation, gifted, leakage. These terms not only characterize various types of sovereign force but also elements of siege or modes through which we might think through waste siege as part of everyday life under Israeli occupation.

Within settler colonial regimes, waste is a vexed resource. As many recent scholars have pointed out, waste accumulations are unevenly distributed (Liboiron 2021, Pulido 2006). The lack of state capacity to manage waste—whether infrastructural, financial, managerial, or otherwise—is seen as a failure to be modern, if not a failure of the non-sovereign peoples themselves to care for "their environment." As described in Chapter 1 ("Compression") and Chapter 5 ("Leakage"), environmental actors—whether that be Authority waste and water officials or Israeli environmentalists who see themselves as working towards collaborative peace efforts—negotiate how Palestine's waste is a continued source of foreign investment. As Stamatopoulou-Robbins describes...