Everyday agency and transformation: Place, body and story in the divided city
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836718807510 |
| Author | Johanna Mannergren Selimovic |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
807510CAC0010.1177/0010836718807510Cooperation and ConflictSelimovic
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Cooperation and Conflict
2019, Vol. 54(2) 131 –148
Everyday agency and
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and story in the divided city
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic
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
Corresponding author:
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Box 27035, SE-102 51
Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: johanna.mannergren@ui.se
132
Cooperation and Conflict 54(2)
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 bar-
rier 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 rela-
tions (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 con-
nected 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 mic-
ropolitics 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 nar-
rative 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 sepa-
ration 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
Selimovic
133
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 con-
cepts 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 occupa-
tion. 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 sta-
tions 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 agen-
tial 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 embod-
ied, and contingent on our relations with others in the place we share. It...
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