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Books by Ronen Shamir
Treating law as an essential cultural component in a nation-building project, this book offers a ... more Treating law as an essential cultural component in a nation-building project, this book offers a socio-historical analysis of a community-based system of justice under colonial rule. It traces the attempts of Jewish jurists–nationalists to establish a non-religious system of Hebrew Courts in British-ruled Palestine. This book analyzes the secular, national and anti-colonial ideology of the Hebrew Law of Peace and shows that Jewish religious groups, secular lawyers and leading Zionist institutions undermined the Hebrew Law project. The book develops the concept of 'dual colonialism' to analyze the complex relations between Jewish settlers and British colonizers, and explores the reluctance of leading Zionists to allow a process of nation-building from below that would have allowed communities, rather than organized quasi-state institutions, to define the trajectory of Jewish nationalism.
Taking its cue from earlier studies of electrification in Europe and the U.S., the book moves the... more Taking its cue from earlier studies of electrification in Europe and the U.S., the book moves the inquiry to the colonial setting of 1920s Palestine. The book follows electric wires as they extend to new contact points and asks about the social significance of being permanently attached to an electrical network ('the grid'). By looking at the process of electrification it offers a novel material and market-based explanation to the emergence of ethno-national separatism between Arabs and Jews, discusses the assembly of distinct 'Jewish' and 'Arab' economies, and traces processes of urban segregation in Palestine. The argument is that the construction of an electric grid was a process that created social distinctions, new subjectivities, distinct geographical areas, and new social classifications and categories (types of 'electric consumers'). The method of inquiry adopts some insights of actor-network-theory, accounting for social processes in terms of the associations of human actors and non-human entities. The historical case is means for exploring broader implications for sociological theory in general and for the future direction of the sociology of infrastructures in particular.
American Historical Review, 1997
Papers by Ronen Shamir
Journal of Transport History, 2024
Passengers seldom appear in historical accounts as having their own role in the development of ci... more Passengers seldom appear in historical accounts as having their own role in the development of civil aviation. This study identifies a particular class of air-travellers: colonial officers and their families, stationed throughout the British Empire, who in the late 1940s drove a shift to the air at a time of an acute crisis in shipping accommodations. The drive from sea to air relied on an administrative infrastructure which was created by the Crown Agents for the Colonies on the basis of their earlier agreements with shipping companies. The Crown Agents administered the passage of colonial officers and negotiated a rebate agreement with British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1949. The study concludes that the history of civil aviation and the shift from sea to air travel depended not only on technological improvements but also on passengers whose practices normalised air-travel.
Journal of Historical Geography
Airports provide an essential infrastructure for the production of airspace by facilitating netwo... more Airports provide an essential infrastructure for the production of airspace by facilitating networks of aero mobility. This study considers the case of Lydda airport in Mandatory Palestine. Promoted in the 1930's as a hub for British civil aviation on its India route, Lydda airport is largely absent from the inter-war history of civil aviation although the site would become the location of the present-day Ben-Gurion International Airport. The study finds that while British decision-makers initially trumped the attempts of Jewish settlers to locate the country's inter-continental airport in Tel-Aviv rather than at Lydda, sustained pressure and an anti-colonial Arab Revolt compromised that decision. The tension between imperial trans-continental priorities and domestic ambitions were translated in Palestine into two separate and partially competing neighbouring airports.
Settler Colonial Studies, 2022
This study looks at infrastructures as sites of contest between empire and settler-colonialists. ... more This study looks at infrastructures as sites of contest between empire and settler-colonialists. It analyses the construction of Mandate Palestine's Haifa seaport and Lydda Airport as imperial projects and traces the techno-political networks that allowed Jewish settlers to build their own competing seaport and airport in Tel-Aviv during the anti-colonial Arab Revolt (1936–1939). It identifies a dialectical relationship between colonisers and empire: Jewish settlers welcomed Palestine’s intended role as an arena of imperial development but soon developed their own stakes in securing access to sea and skies. The study contributes to the scant knowledge about infrastructures in colonial settings and specifically to the little-known role of British consultant engineers in facilitating them. All in all the article de-centres the Arab-Jewish conflict as a major historical focus and instead considers Palestine through the lens of the British empire’s conception of the Middle East.
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2015
Whether buried underfoot or strung overhead, electrical lines are omnipresent. Not only are most ... more Whether buried underfoot or strung overhead, electrical lines are omnipresent. Not only are most societies dependent on electrical infrastructure, but this infrastructure actively shapes electrified society. From the wires, poles, and generators themselves to the entrepreneurs, engineers, politicians, and advisors who determine the process of electrification, our electrical grids can create power-and politics-just as they transmit it. Current Flow examines the history of electrification of British-ruled Palestine in the 1920s, as it marked, affirmed, and produced social, political, and economic difference between Arabs and Jews. Considering the interplay of British colonial interests, the Jewish-Zionist leanings of a commissioned electric company, and Arab opposition within the case of the Jaffa Power House, Ronen Shamir reveals how electrification was central in assembling a material infrastructure of ethno-national separation in Palestine long before "political partition plans" had ever been envisioned. Ultimately, Current Flow sheds new light on the history of Jewish-Arab relations and offers broader sociological insights into what happens when people are transformed from users into elements of networks.
Middle Eastern Studies, 2019
This study analyzes one instance in the history of British-ruled Palestine's projects of statisti... more This study analyzes one instance in the history of British-ruled Palestine's projects of statistical calculation. It traces the maneuvers of statisticians and officials vying to shape the type of data that would be generated by the 1931 Census of Palestine. We focus on those aspects of the census which could have yielded valid statistical knowledge about the alleged emergence of an Arab 'landless class', arguably as a result of Jewish colonization. The urgency in generating such knowledge were British concerns and Palestinian-Arab claims that Jewish immigration exhausted the 'absorptive capacity' of Palestine: straining water resources, reducing the areas of Arab-held cultivable lands, and restricting employment opportunities for Arabs. 1 We find that the Census, contrary to original British intentions and Arab hopes, altogether avoided using landlessness as a statistical category. We situate this outcome in the context of an asymmetry between Jews and Arabs in matters of statistical expertise. We show that Zionist institutions were by far more effective than Arab ones in translating their political interests to the language of comparative statistics and in asserting themselves on a par with British expertise. At the same time, we also find that the definitions of 'cultivators' and 'labourers' in the schedule of the census and the final tabulation of its results indirectly provided a strong approximation to an alleged Arab landless class, although not one whose size could be attributed to Jewish colonization. We attribute this result to the ability of the British Superintendent of the Census to somewhat neutralize the politics of calculation by aligning the Census of Palestine with the British colonial experience with the censuses of India. Our study is anchored in three basic premises. First, censuses are instruments of state power and their history is intimately coupled with the history of imperialism; their rules of categorization create a 'totalizing classificatory grid' by which populations 'are ordered for administrative purposes'. 2 Second, censuses do not merely reflect and record demographic and statistical facts but are constitutive of these facts: affirming, validating or fixing some social categories or economic relations while disallowing or misrecognizing others. Censuses assemble social worlds and hence shape not only governmental policies but also public perceptions of difference and hierarchy, processes of identity formation, and more broadly 'the categories we think in'. 3 Third, subsequent to these two premises, censuses often become sites of contestation over their categories and rules of classification. 4 It is this latter premise which is our prime focus here. The schedules and operations of censuses become sites of contestation when the enumerated population or a segment of it openly or tacitly tries to modify, challenge, oppose, subvert, inflate, or otherwise frustrate official classifications and definitions. 5 Censuses also become sites of contestation when statisticians, demographers, and other social scientists debate their methods of measurement by invoking the language of scientific expertise and comparative statistics or when census officials negotiate or clash with political leaders and policy-makers over what to measure. 6 In all such cases matters of uneven political representation, unequal scientific resources,
History and Anthropology, 2018
An archival reconstruction of a 1930s engineering expedition to study the hydroelectric potential... more An archival reconstruction of a 1930s engineering expedition to study the hydroelectric potential of the River Nile explores the investigative modalities of engineers. Contributing to an evolving anthropology of infrastructure and electricity the paper offers a material/relational analysis of an engineering field of planning and explores the relationship between ways of seeing and the drive to quantify (commensuration). Contributing to the study of colonialism, the paper finds that the engineering methods brought the African population into view either as a labour force or as politically troublesome but not as potential consumers of electricity.
NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 2016
Elektrizität und das "Empire": Palästina der 1920er-Jahre unter britischer Kontrolle Der Beitrag ... more Elektrizität und das "Empire": Palästina der 1920er-Jahre unter britischer Kontrolle Der Beitrag untersucht die technischen und politischen Aspekte der frühen Elektrifizierung Palästinas unter britischer Herrschaft in den 1920er Jahren. Er betont dabei die zentrale Bedeutung von technischem, topographischem und hydrologischem Wissen der beteiligten Akteure für den Elektrifizierungsprozess. Eingebettet in den breiteren Kontext kolonialer Elektrifizierungsvorhaben zeigt die Studie, wie sehr die britischen Kolonialherren mit ihrem beschränkten Wissen der lokalen Gegebenheiten in Palästina sowohl der deutschen Konkurrenz wie auch den einheimischen Unternehmern hinterherhinkten. Entsprechend gelang es den Briten nur bedingt, den eigentlichen Elektrifizierungsprozess zu kontrollieren und mit ihren eigenen Entwicklungszielen in Einklang zu bringen. Auf Grundlage dieser Erkenntnisse hinterfragt der Beitrag die grundsätzliche Annahme, Elektrizität habe als Instrument kolonialer Machtausübung gedient.
Current Sociology, 2017
Ethnographic observations at an early-detection centre for cancer serve as a basis for theorising... more Ethnographic observations at an early-detection centre for cancer serve as a basis for theorising the spatiality of preventive medicine. Based on insights from both the sociology of health and the sociology of space, the article outlines a re-spatialisation of health by articulating the concept of osmotic-spatiality: spatial-temporal arrangements which transform health into a personal task and an individual achievement, producing the subjectivity of ‘healthy patients’.
Subjectivity, 2016
This paper deploys a relational-material approach for tracing the assembly of passengers as they ... more This paper deploys a relational-material approach for tracing the assembly of passengers as they move through airports and use its series of passage points. While many studies analyse airport mobility and passengers' experiences, few do so with the question of subjectivity as their main theoretical focus. Rather than treating subjectivity as an epiphenomenon or alternatively as a myriad of spatio-sensual experiences, we treat the subjectivity of airline passengers as a product and an achievement: a work of assembly which requires the skilful coordination of body, luggage, and documents. We introduce the notion of 'mobility capital' as a vital ingredient in this process of active assembly: learnt variations and improvisations while interacting with the architecture of airports and with the materially embedded regulation of civil aviation account for the process of acquiring the subjectivity of airline passengers and for the variance among them.
Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2010
The career of corporate social responsibility (CSR) indicates that it evolved into a field of pri... more The career of corporate social responsibility (CSR) indicates that it evolved into a field of private and self-regulation that bears all the hallmarks of new governance. Accordingly, this review offers an analysis of CSR as a reflection on the governance turn in sociolegal studies. It relies on the literature to show (a) that socially responsible corporate practices developed in response to public critique of corporate powers and (b) that the emergent field of CSR shows capitalism's ability to transform critique into commercial and managerial assets. Devoting specific attention to the role of academic research and theory in consolidating the framework of new governance, the review reflects upon the trajectory of law in latter-day capitalism and theorizes governance as the privatization of the sources and instruments of authority.
Law & Society Review, 1990
... The perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian residents is not studied here.2 This study examin... more ... The perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian residents is not studied here.2 This study examines the response of Israeli public opinion leaders, the mass media, political elites, and the academics to policy issues processed by the court. ...
Treating law as an essential cultural component in a nation-building project, this book offers a ... more Treating law as an essential cultural component in a nation-building project, this book offers a socio-historical analysis of a community-based system of justice under colonial rule. It traces the attempts of Jewish jurists–nationalists to establish a non-religious system of Hebrew Courts in British-ruled Palestine. This book analyzes the secular, national and anti-colonial ideology of the Hebrew Law of Peace and shows that Jewish religious groups, secular lawyers and leading Zionist institutions undermined the Hebrew Law project. The book develops the concept of 'dual colonialism' to analyze the complex relations between Jewish settlers and British colonizers, and explores the reluctance of leading Zionists to allow a process of nation-building from below that would have allowed communities, rather than organized quasi-state institutions, to define the trajectory of Jewish nationalism.
Taking its cue from earlier studies of electrification in Europe and the U.S., the book moves the... more Taking its cue from earlier studies of electrification in Europe and the U.S., the book moves the inquiry to the colonial setting of 1920s Palestine. The book follows electric wires as they extend to new contact points and asks about the social significance of being permanently attached to an electrical network ('the grid'). By looking at the process of electrification it offers a novel material and market-based explanation to the emergence of ethno-national separatism between Arabs and Jews, discusses the assembly of distinct 'Jewish' and 'Arab' economies, and traces processes of urban segregation in Palestine. The argument is that the construction of an electric grid was a process that created social distinctions, new subjectivities, distinct geographical areas, and new social classifications and categories (types of 'electric consumers'). The method of inquiry adopts some insights of actor-network-theory, accounting for social processes in terms of the associations of human actors and non-human entities. The historical case is means for exploring broader implications for sociological theory in general and for the future direction of the sociology of infrastructures in particular.
American Historical Review, 1997
Journal of Transport History, 2024
Passengers seldom appear in historical accounts as having their own role in the development of ci... more Passengers seldom appear in historical accounts as having their own role in the development of civil aviation. This study identifies a particular class of air-travellers: colonial officers and their families, stationed throughout the British Empire, who in the late 1940s drove a shift to the air at a time of an acute crisis in shipping accommodations. The drive from sea to air relied on an administrative infrastructure which was created by the Crown Agents for the Colonies on the basis of their earlier agreements with shipping companies. The Crown Agents administered the passage of colonial officers and negotiated a rebate agreement with British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1949. The study concludes that the history of civil aviation and the shift from sea to air travel depended not only on technological improvements but also on passengers whose practices normalised air-travel.
Journal of Historical Geography
Airports provide an essential infrastructure for the production of airspace by facilitating netwo... more Airports provide an essential infrastructure for the production of airspace by facilitating networks of aero mobility. This study considers the case of Lydda airport in Mandatory Palestine. Promoted in the 1930's as a hub for British civil aviation on its India route, Lydda airport is largely absent from the inter-war history of civil aviation although the site would become the location of the present-day Ben-Gurion International Airport. The study finds that while British decision-makers initially trumped the attempts of Jewish settlers to locate the country's inter-continental airport in Tel-Aviv rather than at Lydda, sustained pressure and an anti-colonial Arab Revolt compromised that decision. The tension between imperial trans-continental priorities and domestic ambitions were translated in Palestine into two separate and partially competing neighbouring airports.
Settler Colonial Studies, 2022
This study looks at infrastructures as sites of contest between empire and settler-colonialists. ... more This study looks at infrastructures as sites of contest between empire and settler-colonialists. It analyses the construction of Mandate Palestine's Haifa seaport and Lydda Airport as imperial projects and traces the techno-political networks that allowed Jewish settlers to build their own competing seaport and airport in Tel-Aviv during the anti-colonial Arab Revolt (1936–1939). It identifies a dialectical relationship between colonisers and empire: Jewish settlers welcomed Palestine’s intended role as an arena of imperial development but soon developed their own stakes in securing access to sea and skies. The study contributes to the scant knowledge about infrastructures in colonial settings and specifically to the little-known role of British consultant engineers in facilitating them. All in all the article de-centres the Arab-Jewish conflict as a major historical focus and instead considers Palestine through the lens of the British empire’s conception of the Middle East.
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2015
Whether buried underfoot or strung overhead, electrical lines are omnipresent. Not only are most ... more Whether buried underfoot or strung overhead, electrical lines are omnipresent. Not only are most societies dependent on electrical infrastructure, but this infrastructure actively shapes electrified society. From the wires, poles, and generators themselves to the entrepreneurs, engineers, politicians, and advisors who determine the process of electrification, our electrical grids can create power-and politics-just as they transmit it. Current Flow examines the history of electrification of British-ruled Palestine in the 1920s, as it marked, affirmed, and produced social, political, and economic difference between Arabs and Jews. Considering the interplay of British colonial interests, the Jewish-Zionist leanings of a commissioned electric company, and Arab opposition within the case of the Jaffa Power House, Ronen Shamir reveals how electrification was central in assembling a material infrastructure of ethno-national separation in Palestine long before "political partition plans" had ever been envisioned. Ultimately, Current Flow sheds new light on the history of Jewish-Arab relations and offers broader sociological insights into what happens when people are transformed from users into elements of networks.
Middle Eastern Studies, 2019
This study analyzes one instance in the history of British-ruled Palestine's projects of statisti... more This study analyzes one instance in the history of British-ruled Palestine's projects of statistical calculation. It traces the maneuvers of statisticians and officials vying to shape the type of data that would be generated by the 1931 Census of Palestine. We focus on those aspects of the census which could have yielded valid statistical knowledge about the alleged emergence of an Arab 'landless class', arguably as a result of Jewish colonization. The urgency in generating such knowledge were British concerns and Palestinian-Arab claims that Jewish immigration exhausted the 'absorptive capacity' of Palestine: straining water resources, reducing the areas of Arab-held cultivable lands, and restricting employment opportunities for Arabs. 1 We find that the Census, contrary to original British intentions and Arab hopes, altogether avoided using landlessness as a statistical category. We situate this outcome in the context of an asymmetry between Jews and Arabs in matters of statistical expertise. We show that Zionist institutions were by far more effective than Arab ones in translating their political interests to the language of comparative statistics and in asserting themselves on a par with British expertise. At the same time, we also find that the definitions of 'cultivators' and 'labourers' in the schedule of the census and the final tabulation of its results indirectly provided a strong approximation to an alleged Arab landless class, although not one whose size could be attributed to Jewish colonization. We attribute this result to the ability of the British Superintendent of the Census to somewhat neutralize the politics of calculation by aligning the Census of Palestine with the British colonial experience with the censuses of India. Our study is anchored in three basic premises. First, censuses are instruments of state power and their history is intimately coupled with the history of imperialism; their rules of categorization create a 'totalizing classificatory grid' by which populations 'are ordered for administrative purposes'. 2 Second, censuses do not merely reflect and record demographic and statistical facts but are constitutive of these facts: affirming, validating or fixing some social categories or economic relations while disallowing or misrecognizing others. Censuses assemble social worlds and hence shape not only governmental policies but also public perceptions of difference and hierarchy, processes of identity formation, and more broadly 'the categories we think in'. 3 Third, subsequent to these two premises, censuses often become sites of contestation over their categories and rules of classification. 4 It is this latter premise which is our prime focus here. The schedules and operations of censuses become sites of contestation when the enumerated population or a segment of it openly or tacitly tries to modify, challenge, oppose, subvert, inflate, or otherwise frustrate official classifications and definitions. 5 Censuses also become sites of contestation when statisticians, demographers, and other social scientists debate their methods of measurement by invoking the language of scientific expertise and comparative statistics or when census officials negotiate or clash with political leaders and policy-makers over what to measure. 6 In all such cases matters of uneven political representation, unequal scientific resources,
History and Anthropology, 2018
An archival reconstruction of a 1930s engineering expedition to study the hydroelectric potential... more An archival reconstruction of a 1930s engineering expedition to study the hydroelectric potential of the River Nile explores the investigative modalities of engineers. Contributing to an evolving anthropology of infrastructure and electricity the paper offers a material/relational analysis of an engineering field of planning and explores the relationship between ways of seeing and the drive to quantify (commensuration). Contributing to the study of colonialism, the paper finds that the engineering methods brought the African population into view either as a labour force or as politically troublesome but not as potential consumers of electricity.
NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 2016
Elektrizität und das "Empire": Palästina der 1920er-Jahre unter britischer Kontrolle Der Beitrag ... more Elektrizität und das "Empire": Palästina der 1920er-Jahre unter britischer Kontrolle Der Beitrag untersucht die technischen und politischen Aspekte der frühen Elektrifizierung Palästinas unter britischer Herrschaft in den 1920er Jahren. Er betont dabei die zentrale Bedeutung von technischem, topographischem und hydrologischem Wissen der beteiligten Akteure für den Elektrifizierungsprozess. Eingebettet in den breiteren Kontext kolonialer Elektrifizierungsvorhaben zeigt die Studie, wie sehr die britischen Kolonialherren mit ihrem beschränkten Wissen der lokalen Gegebenheiten in Palästina sowohl der deutschen Konkurrenz wie auch den einheimischen Unternehmern hinterherhinkten. Entsprechend gelang es den Briten nur bedingt, den eigentlichen Elektrifizierungsprozess zu kontrollieren und mit ihren eigenen Entwicklungszielen in Einklang zu bringen. Auf Grundlage dieser Erkenntnisse hinterfragt der Beitrag die grundsätzliche Annahme, Elektrizität habe als Instrument kolonialer Machtausübung gedient.
Current Sociology, 2017
Ethnographic observations at an early-detection centre for cancer serve as a basis for theorising... more Ethnographic observations at an early-detection centre for cancer serve as a basis for theorising the spatiality of preventive medicine. Based on insights from both the sociology of health and the sociology of space, the article outlines a re-spatialisation of health by articulating the concept of osmotic-spatiality: spatial-temporal arrangements which transform health into a personal task and an individual achievement, producing the subjectivity of ‘healthy patients’.
Subjectivity, 2016
This paper deploys a relational-material approach for tracing the assembly of passengers as they ... more This paper deploys a relational-material approach for tracing the assembly of passengers as they move through airports and use its series of passage points. While many studies analyse airport mobility and passengers' experiences, few do so with the question of subjectivity as their main theoretical focus. Rather than treating subjectivity as an epiphenomenon or alternatively as a myriad of spatio-sensual experiences, we treat the subjectivity of airline passengers as a product and an achievement: a work of assembly which requires the skilful coordination of body, luggage, and documents. We introduce the notion of 'mobility capital' as a vital ingredient in this process of active assembly: learnt variations and improvisations while interacting with the architecture of airports and with the materially embedded regulation of civil aviation account for the process of acquiring the subjectivity of airline passengers and for the variance among them.
Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2010
The career of corporate social responsibility (CSR) indicates that it evolved into a field of pri... more The career of corporate social responsibility (CSR) indicates that it evolved into a field of private and self-regulation that bears all the hallmarks of new governance. Accordingly, this review offers an analysis of CSR as a reflection on the governance turn in sociolegal studies. It relies on the literature to show (a) that socially responsible corporate practices developed in response to public critique of corporate powers and (b) that the emergent field of CSR shows capitalism's ability to transform critique into commercial and managerial assets. Devoting specific attention to the role of academic research and theory in consolidating the framework of new governance, the review reflects upon the trajectory of law in latter-day capitalism and theorizes governance as the privatization of the sources and instruments of authority.
Law & Society Review, 1990
... The perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian residents is not studied here.2 This study examin... more ... The perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian residents is not studied here.2 This study examines the response of Israeli public opinion leaders, the mass media, political elites, and the academics to policy issues processed by the court. ...
Law and Globalization from Below
... CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A CASE OF HEGEMONY AND COUNTER-HEGEMONY Ronen Shamir ... cou... more ... CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A CASE OF HEGEMONY AND COUNTER-HEGEMONY Ronen Shamir ... countries by transnational corporations had become intolerable."Counter-hegemonic efforts ... safeguard the flexibility needed" to address the diversity of European ...
Law and Catastrophe, 2007
Law & Society Review, 1996
for their insightful and constructive reading of earlier drafts. I also thank four reviewers of t... more for their insightful and constructive reading of earlier drafts. I also thank four reviewers of the Review for their excellent suggestions for revisions and clarifications. The article is based on research supported by the Israel Foundations Trustees and the Israel Science Foundation. I also thank Nelly Elias, a research assistant, for her invaluable help.