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

2022, Anthropological Quarterly

Reading Waste Siege in 2020 under a near-global quarantine, it is becoming clear that even universal threats overlap topographies of profoundly disproportionate risk and state management that were baked in decades ago. Seemingly natural phenomena are distributed spatially on the basis of social relations, structural racism, political economy and disinvestment in social reproduction and infrastructure; this pandemic exposes preexisting social conditions and comorbidities. Although Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins' marvelous new book is about waste management in Palestine, it asks extremely timely and relevant questions about the putative universality of environmental threats, mobility, fixity, political violence, and state governance.

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