This talk explores the relationship between national securitization, liberal warfare, and transnational linkages and encounters between the U.S. and the North Africa/Middle East region. Drawing on over a year of research in Israel/Palestine, this talk examines how the tethering of U.S. terrorism law and policy to foreign aid transactions is giving rise to expansive networks of surveillance and enforcement far beyond U.S. borders. In so doing, it offers insight into the ways in which American power remains a significant force in the making and unmaking of political geographies at the global scale and in the Middle East specifically.

Lisa Bhungalia received her Ph.D. in Geography from Syracuse University. She currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Syracuse University and Ohio State University. Her current book project examines the deepening entanglements of regimes of war and policing and aid in Israel/Palestine with attention in particular to the role of humanitarianism and development in liberal strategies of warfare. Her work has appeared in Geopolitics, Environment and Planning A, Geojournal, and Jadaliyya among other venues.