Militarized urbanism in the cold war era: The resettlement of the refugees in Khan Younis

Abstract

The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the first uses settler colonialism as an analytical framework to explore structural violence and Indigenous transfer, expressed through counterinsurgency and urbicide; the second investigates practices of care and governance and their representations within a universalized discourse of humanitarianism. This article introduces a new approach, exploring historical (post)colonial architectural narratives—rooted in international discourses of humanitarian relief and development aid—to interrogate the complex settler-colonial conditions and practices of Israel’s resettlement of refugees. Such narratives emphasis the materialization of resettlement, in which structural violence is culturally co-produced. The article focuses on the Khan Younis refugee resettlement project in the Gaza Strip (1983-1993), drawing on archival materials and in-depth interviews to offering ‘militarized urbanism’ as a novel description of the violence of resettlement. Situated at the junction between military technologies and cultural practices, ‘militarized urbanism’ represents the transformation of the geopolitics of colonial warfare to the colonization of the everyday, where urban and architectural knowledge are reshaped by security logics in the mediation of conflicting civilian and political agendas.