Lisa Bhungalia

“From the American People” examines an understudied dimension of America’s transnational wars: their civilian and humanitarian components. Tracing the entanglements of US national securitization, liberal warfare, and foreign aid governance, this project examines how the tethering of US counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies to civilian aid flows in Palestine has proliferated the sites and means through which an expansive regime of policing, surveillance, and punishment is being exercised over Palestinian life. Aid, it contends, is both relief and war. Tracking these developments ethnographically, “From the American People” illuminates how regimes of war and violence are reproduced through mediums, practices, and institutions that emerge to realize “stability” and “peace.” More broadly, it affords insight into the multiple forms of violence that exist within the concept of war – not only the spectacular and the crisis-laden, but also the mundane, bureaucratic, routinized, and largely concealed.