Spacing Debt

Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine

Book Pages: 208 Illustrations: 10 illustrations Published: January 2021

Subjects
Geography, Middle East Studies, Postcolonial and Colonial Studies

In Spacing Debt Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and social one. Harker traces the emergence of debt in Ramallah after 2008 as part of the financialization of the Palestinian economy under Israeli settler colonialism. Debt contributes to processes through which Palestinians are kept economically unstable and subordinate. Harker draws extensively on residents' accounts of living with the explosion of personal debt to highlight the entanglement of consumer credit with other obligatory relations among family, friends, and institutions. He offers a new geographical theorization of debt, showing how debt affects urban space, including the movement of bodies through the city, localized economies, and the political violence associated with occupation. Bringing cultural and urban imaginaries into conversation with monetized debt, Harker shows how debt itself becomes a slow violence embedded into the everyday lives of citizens. However, debt is also a means through which Palestinians practice endurance, creatively adapting to life under occupation.

Praise

“The first in-depth ethnographic research on debt formation in the contemporary Palestinian context, this groundbreaking work proposes a host of new ways for social geographers to rethink debt at multiple scales. Spacing Debt ambitiously engages theoretical debates across a wide array of disciplinary approaches and effectively links it with fascinating and carefully treated ethnographic cases and interview materials.” — Deborah James, author of Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa

“This is the first sustained treatment of the everyday lives of debt in the Palestinian context based on in-depth fieldwork and long-term engagement with the communities under study. Theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich, this groundbreaking study offers much-needed sociological insight into Palestine's neoliberal debt regime, while showing how Palestine as 'colonial exception' is a rich site to theorize social geographies of debt.” — Rema Hammami, Birzeit University

“The book achieves one of its goals to describe a heterogeneity of experiences with debt in a way that highlights how people exert their agency. This allows Harker to explain how debt can be a source of ordinary crisis, and simultaneously an act of endurance.” — W. Nathan Green, Antipode

Spacing Debt is an essential read for scholars of debt and finance, and for those interested in modes of theory-building that start from the ways in which people live and choose to narrate their lives.... Thinking of debt as endurance helps us see people living with debt as active agents."

— Enora Robin, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Spacing Debt is a thorough and important book that will serve as a refer­ence on the livelihood of urban Palestinians for years to come. Ethnographically grounded and theoretically ambitious, the book offers an interesting read on courses in economic sociology, global develop­ment, and the like.” — Lotte Segal, Middle East Journal

“Christopher Harker's ethnographic study Spacing Debt takes an in-depth look at how Palestinians living the daily consequences of Israeli colonialism, colonial violence and military occupation navigate the constraints of debt and its impact in terms of perpetual social crisis.” — Ramona Wadi, Middle East Monitor

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Author/Editor Bios Back to Top

Christopher Harker is Associate Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London.

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Table of Contents Forthcoming
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