Determining Emotions and the Burden of Proof in Investigative Commissions to Palestine

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Main author: Allen, Lori
Format: Journal Article           
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id eprints-23002
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
description The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.
format Journal Article
author Allen, Lori
author_facet Allen, Lori
authorStr Allen, Lori
author_letter Allen, Lori
title Determining Emotions and the Burden of Proof in Investigative Commissions to Palestine
publisher Cambridge University Press
publishDate 2017
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/23002/

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