Spatial regimes of power: Combined municipal policing in the Arab City of Nazareth

Abstract

This paper examines the agency of Arab urban spaces in shaping local policing arrangements in Israel using a recent experiment with Combined Municipal Policing (CMP) in the city of Nazareth as a case study. Departing from prevailing analytical approaches to the study of local governance in Arab urban localities in Israel, it adopts a distributive notion of agency that addresses both the role of (uneven) arrangements of power in producing Arab-only urban spaces, as well as the role of (uneven) material assemblages and infrastructures of power-road networks, in particular-in generating, and frustrating, local policing arrangements within them. Building on a critique of ethnocratic theory as it relates to Arab-only localities in particular, it argues that changes in local policing arrangements should not be viewed simply as a sophistication of prevailing mechanisms of control, but rather as an interactional consequence of a more complex spatial regime of power that reveals the latent, unintended, and immanent political potency of the (Arab) city to talk to, with, and back to power.