For many around the world, state abandonment is a daily reality. The violence they experience is often not the product of a sovereign decision; no one ordered them to be punished or hurt. Instead, they are harmed solely because they were no longer deemed worthy of care. More than anywhere else, no-man’s land is where this abandonment crystallises into a dominant governing force. Based on seven years of research in Colombia, Cyprus, France, Palestine and Sudan, this paper offers an intimate account of abandoned lives and lands, how they endure and sometimes thrive once left to fend for themselves. It argues that in no-man’s land, abandonment is no longer an error or failure of governance, but a system of rule that radically redefines the relations between the state and those subjected to it.
Abandonment is hardly a foreign concept to political theorists or scholars that document its social and economic effects. The conceptual starting point of this paper is different: It is the first attempt to rigorously account for uncaring, how it emerges as a political system and the impacts it has. Uncaring, I argue, is an extreme sovereign withdrawal that forsakes any pretence of care. The realities documented in this paper are not those that feature the aftermath of neoliberal reordering. There is never a private contractor swooping in to fill the voids left by a callous state for a profit. Nor do these spaces resemble the familiar face of late modern colonial violence, with its architectures of enclosure and the harms it inflicts on precarious lives and lands. If anything, such regimes care too much, turning care into invasive control that is violently policed, or percolates into the intimate fabric of life through humanitarian interventions. Instead, the critical focus of this talk turns to this radical form of the uncaring state and what sets it apart from more familiar practices of sovereign abandonment. To do so, I draws on the Rabbinical Hebrew concept of hefker and consider its ability to open new ways of understanding abandonment-without-care. Importantly, this analysis raises the alarming potential that uncaring is an extreme, but increasingly normalised political condition.
Why write, then, about no-man’s land? Because uncaring happens somewhere, to someone. While it is often hard to trace, it is nevertheless acutely felt. This paper accounts for the politics of uncaring, but it is not a philosophical account of abandonment. Instead, it is committed to giving a more intimate understanding of uncaring as it takes place in concrete, embodied ways. This research, in other words, is about those who have overseen the withdrawal of care, and those who have had to contend with realities of life in spaces that were designated beyond the pale. In doing so, the analysis pushes against a Eurocentric imagination that has largely confined no-man’s land to the killing fields of WWI. Such imaginations have obscured the nuanced political significance of no-man’s land and flattened the complex dynamics that inhabit it. Rather than focus on the horrors of modern war—with its assumed Western, masculine protagonists—this paper foregrounds the rich life that often inhabits these places outside European histories of war. No-man’s land reappears as a space of refuge and political activism, as an object of artistic fascination and cultural fantasy.
Dr Noam Leshem is an Associate Professor in Political and Cultural Geography at Durham University. He is the author of Life After Ruin: The Struggles Over Israel’s Depopulated Arab Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Edge of Care: Living and Dying in No-Man’s Land, which will be published by Chicago University Press in 2023. Leshem is also the lead investigator of the Occupation Debris research project (2023-2026), which seeks new ways through which displaced communities in the Middle East might regain access to hard-to-reach cultural heritage.