Militarised violence in the service of state-imposed emergencies over Palestine and Kenya.

Colonial states of emergency are declared and promulgated to contain the disorder of rebellion, resistance and revolt and to effect a return to an order integral to colonial settlement and occupation. The paper draws on colonial archives, analysis of emergency and colonialism evident in the literature, and the contribution of images to guide apprehension of the sites and locations of the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of Kenya from the 1950s and across historic Palestine since 1948. Positing the practices enabled through Emergency regulations as intensified forms of instrumentalised colonial governmentality and violence, part of the structure of settler colonialism, the paper examines the racialised vocabularies of the British colonial administration of the Emergency over Kenya and the Zionist/Israeli state/military frames of Palestinian resistance, the technologies and architectures of subjugation and punishment through which the threat of disorder is contained in carceral zones, and the militarised violence of the colonial response to resistance characterised as catastrophic threat from an enemy located within frames of terrorism, disloyalty and illegality. Photographs taken as part of an inquiry into the architectures, remnants, material assemblages and spatial arrangements found in the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of post-colonial Kenya and across the multiple geographies of historic Palestine are included as evidence of the photographic event and as provocation to thought in an encounter with the workings of colonialism and of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]