Chronotopes of Security Legal Regimes

Abstract

Legal regimes dealing with security have prominent temporal attributes: they are often intended to operate for a specified period of time in response to an imminent danger and allow governments to employ extraordinary measures enabling them to act faster when faced with time-critical scenarios. Such regimes also have prominent spatial attributes: they often protect a physical border, delineate spaces with extra-legal status, or use surveillance measures such as cameras or patrols for monitoring designated areas. Based on the analysis of one security regime that was imposed on the Palestinian minority in Israel between 1948 and 1966, I argue in this article that such spatial and temporal attributes affect each other and that different legal measures associated with security can be characterized by the specific time/space configuration – or chronotope – embedded in them. In Israel, a military regime was imposed on specific areas to foil the movement of its subjects and thereby further its territorial objectives. The procedures that the regime employed were therefore designed to monitor and control individuals’ whereabouts. Each of these seemingly spatial attributes, however, gained its particular function and meaning from a specific interaction with temporal attributes. The prism of the chronotope illuminates how security legal measures generate distinct modes of governance and produce different boundaries to the political community, in a way that a one-dimensional analysis fails to capture.