Surveillance in Colonial Zones: The case of Hebron City

Ruaa's research aims to understand how spatial planning can be used as a tool of surveillance and control in colonial zones. Ruaa will study the case of Hebron city which suffers from practicing all forms of surveillance-based control by the Israeli occupation. Using the inductive approach, the research will respond to calls of expanding current researches to incorporate colonial and post-colonial zones, to raise theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues and to include Israel-Palestine in mainstream surveillance studies. Ruaa's research seeks to investigate how surveillance practices reshape the spaces and change the use of spaces in Hebron city, especially at the commercial centre? What are the socioeconomic impacts? And how surveillance affects urban expansion and future planning of urban spaces through introducing colonialist dimensions to urban planning and administration? This research will also make contribution to the studies related to Israel's occupation in Palestine, which has been going on for decades and not solved yet and has marked Israel as a surveillance state par excellence. This research will treat the neglect of colonialism in Foucault's pioneering work on bio-power and surveillance through studying restrictions on mobility, urban expansion and land dispossession in Palestine. Moreover, from a theoretical angle, the fusing of colonialism and surveillance will no doubt
bring to the fore discourse on methods of resistance to control.