Role Collapse: The Mechanisms of Hybrid Domination and Violence in the Contemporary Occupied Territories

Joseph Kaplan Weinger, Harvard University

Roles are fundamental building blocks of social life and a prime means for the institutionalization of social order. Political orders enforced by coercion and violence, such as colonial occupation, rely on a cast of actors whose routinized behaviors uphold domination. How do roles break down during crisis, and with what consequences? This paper looks to the case of the fractious yet synergistic intimacy between Israeli settlers and organizations of the Israeli state, examining the phenomenon of “role collapse.” Role collapse describes a process in which the categorical boundaries distinguishing social roles break down, engendering a setting in which institutional frameworks are unable to enforce normative boundaries and enabling actors to cross or fuse roles. Drawing primarily on original ethnographic data and interviews collected in the Occupied West Bank in 2024, amid a wartime state of emergency, as well as archival data collected from the Israel State and Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment archives, the paper adumbrates four mechanisms of role collapse: collaboration/collusion, complicity, commissioning, and commandeering. It also details the sub-mechanisms, including realignment or functional substitution, hybridization, normative convergence or divergence, and ambiguation or de-differentiation. The paper then assesses the repercussions of this now-sedimented phenomenon, particularly in the Occupied Territories. Role collapse sustains a social order of diffuse violence that splinters the formal state monopoly, enabling non-state actors to enact systemic and opportunistic violence that furthers coercive territorial redistribution, while simultaneously reconfiguring power through a hybridized system of extralegal and bureaucratized domination.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 116. Politics of the Middle East