Table of Contents

Introduction
1. War Through Law
2. Elastic Sovereignty
3. Work of the List
4. Afterlives and Reverberations
5. Asphyxiatory Violence
Conclusion

About the Author

Lisa Bhungalia is Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews

"Elastic Empire is an utterly brilliant piece of research. Lisa Bhungalia fluently and beautifully uses theoretical elaborations of plasticity and malleability of empire to show the interconnections between the aid industry and settler colonial and imperial violence."—Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies "Into the well-studied terrain of contemporary Palestine and Israel, Lisa Bhungalia has produced a book of stunning originality. Through wide-ranging and incisive analysis, she explains how ever more highly securitized models of foreign aid adversely affect Palestinians. Aid, she argues, is war by other means."—Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture "Elastic Empire offers a riveting portrait of the quiet administration of violence. Lisa Bhungalia maps US shadow wars carried out through the daily work of aid and state terror in Palestine. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the intimacies of US empire and the topological tentacles of counterterrorism law."—Alison Mountz, author of The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago "Washington's military and diplomatic support for Israel has understandably been the main reason for outrage among campus protesters across the US in the context of the ongoing war on Gaza. In the book Elastic Empire, we learn about more subtle forms of violence. It is not only with weapons and vetoes at the UN Security Council, but also through aid, that the US inscribes its imperial influence on Palestine."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment "Elastic Empire reveals critical forces, trends, and movements for thinking about aid and war in the present day. As aid takes the form of war itself, acting as a form of asphyxiatory violence in its own right, Bhungalia emphasizes the way that Palestinians continuously find new modes of relationality that allow them to survive in the face of over a century of settler-colonial dispossession."—Charles Finn, Antipode "In her book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine, Lisa Bhungalia sheds light on how aid provided by the US contributes to sustaining the status quo of Palestinian oppression under Israeli occupation."—Jacqueline Tong, Palestine Book Awards