Note: 2 page 212s, 2 page xxvi (at end).

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In 1995, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established as an interim Palestinian government on shreds of land within the West Bank and Gaza. One of the new authority’s lesser-known administrative mandates is protection of the environment from pollution. Though the PA was to have a semblance of “self-rule,” the Oslo Accords that established the PA also stipulated that the latter seek Israeli approval when building most large-scale infrastructures—including those designed to manage waste. Meanwhile, emergent ideas about the environment defined it as a limitless expanse. The environment projected out from PA enclaves on thirty percent of the land in all directions—including into the air above and into the subterrain below. The Accords projected environmental responsibility into Israel proper as well as into areas it “shares” with Palestinians in the occupied territories. As a consequence, Palestinian waste infrastructures are objects of concern not only to the Palestinian communities they are designed to serve but also to the Israeli state, to Israeli settlements, to regional neighbors and to foreign donors in far-flung offices who are concerned with “environmental security.” This dissertation investigates a series of multimillion dollar PA projects aimed at protecting what came to be called the “shared” environment through management of Palestinian wastes. In doing so it analyzes the tension between the insistence, on the one hand, that the PA govern “its” population within strictly defined borders as part of a hierarchical system of nested sovereignties in which Israel’s is the superior form, and the imperative, on the other hand, that this territorially-defined, officially interim government perform care for the territory’s longterm ecological future. It tends to be taken for granted that Oslo produced a period of separation by enclosing the West Bank and Gaza and cleaving them off from Israel proper. Millions of West Bank Palestinians are no longer permitted to work in, travel through or even visit Jerusalem or Israel. Israel has prohibited Israeli citizens’ entry into PA areas of the West Bank. This allows PA areas to appear relatively autonomous—insofar as they are viewed as separate from Israel. But in a number of significant ways, Israel continues to control and to direct the daily experiences and future possibilities of West Bank Palestinians. Separation and control are thus equally accurate characterizations of Palestinians’ experiences post-Oslo. This dissertation contends that their particular combination in the post-Oslo period has allowed people living in the West Bank to experience PA governance as what, borrowing a term I heard there, I call a phantom state (shibih dowlah). Palestinians see the limits of PA autonomy vis-a-vis Israel and the PA’s many donors. The PA is specter-like: an appearance without stable material follow-through. People nevertheless treat the PA as a matter-of-fact, tangible part of their lives: as an address for appeal, requests and complaints, as a distinct entity upon which responsibility, blame and, very occasionally, even praise is bestowed. Studies of garbage at the turn of the twenty-first century show that modern waste has the capacity to destabilize and to undermine political systems because of the risks it is perceived to pose and because of the difficulty of keeping it stable and contained. Unlike water, oil and electricity, waste is an infrastructural substrate whose flows should move out from inhabited areas rather than into them. As mobile, abject matter that perpetually threatens the environment, it requires constant monitoring. It is managed at regional scales. In the Palestinian context, waste therefore reveals some of the spatial-geographical complexities that render the treatment of separation and control as an either/or dynamic impossible to sustain. It also reveals the ways in which believing both separation and control to be true for the people experiencing them in combination means living, working and planning within a logic of constant contradiction. Waste is not the only infrastructural substrate that reveals the Mobius strip of separation and connectedness of the post-Oslo period. But waste and its infrastructures are uniquely useful for showing the impossibility and the partialness of a politics of separation more broadly in an emergent era of environmental securitization. This dissertation thus analyzes an incommensurable tension in what Achille Mbembe has called a “late-modern colonial occupation” that operates in the style of older forms of indirect colonial rule. That tension renders governance of people and territory both difficult and incoherent. It produces environmental hazards while seeking to eliminate them. And it performs major political displacements among colonized and colonizers alike.

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This study explores the life of the prominent Russian Orientalist and colonial administrator Aleksandr Semenov (1873-1958). In the course of his long and versatile career in Central Asia - where he came to in 1901 as a low-ranking member of Turkestan's colonial administration, and where he died in 1958 as the first director of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of Tajikistan's Academy of Sciences - Semenov participated in the transformation of the region from a Tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an 'Empire of Nations'. His influence on national historiography and notions of national identity was especially marked in the case of the Soviet Union's only Persian-speaking republic, Tajikistan, with which Semenov was connected through his interest and expertise in Persianate Central Asia. This thesis even goes so far as to argue that Semenov's scholarship and his work as an advisor to the Soviet government facilitated the very establishment of Tajikistan, which Paul Bergne has described as a nation initially promoted by Russian Orientalists. Further research in Russian archives is required, however, to better substantiate this claim. Rather than focussing on the (early) Soviet period and on so-called national territorial delimitation of Central Asia, as scholars such as Hirsch and Arne Haugen have done, the present study, in the vein of scholars like Vera Tolz and Vladimir Genis, highlights the ways in which both Bolshevik nationalities policy and Soviet Oriental Studies grew out of the studying and ruling of Central Asia in the late imperial period. It does so through an examination of Semenov's career, scholarship and personal networks, and on the basis of his personal archive in Tajikistan's Academy of Sciences, which has not been researched in any systematic way since the early 1970s, and in which no scholar from outside the former Soviet Union has ever worked.

The Council of Advice first emerged as a constitutional device for colonial rule in colonies captured by Britain during the wars against France between 1793 and 1814. The search for some new form of government for colonies of conquest had been necessitated by the difficulty generally experienced in assimilating formerly foreign colonies into the traditional British pattern of representation. Experience in Quebec between 1764 and 1791 had led to the gradual recognition of conciliar government as a workable substitute to bridge the gap between military rule and the grant of representative institutions. Between 1794 when a Council of Advice was first introduced in the island of San Domingo, and 1825, when the Cape of Good Hope was granted a council of this type, the composition, function and scope of such councils was gradually defined and elaborated. There was a continual interplay of precedent and example from one colony to another, facilitated by the growth of the Colonial Office in London during the early decades of the 19th Century. Councils of Advice were also introduced into some a-typical colonies of settlement, notably New South Wales, where the particular circumstances of the colony gave rise to the further development of the conciliar pattern of government, influenced by the practical experience in Quebec prior to 1791. Thus the Council of Advice at the Cape of Good Hope from 1825-1834 was but one example of an instrument of government which was being widely used in the British empire, and which was still developing in form and function during the period under consideration. The Council of Advice at the Cape reflects this fluidity. The composition of the council was altered on several occasions during the nine years of its existence; the degree of independence allowed to council members was a question which arose on several occasions, especially in relation to discussion of policy decisions taken in London; moreover, the council met at the discretion of the governor and four different men held this office during the period 1825-34, each with his own individual idea of the function and value of a council of advice. Preface, p. 1-2.

Thèse en cotutelle : Université Laval, Québec, Canada et Université de Bordeaux, Talence, France. / À partir d'une collecte d'archives et d'entretiens, cette thèse propose de renouveler l'histoire de l'institution électorale au Sénégal durant la période coloniale. Ce travail affirme la double nécessité d'historiciser les phénomènes de circulation internationale et d'extraversion des normes et des dispositifs de vote, et d'élargir l'horizon géographique de la socio-histoire du vote pour tendre vers une histoire plus polycentrée. Revisiter le cas sénégalais, qui incarne le modèle triomphal de la diffusion des pratiques électorales depuis un centre européen, incite à questionner un récit de l'universalisation du vote individuel-majoritaire et secret qui serait d'office celui d'une victoire progressive. En nous détachant des conceptions les plus évidentes du vote et en analysant les catégories produites dans le contexte colonial, nous mettons au jour des pratiques jusque là négligées ou envisagées de manière cloisonnée : élections menées par les militaires lors de la conquête à partir des formes électives vernaculaires, pratiques locales de dévolution du pouvoir, dispositifs de participation et de délibération nés de la pratique administrative, élections dans les chefferies, élections séditieuses, etc. Seule la prise en compte de cette pluralité de pratiques et de procédures permet de comprendre la forme prise par l'institution électorale dans le pays et sa consolidation. Ceci, sans nous limiter à un inventaire, mais en passant de l'étude de l'acte de vote à celle d'un espace de pratiques. Nous défendons ainsi la nécessité d'une approche relationnelle, capable de montrer que l'institutionnalisation du vote s'est d'abord jouée à ses frontières. En nous situant successivement à l'échelle de la société coloniale et au plus proche de ces activités, nous montrons les influences réciproques qui existent entre les pratiques et les formes de concurrences, de différenciations et de requalifications à l'œuvre. Arpenter l'histoire du vote au Sénégal permet en retour d'interroger plus largement les temporalités et les rythmes de l'histoire de l'institution électorale et partant d'en proposer un récit moins linéaire.

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