The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about the gendered dimensions of Israel's convoluted permit system and checkpoint security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork close to one of the largest checkpoint terminals in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the article develops knowledge about checkpoints in three important ways: i) as gendered spaces that regulate women's mobility differently from that of men; ii) as spaces that produce particular embodied experiences for women; and iii) as security mechanisms that disrupt and regulate relations of care. This knowledge builds towards the main argument of the article: Palestinian women's lives are profoundly affected by Israel's imposition of permit systems and checkpoints in terms of highly gendered impositions of (im)mobility, embodied experience and relations of care. The research presented here thus makes two wider contributions to research on security to do with how the checkpoint brings the politics of gender and occupation to the fore, and how security infrastructure connects to the politics of care under military occupation.

How do we identify and understand transformative agency in the quotidian that is not contained in formal, or even informal structures? This article investigates the ordinary agency of Palestinian inhabitants in the violent context of the divided city of Jerusalem. Through a close reading of three ethnographic moments I identify creative micropractices of negotiating the separation barrier that slices through the city. To conduct this analytical work I propose a conceptual grid of place, body and story through which the everyday can be grasped, accessed and understood. 'Place' encompasses the understanding that the everyday is always located and grounded in materiality; 'body' takes into account the embodied experience of subjects moving through this place; and 'story' refers to the narrative work conducted by human beings in order to make sense of our place in the world. I argue that people can engage in actions that function both as coping mechanisms (and may even support the upholding of status quo), and as moments of formulating and enacting agential projects with a more or less intentional transformative purpose. This insight is key to understanding the generative capacity of everyday agency and its importance for the macropolitics of peace and conflict.

The almost 100 Israeli checkpoints that are located inside the West Bank and on its ‘border’ with Israel play a particularly important role in the architecture of occupation. They represent key political technologies that are used to monitor, discipline and/or selectively limit the mobility of Palestinians. In this paper, I analyse the ways in which the design of the newly relaunched Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem represents a certain specific ‘checkpoint future’, materialized in the continued ‘evolution’ of Checkpoint 300, its machines and ‘façade of legitimacy’: a future in which the Israeli military regime controlling the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is kept in place and the checkpoints and their inherent violence are increasingly normalized. Furthermore, I argue that this ‘checkpoint future’ does not lead to a less violent or arbitrary checkpoint regime. This remaining presence of violence should not be framed as a failure, instead, the continued presence of violence, analysed here as experienced and expressed in the arbitrary functioning of the checkpoint machines, as well as the ‘legitimised façade’ of Checkpoint 300 are intrinsically bound and an expression of the same violent future: a future with an enduring Israeli military regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Over the past two decades scholars committed to combating social exploitation and oppression have converged in Canada, South Korea, Hungary, Mexico City, Mumbai and Frankfurt to participate in the International Critical Geography Conferences. This edition is the first gathering in the Middle East, one that opens a new vista for critical geography that is both timely and long overdue. Holding the conference in Palestine offers progressive academics an unprecedented opportunity to observe, engage with, and learn about the complex human, political and economic geographies of this region. Shaped by a long century of European settler colonialism and US imperialism, Palestine is much more than a site of endless political violence and revolutionary struggle. We have conceived this conference as a way to directly engage with a place and a people that are widely discussed yet seldom heard and understood. As such we hope that our discussions and experiences will move beyond commonplace binaries and reductive portrayals of Palestinian life. Further, we hope to do so in ways that allow us to learn together about commonalities and differences with other settings and struggles around the world.

Themes • Connection between displacement and borders/walls • Historical depth to structural means of inclusion/exclusion • Walls include/exclude and define parameters of belonging and rights/privileges • Violence – pervasive -overt and always a potential • Climate change and its impacts are going to trigger massive flows north (We haven’t done much on this topic, but it is certainly on the horizon) • North-South global divide – fortress north; global apartheid continues to take shape and adapt to changing circumstances • Unevenness in mobilities • Booming and lucrative industry around control over mobility from actual building of walls to surveillance technologies (i.e., vested interests are at work) • Documentary regimes – as an accompaniment to borders and walls from identity cards to passports to possible, impending health passports. • Environmental impact is serious • Human Rights violations – mobility as a human right; the right to seek asylum ----- When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were only about 15 border or security walls in place, or under construction, globally. Today, there are more than 70 walls worldwide. Walls on nation-state borders are an increasingly prominent focus of modern life with far-reaching impacts on human culture and well-being, and the environment we live in. Border walls have always been political symbols and today transformations of these walls (such as "virtual walls") remain a hot topic of discussion. Border barriers are ever-present and continue to be implemented throughout the world. Our work touches on many diverse areas of concern: Mobility is a natural human behavior that walls attempt to void. Currently, capital and commodities move more freely than people. Walls create unequal mobility in which privileged and functional workers pass. Those who are not allowed to pass face the payment of large sums and debt to human smugglers, and risk physical injury and death in the dangerous journey around walls. Walls—and, more widely, restrictions, checkpoints, and barriers—have cut off normal social-cultural ties across regional and local border communities that depend on informal mobility. 2 Limiting mobility chips away at human rights. Enclosures set limits on basic and meaningful human goals and needs: to gain a livelihood, seek asylum, or avoid danger. But there is also a “domino effect” when people do not even try to move through walls and other barriers, despite fear of persecution and hope for a better life. They recognize that the path to such hopes is physically dangerous, and often lined with victimizers. The accumulation of waiting people in camps and towns in the midst of danger and extreme exploitation, and even the trips never taken, despite compelling reasons, need much more penetrating attention. 3 Walls politicize space. Symbolic or political drivers, such as nativism, underlie and are the foundation of walls. The discrepancy between offcial formal policy claims for a supposed need of walls and the actual reality and results of walls spotlight the political symbolism embedded in the ideology of walls: An enclosed inside distinguished from an “othered” outside, or a “threatening other” contained from spilling out. Walls are often implemented after periods of “crisis,” mostly national, but also class-based in the case of gated communities. This includes the closure that concentrates refugees and asylum seekers into camps and settlements. 4 Walls are not limited to human-made physical barriers. Obstacles to entry include checkpoints on movement paths or belts of concentrated enforcement near boundaries. New detection technologies, “virtual walls,” identify moving people and conveyances, and aim to inhibit them. Geographic obstacles, such as the Mediterranean Sea or perilous deserts, may be used as barriers by design. Walls are materialized forms of spatialsocial exclusion, deployed unequally against some but not all people. 5 Placing rigid barriers across the landscape obstructs ecology. The result of such physical borders is a disruption to breeding diversity for many moving animals; habitat destruction through wall building itself; and rechanneling or blocking the fow of surface water. These walls also damage cultures tied to the free flow of ecology. 6 Walls have important effects on health. People are harmed by actually trying to cross a border (sometimes falling from the wall, or being shot at by border guards), but walls also bar people from seeking out better healthcare services.

This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women's lives-even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints-are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women's lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men's days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women's everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel's military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border. In this paper we focus on the ways that checkpoints in Palestine affect the lives of women "beyond the checkpoint". Specifically, we refer to the thousands of Pales-tinian women whose husbands travel through checkpoints as labourers with an Israeli Civil Administration-issued permit that depends on the man's status as a married parent. By Israel's logic, these family ties render the men less terroristic-that is, less likely to risk death or detention-as they endure the punitive commute to provide low-wage labour for Israel's growing economy. The commute through checkpoints is characterised by restless crowds, the constant threat of violence and severe delays that mean long absences from the home. As a too often overlooked corollary, the permit requirement of "married parent" status determines that for every man who passes through the overcrowded checkpoints , there is a woman and at least one child "left home" to deal with the domestic labour on which the man's wage labour-and by extension, the Israeli economy-depends. Just as, therefore, men's mobility is restricted and regulated by the checkpoint, so too is women's participation in familial, cultural and economic life. The difference is that the effects of checkpoints on men's lives are more visible and more widely documented, while women's lives are affected in the less visible spaces "beyond the checkpoint". Our objective in this article is thus to bring women to the fore of a discussion of Israeli checkpoints in Palestine to better understand the ways that Palestinian women's lives-even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints-are affected by Israeli security infrastructure.

This article sets the gendered effects of low-wage, cross-border labor in Palestine within a global frame of uneven development. Drawing on fieldwork close to Checkpoint 300, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we first provide an account that centers Palestinian women's social reproduction as coconstitutive of male crossborder employment in the Israeli economy. Discussion then moves to consider gendered work in apartheidera South Africa with the intention not to draw analogies but to explore how labor articulation situated South Africa within the power geometries of globalization. Returning with these analytical tools, we undertake a relational comparison to reconsider the cross-border as a global space. Cutting-edge security technologies and migrants from Thailand are some of the new objects, ideas, and people that coalesce and reshape Palestinian domestic life. The gendered effects of social reproduction are thus connected to both Israel's military occupation and its location within global capitalism. The article makes three key contributions by (1) foregrounding women in discussion of cross-border labor, (2) explicating state-global relations in regimes of segregation, and (3) mobilizing relational comparison as a tool for understanding local exploitation within global structures.