In Conversation: Noam Leshem interviewed by GDI Students for Palestine Artwork

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In Conversation: Noam Leshem interviewed by GDI Students for Palestine

June 19, 2025 • Global Development Institute

In this episode, GDI students Max Slater, Rosie Rochester, and Armando Caroca Fernandez interview Dr Noam Leshem (Durham University) about his new book, Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land (The University of Chicago Press). They discuss the notion of no man's land as a site of radical uncaring, exploring the political dynamics of state abandonment in a range of conflict zones such as Palestine, Syria, and Sudan.

Find out more about GDI Students for Palestine here and check out the CfP for their upcoming conference here.

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Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters

Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. Based at the University of Manchester, we're Europe's largest research and teaching institute addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode we'll bring you the latest thinking, insights and debate in development study.

Speaker 2 [00:00:32] Hi everyone, and welcome to this GDI podcast. My name is Max. I'm an MSc student in global development here at the University of Manchester, and I'm joined today by Rosie and Armando.

Speaker 3 [00:00:42] So along with Max and some of our other peers, we're part of the GDI Students for Palestine, focusing on the intersection of social justice issues and academia in Palestine here in Manchester. We're also lucky enough to have some PhD students involved, such as Armando. Do you want to quickly introduce yourself?

Speaker 4 [00:00:56] Yeah. Hi everyone. My name is Armando Caroca. I'm from Chile. I am a PhD researcher at the Global Development Institute, part of this group. And I'm currently researching sacrifice zones or social environmental impacted territories due to mining in Chile. Thank you, Noam, for being here and Roske and Max for inviting me.

Speaker 2 [00:01:22] And last but not least, the topic of the podcast, Dr. Noam Lesham, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, who students of Palestine were lucky enough to host earlier this year in collaboration with the GDI Lecture Series. Noams most recent book, Edges of Care, Living and Dying in No Man's Land was published this year. And in today's conversation, we'll be discussing the central themes of edges of care and what drew known to these marginal geographies. And we'll also explore the book's relevance to contemporary debates in global development, increasing violence of sovereign care, and the possibilities of resurgence, particularly around the unfolding situation in Gaza and wider Palestine.

Speaker 5 [00:02:00] Thank you very much. Thank you all for having me on the podcast. It's great to be in conversation again.

Speaker 3 [00:02:08] Great. So for those of us that were at the talk you did with the GDI a couple of weeks ago, you gave a really insightful discussion about the book. But for any listeners who weren't able to be there, could you sort of give us a big summary? I know that's quite a broad question to start us off with.

Speaker 5 [00:02:25] No, absolutely. The book started from a seemingly simple question. Back in 2013, I was driving with a friend who later became a very close colleague and collaborator on this research, Dr. Alastair Pinkerton. And In our conversation, which was rambling as our conversations often are, we started talking about No Man's Land. And initially, we both assumed that we both knew what we were talking about when we were talking about no man's land. But gradually we realized that actually no man's land is an extremely murky concept. It's not one that is well established in political theory. It has actually no status in international law or international relations, which left us therefore with the core question, What is no man's land? And I guess the word two directions we could follow in trying to figure out answers to that question. The first was to kind of ensconce ourselves in libraries and go to archives and try and figure out the history and genealogy of this concept. We did some of that, but both of us are scholars who are deeply committed to what is often referred to as grounded theory and to participatory research. So research that really tries to answer big questions and to figure out answers to those questions by actually engaging with communities. Individuals, groups, whose lives are really engaged with these questions, for whom these questions are not just intellectual curiosities, but rather have much greater stakes. And that's really what we did. We started traveling and doing field research in places like Cyprus, Palestine, Sudan, France. Later on in Colombia, and really engaging with communities who have found themselves at one point or another, in one political constellation or another relegated to what they themselves experienced as no man's land. And through engagement with these communities A common thread that emerged was a core and deep sense that they, these communities, have been abandoned by the state. And therefore the book is really a story of these communities. A story of these individuals who have found themselves in places that the state basically turns its back on. And we see that this kind of dynamic taking place in different historical contexts and in radically different political circumstances. But what the book is trying to do is really document what I would consider to be... A radical form of political and sovereign abandonment, abandonment that is carried out by the state, and abandonment that very much loses all aspects of state care that we associate with sovereignty today.

Speaker 3 [00:06:59] Great, thank you so much. I mean, there's loads to go into there. So, I guess my first question would be, I was reading some of your book, and in the introduction, you talk about, I think, a phrase that Israeli officials said to you of I don't care, and this sense of uncaring that is kind of like inherent across the kind of state abandonment kind of idea. And could you kind of explain, was this like at the start of the process? Was this. Something that kind of led to this exploration of no man's land or how does it link into this wider?

Speaker 5 [00:07:37] So the scene that opens the book is a moment that takes place in East Jerusalem in a peripheral neighborhood called Sheik Sa'id. Many people who actually study Palestine, many people who live in Palestine, most of don't know about Cheikh Sa'id because it's small. And it's on the far southeastern outskirts of the city. I first went to Sheik Sa'id because I was living and working in different kind of activist contexts in the city, and Sheik Sa'd was a neighborhood that was about to be cut off. From the rest of the city by the apartheid wall, by this big mammoth barrier that Israel built in the early 2000s. And this wall basically snakes through Palestinian neighborhoods and cuts off some of them, leaving them on basically the eastern part of the wall unable to access their center of life in the city. Sheik Sa'id was one of those neighborhoods and I was visiting the neighborhood quite often. When the wall was completed, I came back to Sheik Sa'd and tried to visit the neighborhood again. Now, what is unique about Sheik Said is that it only has one entrance. There is only one road that leads into the neighborhood from the city. And on the other three sides, the neighborhood is basically isolated because it sits on the top of this very steep mountain, and there are very kind of sharp slopes on all other directions. And what happened was that when Israel built the wall and cut off this single artery leading into the neighborhood, the neighborhood found itself. Basically isolated on this mountaintop. There was a very rugged path that led from the other side of the neighborhood. But I approached the checkpoint. This was back in 2010. And there was a single Israeli soldier standing there looking quite bored and very quickly he figured out I wasn't local. And he says to me, you can't come in. Kind of said, well, is Sheik Sa'ed now like a closed military zone? Is there a reason why I can't come in? And he said, no, no no, it's not. I mean, you can come in from the other side. Now i try to explain that there is no other side to go into shikha side that all other ways of entering the neighborhoods are nearly impossible and that the single path that leads up to the neighborhood would be completely inaccessible to the car i was driving at the time. He just looked at me and then he said those words i don't care. Now, it's easy to dismiss this as simply the callousness of a single soldier, the kind of callous that basically all of us encounter in different ways at different moments when we come into contact with state bureaucracies of different kinds. But I want to take this phrase, the seemingly banal kind of offhand statement, I don't care very, very seriously. Because I think that for the most part, the way that we as political thinkers and political activists often think about the state is through what we might consider as a spectrum of care. The state fundamentally cares. It cares sometimes in kind of very positive and benevolent ways. You know, it provides for us. It supplies us with protections and various kinds of safety networks. But also the care that the state provides can also take quite dark forms, various kinds surveillance and even violence. In its extreme form, state care, as we have seen from the history of totalitarianism, state care takes the form of murder and even mass killing. But what happens in those situations where the state articulates not only a sentiment but a form of a policy where it simply doesn't care, where it really deeply severs that fundamental sovereign relation of care to entire populations in a given territory? That is really what that seemingly banal encounter with that military guy exposed to me and what really started this research in earnest.

Speaker 4 [00:13:14] Thank you, Noam, for your answer. I have several questions, but I think the most pertinent, based on what you just said, it's about this idea of zones of abandonment and care. I wonder, because you have a background also in geography, and I wanted to ask about the spatial features of these territories, because I wonder if these kind of territories are... Emerge as a result of some special features that have been physically isolated or next to borders or lack or actually abundance of natural riches richness etc or it's just it could also happen in the midst of the most populated area maybe like in Jerusalem and based on that I wanted to ask if you see some correlation in your cases about... These kind of territories kind of abandoned by the state, do they emerge historically maybe as a result of kind of imposed national borders or imposed governments on people that maybe had already historically some level of independence or maybe some kind of misalignment between an existing state? Their territories and borders and the people that are considered their population. You see this kind of like misalignment between these things that might explain these territories.

Speaker 5 [00:14:53] Why insist, as you rightly point out on the spatial features of this dynamic, there's been some really historical, important historical and political work across the social sciences around the question of abandonment. You know, abandonment is a very important feature in political theory, in the way that late modern political theorists from Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe have all tried to make sense of abandonment as a political instrument, as a political tool. And one of the things that we see in this research, in the existing corpus of Which is that- For all of them, abandonment is part and parcel of the arsenal of the state. It's part of this quite violent toolkit that the state can mobilize and wield. Likewise, scholars of economic... In social relations i'm thinking for example the work of elizabeth pavinelli have really documented the extent to which various forms of neoliberalization have led to the systemic abandonment. And the withdrawal of the state primarily is part of various acts of privatization and the basically subcontracting of care to to private contractors. What we see in the book is spaces and situations where the dynamic of abandonment does not really fit with either of these. On the one hand, this kind of abandonment does not really emulate the kind of geographies that are most often associated with biopolitical abandonment, primarily the camp or the colony or the plantation. All of these are kind of recurring geographies in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, and many others. Because in the camp and in the colony and in the plantation, what we see is that every aspect of life is measured, calculated, monitored, almost to the point where life itself is reduced to this kind of intensive and intrusive care, right? It takes the most abrasive and even murderous form. In the spaces I write about, the state really doesn't care. It has severed even those modalities of violence, intrusion, and surveillance that we see in many other geographies of the present violence. And likewise, the spaces that I write about don't really feature that kind of neoliberal abandonment in the form where The state basically says, I'm going to basically roll back, knowing that I can subcontract services or goods to others, to a company or a contractor who will pick up the pieces. Instead, the state abandons without any kind of the strings attached that we see in other constellations. Now... To go back to your question, Armando, why then insist on the spatiality? First, because abandonment happens somewhere. It leaves a real footprint on particular spaces. And it appears with much greater intensity in those spaces I write about. Many of these spaces, as you rightly point out, are liminal in nature. So they already exist on the margins of the sovereign territory along borders, or as we saw in the case of Sheik Sa'ed in Jerusalem, that neighborhood I talked about a few minutes ago, there is a particular kind of topography that results in their isolation. But in other cases, what we see is the emergence of these spaces of uncaring at the heart of the national territory rather than at its margins. We mentioned Jerusalem, but even there one could argue maybe this was already kind of a peripheral neighborhood within the urban perimeter. Okay, but what about the case study I write about in Colombia? In 1998, the Colombian government of Andres Pastrana decided that as an effort to facilitate a peace process with FARC, with the guerrilla forces, that he was going to withdraw all military, police and judicial forces from an area in the heart of the country, an area the size of Switzerland, that will be turned into a FARC safe zone. Um, this area that was abandoned by the Colombian state for about three years was known as the clearance zone or the zone of the display. And what we see in the clearance is own in Columbia is a space that sits very much at the heart of the country. Um, a space, that very much has histories of kind of frontier colonization, like many areas. South and in Central America, and I document in the book the particular histories of colonization, extraction, indigenous ethnic cleansing that have kind of intersected in this region. But one of the things that makes it so unique is indeed, as you point out Armando, the fact that it already sits with in the heart of the national territory in a way that kind of really scrambles our traditional association, which I think is quite a cliché of No Man's Land, which kind of associates it with these faraway places on the kind of territorial periphery. The other part of your question is also important. Is there kind of a social, political, or even ethnic dimension that already kind of makes certain populations more prone to becoming abandoned in this way, to being relegated into these spaces of uncaring? In some places, yes. Absolutely. We mentioned the fate of Palestinians who are already living under an ethno-national regime that sees them as a fifth column in the best of circumstances and an enemy force within, in more kind of. ...Darker interpretations... In other cases, like the case of Rukban, a camp on the border between Syria and Jordan that basically existed from the early aughts from... About 2013, all the way until last week when it was formally closed. That camp housed numerous Syrians who were escaping the violence of the Syrian civil war. And there was no kind of specific characteristic that we can isolate and say, aha, this is a marginalized, already marginalized group that kind of makes it more obviously vulnerable to this kind of precarity. So I think, again, these spaces open up kind of real challenges for us as social and political scientists to really dive into kind of what is the political logic at play? And I think that's really what the book is trying to generate, this kind of renewed conversation that grapples with kind of a political logic of state abandonment.

Speaker 2 [00:24:33] I think my further question is around writing about these edges of care and also to write about it is to kind of confront the ethical dilemmas of representing life and spaces of abandonment. I know you mentioned in the book how not to aestheticise suffering or ruin and how not render people passive or mute in the face of kind of structural neglect. You reflect on these ethical difficulties a bit of researching and writing about spaces marked by destruction and abandonment, while acknowledging how writing in turn these spaces itself is an act of framing that cannot escape power relations. I was wondering, how do you negotiate this inevitable entanglement between kind of academic coloniality representation and storytelling when writing about no man's land and the communities that live there.

Speaker 5 [00:25:25] Such a wonderful question. Thanks for that, Max. I think first. I try and really dwell in that process that you described so well of negotiation. It's a constant tension that rather than kind of give into the fantasy that I might somehow resolve it, I constantly try and keep alive. And I do that. Through different means. First of all, by never forgetting and constantly foregrounding who this book is accountable to. I remember early on when I had a very early draft of the book, I convened a workshop with colleagues whose opinion I deeply appreciate, and they read that initial draft, and one of them asked me, who is the audience for this book? And I found myself a little bit kind of taken by surprise by that question, perhaps less prepared to answer it. And it really stuck with me just how ill-prepared my answer was. Like, who is the audience for this? I have an answer, but maybe we can return to that later. But I came home from that workshop I shared this with my partner and she said to me, maybe that question is the wrong question. Maybe the question is not who your audience is, but who are you accountable to? And I think that was a really pivotal moment that helped me crystallize the kind of commitments that this book is trying to live up to. And the ethical and political consequences that those commitments have for me as a scholar, as an interlocutor to many of the people I've worked with over the years. And the kind of process I hoped to and I continue to remain committed to sustaining in this research. Which is a dialogical one, one that never sees any piece that comes out of this research as the final say, as it were, but instead just yet another step in an ongoing conversation that within that conversation I have to stay honest, I have to stay open and I have to also remember. I am accountable to. So, for example, a few years ago, kind of an early output of this research was a collaboration that we did with Google Arts and Culture, which is this platform that Google has to host various kinds of visual storytelling. And as part of that, we produced virtual reality documentaries that I was really pleased to bring to Manchester, one of them. When we launched that in 2019. It was never a question for me that what had to happen was then that we take these documentaries and go back to Colombia. And we travel through the villages and towns that we worked with, with the communities that we engaged with in telling their story. And we give the story back because it's never ours to begin with. And One of the things that I hope to do with the book is to ensure that likewise, it travels back to those that it belongs to. So the book has now being translated into Arabic. It's later this year going to start being translated in Spanish. And really, it's part of the commitment of the book of ensuring that I stay honest and I stay in that process of negotiation, those ethical and political commitments.

Speaker 3 [00:29:54] That's really interesting. So, I mean, you talk about like telling these stories, and I think something that I was thinking about is how telling these stories. And as part of GDI Students for Palestine, we hosted a screening of the documentary No Other Land, which I think tells a really important story of the experience of Palestinians who've been occupied in the West Bank. But I guess my question is Basil Adra, one of the directors, emulates a feeling of being continually ground down by the sense of nothing happening in the West Bank, particularly. And I think it really relates to the idea of kind of exposure that you talk about in your book. And I've got a quote that says, instead of bullets, ice and snow appear as lethal forces. And I it's kind of a really interesting comparison point of how does this experience relate to landscapes of uncaring in Palestine, particularly?

Speaker 5 [00:30:52] Yeah, this quote is from one of the stories I write about in the book, which is the story of 415 Palestinians who were basically pushed across the border by Israel in 1992 into Lebanon. And they were stuck on a mountaintop in Lebanon for a year. And I really draw inspiration from much of the poetry, literature, photography that emerges from that year of exile that these hundreds of Palestinians have experienced on that mountaintop in a place called Marja Zuhur. And I say I draw inspiration because I think it really crystallizes what I mean by by exposure. You know, life that is left stripped of the defenses and protections that we assume we have in normative political circumstances. And life that is stripped away is life exposed, to quote a very often used phrase from kind of biopolitical theory. When we say life exposed, we often mean that kind of, as you quoted from Basel, this kind of experience of being ground down, being kind of constantly open to the trials and tribulations of the world around us, its violence and its harms. But exposure is also to see further. And one of the incredible things that took place on that mountaintop in 1992 was that 415 Palestinians did not just sit there passive, waiting for their fate, but instead organized themselves, created a university, systems of education, activism, advocacy. Um, some of the most of prominent political leaders of the following decades of Palestinian resistance emerged from that mountaintop. So how do we then think about exposure as more than just vulnerability and precarity? How do we also think about it as the potential to build new communities, to expose ourselves to others, to be vulnerable, but to be vulnerable together and to create new forces out of that. And actually one of the things I really draw inspiration from No Other Land is just the fact that there is a commitment by so many in that film not to see their to Israeli violence as the end, but instead to expose that violence, to expose that exposure, to be with others, to be with other Palestinians, but also to find allies, Israelis, internationals in that struggle. And I think that no other land kind of really captures in a really heartbreaking way that kind of duality of exposure, deep vulnerability, but at the same time the immense power that we can draw from these acts that emerge from places that are subjected to these extremely violent forms of sovereign state uncaring.

Speaker 4 [00:34:50] We just wanted maybe to wrap up asking you about your new project that is called occupation debris that's please let me know if i'm being mistaken uh it's about cultural heritage um so you're talking about how cultural sovereignty and self-determination against this violence of displacement and exclusion could be super relevant to these communities similar to what you just commented on that case. Could you explain a little bit more about what you're doing now about this research and also what's the relevance you see in preserving culture when it seems like nothing else has been preserved like any other material conditions or etc when you have to leave your house or see your house demolished, etc. What's the relevance of culture, and to take that with you elsewhere.

Speaker 5 [00:35:56] It's a question that's constantly on my mind. And I would lie if I'd say that I have a strong or even partial answer to it. But I'll share with you some of the work that we've been doing, what's been motivating in it, and where we are with that work. So Occupation Debris is a research project that I currently lead. Um, and it starts from. The starting point of this project is really the abandonment that I spoke about throughout our conversation. Spaces that have been abandoned, either as the result of war or various forms of neglect that follow it in Palestine. And primarily the very large collections of material cultural heritage that still exist. In the hands of various Israeli institutions, but that Palestinians have no access to. These include museums, these include archives, but they also include universities. And I think it's really important to talk about the complicity of universities in the disenfranchisement and in becoming agents of the abandonment that I spoke about earlier. And our starting point was one such collection, a collection of archeological material that was dug up in the depopulated village of Qadas in the north of Mandatory Palestine, what now is Israel near the border with Lebanon, and we were able to get hold of that collection. It's a very humble collection of material culture from that small village. And what we did was in collaboration with the Palestinian Heritage Museum in occupied East Jerusalem, we're able to facilitate the release of this collection from the shackles of these Israeli institutions. We were able to ship it to Durham, to the university I work in. And to facilitate a participatory process with a group of Palestinians who live in the UK to, for the first time, really determine what they would like to see happen with a collection, an archive of this sort. And our role was really to resource their decisions and to really ensure that their agency is the rightful owners, even though they're not direct descendants of that village, but they as Palestinians have the agency and the resources to do whatever they want with this. And just a couple of weeks ago, we launched an exhibition. Kuntzlaum, which is a cultural space in London that was curated by the group where they mobilized this collection as a way of shedding light exactly on the destruction and kind of repeated annihilation of Palestinian material life by Israeli settler colonialism. And it has been a very moving process and a process that really sheds light on what I think our role, partly as academics, as scholars and as activists is, is to ensure that we remain accountable. As a settler scholar, and I often talk about my own positionality as a settlor scholar who grew up on stolen Palestinian land. That question is constantly haunting me, is how do I ensure that I put my resources, my privileges in the service of ensuring that tomorrow is slightly less dominated by the abandonment that we're living through today?

Speaker 2 [00:40:23] I think on that note of accountability, justice and resistance is the perfect place to end this podcast. Thank you for joining us. And we hope this discussion has offered new ways to think about abandonment, complicity, and alternative resistances to those things. Concepts that as we've explored today, deeply resonate with the unfolding situation Palestine, Gaza and the aid camps. Before we go, we'd like to invite listeners, whether students, researchers, or activists, maybe even know themselves, to contribute to an important upcoming event, the GDI Conference on Palestine, Social Justice, Dequalization, and Development Studies, here at the University of Manchester on the 17th of October. We are currently welcoming submissions from anyone engaging with these urgent themes, whether through research, creative practice, lived experience, or critical reflection. This conference is designed as a space to reimagine development beyond colonial frameworks and to foster solidarity centered conversations around Palestine. The deadline for submissions is June 30th. Please visit the GDI blog for full details on how to submit your proposal, or you'll find our call for submissions on our LinkedIn as well. We hope to see many of you there. And again, thank you to Rosie and Amanda for joining me, and particularly Noam for this really interesting talk. Thank you for listening as well. Thank you so much, Noam.

Speaker 5 [00:41:43] Thank you for having me. I really appreciate your interest and your questions.