The wandering frontier: Geographies of colonial herding in Palestine

This article examines the emergent phenomenon of Israeli colonial herding outposts in the occupied West Bank, where animals—sheep, goats, cows, and camels—are deployed as instruments of frontier expansion. Specifically, it investigates how colonial herding appropriates, instrumentalizes, and weaponizes Indigenous Palestinian pastoral practices and animal bodies to erase and replace Palestinian life and life-worlds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Palestinian shepherding communities at the forefront of frontier violence, and engaging scholarship across Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and political geography, the article unravels three spatialized currents regarding the political logics and modes of violence that guide colonial herding and unfold through it. First, by juxtaposing Palestinian Indigenous shepherding praxis with colonial herding, we conceptualize the latter as form of cultural-material mimicry and mode of appropriation, we term Playing Bedouin , which taps into the former's environment simultaneously seeking to eliminate Palestinian presence and to forge a self-indigenized settler identity. Second, the article traces how animals and herding practices become mobile infrastructures for colonial policing, vigilantism and ecological destruction— a mode of eliminatory violence that mobilizes and weaponizes the Palestinian ecological milieu and operates through it, which we term elimination through the milieu . Third, the article shows how colonial herding conjures an efficient technology of territorial expansion that transforms animals into ‘colonial subjects’ performing an extension of the settler body— a wandering frontier . The wandering frontier, we argue, offers a milieu concept for comprehending the constitutive role space, ecology and more-than-human bodies have in the making of the settler colonial frontier.