How Do States Annex Territory? Israel's Politics of Annexation Past and Present

• In Event: Meaning, Identity, and Claim-Making in Palestine and Israel

Abstract

How do states annex territory? What explains temporal and cross-case variation in mechanisms of annexation? How does such variation impact the long-term processes of territorial incorporation? Scholarship on annexation has largely treated annexation as an act of declaring or legislating sovereignty over unincorporated territory. Yet such an understanding is insufficient for analysis or explanation of the sources or consequences of variation in the mechanisms of annexation. This paper treats annexation as a variable process of institutional change, rather than simply an act that changes the legal status of a territory. Instead of taking the perspective of international law or systemic level analysis, which are the levels on which the most prominent research agendas on annexation have been developed, it takes an approach anchored in historical institutionalism, which emphasizes the significance of critical junctures, path dependence, and forms of endogenous change.


The paper uses recent political struggles in Israel over annexation of the West Bank to motivate and frame these questions. It traces a genealogy of the annexationist movement and explains its recent growth. The paper then turns to history to consider the differences between each of Israel's previous annexations. It uses these sub-national cases to develop a typology of forms of annexation and concludes by putting the Israeli cases in global comparative perspective. In sum, the contributions of this paper are twofold: to advance research on Israel’s rule over the West Bank and Gaza and to refine comparative and theoretical scholarship on annexation and territorial expansion.

Author

• Nathaniel Shils, Amherst College