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Paper short abstract

What happens when military occupation attempts to impose its sovereignty over the lives and deaths of the people that it occupies? And what happens if these lives keep escaping in and out of borders, threading a defiance for both death as well as occupation?

Paper long abstract

What happens when military occupation attempts to impose its sovereignty over the lives and deaths of the people that it occupies? What happens when these lives keep escaping in and out of borders, sustained by a defiance for death and dense webs of kinship that stretch across and within the securitised lines of control? For this is what happens in the Golan Heights, where four stateless Syrian villages have resisted the imposition of Israeli occupation and refused the manipulation of their Druze identities. Under Israeli occupation since 1967, continuous human rights violations, settler-colonial land-grabbing, the stateless Syrian Druze communities continue to resist Israeli occupation and remain connected with families and communities across the multiple securitised borders that Israel has set up. And hence, a missing Syrian man is born again in Lebanon, and then his funeral held by his extended family in the Golan. A grandmother lactates again after her dead son returns to her family as her grandson. And a sense of justice served posthumously when the dead returns to confer justice. Thinking with these returns of the dead through multiple borders, I wonder what reincarnation and resistance can tell us about life, death and the threads of kinship that are able to piece together a fragile but also enduring alternative sovereignty.