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How does a benign toponym (place name) transform into a threat to a group’s ontological security (OS), and how do diverse actors within the group respond to this perceived threat in an effort to reconstitute their OS?

 

This study extends the “material turn” in OS studies to include the OS politics of toponyms. It does so by tracing the struggle over one toponym, “Gaza Street” in the city of Jerusalem, a relic of historic Israel/Palestine, when Jerusalem was connected by roads to other major cities in the country.

 

Co-authored with Oren Barak and published in Global Studies Quarterly, in this article we integrate walking as method and participatory IR, ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and textual analysis to trace the process whereby “Gaza Street” in Jerusalem, a toponym with a functional and benign meaning, became an abject toponym—an ambiguous object which elicits everyday ontological insecurity since it blurs the boundaries between “self” and “other” and disturbs existing political and social orders.

 

This extensive six-year study, which is based on close engagement with the street's changing physical and symbolic landscape, also involves students of international politics, who played an active part in tracing the various formal and informal OS-seeking strategies—ranging from elimination, distancing, and normalization to humor, repression and integration—adopted to manage and contain the ontological insecurity emanating from this abject toponym. These OS-seeking strategies are utilized by diverse actors on the street: street tenants, business owners, municipal bureaucrats, Palestinian and Israeli academics, passers-by, private entrepreneurs and civic and political activists.

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The study demonstrates how benign and daily objects, including toponyms, may transform into abject objects that threaten a group’s OS, how various actors cope with this threat, and how security-related and political concepts can be studied through novel pedagogic tools by students of International Relations (IR), who actively participate in their unravelling. This creates new bottom-up participatory knowledge and adds a multiplicity of fresh perspectives to the study of everyday international phenomena.