Territorial governance in West Asia and North Africa: grey territorial governance in the West Bank

"Grey Territorial Governance" is proposed as an analytical and descriptive framework for the spatial-legal functions of institutions aiming to realise territorial logic of power, i.e. the collective, substantial, and imagined geopolitical interests. Grey governance, the conjunction of "territorial governance" and "grey speciality", is relevant to diverse configurations of control and power, particularly supportive of settler-colonialism, as well as in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, where past colonial rule has left its footprints in contemporary territorial governance. The colonial logic of spatial control demands flexibility, dynamism, interpretability, and adaptability, thus serving as a "zone of comfort" for practising grey governance - obtained through fuzzy and flexible formal and informal geopolitical practices/technologies that replace legal planning procedures and property rights. The chapter conceptualises grey governance through two cases of informality and displacement in the occupied Palestinian Territories: an informal Jewish settlement, Amona, and the Bedouin-Palestinian community, Khan al-Ahmar.