My dissertation is a comparative analysis of the relationship between globalization, political transition, and spatial restructuring in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last 20 years. I begin by arguing that neither the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa nor the Oslo "peace process" in Palestine/Israel can be understood apart from the neo-liberal restructuring of the South African and Israeli economies.

With this as my starting point, I then examine the relationship between these large-scale processes and local struggles over spatial restructuring in Johannesburg and Jerusalem. Based on 27 months of ethnographic and archival field research in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, I analyze the interplay between state-formation, capital accumulation, social movements, and everyday life practices in the production of space. The reclamation of urban space by Black South Africans has been accompanied by market-based reforms that are contributing to permanent unemployment, an intense housing crisis, and the proliferation of informal settlements. While capital and the state attempt to gentrify Johannesburg by removing poor residents to townships on the urban periphery, the South African elite withdraws to a world of privately secured walled enclosures in the northern suburbs. In Palestine/Israel, the Israeli state has been building walled enclosures around the Gaza Strip and the cities of the West Bank while economic restructuring facilitates separation by eliminating the demand for Palestinian workers. Together, these processes are severing East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and generating intense pressure on Palestinians to relocate from Jerusalem to one of the cities behind the wall.

Despite vigorous debates about the similarities between contemporary Israel and apartheid-era South Africa, this is the first comparative study of the simultaneous transitions that reshaped social relations in both of these countries during the 1990s. In addition, this study is located at the intersection of three growing sociological literatures: neo-liberalism and Empire; sovereignty and the state; and the 'spatial turn' in the social sciences.