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Signalling pathways control the cell-cycle engine by regulating transitions between phases in the cell cycle. These are transitions where putative decisions are made such as initiating DNA replication (entry into S phase) or segregating duplicated chromosomes (entry into M phase). The mechanisms for regulating these transitions involve the so-called cell-cycle checkpoints. This chapter discusses the modelling of a G1 checkpoint called the restriction point in mammalian cells — a checkpoint where a cell's commitment to DNA replication is made. A G2 checkpoint that prevents cell-cycle progression into mitosis when, for example, DNA damage is not repaired is also discussed. There are various exercises at the end of the chapter.

This chapter focuses on the Five Walls of Pharaoh in Deir al-Medina. It first considers the possibility that movement in the necropolis area was at least partially restricted and that the workmen usually had free access to the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. It then discusses the presence of checkpoints in the necropolis area to monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic, probably also in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. These checkpoints in the necropolis area have always been associated with the Five Walls of Pharaoh. In year 29 of Ramesses III, the workmen passed these checkpoints more than once in search of their rations. The chapter also examines a number of theories regarding the location of the Five Walls, including those suggested by Egyptologists Raphael Ventura, Paul John Frandsen, Andreas Dorn, and Günter Burkard.

This chapter explores the mechanisms and strategies through which the groups of study challenge, maintain, or transcend geopolitical and identity boundaries in the course of their peace and justice activities. The chapter discusses in particular how three binational groups: the AIC, Panorama, and Ta'ayush constantly negotiate internal identity boundaries even as they negotiate external boundaries through their interaction with other groups and their broader socio-political contexts, as well as how Machsom Watch's role of monitoring checkpoints places the group in a unique position for observing social, political, and geographic boundaries. Drawing on primary interviews and observation of group activities in 2004–2005, it uses geopolitical theories, including Sack's theory of territoriality, to analyze the mechanisms used by each group independently before offering observations on territorial tendencies used across groups.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2008, this chapter discusses events occurring between 2005 and 2008 that altered the socio-political, economic, and geographical context for Israeli and Palestinian peace activism. The election and boycott of Hamas in the 2006 elections, the completion of new checkpoint “terminals” and large segments of the separation barrier, as well as the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip affected how and where peace and justice groups could hold activities. Faced with trends of militarism, unilateralism, and fragmentation at the official level, combined with the absence of a sustained or legitimate political process, existing forms of nonviolent struggle had little resonance. The chapter discusses continued activities of awareness raising, institution building and constructive confrontation and outlines the obstacles facing activists in 2008, including a further distancing from the term “peace.”

This chapter assesses the second mechanism that triggers the formation of amoral communities: the production of borders. When moderates are excluded through social ostracism, threats, violence, or in-group policing, it becomes easier for political leaders to divide people who previously lived peacefully in their communities. When the exclusion of moderates is accompanied by the production of physical borders, or the setting up of barricades, checkpoints, and, eventually, wartime dividing lines, then the conditions for the formation of amoral communities are created. In those communities, physical borders force individuals to choose one of the sides, and the population is both divided and policed accordingly. In the communities in which these processes of creating new political identities—which are ethnically or culturally defined—are set in motion, the military and political leaders gain greater control of the civilian population by limiting their political options, artificially reducing ambiguity in the identification of potential members of the out-group, and preventing in-group defection. Given that in amoral communities individuals' freedom to express or act on the basis of their personal views becomes extremely limited, especially if those views do not fit into the new social ordering, favorable conditions for targeted violence against civilians are created.

This chapter discusses key material and discursive contestations over Ruhuna National Park's meaning during Sri Lanka's recent civil war. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Ruhuna was subject to sporadic closure because of infiltration by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatists (LTTE, or ‘Tamil Tigers’). The chapters shows how the park was therefore a key material and imaginative geography through which Sri Lankan nationhood was contested, from its militarization involving checkpoint and surveillance culture through the 1990s, through to the semiotic rejections and reclamations of words like ‘tiger’ and ‘jungle’ played out in the national press through the 1990s. This chapter also concludes on Ruhuna National Park by emphasizing its implication as a site of nature irreducibly connected with the political geography of Sri Lanka's ethnicized politics of nationhood.

A newlywed confronted the horror of occupation while caring for his aging parents and pregnant wife. Framing his narrative carefully as one of avoiding the possibility of collaboration, the young man emphasizes instead the violent confrontations he often had with occupying rebels as he sought food for his family. He gained a reputation as a “gentleman,” an honest man laboring only to sustain his loved ones, and one who did not challenge rebel authority.

The author spends a day at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas. Located 90 miles north of the border, it is one of the busiest checkpoints in the U.S., with about 275,000 pounds of narcotics seized annually. She interviews several border patrol agents about their work as she observes the lines of traffic swerving through surveillance cameras, K-9 patrol, and roadside interrogations. Next, the author travels to the home of visual artist Celeste De Luna. Though her work seems to epitomize dissent, De Luna complicates her images by revealing that her husband is himself an immigrant (from El Salvador) yet works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The young adults in Chapter Four experienced blocked upward mobility, but not because of lack of English literacy, as is usually thought. Instead, their problem was papers. This chapter describes how concerns with papers infused young people’s everyday literacy experiences, as they wrote to pass both their classes and the border checkpoints that pervaded school and state.

The introduction provides historical, theoretical, and cultural context for analysing the relationship between border spaces and literature and film. Beginning with a historical overview of borders in Israel and Palestine, with an emphasis on the recent proliferation of checkpoints and walls, it links spatial transformations to cultural shifts. Specifically, while borders have always featured in Palestinian and Israeli cultural production, their expansion in the 21^st century has increased their prominence as crucial literary and filmic spaces. This chapter draws on contributions from the “spatial turn” in critical theory, in order to situate this study within larger transnational trends and phenomena. It argues that in the contemporary era, borders in Israel/Palestine are ubiquitous, excessive, and deceptive, leading to the question that guides much this book: How do these borders shape literature and film, and how do authors and filmmakers respond to, critique, and, in some cases, contest their presence?

Moving from documentary to fiction film, this chapter centres on Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002), which juxtaposes silent, repetitive scenes of mundane daily life with moments of absurd fantasy, in a disorienting fashion. Suleiman’s film, which features little dialogue or plot, repeatedly stages scenes at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. I conceptualize the checkpoint’s power as emerging from its establishment of control over vision and sight, drawing on studies by Weizman and David Fieni, among others, and I argue that Suleiman uses the cinematic camera to look back and to contest the contingent power of the checkpoint. Moreover, by calling attention to its own status as film through techniques of framing and staging, Divine Intervention reveals the fragile, performative, even theatrical nature of the checkpoint’s projection of power, and it stages fantasies of its destruction. Modes of contesting and circumventing the border emerge from an intensive and persistent focus on the border itself, and fantasy becomes a means of articulating new paradigms of political resistance.

Chapter 6 investigates the performative force of speaking Tamil in public spaces in Kandy and Colombo. It shows how Tamils used Sinhala and avoided Tamil to conceal or mitigate their ethnic identity. This chapter further analyzes the ideological weight of Tamil by looking at Sinhalas’ Tamil-as-a-second-language (TSL) practices at training programs administrators and police officers, as well as at a peacebuilding NGO that promotes trilingual communication. TSL classes provide a sphere of practice in which Sinhalas could comfortably speak Tamil, but on the street their use of Tamil was fraught because of its ideological association with Tamil ethnic identity and because it was perceived as a threat to the dominance of Sinhala. When Sinhala members of the NGO spoke Tamil, they used a mocking variety that reinforced negative stereotypes about Tamil people. This chapter demonstrates how ideologies and practices around speaking Tamil reflect and produce ethnic divisions.

This chapter focuses on Israel's occupation of the West Bank since 2003, along with its counterterrorism operations against Palestinians in the area. It begins with a discussion of Israel's decision to discard the idea of relying on a Palestinian partner to ensure security, with particular reference to Mahmud Abbas, who was appointed by Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasir Arafat as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in March 2003. It then considers Israel's apparatus of control in the West Bank including checkpoints, along with detentions, arrests, and interrogations. It also examines factors that complicate the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, along with house demolitions, permits, and deportation carried out by Israel to pacify Palestinian areas and to suppress terrorism.

This chapter describes the checkpoint border regime at the US-Mexico border. The function of the checkpoint is not to juridically enclose and link increasingly large and unpredictable oscillatory flows, but rather to establish a kind of functional economic equilibrium between rapidly expanding and contracting flows of migration. The checkpoint balances the desire for precarious labor with the reproduction of an atmosphere of perceived insecurity and danger. The historically privileged sites of immigration enforcement—fences, walls, ports of entry, detention cells, and so on—are no longer sufficient to ensure the continuous control and rapid redirection of migrant flows required under contemporary circumstances. The US-Mexico border must now be deployable at any point whatever throughout society.

The fourth and final border regime analyzed in this book is the checkpoint. The checkpoint adds a further form of kinetic social division to the previous regimes, and in particular responds to the cellular regime of the Middle Ages. While the cellular borders of the Middle Ages were primarily directed at dividing human beings into enclosed individuals, checkpoints further divided these individuals into collections of “data.” Data becomes the discreet and quantifiable substratum that composes individuals: age, height, weight, location, status, and so on. Accordingly, the border technologies that emerge under this regime are by far the most polymorphic of all historical borders up to this time. Any space-time point can become a border.

This chapter describes the other two major kinds of checkpoints: the security checkpoint and the information checkpoint. The security checkpoint is the defensive limit border that emerged in the modern period. While the police checkpoint offensively marches out into the streets to mark a division in the population between citizens and criminals, the security checkpoint protects, defends, and enforces the institutions that are defined and ordered by this border march. The third major type of modern border is the information checkpoint. In contrast to offensive police borders and defensive security borders, information borders have a unique boundary or binding function: they compel or bind social flows together as assemblages of data points. A data point is an isolated bit of social flow—a location, a name, a color, a date—that is used to divide and arrange the passage of social flows.