This chapter captures the current state-of-play of the West Line hub in a continually turbulent region, speculating on how things might and should go in the future – both in the West Line and in other e-waste hubs that share many dynamics and predicaments. The future of the West Line and its long-standing e-waste industry teeter in the balance, buffeted by geopolitical currents. The West Line waste flows and burning emerged from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have embodied it for decades, in a way that is increasingly salient in the recent years of a right-wing coalition government, and intensified conflict after October 7, 2023. The politics of waste is now explicit, with Palestinian municipal rubbish collection trucks blocked by military checkpoints, and Israelis calling for a creeping “green” annexation of Area C and whittling away of Palestinian authority in Areas A and B as the only way to prevent the “chemical terrorism” of waste burning. While these regional politics, which have so frustratingly frozen our promising hub-driven efforts, are surely sui generis, the underlying challenges are instructive globally for the interfaces between the e-waste hubs, environmental NGOs, and national e-waste policies, and this chapter closes in teasing out these broader lessons.

Chapter 8, Mapping Political Art-Scapes, examines the geo-politics of the International Art Biennale in Venice.It begins by mapping how the Biennale transforms the local city space of Venice into a global art-scape.The Giardini and the Arsenale house the majority of the 85 national pavilions – established member states own art embassies in the Giardini while probationary member states rent exhibition spaces in the Arsenale. Pavilions become proxies through which states present an image of themselves to the international community. I contrast South Africa’s 2013 national pavilion with that of the United Arab Emirates (the two states shared an exhibition space in the Arsenale) in order to show how comparisons between states are forced upon them by virtue of exhibiting in the Biennale. I argue that these art-scapes provide fertile ground for states to offer an image of themselves – images which are not necessarily perceived how states intend.