Runa Johannessen’s thesis, Probing the Terrain: Cunning Spatial Agency in the West Bank, is an investigation into a complex spatial reality of building that is intrinsically linked to the nexus of the Israel-Palestine conflict. To understand how the Palestinian areas of the West Bank are shaped and inhabited – how people build and in what way space is being dealt with – one has to understand the modes of power that affects and transforms Palestinian space, and how spatial practices are developed in a close relation to the occupation. Through observations of particular cases, crossing different scales, shapes, typologies and specific problematics, her aim is to unfold materialization of politics in built structures, to address the concerted actions of regulating powers and tactical movements of building, and to ask how Palestinian agency of building can be perceived.