This book takes shape from the four-part video project of the same title, Fragments II - Not a Shared Ground, filmed between 2019 and 2023 in Palestine, Western Sahara, Somaliland, and Taiwan. It carries the films into another form, reworking them through texts, essays, still images, maps, and fragments of conversation, allowing more time for thought to settle. If the videos register encounters through movement, interruption, and limited access, the book stays with what those encounters leave behind. What comes together in these pages is not one shared political condition, but a set of unequal pressures that shape each place differently.

These places are not the same, and the book does not ask them to be the same. It stays with the uneven terms under which each comes into view: what can be reached, what remains distant, what can be shown, what has to stay partial. To approach, to enter, to remain, to record: none of these are neutral acts. By the time an encounter begins, its terms have already been set. The book does not try to resolve those conditions into a single argument. It remains with what is partial, interrupted, and withheld, because that is where their conditions are felt most clearly.