CRASSH | Genocide and organised abandonment

19 June 2024
www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/4...
Convenor:
Danai Avgeri (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography)
Speaker:
Mohammed Elnaiem (Director of the Decolonial Centre)
Summary:
Organised abandonment is a phrase which Ruth Wilson Gillmore uses to describe the predominant technology of structural violence in an era where millions, if not billions have been made redundant and surplus to the requirements of capital. Organised abandonment, Gilmore contends, needs to deploy organised violence - to absorb some of the surplus populations in order to contain the rest. Capital needs an otherwise unemployed prison guard to keep the prisoner in a cage. One can of course, also see the various regimes of violence which are used to contain hungry, and dispossessed passions - to protect, using her words, capitalism from capitalism. But is organised abandonment sustainable?
Mohammed Elnaiem, director of the Decolonial Centre, will argue that in fact, genocide happens when organised abandonment is no longer possible. This will be a talk that explores case studies in Palestine, the DRC, and Haiti.