Call for papers: Slow Violence and Environment at the International Sociological Association forum conference in Porto Allegre- Brazil in 14-18 July 2020

Session organiser: Saad Amira, University of Basel, Urban Studies Department

The forum’s overarching theme is : Challenges of the 21st Century: Democracy, Environment, Inequalities, Internationality. This session is titles Eco-Politics of Israeli Settler Colonialism, Palestinian Neo-Patrimonial Politics of Corruption and Every Day Forms of Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank and falls under the following theme: Human Rights and Global Justice. Kindly note that any abstracts of relevance to the field of Slow Violence and Environment, which might tackle other settings than Palestine are welcomed. 

Abstracts due: 30th of September 2019

Kindly check the link below for more information on the content of the session :
The Slow Violence of Israeli Settler-Colonialism and the Political Ecology of Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank

This research uses the concept of ‘slow violence ‘ in a Palestinian village to explore the political ecology of the Israeli settlers-colonial paradigm, and its relationship to the politics of corruption of a curtailed neo-patrimonial entity, namely the  Palestinian Authority. Slow violence is violence that manifests gradually and often invisibly, in contrast to spectacular violence that more frequently garners media and political attention. My research explores and maps out the structure of slow violence in Palestine, where the “de-development” politics of the Palestinian National Authority and the Israeli settler-colonial enterprise converge. It addresses a significant scholarly gap in that attention to these issues focus almost exclusively on violence as a spectacle, overlooking the centrality of nature as a productive political and developmental space in settler colonial discourse and practice. Here I focus on three aspects of the slow violence of settler colonialism and its relationship to political ecology: the unleashing of wild boars into Palestinian villages; the uprooting of olive trees and continuous destruction of other crops; and the relocation of Israeli toxic waste industries to the West Bank, which includes the dumping of settlement waste onto Palestinian villages. All these practices transform the meanings of security and stability for Palestinians,  as notions of Patriarchal (de)development reduce Palestinian politics of liberation into politics of corruption, perpetuating it as the only paradigm of Palestinian Political agency .
https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/forum2020/webprogrampreliminary/Symposium562.html