Racial Capitalism and the Making of the Israeli Frontier

Location: Room will be communicated latest by February 10th to those who have registered. Please register here

https://doit.medfarm.uu.se/bin/kurt3/kurt/8898602

by February 9th at the latest. Please note that the seats are limited.

Abstract

Wassim Ghantous will present his work with a forthcoming article. The article offers a novel framing for enquiring the deep entanglement between Israel and Western-led global centers of domination.

Moving beyond geopolitical reasonings and historical analogies, it locates this relationship within a dynamic space of homological correspondence, positioning Israel as its frontier.

This space refers to a historicized relationship binding Israel and global centers through a shared infrapolitical plane underwriting racial-capitalist modernity. 

The framing precludes exceptionalizing Palestine/Israel while carving out space attentive to political continuities, expansions, and frictions.

Reflecting on center-frontier relations and engaging notions of exception, (in)security, and political violence across political geography, critical security studies, and settler colonial studies, the article reveals two interrelated movements encapsulated in the wave metaphor: one locating Israel as a wave-edge of intensification and expansion—colonial, territorial, economic, and military—which, second, constantly reverberates back into global centers realigning them to its forces.

It concludes with notes on homological compression after 7 October 2023 and the destabilization of global order.

Dr Wassim Ghantous is a Senior Researcher in political geography, and a member of the Space and Political Agency (SPARG) and Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence (GOCEP) research groups, at Tampere University. His interdisciplinary research engages critical theory, human and political geographical approaches for studying questions of politics, de/coloniality, violence, surveillance, (in)security, and resistance, as they play out in the context of Palestine/Israel and beyond.

Chair: Dr Petter Hellström, researcher at  Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University and initiator of the Uppsala Declaration of Conscientious Objection

Discussant: Dr Claes Tängh Wrangel, Researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, CEMFOR, Uppsala University.

Warm Welcome!