Unsettled Earth: Against Abstraction: Towards a Politics of Confrontation

This lecture begins with a refusal of abstraction as the dominant response to colonial violence. Today, violence is increasingly processed through frameworks that fracture political formations and hollow out movements. Instead, what is required is confrontation—not only of the violence and its perpetrators, but also of the effects that this violence has had on us. How has it managed to train us to live inside a permanent equation in which some lives are made possible only through the disposability of others?

This fragmentation is enforced through an imposed order of language and narrative, one that permits speech only through managed appeals to “joint struggles” or “solidarity,” mapped onto Sykes–Picot borders or, worse, calibrated around where empire is expected to strike next rather than reckoning with the fact that we have already been under attack, living through existential wars, since the inception of our nation-states, alongside Israel as an imperial outpost.

What follows is that fragmentation forces us to speak through a rhetoric of exceptionalism. Yet the only thing exceptional is that across the Arab–Iranian region—or whatever name one insists on—refugeness and exile have become the defining political condition of the present order. The claim to exception rests on a collective condition we now share, that we have all become struggles over a right to return. Return to what remains deliberately unclear. In a landscape of permanent war, there are permanent refugees and a permanently deferred return. This condition deepens fragmentation, as we come to recognize one another through fractured identities rather than through the shared question of exile and dispossession and how return might be imagined together against an expanding regime of militarization, camps, prisons, borders, and genocide that can only reproduce new cycles of displacement.

This demands a confrontation, not with our so-called failures, nor through tired traditions of lamenting defeat or celebrating victory, but with what has been abandoned, i.e. the histories erased and the political clarity sacrificed in our attempts to make ourselves legible to an order that survives precisely by abstracting us. Against this, the conversation argues for confrontation among ourselves as a political method, one that resists abstraction. What becomes possible when movements stop speaking to distant arbiters of legitimacy and begin speaking to one another across shared conditions of displacement/refugeness/dispossession/exile? How might return be reimagined as a political process? What forms of clarity emerge when confrontation becomes the bridge between us, rather than the illusion of a unified struggle?

Islam al Khatib is a Palestinian researcher and doctoral candidate at the LSE. Her work sits at the intersection of surveillance, knowledge production, and global tech infrastructures.

Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist whose research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.

Marwa Arsanios is an artist and filmmaker. From land rights to forms of community self-organisation and self-defence, Arsanios examines strategies used by different communities to confront colonial-capitalist structures-whether familial, state or corporate-in territories in Kurdistan, Iraq, north-western Syria, Lebanon and Tolima, Colombia.