Kanafani made it clear in his speech that the “most significant words” have lost all meaning because they have been stripped of their historical specificity and relation to struggles for liberation. Despite their historical significance, concepts thus no longer signify concrete social relations, institutions, processes, and modes of resistance. Every writer and intellectual, according to Kanafani, is individually concerned with assigning their own meaning to concepts without contextualizing them within their historically specific material conditions, using instead their “private understanding…that had no consensus and which thus meant nothing.” Words such as revolutionary and socialist may very well be used and widely disseminated but they are not necessarily tied to material reality and the movements, including armed resistance, seeking to destroy the material systems of domination and exploitation, such as racial capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Kanafani urged us to re-evaluate concepts so that they can be given “definite and meaningful specificities”, which means that concepts must necessarily be grounded in the concrete struggles and in the social reality in which these struggles unfold. The “total absence of meaning in discourse”, as he put, has led many astray, convincing them that radical language in and of itself, particularly when disassociated from social reality, can lead to revolutionary action. The use of radical terms rather than an insurgent praxis (thought, action, and reflection) is all that matters.

In this sense, radical terms can very well be used by any individual but these tend “to conceal his own impotencies or to hide his intentions. We now have a lore of blind language that has managed to empty discourse of any effective value, making it possible to employ it for contradictory aims at one and the same time.”

The “exploitation of language” is what Kanafani saw as one of the counterinsurgent weapons used by the dominant class who hide “behind a cloud of words” and at the same time hide their impotence in thinking clearly and incisively about material reality. This “incantatory thought”, as he referred to it, may very well seduce people to believe that change is possible but in reality the use of certain terms “replaces clarity with sound and disguises the absence of a goal with ringing words that satisfy the emotionality in the depths of us all without ever illuminating a vision” of a concrete political project. This in turn creates “a sense of security for those who are frightened by change, and provides a curtain of fog over the movement that they truly fear.” On the one hand, discourse, even if radical in content, may serve the interest of the dominant class when its form is purely aesthetic. On the other hand, social movements risk becoming influenced by an empty discourse lacking a genuine revolutionary commitment that is both unwavering and militant.

Kanafani asks, “if language is the means of the exploiter, what then can serve as the defense of the exploited? And if the exploiter goes beyond the exploitation of language used to obtain his own objectives, then what is to be the strategy for the exploited?” This question not only points to epistemological concerns but more importantlty to a necessary praxis that is not reduced to the production of knowledge, theory, and concepts alone. Decolonial theory, especially the way it has been consumed, diluted, and defanged, shows a tendency to reduce radical change to epistemology. Other theories are also not immune to becoming what they claim to be against. I mention this to assign historical specificity once again to the theories that may lose sight of and detach themselves from concrete struggles of liberation once confined to academia.

In the face of the genocidal imperial and settler colonial projects of the US and Israel, the above question guides us to realize that we cannot write our way out of domination, exploitation, and dispossession. It forces us to ask Lenin’s revolutionary question, “What is to be done?”

What is to be done during the ethnic cleansing of immigrant communities in the US, the policing and incarceration of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, the geopolitical reconfiguration of imperialism and fascism with “Making America Great Again” leading the way, the criminalization of protests, and the increasing surveillance and counterinsurgent technologies within and beyond academia?

Although the institutionalization of radical thought has been critiqued for quite some time now, it is only within the context of the genocide in Gaza where the contradiction between academic knowledge production and material commitments to liberation have become more heightened. We all perhaps could make a list of colleagues who have built their careers on the most radical traditions, including anticolonial and decolonial theory, yet have stood idly by while university administrators called the police on students, faculty, and staff protesting the genocide in Gaza and the university’s complicity and active participation in it. There’s no need to discuss this point any further since it has already been addressed in previous posts and by others such as the Resistance Archives who accurately examine the quiet capture of academics. They write:

Liberation is talked about often—in classrooms, in books, across social media - but the material struggle behind those words has faded. Those who suffer most under capitalism are trapped in survival, forced to navigate a system that leaves them little time or space to organize. Those with enough comfort to study revolution, to imagine something different, often find themselves unwilling to risk what they have. Comfort turns into a quiet form of captivity… the people with enough stability to think about change are often the ones least willing to risk it. Comfort, even when it is modest, becomes a quiet captor. A steady job, a roof over your head, access to healthcare, the chance to own a home, the easy promises of consumer goods; these things are dangled as proof that the system can work if you just play by its rules… Consumerism has replaced the dream of collective freedom with private ambition, and solidarity has been traded away for individual survival. The fear of losing what little you have becomes stronger than the anger at injustice…

Fred Hampton was certainly right to say that “Theory’s Cool, But Theory With No Practice Ain’t Shit”. The Resistance Archives and A. Tahrir (2025) echo this point and write in detail that,

In the heart of the West, revolution survives mostly in theory. It is debated in universities, passed around in books and podcasts, thrown into slogans and branding. But without material sacrifice, theory is nothing… In a society where even rebellion can be marketed and sold back to us, the sharp edge of revolutionary thought is dulled. We live in a world where outrage is not a threat but a product. Anger is turned into spectacle. Radical words are packaged into careers, personal brands, and performances that leave real power untouched… Talking about liberation replaces fighting for it. Revolution becomes something we consume, not something we build. Without the willingness to step beyond discourse into action, even the most sophisticated analysis collapses into another pillar of the system it claims to oppose… In Palestine, the idea of revolution has never been an academic exercise or a lifestyle choice. It is a necessity born from survival, faith, and an unbroken connection to the land… Revolution in Palestine is not romanticized. It is survival. It is faith carried through generations, collective memory made flesh, and the unbreakable refusal to be erased… If revolution is to have meaning again in the heart of empire, it must move beyond theory and reclaim the courage to sacrifice. It must confront the fear that clings to comfort, the fear that survival will be harder if we resist. True change has always demanded risk, loss, and the willingness to stand firm even when the ground shifts… Comfort is not freedom. It is the quiet reward for obedience, the gilded chain that binds potential to stagnation. The examples of struggle from places like Gaza remind us that when everything is stripped away, what remains is not despair but an unbreakable will to live with dignity. Revolution demands that we remember what matters beyond survival and beyond comfort. It demands that we live, not just speak, the struggle we claim to believe in… We cannot theorize our way out of the chains we are too afraid to break. We cannot speak of struggle while defending the small comforts handed down by the very system we claim to oppose. Every privilege that binds us is a weapon turned against the world we say we want to build. Empire does not fear our anger. It fears our willingness to give up everything we were taught to hold sacred. To fight for the future demands that we let go of the illusions that tie us to the present. It demands a life lived with clarity, with courage, and without apology. (para. 9-12; 14; 18-20)

As the genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran continues, we must therefore position ourselves clearly and militantly. We must continue to organize and disrupt the spaces that we know will one day forget that they, too, justified, enabled, and participated in genocide and imperialist wars. We know that those who remain silent today will one day write books and articles on genocide and imperialism but only after the fact. In the present, we cannot become what Rabea Eghbariah (2023) referred to as the “scholars [who] tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent” (para. 7). To act and write with urgency, we must refuse to play the careerist and opportunist game academia loves to play as the world burns around its ivory towers. Mohammed El-Kurd (2025) states, that they will one day lecture the world about genocide and the war against Iran in the past tense when in fact they said and did nothing while it unfolded for their unwilling eyes to see. These vultures, as El-Kurd labels them, are in our midst. We can probably picture one or more colleagues who are unbothered by genocide or even rejoice that there will finally be a “regime” change yet will likely write about it when the literal “dust settles”—when the bodies buried under the rubble are reduced to footnotes in yet another published book, when making land acknowledgements can be made on Palestinian land without consequences. These vultures will one day romanticize what they once condemned, what they did not defend, and what they enabled through their silence. They will not only romanticize the past but also depoliticize, mystify, and commodify it. El Kurd (2025) states that these “vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh” (p. 2) so that the past can be frozen in time in some museum. That’s exactly how counterinsurgency works.

We must, therefore, heed Kanafani’s call to avoid incantatory thought and re-inscribe concepts with political content that is both historically specific, praxis-oriented, and militant. Or, as Bassel al-Araj expressed, “If you don’t want to be engaged – if you don’t want to confront oppression – your role as an intellectual is pointless.”

Sociology has not been an exception within the mosaic of our cultural [and intellectual] colonialism, which persists across political and economic forms of colonialism.

This statement reveals that before postcolonial and decolonial studies emerged as a more solidified field in the Global North key figured in Latin America were already challenging the craft of social science and its detached and neutral forms of writing under the guise of objectivity. From the very beginning of the creation of social science departments in the region, radical critiques against material and symbolic forms of colonialism already existed. These critiques arose in a context in which decolonization and liberation movements took hold of the aspirations of subjugated peoples throughout the world (including the US with students fighting for third world studies programs which became ethnic studies)—this context served as the condition of possibility for radical discourses to emerge within and beyond academia.

Radical thought is therefore not a mode of thinking that is property of academia. Rather, every community, region, or continent that has the shared history of modern/colonial domination has expressed radical interpretations of the world in literature, poetry, music, and oral history, not to mention the ways these interpretations shaped struggles for liberation.

For example, Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude theorizes the heterogeneous social existence of Latin America and the Caribbean and paints a new image of the social world of the region—where histories of colonialism and imperialism, as well as sociocultural universes coexist with one another and more often than not enter into contradictions and conflicts.

Literature, understood in its widest sense, offers theoretical insights often ignored by disciplinary knowledge. Perhaps there’s a reason why Mariátegui dedicated over 40 percent of his book to examining the heterogeneous character of literature, particularly the intimate links it has with the heterogeneous social existence of colonial contexts. Anibal Quijano builds upon Mariátegui’s work to advance the notion of historical-structural heterogeneity, which helped shift the understanding of the Social toward a heterogeneously structured totality.

Theorizing must therefore be situated for it to interrogate social reality from vantage points often excluded from the canon—that is, from the ideological hegemony of disciplinary discourses. It must be capable of learning from excluded texts and contexts to be able to reconceptualize the notion of social totality beyond the narrow understanding of “society”. Our writing must draw on a wide range of geographies to amplify other interpretations of the world. It must uncover what modernity has excluded, which implies theorizing the world from places of understanding that to this day are systematically silenced. By thinking from excluded geographies not only are new images, concepts, and interpretations of the world made more visible but, more importantly, the silenced histories and material struggles for liberation.

Tracing the struggles of the past uncovers the systematic silences that distort our understanding of the present and limit our future political horizon—for without an understanding of the past, how is the present unsettled to create the conditions of possibility for an alternative future to emerge? As Robin DG Kelley states in the forward to Cedric Robinson’s book, we need to recover a “radical understanding of the past in order to chart the way forward.” The past helps us radically interrogate social reality to collectively act and realize the unthinkable. As James Baldwin expressed, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”

Thinking from silenced histories intends to recover the alternative future horizons past struggles fought for under material conditions not of their own choosing. Keeping utopia alive is not naïve, nor is it ahistorical or lacking sociological implications. It’s the utopic horizon we keep alive that makes it possible to articulate a politics that may work toward reaching said horizon—albeit without any guarantees. Utopias are intense collective desires and projections of a world we would like to live in.

As Robinson observed, “The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths.”

Writing in Times of Genocide

It is worth asking: What purpose does our writing serve in the hour of genocide, when bombs continue to drop, when mangled bodies are strewn in the streets, where paramedics constantly carry real beheaded babies for the world to see? When our writing actively unsettles colonial projects, we must be ready to make sacrifices by writing unequivocally about Palestinian liberation and by unapologetically critiquing Zionism, which, as some of us personally have experienced, can easily jeopardize our careers.

No matter the consequences, we must write as if life depended on it because that’s exactly what’s at stake. As Salamanca et al. (2024) inquire:

How does one write in the midst of an ongoing genocide? When the contours of Palestine are being redrawn in blood, and when unconscionable images of starving, injured, and dead children, women, and men have become our daily breakfast? What’s our task as scholar-activists, as human beings, when we become witnesses and thus unwilling accomplices to the ravaging of an ancient people and geography that has stood tall for generations as a cradle of civilisation? (para. 1)

In Digging Tunnels with Pens, Yafi asks, “What do we do, then, when the very structures we seek to change enforce the limits on our activism, writing, and thoughts?” (para. 3). By asking this question, Yafi suggests that one should work toward creating a clandestine publishing network to resist intellectual colonialism and to create “a pathway to knowledge production that bypasses the gatekeepers of Western academia and operates beyond its restrictive boundaries”. Only by breaking free from these institutional constraints can we begin to speak truth to power in more radical forms. This does not mean that we need to abandon our positions within academia, but that we need “to master the art of navigating both worlds – maintaining our presence within institutional frameworks while never losing sight of the collective struggle” (para. 14)…

I want to end my talk with an excerpt from Sherene Seikaly article Palestine is a Paradigm. This excerpt exemplies what it is to use a craft that affectively moves the reader away from despair and toward hope and action.

To parent in genocide is to exist in fragments of time between life and death. To parent in genocide is to witness bodies in fragments. It has become a “strange scene” to mourn over a shroud containing “a whole body with two hands, ten fingers, two feet, and a head.”

To be a good parent is to “bury your children whole.” To be a good parent is to find the head matching your child’s body after an air strike. It is to hope that your child’s body parts will not be “mixed with the garbage” or “cut up in pieces,” marked with tank treads and bulldozer tracks.

To parent in genocide is to exist in fragments between speech and silence. It is to find words to prepare children for forced absences, sudden deaths, unexpected arrests, and critical injuries. It is to shelter from a “place of grief.” It is the “struggle to speak” with rage filling the throat. It is to “swallow … [the] tongue” in times of speechless horror. It is to witness famine robbing speech. It is Khalil watching his son, Sa‘id, his eyes hollowed, his skin ashen, his stomach empty, unable to cry from hunger. It is Nabila, witnessing how horror forced her nonverbal son, Muhammed, to speak for the first time as Israeli soldiers released the dogs that would maul and kill him. It is Mona, looking at her son, Muazzaz, as he emerged from nine months of administrative detention, less than half his previous body weight, unable to walk unaided, his right arm jerking, his speech erratic, unable to recognize his father. In the face of all this death, Palestinians offer lessons on life--on how to cherish life amid relentless horror. Fathers like Ahmad Imteiz navigated bullets and survived hunger on and through love alone. On the day of the Flour Massacre, when throngs of hungry people at the Nabulsi roundabout in Gaza City were subjected to live Israeli ammunition, Imteiz crawled for a kilometer as bullets rained down around him. He clung tightly to four cans of fava beans and a chicken. Once he was far from the Israeli attack that would take 115 lives that hour, he stood up to run. A journalist would later ask him if it was worth it. “Yes,” he answered, “to save my hungry children, yes.”

Underneath the rubble and the smoking guns of genocide, lie the deepest threat to these regimes, our capacity to tell our stories.

We know, however, that stories or knowledge alone are insufficient if they do not inform militant action against a genocidal settler colonial state.

As I write these words, I am “back home” in the place that’s never really felt like home. Dwelling in the belly of the beast, I sit at my desk, staring at the computer screen, several tabs open, wondering exactly what I am going to write.

I can write about the electoral coup in Honduras that imposed a right-wing government aligned with the US and Israel. I can write about the ICE raids in Minneapolis and the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, or the protests that ensued, but I am not too sure what these words would mean in terms of changing or challenging the fascist settler colonial regime of the US. Words along cannot stop violence unless words inform action. Violence, as Fanon instructed us, can only be met with violence. Force must be met with force. Ideally, words would move mountains, but unfortunately they fall flat when radical thought is reduced to concepts, ideas, and theories that now have become property of academia, and have thus been emptied of their political and militant content.

Once uprooted from the material conditions that made it possible to articulate a revolutionary theory or concept that dialectically informs revolutionary action, these become commodities for so-called radical academics to consume and present at academic conferences complicit in genocide. It’s funny yet also tragic how revolution can so easily be reduced to an aesthetic, a demeanor, a vibe, with no substance in actual reality, struggle, or direct action. All that matters is cosplaying the revolutionary who presents a soon-to-be-published peer-reviewed article at the Marriott or Convention Center, likely while wearing a leather jacket that fits the part. Who needs revolution and collective action when the radical star professor we dearly admire can lead the way? Lead us astray I should say.

Meanwhile, people in Gaza are still being killed and starved and those in the West Bank are being arrested, tortured, and displaced by settlers. In the US, thousands are being arrested, detained in concentration camps, and deported. In Latin America, the US is reasserting its dominion over what it continues to treat as its personal backyard, free to do with it as it pleases. As I write these words, the US is choking Cuba’s oil supplies by imposing a total blockade on a small island that has ingeniously survived the US-led genocidal economic structure for decades. A total siege, no different from what Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza.

Again, what am I supposed to write about? And what will these words mean at the end of the day? I am not too sure. All I can say for now is that do what you can wherever you are. Create alongside others the spaces that are nonexistent yet nonetheless in the process of emerging. Disrupt and abandon the spaces and institutions that seduce you to believe that without them your life is somehow meaningless. Organize, even if it seems futile at the moment. Fight for those who are at the receiving end of state-sanctioned violence. Speak up even if you’re surrounded by an ocean of silence. Constantly ask yourself what is to be done and what role you can play in existing organizations.

Ultimately, we need to remember Robin D. G. Kelley’s words: “Solidarity is not a market exchange.” It’s not a transaction that will yield personal benefits down the road. Indeed, active solidarity is likely to have serious consequences—but never more severe than those that result from doing nothing as the fascist, settler-colonial, and imperialist gears trample over us.

We are writing to let you know that today is the deadline for early bird registration for the Decolonial Conference.

Registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/decolonialconference/1684372

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Program Committee

decolonialconference@proton.me

We hope this email finds you well. We are writing because we have decided to extend the deadline for early bird registration. The deadline is now January 19.

Registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/decolonialconference/1684372

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Regaining the allegiance of a community that would otherwise support a subversive and revolutionary movement is central to counterinsurgency. It’s not for nothing that counterinsurgency theory and praxis has used Mao’s fish and water analogy to convey a clear message: an insurgent fish cannot survive for very long if the water in which it thrives has been contaminated by counterinsurgency. If the water, that is, the people, adopt the ideology proposed by counterinsurgency’s propaganda wing, the fish will be unable to proliferate materially or ideologically without the people’s support.

This means that for counterinsurgent operations to gain the support and allegiance of a population will depend on more than ideology. A particular community must see “with their own eyes” some progress once it aligns itself with counterrevolutionary forces. According to Frank Kitson, prosperity is “a potent weapon in the struggle against those who wish to overthrow the existing order, but also there would be little point in defeating the insurgent only to be left with a ruined community” (50-51). The fish and water analogy can therefore be extended to the material reality that creates the conditions for insurgencies to emerge in the first place. The people’s support of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces will also depend on how their basic needs are met. While insurgencies will aim to increase the productive forces in defense of the people’s autonomy and self-determination in their protracted anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist struggle, counterinsurgencies will seek to increase productive forces to defeat an insurgency and to maintain domination and exploitation, even if small concessions have to be made in order to defeat the former.

The State will promise or implement economic reforms to convince the population that change is on its way and that insurrections will only get in the way of development through their “terrorist” activity. The Alliance for Progress is a clear geopolitical and economic policy the US implemented during the Cold War to apparently improve the material conditions, not because of altruistic reasons, but as a strategy against the rising tide of insurrection. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the State and anti-State forces depend on the people who give it strength. Reforms also go hand in hand with ideological warfare as the latter will aim to convince the people that the former will not be successful with the existence of the “barbaric,” “savage,” and “terroristic” activity of an insurgency, while the former will strengthen the latter by providing “proof” that change can happen from within. As Kitson notes, the “people will prefer to back a limited advance offered by the government” for its limited scope than the “far-reaching” revolutionary transformation of an insurrection “because of the greater [perceived] likelihood of getting something” in the present (51).

Reforms are therefore counterinsurgent policies of containment, bandages that prevent structural change and persuade people to side with the State that has historically oppressed them. If reforms seek to minimize and ultimately end the support system of an insurgency, policies must relate to an insurgency’s cause, which has found resonance in a people’s historically specific struggle. If an anticolonial struggle is fighting for complete territorial and political economic autonomy, the colonial government may implement minor agrarian and land reforms to discredit the revolutionary struggle. If a student movement demands the radical transformation of the university and its ties to Israeli weapons manufacturers, university administration may establish committees to implement reforms that will never materialize but will weaken the movement. If living conditions have reached a point where working-class people begin to take subversive direct action, the government may use charismatic “socialist” politicians to drain the energy out of a movement, reducing its demands to reforms that, once again, will not change the economic structure profiting from our disposability—that is, from our wasted lives, labor, and land that generate surplus value for capitalism, particularly extracted from the Global South.

When ideology and reforms do not work or when people militantly aligned with the resistance refuse the compromise the State wants to impose, countersinsurgency initiates a more explicitly violent approach. For example, the British implemented a policy of enclosure by putting hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu in concentration camps, physically separating them from the Mau Mau resistance, for these communities were seen as its economic and military foundation. As Caroline Elkins writes, after conducting hundreds of interviews of survivors, “I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic: only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomizing its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilizing mission reinstated” (xiii). The ethnocidal structure and annihilatory logic of imperialism and colonialism are quickly recalibrated when resistance cannot be “pacified.”

Decades before the Mau Mau rebellion, during the Scramble for Africa, Elkins notes that Francis Hall, who was an officed for the Imperial British East Africa Company, led several raiding campaigns against Kikuyu communities, they resisted from the very beginning. This led him to write his father, a British colonel, suggesting that the “only one way to improving the Wakikuyu…is [to] wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food supplies” (3). Here we see the contradiction between the ethnocidal structure’s annihilatory logic with the material economic conditions to survive without forced labor. Despite this dependence, Kikuyu villages that continued to resist were systematically destroyed. Similar to the Palestinians in Gaza who have been violently displaced, Kikuyu communities fled to the interior to escape the armed invasion in the late 19^th century.

With vast lands now “empty” of Indigenous peoples, settlers were recruited to increase agricultural production. Relevant to point out is that Zionists considered East Africa as a potential region to colonize and settle. British newspapers would go as far as to publish advertisement to persuade “would-be settlers”.

“Settle in Kenya, Britain’s youngest and most attractive colony. Low prices at present for fertile areas. No richer soil in the British Empire. Kenya Colony makes a practical appeal to the intending settler with some capital. Its valuable crops give high yields, due to the high fertility of the soil, adequate rainfall and abundant sunshine. Secure the advantage of native labor to supplement your own effort.”

The dispossession of land and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people are not unique to British imperialism but reflect the Euromodern colonial policy that could be traced back to the 15th and 16th century. In the 19^th century, however, with industrialized means of warfare, imperial counterinsurgent warfare at the time, Elkins argues, was akin to big-game hunting rather than actual combat, no less genocidal than Spanish or Portuguese colonization but certainly more efficient.

As colonization solidified and settlements emerged in Kenya, agricultural production was still a serious problem for white settlers. To resolve this, colonial administration established Indigenous reservations, similar to the Bantustans in South Africa and reservations in the US at the time. The aim was to fragment the social fabric and confine the Kikuyu people into unproductive lands. To increase revenues and force Indigenous people into the wage economy, taxation was implemented so that they would search for work in the fertile settlements, which would allow them to pay their taxes and provide for their families. Another regulation that parallels other settler colonial projects is the control of the Indigenous population’s movement. African workers needed a permit to travel between their reservations and the white settlements, no different from Palestinians. Elkins observes that by 1920, “all African men leaving their reserves were required by law to carry a pass, or kipande, that recorded a person’s name, fingerprint, ethnic group, past employment history, and current employer’s signature” (16). Indigenous peoples placed their permit in a metal box around their neck, which was referred to as a goat’s bell (mbugi). One of the Elkin’s participants, who was forced into the coercive, exploitative wage economy, expressed the following in one of her interviews: “I was no longer a shepherd, but one of the flock, going to work on the white man’s farm with my mbugi around my neck” (16). The dehumanization of colonized people in Africa, once again, parallels other colonized regions, whereby the colonized are portrayed and treated as inferior while the settlers are presented as virtuous pioneers on a civilizing mission to develop wasted lands and savage peoples.

When the Kikuyu resisted these coercive policies of enclosure, taxation, and control of movement by sabotaging settler productive activities and machinery or by continuing to increase their agricultural productive capacities to lessen the need to participate in the settler’s wage economy, the colonial administration implemented another tactic to prevent the Kikuyu from growing profitable crops such as tea and coffee and owning a certain amount of cattle, though they could grow maize freely before the end of World War II, when grains had to be sold at a set price. This forced more of the colonized population to look for work in white settlements. The political economy linked to agricultural production thus subordinated Indigenous labor and products so that white settlers could have an advantage in the market. This illustrates the racial capitalist designs in settler colonies, no different from other regions which had implemented similar policies to contain, tax, control, and limit the production of Indigenous peoples in order to create a state of economic dependency on the white ethnoclass.

In times of insurgent resistance, however, these policies would become more violent and indeed genocidal, which we’ve seen time and again in Palestine, the US, Guatemala, and other colonized communities who tried to reclaim their land and labor. Before entering its more explicitly genocidal phase, some policies sought to delegate power to a co-opted Indigenous class. Colonial-appointed chiefs in Kenya were created to manage and control the Indigenous population, particularly surveil and punish any form of resistance, as well ensure the effective recruitment of labor and taxation. This new political structure played into the colonial trope of tribalism, but in fact it contradicted the governance structure of elder councils within Kikuyu communities that had never been ruled by a chief, let alone one appointed by the colonial government. As in other regions, these colonially appointed leaders would be rewarded for their service. The chiefs who failed to effectively control a population would be quickly stripped of their title and replaced with another.

With this new political structure, we see a clear counterinsurgent policy alongside the emergence of subversive practices and insurrections against an illegitimate authority within Kikuyu communities. The seed of rebellion had been sown at the beginning of colonization, but it began to germinate under the internal colonialist governance and racial capitalist political-economic structure that further fragmented the Kikuyu people, divided between the dispossessed majority, who were heavily exploited and dominated, and an Indigenous minority who benefited from and participated in colonial rule.

Notes on following post:

The governance structure alone is therefore insufficient in stopping a population from rebelling. Power alone must be accompanied by ideological warfare, which in colonial contexts has been dominated by religion and education. Christian missionaries of different denominations competed to save the soles of the “savage” population. They used Indigenous labor to build churches and school that re-educated Indigenous peoples in Western ways of life, which served as the ideological basis for legitimating the political economic structure.

It is this genocidal history that shaped the response to the Mau Mau rebellion.

Du Bois wrote this piece during the Nakba in 1948. In this text, you will find the problematic views and colonial tropes used against Arabs and Muslims, which justified Zionist colonization to apparently bring development in the region and advancement of the Arabs, who Du Bois portrayed as despotic, ignorant, fanatic, and backward in need of civilization. It’s shocking to read this piece not necessarily because of the colonial tropes but because they were written by a scholar who had already published brilliant critiques of colonialism and its dehumanizing rhetoric. This doesn’t mean we should hastily dismiss Du Bois’ work. This would be a reactionary position. It simply means we should critique his work’s shortcomings and situate it historically.

What is there right and wrong in the question of Palestine, which today faces not simply the United States but the whole world? It is not a difficult question. There is something terribly simple about it. Every child knows that ancient Jewish civilization and religion centered in Palestine. One has but to name its cities, rivers and places—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Damascus, Jordan, Galilee and a hundred others. Everyone knows the way in which the history of the Jewish religion is wound about Palestine and from there how the thread runs through all modern history.

Palestine is a land largely of plateaus, mountains, and deserts, sparsely inhabited, and could easily maintain millions more people than the two millions it has today. Among the million Arabs there is widespread ignorance, poverty and disease and a fanatic belief in the Mohammedan religion, which makes these people suspicious of other peoples and other religions. Their rulership is a family and clan despotism which makes effective use of democratic methods difficult.

Now it happens that the Jew wandering through Europe has for two thousand years been fighting for a place. He was not allowed in mediaeval Europe, because of his religion, to pursue the ordinary vocations of most people. He became, therefore, a peddler and a financier, beginning his work with the new capitalism that arose in the Middle Ages. Here he found his vocation and served in every country.

There is no question of the contribution which he made to modern civilization, not only in banking and finance, but in the arts, in the fineness of his family life, in the magnificent clearness of his intellect. But he was faced always by three alternatives: Should he lose himself in the surrounding population and through that give up his peculiar culture and religion; should he keep to himself, an integral unit; or finally, should he try to find a state of his own? All three of these answers were made. Millions of Jews had lost themselves in the population of Europe and their blood mingles with that of other people’s.

At the same time they have kept a curious and fruitful unity in their culture and in their religion. Finally, after a bitter fight, there arose with increasing voice, a demand on the part of the Jews themselves that they should go back to Zion and refound the state which they had lost. This Zionism met opposition from many thoughtful Jews. They said this would increase anti-Jewish attitudes rather than decrease them. But the situation ceased to be academic. There began to be a growing feeling that certain of the Jews could only escape persecution by migration to a homeland.

Then during the First World War, on November 2, 1917, came the great promise of the British Empire: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object.” Moreover, this was no longer a mere question of religion and culture. It was a question of young and forward-thinking Jews, bringing a new civilization into an old land and building up that land out of the ignorance, disease, and poverty into which it had fallen; and by democratic methods to build a new and peculiarly fateful modern state. A start has been made in education, agriculture, water power, industry, and commerce.

Ernest Bevin, the Labor party’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, building on some half-hidden dislike of Jews in his own mind, not only refused to carry out the British promise but used British troops against the Jews, trained Arab troops for use in the future against them, and used the Navy for keeping the displaced persons from migrating into Zion. In the United States, President Truman, after having promised to stand by the founding of Zion, inexplicably went back upon his word, refused to permit arms to be given to the beleaguered Jews in Palestine and since then has been trying to straddle the fence and make any efforts of the United Nations ineffective and impossible.

In the meantime, a million displaced Jews are begging to be allowed to migrate to Palestine, where there is room for them, where there is work for them to do, where what Jews have already done is for the advantage, not simply of the Jews, but of the Arabs. The British Navy is keeping the Jews out and when the British Navy ceases to act, the British trained Arabian Army will walk in and begin war. This may be the Third World War. If it is, the guilt of this final disaster of modern civilization lies upon the heads of Ernest Bevin and Harry Truman.

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The analyses of some so-called Marxists and communists on social media show how quickly they betray internationalism by focusing solely on improving and reforming the conditions of the working class nationally, without ever tying domestic material conditions to exploitation and domination abroad, not to mention the domestic relations of power that revolve around of the axes of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Methodological nationalism prevents people from thinking beyond their narrow nation-state frames of reference. Ultimately, it reflects a liberal and indeed fascist tendency in US politics, whereby the suffering of others is so easily disregarded, where what’s happening in Gaza is just another issue that detracts from the problems experiences by “Americans.”

This does not mean that politics from below, community organizing, and coalition building is insignificant. What I’m critiquing here is the reduction of politics to electoralism where reform becomes the end goal, not the destruction of interconnected systems of exploitation and domination.

Liberalism has saturated all spheres of social existence and constitutes the infrastructure of fascism and colonialism. Possessive individualism, whiteness, conquest, colonialism, imperialism, fascism, and racism are deeply entangled, despite those who deny their structural linkages. That’s why it’s not surprising that liberals of all shades have downplayed the genocide in Gaza, including those who self-proclaim to be more radical.

Samir Amin points out that liberalism requires that we act only within the limits of the capitalist system so we can “reform” it. He reminds us that “The reconstruction of a citizen politics demands that movements of resistance, protest and struggle” must eradicate this “liberal virus.” The myth of liberalism is believing that there are radically different political options when at the end of the day it’s all the same shit, especially for the Global Majority.

George Jackson’s critique of liberalism’s counterinsurgency is more relevant than ever. “When any election is held it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of the power brokers.” Expecting that one day the dominant ethnoclass benefitting from colonialism and racial capitalism will “progressively” change (through elections) is one of liberalism’s greatest myths.

It’s for this reason Sara Ahmed points out how institutions may very well recognize harm but will do so only as a symbolic gesture without ever having to commit to transforming anything in material terms. This “non-performativity” only strengthens liberalism’s “affirmations and forgetting” without making structural change, which typically results in convincing the population that change is indeed on its way. This is what population-centered counterinsurgency looks like.

Historically speaking, the US’s liberal virus is a result of the settler colonial frontier and its possessive individualist logics and practices where settlers had freedom from restraint. We could only imagine what freedom from restraint meant to Indigenous peoples violently displaced and systematically killed, whose livelihood was destroyed with the killing of bison, for example. The latter is a foundational principle of liberalism. And if the frontier is merely the “outer edge of the wave” of colonialism, then one can rightfully assume that liberalism is the settler’s political culture, one that continues to justify colonial practices and dispossession at a global scale, and one that is increasingly seducing those on the receiving end as well, distancing them even further away from acquiring a revolutionary consciousness. As long as they benefit somehow, even if meagerly, then nothing and no one else matters, not even genocide as well as mass deportation and incarceration (ethnic cleansing).

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After World War II, the CIA wasn’t the only one doing research on counterinsurgency. Following the publication of The Pacification of Algeria in 1963, David Galula published Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Galula grew up in Tunisia and Morocco, later becoming a major and captain of the French Army during the Algerian Revolution (Marlowe, 2010). His wealth of knowledge of insurgency and counterinsurgency spanned from China’s Revolutionary War, Vietnam War, and the Greek Civil War, but his direct experience in Algeria commanding the 3^rd Company of the 45^th Colonial Infantry Battalion gave him the opportunity to apply and further theorize counterinsurgency.

In Marlowe’s intellectual biography, one learns that when Galula arrived in Algeria as a junior officer, he was directly involved in putting into practice the counterinsurgency concepts developed by French theorist-practitioners such as Charles Lacheroy and Roger Trinquier. However, his career took a turn when US General Edward Lansdale, an early supporter of Galula’s work, brought him to the United States, where Galula participated in the war college and think tank circuit during the initial surge of interest in counterinsurgency (COIN) theory in the early 1960s. With the additional backing of US General William Westmoreland, Galula secured a position at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, where he authored his influential book on counterinsurgency.

Galula’s work resurfaced after 911 and War on Terror that ensued when it was cited by the US Military Field Manual (3-24) on Counterinsurgency led by General Patreaus in 2006. The recovery of Galula’s work sheds light on the colonial context from which counterinsurgency theory and praxis was established, particularly the role ideology plays in either strengthening or weakening an insurgency and the centrality of attaining the the support of a population, which the US military sought to imitate in Iraq and Afghanistan, albeit with much failure.

Galula wrote that an insurgency “cannot seriously embark on an insurgency unless” there’s a “well-grounded cause” the general population resonated with and finds legitimate (p. 8). Paraphrasing Clausewitz, Galula states that an “Insurgency is the pursuit of the policy of a party, inside a country, by every means” (p. 1). He also clarifies that an insurgency is not contingent upon the use of force since an insurgency can emerge long before force is needed. Before an insurgency engages in direct violence, particularly in the preparatory stages of organizing political education campaigns, counterinsurgent measures cannot be taken so easily, insofar as the former cannot be easily defined and located. While insurgency at this stage is an “imprecise, potential menace” (p. 3), it does not mean that nothing is to be done to stop it from expanding and becoming a revolutionary force that speaks to the people’s dreams of liberation. During the initial stages, according to Galula, counterinsurgency must “try to eliminate or alleviate the conditions propitious for an insurgency” (ibid).

While ideology is of key importance during the initial stages of an insurrection, the safety of the population, especially who will protect them from enemy forces, will greatly shape the population’s attitude toward the insurgency. There is no doubt that those leading a counterinsurgency also control the media and the information is disseminates. After all, ideological warfare is crucial to isolate an insurgent group from the population. Galula admits, however, that the most formidable asset an insurgency holds, albeit considered within the “field of intangibles”, is “the ideological power of a cause on which to” justify direct militant actions that will be based on strategies and tactics that will not only weaken the military position of counterinsurgency but also the political legitimacy upon which the State depends. Ultimately, an insurgency’s strategies and tactics are two-pronged: the insurgency weakens the enemy’s military, ideological, and political position and strengthens its own before, during, and after each encounter.

Echoing Mao Zedong’s work on revolutionary guerrilla warfare and protracted struggle, particularly on the importance of political clarity and military strategy, Galula notes that insurgents should always aim to weaken the counterinsurgent’s support received from the population, such as providing intelligence, military, or economic resources. The goal is therefore to strengthen and expand the population’s support.

“If the insurgent manages to dissociate the population from the counterinsurgent, to control it physically, to get its active support, he will win the war because, in the final analysis, the exercise of political power depends on the tacit or explicit agreement of the population or, at worst, on its submissiveness. Thus the battle for the population is a major characteristic of the revolutionary war” (p. 4).

In other words, a revolutionary war is always a political war, that is, a dispute over the State’s legitimacy to wield the power that it does, particularly over the monopoly of land and labor, which is fundamentally an economic question, which Fanon states at the beginning of The Wretched of the Earth: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” Therefore, it is indispensable that an insurgency’s political cause aligns with the people’s demands, which have been denied for far too long. If an insurgency fails to align its struggle with the people’s demands, it’s either due to a lack of political clarity and thus a weakened military position due to lack of population support, or it’s because counterinsurgency was able to effectively capture a population ideologically and physically, thereby isolating the insurgent “fish” from the people’s water, as Mao would put it. Both situations are dialectically constituted.

In conventional warfare between two relatively equal sides, on the other hand, military action suffices to fulfill the political aims. Clausewitz famous dictum points out that “war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means” (69), illustrating that war is a necessary political instrument used when all other means have been exhausted. This understanding of warfare is what has shaped conventional wars, yet it falls flat when applied in revolutionary warfare. While the former employs positional warfare strategies and tactics as means to destroy the enemy’s military, the latter’s mobile guerrilla warfare depends on the political educational task of transforming a passive population into an active force that will be integrated into the strategies and tactics aimed at destroying the enemy not in one swift blow but through the protracted struggle of the people dispersed geographically in the enemy’s weakest military, political, and ideological positions.

Because of theorists such as Galula who learned from the theories, strategies, and tactics employed by multiple insurgencies, counterrevolutionary warfare’s counterinsurgent operations have imitated the former have emphasized political aims alongside military objectives. These become entwined in one another. Galula argued that “political action remains foremost throughout the war. It is not enough for the government to set political goals, to determine how much military force is applicable, to enter into alliances or to break them; politics becomes an active instrument of operation. And so intricate is the interplay between the political and the military actions that they cannot be tidily separated; on the contrary, every military move has to be weighed with regard to its political effects, and vice versa” (p. 5). Whereas an insurgency has a political and ideological advantage when the government’s military forces lack legitimacy, a counterinsurgency will be at a disadvantage when the government has lost legitimacy and an insurgency’s cause has already spread in the imagination and aspirations of the people.

Notes: If a community feels more protected by the insurgency, then counterinsurgency will be employed to create chaos to diminish support. These counterinsurgent efforts can revolve around economic sabotage of newly established autonomous regions in support of the insurgency. When this proves insufficient, the State or occupying power returns to conventional forms of warfare (systematic bombardment) that destroys life-sustaining infrastructure, as we have seen in Gaza. But to justify the State’s destruction requires ideological counterinsurgency to place blame on the victims (e.g., terrorists, human shields, children of darkness, Hamas started the war) through propaganda designed to convince the population of the lies narrated by the colonizer. The assassinations of leaders has also historically formed part of covert operations. The asymmetrical ideological and physical warfare waged against an insurgency thus constitutes the totality of counterinsurgency.

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In broad terms, counterinsurgency refers to covert actions directed at suppressing subversive, dissident, insurgent, and revolutionary actors. It depends on psychological warfare to assert control over discourse, ideology, and communication in order to delegitimize and isolate insurgent movements and to weaken their support among populations that might otherwise serve as their social, political, economic, and intelligence base. It involves isolating insurgent groups geographically and socially to neutralize their tactical and strategic advantages in guerrilla warfare, while reinforcing the legitimacy of the State and imperial power. For counterinsurgency to be effective, therefore, the dominant ideology must control the flow of information and communication to maintain, strengthen, and reconfigure a population’s allegiance to the State.

In 1951, the Human Resources Research Institute held a conference on psychological warfare at the Maxwell Air Force Base. The Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare of the Army determined that the Operations Research Office would lead the effort in publishing training manuals on psychological warfare. The following year, on April 4, the CIA wrote “Ideological-Psychological Warfare” (released in 2000), a blueprint for counterinsurgency operations at the national and international levels. The document’s opening line states the problem and objective: “To examine the value, content and our means for waging effective ideological warfare against the worldwide Communist apparatus.” In simple terms, psychological warfare is symbolic warfare insofar as the State depends on the reproduction of an ideology that gives it legitimacy. What stands out in this document, like many official documents of the past, is the honesty in terms of why ideological warfare is needed in the first place. The document explicitly expresses that “One cannot fight an ideological war without ideological tools” and that “Human activity follows this sequence: emotion, ideas, organization, and action. In our struggle against the Soviets we have organized and acted without developing a positive synthesis of our ideas”.

Symbolic or discursive counterinsurgency should thus support US imperialism’s geopolitical and economic project by attacking communism ideologically, wherever it may appear. Within this document we note the explicit ways theory and knowledge production in general can be used to target communism. The document argues that the US has insufficiently paid attention in “developing ideological shells to disrupt the basic concepts of the enemy” in order to dismantle communism’s theoretical and ideological foundations. It further asserts that communism is greatly informed by theory, whereas US policy takes a more pragmatic approach to solving problems. “It is for this reason, perhaps, that we have overlooked the advantages that can accrue from a well-designed ideological campaign” (p. 2). The CIA hence recognized that physical force alone is not enough for counterinsurgency to be effective when combating an insurgency whose theory and praxis of liberation resonates with a particular population’s cause and demands against the State.

Another salient argument the document makes is that propaganda can only do so much when it’s not tied to a “permanent literature: with a strong history and philosophy.” If counterinsurgency doesn’t develop its own “permanent literature,” it will solely rely on physical force, which has proven time and again to be ineffective in the long term. Theory must therefore be developed to capture those who would otherwise support an insurgency. It’s not surprising that the post-world war 2 literature in the social sciences and the humanities developed theories on modernization, development, ethics and social justice (a la Rawlsian), as well as the defanged postmodern and poststructural perspectives that falsely claimed the end of history and master narratives. Anthropological studies that were conducted and published in collaboration with the CIA stand out as one of the most egregious, namely studies that infiltrated student movements and Indigenous communities in (neo)colonial contexts.

Research was key in not only targeting the legitimacy of a particular political philosophy such as Marxism, but it also capitalized on the political and ideological rifts emerging from within, aiming to strengthen the most reactionary “communist” forces. As the document states,

“The ideological factor is the Achilles Heel of Bolshevism, a machine put together to impose an ideological pattern that has been demonstrably proven to be inferior. Communism is vulnerable to a counter ideological attack, because whatever moral sanction there is behind the ‘elite’ of Bolshevism, is based on ideology. The more we puncture that ideology and reduce it to cinders in the minds of men, the easier the rest of the job we have set ourselves to do” (p. 6).

It’s evident that top military officials and certainly the CIA have understood the centrality of ideological warfare (e..g, the battle for ideas), noting that military, political, and even economic actions against an insurgency are necessary yet insufficient in reproducing the US’s hegemonic geopolitical position. Non-military ideological warfare is equally important, in other words. For this reason, the university and academia in general, including the broker intellectual class it reproduces, must neatly fall in line with the State’s ideological and material project while presenting themselves as spaces of academic freedom in which inquiry is democratically constituted.

The State certainly rules by wielding its sword but it solidifies its dominion with pen and paper, codified into laws that structure all spheres of social existence, including knowledge producing institutions. In relatively stable socio-political conditions, the State may allow for small pockets of dissidence within the intellectual class in order to maintain the veneer of democracy. This, in turn, establishes legitimacy to what is fundamentally a modern/colonial system of unimaginable violence. When dissident voices become politically unmanageable, however, the State easily recalibrates itself. Its disciplining mechanisms effectively create a culture of fear so that faculty, staff, and students return to their subservient positions, particularly when social movements take on more radical expressions that directly challenge the material and ideological apparatuses of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Take, for instance, the way faculty, staff, and especially students have been criminalized for speaking out and organizing against genocide. What separates these protests from that of other student-led protests is that the Gaza Solidarity Encampments were not organizing for inclusion or to restructure the curriculum. They undoubtedly achieved this by reclaiming education in the lawns they occupied. But what is of greatest importance to acknowledge is that they examined and amplified the material links between the university’s production of knowledge and the manufacturing of technologies of colonial violence “battle-tested” on Palestinians and exported around the world to repress liberation struggles. It is not surprising that the State’s counterinsurgency on the domestic front is seeking to discursively and materially target students, faculty, and staff whose only crime was to demand for the university to disclose, divest, and delink itself from Israeli weapon manufacturing companies. The counterinsurgent discourse on “pro-Hamas” or “terrorist sympathizers” we see in the mainstream media or the concrete actions such as visa revocations, ICE raids, suspensions, dismissals, and arrests has had a chilling effect, to say the least. The concerted attacks against dissidents reveals, more than anything, that pro-Palestine, anti-genocide, and anti-colonial organizing is perceived as a threat, and that the broker intellectual class in academia or imperial stenographers of mainstream media must continue to play the counterinsurgent role in undermining the legitimate demands of those who have chosen to side with the oppressed. If you are not silent and complicit, there will be consequences.

The CIA’s Ideological/Psychological Warfare Manual, alongside other manuals on counterinsurgency, admits to the ideological strength of insurgency and the centrality of gaining legitimacy via population support at the expense of the State. While counterinsurgency or counterrevolutionary measures have seemingly unlimited resources and military power, the insurgency’s power lies in its philosophy and praxis of liberation (ideology), social and cultural capital, and historical and collective memory that is diametrically opposed to domination. In conventional war, the insurgency would find it impossible to defeat the State’s military, at least in the initial stages of an insurrection. However, in guerrilla and ideological warfare, the insurgency stands a better chance, however long this may take. After all, an insurgency is a protracted struggle that is difficult to anticipate how long it will last until insurgents collectively deliver the final blow against the State. An insurgency’s unpredictability and protractedness are what give it its strength.

In 1953, The Nature of Psychological Warfare was published (released in 2008), and the first line of chapter 1 directly positions the aims in the following way: “Psychological warfare is one of the means nations use to promote their policies and objectives vis-a-vis the outside world” (p. 3). Counterinsurgency in the form of psychological warfare, as the document argues, has been waged since nations have existed, tracing the use of rhetoric and communication theory from ancient to modern times. The Trojan Horse is claimed to be a one of the earliest examples of deception and psychological warfare, though in this instance it is intimately related to physical warfare or direct military action. Unsurprisingly, Nazi Germany is referred to as a contemporary example of the use psychological warfare via the new technologies designed for mass communication (e.g., radio). Certainly a precursor already existed in the United States with the use of the radio, documentary film, and student and professor exchange programs, and printed publications, but Germany took it to unprecedented levels through the systematic control of information and propaganda, as well as academic and scientific knowledge production.

An important insight that this document provides is the notion that, even when conventional warfare becomes inevitable and when a victor has been declared or “when the shooting war is over”, counterinsurgent action (p. 7), including psychological warfare, must be taken to consolidate the victory. In times of peace or in times of war, counterinsurgency must be used against enemies and friends alike, for it is much more effective to engage in psychological or symbolic warfare before an insurgency begins to employ its own ideological warfare (“the battle of ideas” waged through pen and paper), which, as mentioned above, is much more grounded in the material reality insurgents are trying to radically transform, thus having greater resonance with the general population.

Symbolic or epistemological warfare draws on theoretical advancements of the human sciences, particularly the disciplines and fields that have advanced some form of communication theory. As the text at hand illustrates, “Education, journalism, advertising, public opinion measurement, human relations, labor relations, military morale studies, and community studies have all served as laboratories for developing a body of theory about communication” that serves counterinsurgency (p. 9). Political science, psychology, anthropology, and sociology, as the points out, are one of the most salient disciplines in regards to empirically examining and theorizing communication as integral to social existence. Studies focused on the symbols of communication, mass media’s impact on collective behavior, how recipients of a discourse make meaning of and decisions from the communication available to them, how communities choose or abandon leaders, and, how and why social unrest emerges to threaten the status quo, not to mention the creation of a culture of fear within a (perceived or real) hostile environment.

Means of communication have undoubtedly sought to manufacture consent using the knowledge that comes out of these academic studies. It is not for nothing that the social sciences formed a central role during the Cold War. Education is also listed as yet another important discipline and field of research, namely pedagogy (of domination) and its concomitant theories of learning aimed at indoctrination: “the systematized knowledge of learning and forgetting curves, and of motivations to learn; and the several systematic theories of learning that seek to combine experimental knowledge into a structure of principles” are of great importance for counterinsurgency (p. 9). Whether conveyed through mainstream media, schools, or universities, dominant discourses are contingent upon a curriculum and pedagogy of cruelty aimed at indoctrination. The practice of counterinsurgency is the application of the theories developed by the human sciences, theories of communication, pedagogy, curriculum, and the ways knowledge and the attitude this produces functions to reproduce power.

“We can bear in mind that psywar is often ‘waged in peacetime, ‘against’ friends, ‘for’ constructive purposes, and yet give due weight to that one very important type of psywar is wage in wartime against enemies, mostly by soldiers, not civilians, and for purposes that are destructive or even lethal.” (P. 12)

Psychological warfare, whether for military action or manufacturing consent, has some key features that should be kept in mind: the source, target, message, symbol, and medium. The source refers to the individual or organization where a message originates. The target of psychological warfare can vary from individuals to entire populations, governments, and organizations. In The Nature of Psychological Warfare, the message is described as follows: “The message of psywar is always a symbol or a series of symbols that is to be communication to the target audience with the intention of inducing (a) a specific and diseried reaction that will lead to (b) specific and desired behavior on the part of that audience.” The symbol is what communicates an idea, whether in concrete or abstract terms, that will serve the purpose of counterinsurgency. For example, the imagery of Black men, who are on the verge to rape white women, symbolizes and communicates the brute, savage, and violent nature Black men, which serves to justify lynchings, mass incarceration, and police brutality. The media through which a message travels from the source to the target can vary from books, magazines, leaflets, news, movies, cartoons, radio broadcasts, commercials, and billboards.

As we have seen in Gaza, Israeli drones have dropped leaflets and issued multiple directives to already displaced Palestinians instructing them to move to designated “safe zones.” On October 13, 2025, a drone dropped leaflets after Palestinians were released from the Israeli prisons, communicating to families in the West Bank the following message: “We are watching you. If you give any support to the terrorists, you will be arrested.”

We have also seen baseless claims that Hamas carried out mass rape during Operation Al Aqsa Flood, a claim that casts Palestinians as subhuman, animal-like, and inherently violent terrorists who must be extermination. News reports and posts on social media since October 7, 2023 show coordinated efforts to communicate to the world that Palestinians deserve death, that, to bring peace to the middle east, Palestine must be eradicated. The source may range from Israeli bot farms to major outlets such as The New York Times, yet the target, message, and symbolic forms often converge regardless of the medium used to send out a dehumanizing message.

In a time of genocide, resistance, and global solidarity, psychological warfare in academia has become a primary tool to silence dissent. There are different levels that should be addressed to understand the relationship between psychological warfare and academia. At the micro level, there are FOIA requests on faculty members which aim to create a culture of fear. Everyday interactions with faculty who are indifferent and silent also convey a message that dissent is not welcome in the white halls of the ivory tower. Here, silence symbolizes complicity. Those who do not comply with the culture of indifference are thus deserving of repression. After all, “they asked for it.” “They should have listened to senior faculty who told them to not rock the boat until they got tenure.”

At the institutional level, administration has easily (or willfully) succumbed to outside pressure to discipline faculty, staff, and students who have spoken out and organized against genocide, including the university’s investments in the production of weapons and technologies of colonial violence. Title VI has been weaponized to justify summary suspensions and dismissals, whereby the “safety” of Jewish faculty, staff, and students is apparently under threat and must be defended at all costs. The message conveyed to the university community is safety, yet the aim is to shield Israel of all criticism for its genocidal actions in Gaza and to obscure the university’s complicity and concrete investments in genocide. A chilling effect doesn’t really capture the disciplining apparatus violently responding to dissent, which has impacted peoples livelihood and health for merely choosing to be on the right side of history. It doesn’t really address the fascist reconfiguration of institutions that at the very least pretended to care about academic freedom and free speech. In a time of genocide, universities and academia writ large have revealed their inherently violent foundations, which could never be reformed or serve as a source of social transformation. At the more macro state and national level, policies and executive orders adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism have also resulted in the criminalization of all critique related to Israel’s settler colonial, racist, and genocidal project.

Ultimately, psychological warfare can take various forms in different historical contexts yet the objectives remain the same: counterinsurgency, pacification, submission, and domination.

One could also situate this discussion in the 16th century to understand the relationship between the university and counterinsurgency, but this would unfortunately require more than one post [book] to cover the pervasive ways universities actively participated in colonial dispossession. It should suffice to say that universities were one of the major pillars, if not the most important, in sustaining colonialism. In a previous post, I discussed Plan Camelot in more detail. The university’s production of knowledge materialized into weapons, surveillance, and counterinsurgency against the colonized. The instrumental rationality constitutive of dominant knowledge production did not only serve as an ideological underpinning of the modern/colonial capitalist world, it resulted in the production of efficient modes of social and psychological control via the categorization and social classification of “races” designated for manual and intellectual labor, free, enslaved, coerced, or otherwise. Modernity’s instrumental rationality produces the cultural bombs in one instance, as Thiongo noted, but it also produces the very real bombs used against the wretched of the earth. This Euromodern rationality culminated in the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet its project is unfinished within the contexts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including the use of artificial intelligence and other technologies of colonial violence tested on Palestinians.

From the missionaries of the 16th century promoting salvation to the social scientists of the 20th century advancing progress and modernization, and to the proponents of democracy in the 21st century promoting peace through their Global War on Terror, all have aligned with imperial interests. The only difference, as mentioned already, is that the latter form of knowledge production manifests itself in concrete weapons that are battle tested on the colonized, such as the way Israel has become a laboratory to test weapons, surveillance, and techniques for dispossession, genocide, and population control, all of which serve US imperialism greatly for these are then deployed within the US and in regions linked to its “national interests”, that is, its imperial futurity.

Although these accounts are certainly worth including, in this chapter I will only focus on theories of counterinsurgency and insurgency that emerged within the context of decolonization and liberation movements after the second world war, a period commonly referred to as the Cold War era. It is within this time period that one sees counterinsurgency become more programmatic and systematic, where one also sees a proliferation of symposia and publications on the topic. This chapter does not provide an exhaustive account but it integrates the writing of counterintelligence agencies and academics/intellectuals in the service of empire. I balance the discussion by including the writing of revolutionaries who inverted the colonial gaze to study counterinsurgency by carefully examining the way counterinsurgent thought infiltrated the work of colonized intellectuals who, rather than committing themselves to liberation movements, worked diligently with colonial powers to co-opt them.

Geographically speaking, my book will only focus on a few countries colonized and dominated by France, England, United States, and Israel. It would be difficult to focus on all cases equally so I limit my attention to Vietnam, Algeria, Kenya, Ireland, Latin America, the US, Israel, and Palestine. I selected these cases since they will allow for examining counterinsurgency’s form and content in distinct colonial contexts responding to insurrections. While direct counterinsurgent action is addressed, the psychological and epistemological dimensions will also be examined to point to the importance of ideology, propaganda, and knowledge production in the protracted struggle to obtain the legitimacy of a population.

Indeed, the counterinsurgency that took shape after the second world war is what is referred to as a population-centered framework and approach that persists until today. This counterinsurgent framework evinces that it is insufficient to engage in armed counterinsurgency solely directed at an insurrectional movement and its members, insofar as the social and cultural fabric supporting an insurgency remains intact. It’s also insufficient to wait for insurgencies to manifest themselves as an armed struggle. Preventative counterinsurgency through psychological warfare must anticipate its emergence. With mass communication, counterinsurgency has made a systematic intent to dissuade communities from supporting insurrections, persuading and coercing them to offer their loyalty to the established matrix of power and the meager rewards it has to offer.

Legitimacy is a constitutive feature of (counter)hegemony, as I elaborate in a following post, and is thus at the heart of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Without the support of the people, both will lose the collective power needed to win a revolutionary and counterrevolutionary war. The battle of ideas is, therefore, central to maintaining, losing, or gaining legitimacy from the people that nourish a struggle for liberation. As Ghassan Kanafani wrote, the objective of counterrevolutionary forces is not only the destruction of the

“military power of the resistance, but at undercutting the social and political ground beneath its feet, effectively ending it as a movement that represents the fighting will of the Palestinian masses….This cannot be done in any straightforward way. It would require a meticulously planned strategy that can divide the loyalties of the Palestinian masses, undercutting the social pillars that the resistance relies upon not only in order to achieve its emancipatory objectives, but those that form the bedrock on which the resistance justifies its very existence. The “Palestinian state project” is precisely the bomb planted to undermine the social foundations of the resistance. This project would need to be specifically designed to obliterate popular loyalty to the resistance movement. If the opposing forces can guarantee the elimination of the resistance movement’s standing as representative of the Palestinian will, it will be quite easy to impose any form of surrender upon the Palestinian masses.”

Kanafani showed us the importance of studying counterinsurgency. The point is not only to study insurgency and counterinsurgency from the standpoint of revolutionaries. This is insufficient. From the reviewed sources, counterinsurgent intellectuals don’t hastily disregard revolutionary texts, which means that we should also engage counterrevolutionary theorists to understand their tactics and strategies, and how they studied and examined insurgencies as a means to co-opt and destroy them.

As the biographer of David Galula writes, “Combating Communist insurgency was as urgent a task as defeating Al Qaeda is now. Mao was much studied, for the same reasons we now read the Quran and jihadist doctrine.” Despite their distorted racist worldview, our enemies read revolutionary texts, and we should thus return the analytical gaze to see exactly what they are writing and how it is being put into counterinsurgent practice. As one of the authors of Ugly American writes, which popularized the notion of counterinsurgency in the US, “When I was in Korea, I picked up a book by Mao Tse-tung. . . . I hate what he stands for, but he does have a kind of genius.” (op cit, p. 127).

We must study counterinsurgency not for studying’s sake but rather because of the ethico-political responsibility the insurgent intellectual has in revealing how the past lives in the present. Or, as CLR James wrote “On the Question of Power,” we must seriously study the art and historical circumstances of (counter)insurgency so that we don’t make the same mistakes others made, particularly when considering the unforgivable betrayals that took place in past revolutionary movements. We must study the past because the present demands we dedicate our energies to what will best inform the ongoing struggles of today, even if our analyses and interpretations are only modest contributions to the knowledge that’s already born in sites of struggle.

In my next post, I will focus on Mao’s writing and why it shaped the way counterinsurgency theory was articulated after World War II.

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As scholars within and beyond academia, we write in solidarity with academic freedom of expression with our colleague, Dr. Farhana Sultana, an internationally recognized scholar and tenured Full Professor of Geography at Syracuse University since 2008, who was placed on leave for extramural speech in the context of intensifying repression.

In September 2025, Professor Sultana was targeted, harassed, and maligned on social media by individual and state actors, and media outlets for a social media post. Combined with political pressure, Syracuse University soon placed her on leave, which the AAUP Chapter at Syracuse University and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) condemned.

Syracuse University’s punitive response to Professor Sultana’s remarks exemplifies the growing chilling effect of silencing and repression, and vilification of free expression in academic institutions, where faculty, students, and staff are increasingly disciplined, harassed, surveilled, and silenced for their political speech outside the classroom. With universities capitulating to right-wing political pressure, dissenting voices now face intensified repression and growing fear of reprisal.

We issue this statement with an urgent call for Syracuse University to uphold its professed commitment to academic freedom and the right to free expression both on and off campus. Professor Sultana’s comments, made in her capacity as a private citizen on personal social media, have been deliberately weaponized by right-wing media outlets and online agitators. The ensuing campaign of harassment and institutional retaliation constitutes a grave violation of the principles of academic freedom that universities are obligated to defend.

Regardless of political or ideological differences, all scholars should be alarmed by the escalating pattern of targeting extramural speech to suppress critical voices, particularly those who are of marginalized backgrounds and communities, such as Muslim women of color, in our current political environment. Placing Professor Sultana on leave for her expression as a private individual undermines the very foundation of academic freedom. It also contradicts Syracuse University’s commitment to “unequivocally” affirm “free expression and free inquiry.”

The persecution of Professor Sultana is not only an attack on one scholar but a manifestation of the systematic assaults on higher education that have undermined the very autonomy of academic life. As educators and researchers, we affirm that the vitality of intellectual life depends on the ability to speak, write, and think freely, especially when such speech provokes discomfort or controversy.

Professor Sultana has significantly contributed to political ecology, water governance, and human rights approaches in research, scholarship, and teaching, not to mention her public intellectual work that makes academic knowledge accessible to a broader global audience. Thus, Professor Sultana must return to her critical work and continue her commitments to her students. To do otherwise would be detrimental to students who benefit from her expertise and guidance in their classrooms and research projects.

We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Sultana and with all scholars who face harassment and retaliation for their extramural speech. Syracuse University should be protecting Professor Farhana’s academic freedom and the right to free expression, including ensuring her safety—by safety, we mean providing real protection from targeted harassment and institutional retaliation, rather than selectively invoking and weaponizing the concept of “safety” to silence dissent, as we see time and again. We call on Syracuse University to immediately reinstate her, guarantee her genuine safety and due process, and reaffirm its institutional commitment to the core principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression.

Introduction

Thank you for the introduction Tristan. I’m truly honored to have been invited to be one of the keynote speakers. I’m still not sure if I was the right person to invite, but here I am, after so many years since I last presented at Bergamo as a graduate student in 2017. Sometimes I even question whether the work I do has contributed in any significant way to curriculum studies or if my work even belongs in this field. And now here I am as a keynote speaker in a room full of curriculum scholars who have to listen to me speak for hopefully not more than an hour. I hope you’re ready because I’m here to talk shit about academia.

Before I begin, I want to say that when speaking and writing about genocide, I do not claim to be an expert but rather a diligent student of so many Palestinians and their contributions to decolonial thought and praxis—a praxis that entails willing to take risks by not only speaking truth to power, as the adage goes (which seems to have lost much of its meaning as of late), but taking concrete actions against institutions that are actively enabling and participating in the genocide in Gaza. The institutions I’m referring to here are universities and academia writ large.

Positionality: A Violently Entangled History with Palestine

What brings me here today, once again, is not necessarily my expertise, but my experience of being at the receiving end of institutional violence for simply speaking out and organizing against genocide at my university, as well as for my social media posts that used to go viral before Elon Musk shadow banned my account. It seems like being a public intellectual, as Edward Said wrote about and enacted in his unshakeable commitment to the liberation of Palestine, is perceived as antithetical to the narrowly focused role of the academic who should be confined to the ivory tower, that is, to the tower of ivory and steal, as Maya Wind accurately reconceptualizes academia when speaking about the ideological as well the material ways universities participate in violence. If an academic is to have a career, they must know their proper place. They must remain loyal to the broker intellectual class and its patrons. They must aspire to be the stenographers of imperialism and settler colonialism, not to mention racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

As some of you perhaps know, last year my employer, Texas Tech University, suspended me because of my twitter posts denouncing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as the United States complicity and active participation in the livestreamed violence we’ve seen for over two years now. Despite of this or because of it, since my suspension and my reinstatement, I became a founding member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and the advisor for the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Texas Tech, and the founding member and organizer of the Decolonial Conference. As a primary hustle, I suppose I’m still an employee at a university.

I typically don’t share my lived experiences in settings like these, but I already did by mentioning my suspension, so I might as well continue. I think some biographical elements will help substantiate the argument I’m trying to make, which is that our struggles are and have always been interconnected. This argument is not mine nor is it new, but it is certainly worth repeating. I come from a place that had its fair share of insurgency and counterinsurgency. From the 1960s to the 1980s, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements (Contras) emerged in Central America. In this time period, Honduras served as the headquarters of counterinsurgency, particularly since the US effectively prevented the success of an insurrection in Honduras. Honduras became the training ground for the euphemistically termed “low intensity” counterinsurgent operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Bordering these countries, Honduras was geographically and militarily strategic in the 1980s, especially with the free range use of the Palmerola military base to train counterinsurgents, paramilitary groups, death squads (Battalion 3-16), and traditional military personnel. I mention this since the geopolitical game the US played in Central America impacted the border region where my campesino village was (and is) located (image below depicts the view near my village). In fact, Contras entered Nicaragua crossing the mountains and rivers near my village. It is this history that led many Central Americans to immigrate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My family chose to immigrate to the country responsible for all the death and destruction in our region. My entire family lived in southern California undocumented, without healthcare or financial aid for higher education, with constant encounters with police violence, incarceration, and threats of ICE raids and deportation. The first time I was incarcerated, I was only 15 years old. This not-so-distant history is what informs my anti-imperial and anticolonial position both in theoretical and political terms.

I later learned that the technologies of violence tested on Palestinians and sold to the dictatorial regimes of Central America were used to torture and kill dissidents, including students, campesinos, and Indigenous peoples. The same technologies of violence used against Palestinians and later used against my people in Honduras were certainly used against us by the pigs who surveilled our barrios and policed and criminalized our people, not to mention the constant threat of being deported. My brother was deported when he was 21 years old. After the US-back coup in Honduras in 2009, I voluntarily deported myself when I was 23 years old.

Today, we’re seeing the same technologies used at the border, the same drones, the same fascist techniques, the same brutality.

When I speak of the entangled relationship between Palestinian settler colonial dispossession and neocolonial dispossession in Honduras or in Latin America, it’s no longer an abstraction, a metaphor that I want you to consume. It’s concrete. It’s a matter of life and death. The interconnectedness of our struggles is so deep that those who were displaced and/or forced to migrate because of counterrevolutionary violence directly linked to Israel and US imperialism are now speaking out and organizing against the same technologies of violence universities assist in producing. Many are facing consequences, punished for making connections between their histories and geographies of colonial dispossession with the dispossession and genocide of Palestinians. It is the visibility of the entanglement between our struggles across time and space that those in power fear most. From Ferguson to Palestine to Cop City and the anti-ICE LA Uprisings. It is these connections that enable real coalitions to be built. It is this transnational solidarity that historically has held most strength in the past. We know that concerted efforts to fragment movements is also always part of the long history of counterinsurgency. It’s not for nothing that time, energy, and resources are used to foreclose the possibility of insurgent coalitions to be articulated in the present. If this moment has taught us anything, it is that the uprisings we’ve seen on university campuses, against Elbit Systems, and in our communities facing deportation are a testament that our collective resistance is indeed perceived as a threat. Why else would those in power try so hard to silence us if our actions were that insignificant?

Form: https://forms.gle/novSbzT1Y6ZV9Vk56

As scholars within and beyond academia, we write in solidarity with academic freedom of expression with our colleague, Dr. Farhana Sultana, an internationally recognized scholar and tenured Full Professor of Geography at Syracuse University since 2008, who was placed on leave for extramural speech in the context of intensifying repression.

In September 2025, Professor Sultana was targeted, harassed, and maligned on social media by individual and state actors, and media outlets for a social media post. Combined with political pressure, Syracuse University soon placed her on leave, which the AAUP Chapter at Syracuse University and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) condemned.

Syracuse University’s punitive response to Professor Sultana’s remarks exemplifies the growing chilling effect of silencing and repression, and vilification of free expression in academic institutions, where faculty, students, and staff are increasingly disciplined, harassed, surveilled, and silenced for their political speech outside the classroom. With universities capitulating to right-wing political pressure, dissenting voices now face intensified repression and growing fear of reprisal.

We issue this statement with an urgent call for Syracuse University to uphold its professed commitment to academic freedom and the right to free expression both on and off campus. Professor Sultana’s comments, made in her capacity as a private citizen on personal social media, have been deliberately weaponized by right-wing media outlets and online agitators. The ensuing campaign of harassment and institutional retaliation constitutes a grave violation of the principles of academic freedom that universities are obligated to defend.

Regardless of political or ideological differences, all scholars should be alarmed by the escalating pattern of targeting extramural speech to suppress critical voices, particularly those who are of marginalized backgrounds and communities, such as Muslim women of color, in our current political environment. Placing Professor Sultana on leave for her expression as a private individual undermines the very foundation of academic freedom. It also contradicts Syracuse University’s commitment to “unequivocally” affirm “free expression and free inquiry.”

The persecution of Professor Sultana is not only an attack on one scholar but a manifestation of the systematic assaults on higher education that have undermined the very autonomy of academic life. As educators and researchers, we affirm that the vitality of intellectual life depends on the ability to speak, write, and think freely, especially when such speech provokes discomfort or controversy.

Professor Sultana has significantly contributed to political ecology, water governance, and human rights approaches in research, scholarship, and teaching, not to mention her public intellectual work that makes academic knowledge accessible to a broader global audience. Thus, Professor Sultana must return to her critical work and continue her commitments to her students. To do otherwise would be detrimental to students who benefit from her expertise and guidance in their classrooms and research projects.

We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Sultana and with all scholars who face harassment and retaliation for their extramural speech. Syracuse University should be protecting Professor Farhana’s academic freedom and the right to free expression, including ensuring her safety—by safety, we mean providing real protection from targeted harassment and institutional retaliation, rather than selectively invoking and weaponizing the concept of “safety” to silence dissent, as we see time and again. We call on Syracuse University to immediately reinstate her, guarantee her genuine safety and due process, and reaffirm its institutional commitment to the core principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression.

The deadline for the Decolonial Conference is finally here. Submit your proposals today (400-600 words) by 11:59 pm Pacific Time. If you are submitting a symposium or workshop proposal, word limits are more flexible.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

decolonialconference@proton.me

Call for Proposals

https://www.decolonialconference.org/call-for-proposals

The deadline for the Decolonial Conference is finally here. Submit your proposals today (400-600 words) by 11:59 pm Pacific Time. If you are submitting a symposium or workshop proposal, word limits are more flexible.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

decolonialconference@proton.me

Call for Proposals

https://www.decolonialconference.org/call-for-proposals

In his article, Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Tbahki asks in his “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?”. To answer this question Tbakhi unsettles the notion of our writing “craft,” conceptualizing its dominant form as “a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures;…a counterrevolutionary machine”… a “network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire” (para. 2). Despite the contributions of anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon’s poetic prose that disrupted the lifeless text of social scientists and detached abstract language of philosophers, the dominant craft and its conventions still have the power to seduce even the most radical thinkers who are unwilling to name things for what they are in a time of genocide and fascist repression. There’s still a risk of becoming what Rabea Eghbariah (2023) referred to as the “scholars [who] tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent” (para. 7).

It’s undeniable that writing is intimately entangled with power. I’m not the first to say this nor will I be the last. In Western institutions, such as universities and academia writ large, there exists “a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe.” The academic writing craft commodifies, dilutes, and defangs the radical aims of theories and concepts once they are institutionalized. It is all too common for academics to believe that their work is, in and of itself, liberatory, that their articles are examples of decolonization, that their books are THE struggle. As Tbakhi writes, “We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.” Our words don’t cut deep enough.

The dominant craft is what seduces us into acquiescence and complacency, which makes us unwilling to put our bodies and “peace of mind on the line.” It exerts a pressure to compel us to avoid speaking on what matters most, on the most urgent matters such as genocide. This craft is so calculated at times that it allows for the most dehumanizing rhetoric to pass as journalism and academic rigor, whereby Palestinians can be described as human animals or the children of darkness. It is this craft that demands that we first condemn armed resistance before speaking of the incalculable violence in Gaza, that we avoid using genocide to refer to the systematic killing of Palestinians, that we use the passive voice to describe the people who are killed without a clear image of the perpetrator, and that we ultimately transform our writing into genocide apologia that absolves those who are responsible. It is this cold-blooded and cruel craft, as Dabashi writes, that is expressed in a pernicious prose that justifies genocide. To destroy the counterinsurgent craft that invalidates resistance and gives legitimacy to settler colonialism, we must challenge the “regulation, estrangement, sanitization” academia requires of us. This demands “a commitment to constant and escalating betrayals” of academic forms of writing that value method and jargon over life itself, that dismisses the power of the essay and poetic prose that grips the readers, shakes them, and wakes them from their complicit slumber. It demands, in other words, “that we poison and betray Craft at all turns.”

To write with urgency, to write poetically, to write with affect that moves the reader to action requires giving up the careerist and opportunist game academia loves to play as the world burns around its ivory towers. It means willing to make sacrifices, to give up the comfort we enjoy, to refuse being captured by institutions who will commodify every spoken and written word if let them. To write insurgently intervenes in the counterinsurgent machine we refer to as the university that will one day value the work of academics who will edit special issues and publish books on the Palestinian genocide. Mohammed El-Kurd states, that these same academics will one day lecture the world about genocide in the past tense when in fact they said and did nothing while it unfolded for their unwilling eyes to see. These vultures, as El-Kurd labels them, are in our midst. We can probably picture one or more colleagues who are unbothered by genocide today yet will likely write about it when the literal “dust settles”—when the bodies buried under the rubble are reduced to footnotes in yet another published book, when making land acknowledgements can be made on Palestinian land without consequences. These vultures will one day romanticize what they once condemned, what they did not defend, and what they enabled through their silence. They will not only romanticize the past but also depoliticize, mystify, and commodify it. El Kurd states that these “vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh” so that the past can be frozen in time in some museum. That’s exactly how counterinsurgent craft functions.

What purpose does our writing serve in the hour of genocide, when bombs continue to drop, when mangled bodies are strewn in the streets, where paramedics constantly carry real beheaded babies for the world to see? When our writing actively unsettles colonial projects, we must be ready to make sacrifices by writing unequivocally about Palestinian liberation and by unapologetically critiquing Zionism, which, as some of us personally have experienced, can easily jeopardize our careers.

No matter the consequences, we must write as if life depended on it because that’s exactly what’s at stake. As Salamanca et al. (2024) inquire:

How does one write in the midst of an ongoing genocide? When the contours of Palestine are being redrawn in blood, and when unconscionable images of starving, injured, and dead children, women, and men have become our daily breakfast? What’s our task as scholar-activists, as human beings, when we become witnesses and thus unwilling accomplices to the ravaging of an ancient people and geography that has stood tall for generations as a cradle of civilisation? (para. 1)

Elsewhere, I’ve tried to explore these questions. I’ve advanced the notion of a decolonial theoretical intifada—a shaking off of and uprising against the dehumanizing racial theories, narratives, and myths that shackle and thus limit our interrogation of and collective action within the modern/colonial world. A decolonial theoretical intifada or insurgent decolonial mode of theorizing extends far beyond accepted notions of academi ; it necessarily means that, as intellectuals, we collectively act as much as we like to critique (Abu Zuluf et al., 2025).

Mohammed El-Kurd (2024) suggests that there is much more than colonial reality and that it’s tempting to only focus on loss. It’s more difficult to pinpoint the possibilities as a genocide is taking place. What once appeared to be seemingly invincible is now revealing its weaknesses, fissures, and cracks, which will only grow until its inevitable collapse. In other words, Zionist settler colonialism’s vincibility has created the conditions to think anew and to dream and build a world free of domination where new life springs from the rubble. As El-Kurd put it, “As deadly and treacherous and unrelenting as it is, the Nakba won’t last forever. The world is changing because it must. If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution.”

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Dear Comrades, Friends, and Colleagues,

The Program Committee has decided to extend the deadline to October 12. Proposals can be 400-600 words. If you are submitting a symposium or workshop proposal, word limits are more flexible.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

decolonialconference@proton.me

Call for Proposals

https://www.decolonialconference.org/call-for-proposals

“The prison regime undermines the dignity of political prisoners”

The penalties for the crimes of rebellion and related offenses have been progressively increasing with each reform. Each criminal type is tried separately, in a desperate effort to deny the political character of our struggle. The judges invented the thesis that conspiracy to commit a crime is compatible with rebellion and the Supreme Court of Justice has accepted and backed it. The prison regime attacks the dignity of political prisoners; we are dispersed throughout all the country’s prisons, preventing our collective dynamics and the reaffirmation of our revolutionary values. We are prevented from communicating and denied the right to information. We, like the more than 110,000 prisoners in the country, suffer indignified conditions and at times conditions that threaten life, since the minimum conditions of welfare that a human being needs to live are not guaranteed, and on the contrary we are subjected to overcrowding and lack of medical attention that has led comrades to death for these causes. The entry of human rights defenders, humanitarian organizations and verification commissions is prohibited, restricted and made difficult.

In previous writing, we wrote:

From our condition as political prisoners and social fighters we reaffirm our commitment to humanity, to history, and we will continue to fulfill it. We have done so from clandestinity, from the neighborhood, from the village, from the plains, from the mountain, from prison. We hope that we can continue doing so, free, discussing, arguing, obtaining and conceding reason, and that all citizens can do so without the fear of prison or of the cemetery for daring to dream. What is wrong with dreaming? What harm do utopias do?

From the prisons today we continue fighting, for our recognition, for our dignity as social and political fighters, for the respect of human rights, for peace, for social justice, for freedom, for a new Colombia, free, democratic and at peace.

Our work over all these years since we formed as the Political Prisoners Movement has been to develop a program of peace pedagogy, in which encounter and respectful listening take place among all social sectors, political parties, churches and ethnic peoples with the most elementary purpose of articulating and carrying out political exchange with a multiplicity of expressions of Colombian society, as well as of the international [community] that supports both the struggle of peoples for their rights, their autonomy, their independence and their freedom, but also so that those processes can take place in a non-violent and not so bloody way as war, which is one of the alternatives left to us when the oligarchies in power do not want to recognize popular sovereignty; on that point Camilo Torres was clear in saying that:

“I am convinced that all peaceful avenues must be exhausted and that the final word on the path to be chosen does not belong to the popular class, since the people, who constitute the majority, have the right to power. It is necessary to ask the oligarchy how it will deliver it; if it does so peacefully, we will take it equally in a peaceful way, but if it does not intend to deliver it or intends to do so violently, we will take it violently.” (Umaña Luna; E. 2003. p. 91)

Thus, the ones we should most demand to stop the war are not the guerrilla organizations but the oligarchies that have always implemented it to impose their policies and defend their economic interests disguised as democracies, in whose name a people is invaded, trampled, murdered and annihilated.

In that pedagogical and political exchange work, we had the immense joy of receiving the visit of Sahar Francis, defender of political prisoners in Palestine, who came to learn about our experience and to share hers in that very difficult work of being in solidarity with apparently lost causes due to the prolongation of conflicts. The images shown through mass media are nothing compared to what political prisoners in Palestine—and the whole of that people—have to live daily, destined for extermination by the supposed will of a God who chose a single people to make them enjoy the delights of a fertile land amid the aridity of the deserts, and which today has become a terrain of dispute for the great world powers without caring about the fate of its ancestral inhabitants.

“Those of us who resist by different methods and means that imperialist avalanche suffer the consequences”

In the exchange with our comrade Sahar, we reaffirmed once again that the struggle of oppressed peoples is the same, but also that the interests of capitalism are the same everywhere and therefore its methods for the subjugation of peoples. The supposed democracy, paradigm of Western civilization, is being attempted to expand throughout the world, in a re-edition of the crusades that sought to subject all humanity to Christianity. Thus, as was already said before, those of us who resist that imperialist avalanche by different methods and means suffer the consequences, which among others include imprisonment as a warning for the rest of the fighters for freedom and dignity.

In our case, the Colombian State has been copying in an accelerated way the North American model of prisons, so that by being in one of the maximum security prisons built relatively a few years ago, one feels as if one had been extradited to the United States. The symbol that stands out from this “new penitentiary culture,” as the establishment has euphemistically called it, is the maximum security prison located in the city of Valledupar, capital of the department of Cesar, and which the prisoners have called “la tramacúa.” This term (which by the way has the largest population of Arab and Jewish origin due to the migrations that occurred throughout the 19th and 20th centuries) signifies big, heavy, hard, difficult. And it was designed and built with that purpose: to break the human spirit to the maximum point of leading it to see suicide as the only alternative to escape so much ignominy. “Welcome to hell,” is the greeting with which the prisoners already there receive those who are transferred from other prisons, in some cases for being sentenced to penalties that exceed 30 years and can reach 60. In the case of political prisoners, we are taken there for our organizational work in other prisons and in defense of human rights.

The conditions of this prison, which are already being replicated in others in the country, are worsened by the lack of water that makes the smell of urine and excrement permanent. The heat becomes unbearable, especially during the hours in which one must remain locked in cells without any kind of ventilation. The fights over the little water are constant, since each prisoner must collect and store it in 5-liter jugs during the 5 or 10 minutes of supply to be used for the rest of the day. It is not allowed to have radio receivers, much less televisions, and even dental floss is prohibited. This situation is already occurring in prisons located in hot climates such as La Dorada, in the department of Caldas, Jamundí in Valle, and Yopal in the department of Casanare.

On more than a few occasions excrement serves some prisoners as an element of pressure to get their health situation attended to or to insist on a transfer that very rarely is achieved. In this case, the desperate prisoner takes his own excrement and smears it on his body or threatens to throw it at the guards if his demands are not met. The rebel is then taken to the doctor, diagnosed as mentally ill and therefore prescribed anxiolytics to “lower his levels of aggressiveness.” In addition to this, most prisoners find escape in the consumption of hallucinogens; but in the case of the “tramacúa” the number of people who consume sleeping pills every night is alarming, since in prison time passes more slowly during the nights.

In sum, prisons are the instrument that the elites who hold power in the States have designed for social control, but above all to punish those who act in accordance with what the capitalist system has taught them: to get money, fame and power at any cost; only that this too is reserved for that powerful elite, which does not tolerate that anyone different from their caste dares to be equal to them. And in the end that rich and powerful class is nothing more than the result of inheritances obtained through centuries of hatred, plunder and extermination.