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Coloniality and Necropolitics in the Age of COVID-19: The Question of Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

Robin Gabriel
Robin Gabriel*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
*
E-mail: rocgabri@ucsc.edu
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Abstract

This article interrogates the necropolitical logics of the Israeli settler-state apparatus towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines these logics and practices through the prism of coloniality, which conceptualizes manifestations of colonialism (whether material, epistemic, or ontological) as a diffuse set of practices, opening up the conversation to discuss the ways in which international organizations, other states, and the Palestinian Authority continue to inflict the colonial harm through the employment of particular policies. Centring coloniality as an analytic allows a more global perspective and widens the discussion to include the ways in which Palestinians practise decoloniality, building and imagining “otherwise” worlds. This article maps the ways in which the devastation of the pandemic is not a product of the pandemic itself, but larger legacies of material, epistemic, and ontological colonial intervention.

Keywords

Palestinian liberationinternational solidarityIsraeli settler colonialismvaccine apartheiddecoloniality
Type
Research Article
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 28 - 45
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Asian Journal of Law and Society

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