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In the past three years, a collective call has emerged across the world to name the violence inflicted by Israel upon Gaza as “genocide”. Such legal designation has mobilised important demands for accountability and for the fulfilment of international human-rights obligations. Yet, it also raises a broader question: what forms of harm, history, and structural power remain obscured when violence is understood primarily through legal categories? How might we understand the many forms and scales of erasure that exceed any single legal designation?

This opening session takes erasure as a starting point for understanding violence not as a series of discrete events, but as an ongoing process through which the conditions of individual and collective existence are dismantled and transformed. Erasure operates across bodies and intimate lives, landscapes and ecologies, economies and infrastructures, legal and political institutions, as well as across pasts, presents, and imagined futures. Beginning from Palestine, the session examines how interconnected systems of colonial, political, economic, and ecological power sustain these processes across different contexts and temporalities.

The discussion considers both the necessity and limitations of the languages through which violence is named, while examining how responsibility extends beyond direct perpetrators through structures of complicity, omission, and political and economic enablement.

Ultimately, the session asks: How can we recognise and dismantle the systems that enable erasure in different contexts? What forms of life, memory, solidarity, and political imagination emerge within and against these conditions, and what alternative horizons for collective liberation exist and can be conjured?

Haris Zargar

Dr Haris Zargar is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the editor-in-chief of The Hague-based The Contrapuntal magazine. His research focuses on agrarian change, Islamism, foodways, and settler colonialism(s).

Maha Abdallah

Maha Abdallah is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp. Her research examines Zionism, settler colonialism, and the legal framework and concept of genocide, situating the Nakba as an ongoing structural process of destruction and elimination against the Palestinian people. Prior to her doctoral studies, Maha worked with human rights organisations on legal research, advocacy, and international accountability. Her work and engage international law, human rights, occupation, apartheid, genocide, and corporate accountability.

Orouba Othman

Orouba Othman is a joint PhD candidate in Social and Political Sciences at Birzeit University and the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), pursuing a double-degree doctorate. Her doctoral thesis, “The Dynamics of Hope in the Everyday Society of Pain in the Gaza Strip: Multiple Futurities and Temporalities,” is supported by the ULB Development Cooperation Fellowship (2024–2028), the Tania Baker-Asad Scholarship (2024–2025), and the PARC Fellowship (2023–2024). Her research focuses on the anthropology of pain and hope, critical studies of temporality, and anticolonial epistemologies. Her publications include the peer-reviewed article “Beyond the Time of Genocide: Social Pain as a Site of Social Action and Hope in the Gaza Strip” (Idafat, October 2024), the book chapter “Antisemitism and its Contemporary Version: The Jewish as the Enemy of the Zionist Palestine” in Modern Palestine: Exemplars of Liberating Knowledge (Institute for Palestine Studies, 2024), and “Towards a New Sociology of Visual Art Production in Palestine” (A. M. Qattan Foundation, 2025).

Shayma Nader

Shayma Nader is a Palestinian researcher and artist born in Jerusalem. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Translation from Birzeit University and a master’s degree in Creative & Cultural Industries from SOAS, University of London. She is a PhD candidate in Development Studies at the University of Antwerp researching.