Violence and (de)development: From Gaza to “fragile and conflict-affected situations”

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Adam Tooze in Chartbook:

Starting with Gaza and asking where else people starve and fight for their lives is an urgent and productive task. I wrote about the question a few weeks ago. I am prompted to return to it by a new publication by a team at the World Bank.

Right now, I find it impossible to think about violence and (de)development without forming this loop: Gaza-Israel-development-(de)development. The World Bank report includes West Bank and Gaza in its data set of “fragile and conflict-affected situations”, but the list extends to the entire world.

As I argued in the previous post: Gaza is an extreme case because it involves a rich and powerful state victimizing a tightly controlled and largely defenseless population under a state of siege with the explicit intent of ethnic cleansing in conjunction with an ongoing settler-colonial project. Writing in the 1940s Raphael Lemkin struggled to find categories to describe just such a case in Nazi occupied Poland. The neologism he coined was genocide.

More here.

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