Abstract
This session examines ecocide as a historically evolving form of colonial and capitalist violence, in which ecological destruction has repeatedly taken different but connected shapes across time and space, from plantation economies and extractive frontiers to contemporary regimes of fossil capital, militarized occupation, and climate colonialism. It traces how these patterns of destruction are inseparable from the attempted displacement, elimination, and marginalization of peoples, from Palestine to Turtle Island, from the DRC to Kashmir, illustrating how land is rendered both resource and battleground. Engaging debates in climate justice, including work that reads the destruction of Palestine as inseparable from wider planetary ecocide (Malm, 2025), the session explores how ecological devastation is embedded in global systems of power that distribute vulnerability and survival unevenly. At the same time, it foregrounds land as a site of struggle, care, and refusal, highlighting how affected communities contest these intertwined violences and articulate alternative relations to life, territory, and ecological repair.
Invited Speakers
Munira Khayyat
Munira Khayyat is a writer and anthropologist who works on life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her award-winning book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) illuminates resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also, necessarily, as an environment of living. She is currently working on her second book, Heart of Black Gold: Kinship, Archives, Empire, Oil, that intimately fleshes out the heart of empire in Arabia. She has taught at NYU Abu Dhabi (2023), NYU (2024-2026), the American University in Cairo (2013-2023) and the American University of Beirut (2011-2013). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2013), an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (1998) and a BA in history (1997) from the American University of Beirut. She was a Global South Visiting Scholar at Princeton Anthropology (Spring 2024) and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019).
Ewoud Vandepitte
Ewoud Vandepitte is a temporary lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Ghent University. Inspired by a decade of social movement involvement, his work engages with social-ecological struggles. His doctoral dissertation examines how Belgian climate movements struggle to cultivate and maintain hope while navigating tensions around justice, urgency, and emotions like anger, fear, and grief.
Jutte Dessein
Jutte Dessein is a recent graduate from Ghent University and currently works at Oxfam Gent-Centrum. She was closely involved with the student encampment for Palestine at the UGent and has been active for years in the Belgian climate movement. As a student, she researched the narratives and framing around climate justice within the Belgian climate movement and in secondary education in Flanders. Through political theater ('beweegredes') Jutte makes activist concepts and methods accessible for a broader public.