Resisting Erasure

The world continues to witness, in real time, the attempted erasure of entire peoples, landscapes, and their histories. War and scorched-earth tactics have displaced people, destroyed their lands and environments, rendering them desolate for reproduction and return. The criminalisation of people, whether as sans-papiers or simply for having the “wrong” skin colour, subjects entire populations to imprisonment, abandonment, and other forms of structural and intimate violence. Alongside this is the slow violence of development and of the international community and multilateral institutional structures, in which we have long been asked to place our faith, yet which increasingly reveal themselves as complicit, inadequate, or obsolete in the face of ongoing colonial destruction.  

These violences operate not only materially but also narratively and epistemically. Power works through the manipulation of narratives, memory, representation, and storytelling: by determining whose histories are preserved and what is considered true; whose suffering is made visible, whose voices are legitimised, whose stories are morally persuasive and recorded, and whose experiences are erased or rendered unintelligible.  

Yet erasure is never merely destructive; it is a profoundly contested process of power. It reorganises spaces, redraws the horizon of political possibility, and determines whose lives are grievable, whose knowledge counts, and whose futures are considered trustworthy of imagination, recognition, and realisation. 

This year’s Debating Development series, “Resisting Erasure”, takes Palestine as a critical point of departure - not as an isolated case, but as a lens through which broader global dynamics of erasure and resistance against it come into sharper focus. In Palestine, processes of dispossession, fragmentation, and elimination are starkly visible, but they are neither exceptional nor confined. Rather, they resonate with and help illuminate interconnected struggles throughout the world - from extractive frontiers and sites of ecological devastation to prisons, courts, and infrastructures of surveillance.  

Bringing together a diverse range of renowned scholars, social organisers, artists, and legal thinkers, the series examines how attempted erasure operates across these different terrains.  What links genocide and ethnic cleansing to ecocide? Does power to narrate violence eclipse the violence itself, deciding which lives become history and which disappear into silence? To what extent does cultural production resist historical and present erasure (material, social, and political)? How do legal systems enable disappearance under the banner of protection and rights? In what ways do security regimes, digital technologies, and public institutions normalise and reproduce forms of erasure? 

“Resisting Erasure” continuously foregrounds resistance; not as abstract solidarity, but as grounded practices of refusal, collective survival, and relationality. From poetry and memory to histories of and ongoing land defence and abolitionist organising, these struggles are not only against disappearance but also for the reconstruction of better worlds - worlds grounded in justice, dignity, and collective liberation. 

Rather than collapsing differences into easy comparison, the series insists on thinking relationally: how histories, infrastructures, and forms of violence travel, connect, and are continually contested. It asks what it means to build solidarities that do not erase differences but are forged through them - and what Palestine, in its specificity, makes visible about the conditions of struggle and solidarity in these times.