Since October 7th 2023, the world has stood silently and watched as the Gaza Strip has been ravaged by Israeli bombardment in a brutal massacre of civilian life. In the face of over 33,000 recorded Palestinian deaths and an ongoing large-scale humanitarian crisis, we have seen the global failure to bring an end to the genocide of Palestinians and the decontextualisation of the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and stifling Palestinian resistance and aspirations for self-determination. Carcerality, in all its manifestations, is a signifier of continued colonial power. The border is ideologically configured as a fixed concrete boundary that ostensibly protects and contains those within its designated margins. Modern conceptions of security are predicated upon the infallibility and defence of the assumed state system. To fortify these ends, state power and ‘legitimacy’ manifest themselves in the militaristic potential to both secure the state and inflict violence on those that constitute as the ‘other’; i.e. non-citizens. Israel’s continued violence against the Indigenous Palestinians renders the Israeli state and the territories it illegally occupies into a bastion for colonial-carcerality; it reflects the hierarchy of global power as predicated on proximity to the imperial centre and whiteness.
The Israeli State is a site of hypersecuritised and restricted mobility, ultra-surveillance and sustained state violence. Patterns of colonial violence have been replicated by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories; both formally recognised occupied territories (like the West Bank, the Gaza strip and East Jerusalem) and Palestinian lands which were seized during the 1948 Nakba and remain occupied (with most inhabitants living in exile). Within the matrix of colonial control, Israel has tried to render Palestine into a carceral territory, devoid of statehood or sovereignty, while subjecting the Indigenous population to a regime of policing, incarceration, bordering, and surveillance. Carceral logics developed alongside the modern state interweaving the two in a nexus of violence. Grappling with both anti-carceral feminism and decolonial justice means creating room for the alternative re-imagining of the international global order, as aligned with anti-imperial feminist logics that dissolve the state and demarcated borders as antithetical to global solidarity movements for trans/international justice.
Israel’s carceral oppression of Palestinians has manifested in itself in (1) the construction of hyper-securitised borders across historic Palestine, (2) the restricted mobility of Palestinian individuals who must traverse arbitrarily violent checkpoints and barriers to navigate their own territory, (3) the systemic blockade on essential resources to the West Bank and the Gaza strip, (4) the continued attacks on the lands which were internationally designated for a future Palestinian State by the Israeli Government and the physical and psychological threat of territory reclamation, (5) non-attribution of Palestinian sovereignty that ensures legal/administrative power is bestowed solely upon the state of Israel and its Jewish citizens, (6) constructions of settlements and roads in the West Bank that enable freedom of movement to settler populations while denying those same rights to Palestinian populations, and (7) the indiscriminate murder and/or detainment of Palestinian populations that oppose, or are believed to oppose, the Israeli regime.
Carcerality is global; it is omnipresent, deeply interweaved within the international power structure, and greatly profitable. In 2021, Frontex, the border agency of the European Union (EU), began utilising Israeli Heron Drones as a new form of contactless surveillance, replacing naval patrol boats in the Mediterranean. Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, distinguishes the integration of drones into EU border surveillance as a technological upgrade that enables the EU to willfully ignore migrants in distress by rejecting or delaying the deployment of naval assistance. The EU’s strict regime of suppressing the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants is inextricable from the racially-dependent matrices of citizen desirability. Israel, as such, is not rogue or deviant in its exercise of power to deny Palestinians the right to life, but instead follows established global norms of colonial violence. The EU itself is a product of the neoliberalism that positions the state at the centre of international negotiation and cooperation. State-centric endeavours are thus partisan to the constructed hierarchies that place state security over human security.
The state is the ultimate carceral authority and colonial signifier. Carcerality is employed here for three purposes: (1) The state may arbitrarily detain, neglect, and/or execute those that attempt to cross, question or defy its borders in the exercise of bio/necropolitical power, (2) the state itself is a prison whose borders are non-transcendable and that disaffords legitimacy or power to global calls for solidarity in trans/international issues, and (3) the state may delegitimise another less powerful state at whim, for its own violent agenda, and destroy the sanctity of life in its wake. It is no coincidence that Gaza is referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, and that abolitionists like Angela Davis see the Palestinian struggle as an integral part of abolitionism…
Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) sees the destruction of the state as the ultimate end goal — the need for the state will diminish if the international sphere is governed by an ethic of care regardless of identity or positionality. Yet, those countries that have outwardly ‘committed’ to Feminist Foreign Policies, such as Germany, see the continued sale of arms and weaponry to Israel, including in the face of genocide. Here, white feminism bears again its violent head, where whiteness and capital gain has taken precedence over the protection of human life, rendering so-called FFP into mere feminist-washing. As such, we continue to see the need for decolonial approaches to foreign policy and re-imaginings of the international power system.
Time, and time again, border de/remarcations are sites of continued violence, in which the most powerful actor prevails. Reimagining the nation-state is fundamentally an Indigenous-led and feminist struggle, bestowing power on the communities that continue to be disenfranchised by colonial power. Solidarity, as such, is the ultimate form of resistance to an individualist neo-liberalism that seeks to create and maintain the elite. Single-issue politics that refuses to see linkages between carcerality, militarism, intersectional identities and the global power system, will always be insufficient in targeting the globalised systems of oppression that occur in the post-colonial world. Human security cannot be achieved without dissolving the system that places the state, as a fallacious protector of Human Rights, above the sanctity of human life. Within the tradition of anti-carceral feminist logics, decolonial abolition is the method by which the constructions of the oppressor can be dismantled, inclusive of the dissolution of modern border politics that reinforce the idea of the modern ethnostate.
Carcerality extends beyond the prison. Indeed, it permeates every aspect of the colonial-capitalist power dynamics that define relations between the Global North and the Global South. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is constructed within, and to fortify, the colonial matrix of oppression. Global inclinations towards the sole construction of the ethnostate constitute violent politics within a globalised world, and are unavoidably connected to constructions of international carcerality. As such, problematising violence and warfare constitutes a rejection of normalised settler-colonial logics. The dissolution of the modern state system aligns itself with an abolitionist-feminist politic that seeks to reinstate grassroot autonomy in the rejection of the carceral constructions that ensures the supremacy of the West. However, alternative reimaginings are routinely and systemically excluded from popular consciousness, in part due to the structural omission of Black, Indigenous, POC, and feminist perspectives and traditions from academia and politics. It is then incumbent upon those in both the Global North and the so-called Global South to advocate for decolonisation across trans/international borders to achieve justice.
