Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP)

Academy project funding (2025-2029), Research Council of Finland; 

PI: Prof. Mikko Joronen; Reseachers: Dr. Antti Tarvainen, Dr. Wassim Ghantous

The magnitude of recent destructive events in Palestine has rapidly destabilized the Middle East region and the global liberal order of power. The war on Gaza has spread to several Middle Eastern countries – Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran – and has undermined the legitimacy of international courts, the rule-based international system, and freedoms of speech and assembly in many Western liberal democracies. This project examines these global and regional proliferations of Palestine through their 'frontiering'. It explores how various global and regional relations have intensified at the settler colonial frontier in Palestine, while also demonstrating how Palestine, as a space of heightened securitization, militarization, environmental violence, and circulation of technological innovations, creates and intensifies frontiers elsewhere. 

Empirically, the project focuses on three key frontiers of making the ‘global Palestine’: innovation capital, destabilization of democracy, and ecologies of security and militarization. It investigates their global journeys through concrete processes and frictions emerging on the ground, demonstrating the close entanglement of innovation capital with colonial frontier expansions, the destabilization of democracy with tactics of the messianic far-right, and the widespread environmental damage with distribution of security and military technologies. Methodologically, the GLOPAL project develops frontier-making as an approach capable of grasping complex globally related phenomena with a multi-sited research methodology that goes beyond metaphoric analyses of frontier expansion, one-directional core-periphery models of colonial subjugation, and linearly traveling theories. Conceptually, the notion of the frontier is developed to offer a ‘milieu concept’ suitable for approaching various related events and sites as they unfold at the thresholds (territorial/relational, global/local, unbounded/earth-bound, connected/disrupted, fluid/friction, etc.) present in landscapes of frontiermaking. Altogether, the project offers a novel approach for thinking political geographies on a planet divided by present colonialities, connecting various sites around the world while critically elaborating on existing geopolitical trends and their entanglement with the economy, environment, democracy, and conflicts.

ERC Consolidator Grant, 2023-2028

Principal Investigator: Prof. Mikko Joronen; Researchers: Dr. Wassim Ghantous, Dr. Dalia Zein, Dr. Abdalrahman Kittana, MSc Majed Abusalama, MSc Danna Masad, MSc Khalid Dader

This project elaborates ways of making home among those dwelling in societies facing prolonged crises. It traverses through various landscapes to look at ways in which people make home in spaces that are familiar, yet repelling, incapacitating and altogether negating in nature. Such landscapes,  in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza in particular, reflect various forms of crises engendered around economic collapse, infrastructural shortage, protracted conflict-situation, colonial presence, and/or continuation of war by various means. These crises force us to pose a key question on what it means to stay, and make a home, in spaces that constantly expose life to disruptions, incapacitations, and material negations? How does one dwell in crisis, in catastrophe, or in complete annihilation of conditions of living?

HOMCRI project responds to this research challenge on three fronts. Firstly, it generates empirical knowledge on what it takes to dwell in crisis and conflict areas, and with the political conditions they establish, by focusing on spaces that violently separate, distance, and amputate people from their familiar everyday spaces through affective disruptions, material deprivations, and conditions of incapacitation. Secondly, it does so by developing negativity as a methodological tool for approaching dwelling as a tension between ‘home-making’ and ‘spaces of exposure’. Thirdly, it offers a novel conceptual elaboration of negativity as a worldly condition, which challenges the paradigmatic notions of materiality, affect and dwelling in current posthuman thought. The project hence rethinks the negative foundations of human-world relationship by focusing on ways in which negative material and affective bindings align with incapacitating political conditions in prolonged crisis, conflict and colonial situations. HOMCRI has various subprojects (described below) that approach these questions from various angles. 

Kone Foundation Grant, 2023-2027; PI: Tiina Järvi

In the past decade, Lebanon has witnessed an accelerating number of crises that have showcased the malfunctioning of the state and its structures. Waste crisis, water crisis, electricity crisis, multiple political crises, dollar crisis, petroleum crisis, hyperinflation, and several shortages, are but examples of the grievances faced by those living in Lebanon. The covid pandemic, the port explosion in 2020 with its political aftermath and the bread shortage created by the war in Ukraine have increased discontent, but they are by no means its starting point. In fact, since the civil war (1975–1990) there have been little significant changes in Lebanon’s political priorities (Arsan 2018, Salloukh 2015), no concentration on the welfare of ordinary citizens. By 2022, media, international actors and Lebanese civil society were describing Lebanon as collapsed, failing, or already failed state. This research explores the situation in Lebanon by elaborating the concept of failure to ask what it means to live and act in a failing state. By combining ground-up ethnographic fieldwork practice with analysis of policy papers on and political and social responses to the current situation on Lebanon, the research project provides a novel approach to state failure. This is achieved by going beyond the idea of a failed state as a security threat, by rather allowing the voices of those who act amid it to be heard.

The research project draws from geographical and anthropological literature on failure (Amin 2016, Musallam 2020, Osborne 2019, Perrons and Posocco 2009, Smith and Woodcraft 2020), and connects them to the emerging literature on ‘geographies of negative’ (Bissel et al 2021). The focus is on the notion of limit, in particular, as it allows to acknowledge agency as constrained. I am interested in what happens if we see failure not as something that can be left behind and learned from (Carroll et al 2017: 3), but as something that exposes the limits of doing. This approach enables taking seriously the rupturing aspects of failure, to see it as something that continues to curtail and destroy capacities (Philo 2017) rather than as something that allows creativity and innovations to emerge (Lewis 2014).