GENOCIDE IN LATE MODERNITY: PALESTINIAN AND GUARANI-KAIOWA LAND STRUGGLES

Abstract

The article interrogates morally indefensible and politically untenable conditions by situating them within a broader constellation of contemporary forms of collective violence sustained under regimes of authoritarian power. It focuses on Palestinians and the GuaraniKaiowa, both of whom have been subjected to protracted, structurally embedded genocidal processes driven by displacement, territorial fragmentation, and the systematic expropriation of land. Rather than treating these cases as exceptional, the article foregrounds their structural affinities, revealing how distinct geographies of violence are organised through comparable logics of spatial control, dispossession, and abandonment. Adopting a critical socio-spatial perspective, the analysis examines how violence is not only enacted upon populations but actively materialised through the production of ‘impossible spaces’, which are territorial configurations that render life increasingly unviable by eroding its material, cultural and ecological conditions of reproduction. These spaces are neither accidental nor static but are historically contingent formations produced through ongoing struggles over land, sovereignty, legitimacy and, ultimately, basic human rights. Within these constrained and often lethal spatial conditions, the article highlights how resistance emerges not merely as survival, but as a form of spatial praxis. In doing so, they reconfigure space itself, transforming sites of imposed impossibility into arenas of political articulation and socio-spatial transformation.