CSSD working group Racial Capitalism co-sponsors Colonial Pasts and Violent Present of Confinement in Counterinsurgencies with Laleh Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics SOAS University of London, on the evolution of modern regimes.

Detention and confinement— both of combatants and large groups of civilians—have become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century, with a huge increase in the employment of detention camps, internment centres, and the enclosure or isolation of groups of people. Khalili examines the practices and historical roots of two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day – the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. She argues that although practices of incarceration have been defended by the assertion that they constitute measures to “protect” populations against violence and terrorism, liberal states have in fact consistently acted illiberally in their confinements, and that this has increasingly encouraged policymakers willingly to choose to wage wars.

There will be a reception after the talk.

Additional co-sponsorship by the Center for Social Difference, Columbia University, Barnard’s New Directions in American Studies, Verso Books, and the People’s Forum.