Gaza and the Great March of Return: Enduring violence and spaces of wounding

Abstract

This paper develops an agenda for political geographical work on violence, war, and trauma. Drawing from an analysis of the Great March of Return, a series of mass demonstrations in the Gaza Strip in 2018 and 2019, it argues that political geography and related fields could be enriched by the concepts of enduring violence and wounding. Enduring violence is offered as a supplement to existing geographical work on slow violence and cognate concepts such as ‘everyday’, banal′, and ‘chronic’ violence, offering fresh ways of understanding the long-lasting effects of violence and their specific material origins. Wounding is offered as a supplement to political geographical work on necropolitics and the ‘right to kill’, emphasising how a concomitant ‘right to maim’ troubles contemporary theorisations of biopower and necropolitics, and extending geographical work on trauma to include physical bodily trauma. Taken together, the argument is not only that acute (or epidemic) forms of violence can have chronic (or endemic) consequences but also that some forms of harm, like wounding, are characterised by material configurations that are calibrated or otherwise capacitated with the power to impart future harms even in the absence of future ‘blows’. Taking inspiration from geopolitical forensics, enduring violence places new emphasis on the ongoing and lasting harms that inhere in specific geo-materialities of wounding. The paper concludes with a reflection on the relation between enduring violence and wounding and their implications for geographical work on violence, war, and trauma.