Entwined Complicities: Genocidal Geographies of the Youth Carceral State and Arrivals to Educational Abolitionism

This article is continued documentation of genocidal geographies of the youth carceral state, particularly as they have been mapped and operated in occupied Historic Palestine. Through close (re)reading of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (2019), I showcase the buildup and maintenance of a youth carceral state in Palestinian context premised on three organizing logics: 1) security theology, 2) caging as edifice of captivity, and 3) unchilding as continued dispossession. Altogether, lessons from Incarcerated Childhood and their continued facilitation against Palestinians highlight a collective disposition of entwined complicities for those of us in the United States, as showcased in the recent heightened violence and asymmetrical genocidal warfare in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories by Israeli militarized forces since 2023. Pertinent to those in professionalized spaces of social work, education, and community-based youthwork, this article offers an urgent invitation to name the violences produced by globalized youth carceral states explicitly, inclusive of contexts within the United States. Concurrently, I contend we must make conscious pivots toward educational abolitionism, anchored in Palestinian sumud (steadfastness), as guiding praxis to engage in defiance and an end to the outright (neo)colonial evictive denials from childhood for children living under colonial genocidal geographies.