Modern worldmaking and the 21st century colonial genocide in Gaza

Commonplace analyses of responsibility for Israel’s genocide against Gaza come in concentric circles. In the innermost circle, responsibility is attributed to Israel’s ruling politicians. The circle is widened to include the Israeli military, its settler-colonial political culture, the US’s massive military aid, and (most broadly) Western imperialism and racial capitalism. Extending the latter analyses, we situate this genocide in the globally hegemonic world that we call colonial modernity. This concept understands colonial relations as deeply constitutive of modern worldmaking in the past and present, thus subverting the hegemonic stereotype that modernity has superseded colonial relations. We focus on a meshwork of six such deeply constitutive relations (Arora and Stirling, 2023), which we conceptualise as political topology of colonial modernity today: assuming comprehensive superiority; asserting military supremacy; enforcing gendered domination; appropriating cultural privileges; extending imaginations of control; and expanding toxic extractions. We examine how this political topology of colonial-modern worldmaking has constituted Israel’s attack on Gaza as a 21st-century colonial genocide. As forms of violent socio-materiality are enacted in new and horrific ways, those enactments can leave topological relations largely unchanged. To transform constitutive topologies, adequately mobilised counter-forces are required. Although Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an extreme case, its political topology has wider relevance. Alongside intensifying direct solidarities with Palestinian resistance against Israeli colonialism, therefore, we must attend to diverse global struggles that directly confront modernity’s topological relations for worldwide decolonial transformations, so that many worlds may flourish on Earth.