Replicating Palestine in India: a comparison of the architectural violence of the Indian and Israeli states

Examining architecture as the site of direct and indirect violence, this paper compares the state-authored demolitions performed by government authorities in India to those carried out by the Israeli authorities in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In both cases, the targeted communities are subject to “terror talk” which justifies state-sanctioned violence more generally. Placing this comparison within a conceptual framework of architectural violence, it draws parallels between multiple dimensions of state-sanctioned demolitions in the two cases. The comparison is made across two registers: the official rhetoric surrounding the demolitions and the methods employed to construct and selectively invoke the illegality of structures in the two geographies. Through these comparisons, I explore the state’s political utilisation of planning, development and law enforcement to deliberately dispossess targeted communities, framed as “suspect,” “terrorist,” and “other,” in the service of exclusivist nation-building or state-building projects.