9.2 Rethinking Violence Through Slow Erasure

9.2 Rethinking Violence Through Slow Erasure

The concept of slow erasure emerged from the need to describe a form of violence that is neither spectacular nor immediately visible. It is not reducible to mass killings, dramatic acts of state repression, or obvious declarations of war. Rather, it is structural, atmospheric, and cumulative, a mode of unmaking that targets Indigenous life not by sudden annihilation, but through the incremental destruction of what sustains it.

I proposed slow erasure as a framework to foreground how settler-colonialism erodes agency, identity, episteme, and the relational fabric of history and affect. Unlike the dominant image of genocide as a moment of rupture, slow erasure functions through continuity: it is the denial of permits, the bureaucratic wait, the reclassification of archives, the gradual loss of ancestral lands, the miseducation of youth, the criminalisation of grief, the blurring of memory, and the slow exhaustion of hope.

Crucially, slow erasure is a relational, epistemic, and agential for of genocide by attrition. It targets not only individuals or communities, but the networks of relation that make identity and resistance possible, relations to land, to ancestors, to knowledge, and to each other. Its goal is not only to displace people but to dissolve meaning. It is an attack on the connective tissue of Indigenous life.

This framework enables us to reframe settler-colonial violence not as unfinished or incomplete (as is often assumed when genocide does not lead to mass death), but as ongoing and intentional, often operating under legal, bureaucratic, or developmental guises. It also urges us to take seriously forms of resistance that might otherwise be dismissed as minor, insufficient, or symbolic. Under slow erasure, to speak, to teach, to remember, to love, to laugh, to live, is to resist. Slow erasure has analytical value beyond the Palestinian context. It can be mobilised to examine other Indigenous and colonised communities whose cultural destruction does not fit within conventional genocide frameworks. It also offers a language for confronting contemporary forms of systemic violence in today’s neoliberal construct, where certain populations are slowly devalued, denied care, and socially erased.

In this thesis, I have proposed slow erasure not only as a critique of settler-colonial governance, but as an invitation to attend to the quiet, intimate, and prolonged forms of violence that shape our world, and to the equally enduring practices of resistance that rise to meet them.