Palestine Talks Spring 2026

The Expansions of Spaces of Killing and the Logic of Evisceration against Gazans

Prof. Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Global Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London)

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian – a Palestinian Jerusalemite feminist whose scholarship on the settler colonial state’s brutality, unchilding, securitized and sacralized politics, state crime, law and society, and global feminist politics, challenges epistemic violence. She is a Professor Extraordinarius – University of South Africa, the Global Chair in Law – Queen Mary University of London, and a visiting Professor at Princeton University.

Author of numerous books among them Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” (Cambridge University Press, 2010;  Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding” Cambridge University Press 2019);  co-edited volumes Engaged Students in Conflict Zones, Community-engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021); The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press 2023), and a co-edited volume with Stephen Sheehi entitled: Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime, 2024.

Abstract of the lecture
The talk will discuss overkill during the genocide in Gaza, not as excessive brutality but as a settler-colonial formation that organizes death as a totalizing condition of life. As a colonial technology, overkill operates through the systematic evisceration of the colonized sociopolitical body—its cohesion, interdependence, and capacity for regeneration. It subjects populations to continuous and routinized death, rendering human life, family, and community continuity not sacred but instrumental. Death itself becomes capital—extracted, weaponized, and circulated as both power and commodity. In this regime, the destruction of life and infrastructure is not collateral but constitutive: overkill transforms vitality into a means of accumulation and demonstration, a currency of colonial power that is tested, displayed, and sold to produce further capital for the settler state and its global enablers. The talk will conclude by arguing that speaking about the settler colonial regime of overkill centers the unending dispossession and slaughter of the starved, maimed, wounded, displaced, almost dead, and dead as an enfleshed state criminality.

This talk is organised by UGent Palestine Talks in collaboration with Eye on Palestine Festival  and funded by the Internationalisation@Home initiative of the Department of Languages and Cultures.

Registration for this lecture is required. 

Date: 29/04/2026

Time: 7pm to 9pm

Venue: Auditorium 2, Franz Cumont, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent

Contact: Lisa.Franke@UGent.be; Islam.Dayeh@UGent.be