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Disability, Colonialism, and Global History

By Zoe Wineck and Hunadah Al Hariri

Part 1: Global History as an Approach Has Marginalized Disability

As a Jewish settler who grew up on Anishinaabe land and a displaced Arab who sought asylum in Europe, who both happened to meet as students of Global History Masters, we found ourselves repeatedly questioning the ‘defaults’ that have been adopted into our university’s curriculum and wondering about the process that led to them. This is relevant not only in the selection of topics, but also in terms of what voices and arguments are made available, and which ones are not.[1] In this blog, as history students, we will focus on Global History and explain our selection process in this section. Our starting point to this blog was with both of us, on multiple occasions, questioning the pre-existing arguments for Global History and feeling shocked at what the field has overlooked or has not prioritized. We felt that together, we could offer a more robust argument because our identities are stereotypically considered opponents. At the end of the day, we did experience life through different power structures and epistemological dynamics. However, this enables us to bring together a more attentive, detailed, and inquisitive historiographical approach that is more resistant to perpetuating silences.

Between the two of us, there are too many topics, fields and/or methods that we feel that Global History has overlooked, but for the purpose of this blog we will focus on “disability history.” One reason that we chose “disability history” over other “non-default” fields of study is because it seems to us like the first one to be dropped from the quotas of “representation.” Before we explain more about the quotas, we need to clarify what we mean with “non-default” fields. In simplest terms, we consider the types of subfields that “need” to exist to fill in a gap in academic branches, in this case history, as indicators of what is considered the “default.” For example, there was a need to create subfields of history to study “women’s history” but less likely “men’s history,” and subfields to study “queer history” but not for “heterosexuality history,” in addition to those that focus on “disability history,” as opposed to the absence of a history field for the “able-bodied.”[2] To clarify, these “fields” were created because they are not represented in the “default,” which is likely to be based on the perceptions and interests of able-bodied, heterosexual men. And these subfields are the most likely to be seen in quotas of representations: most curriculum today will have to squeeze in a week or more for “gender,” “women,” “queer,” or other “non-default” fields. The argument we aim to make is not a mere criticism of history in general and Global History in particular but rather to highlight the impact of “default” power on real-life situations, historically and today. We will start our blog by introducing the field of Global History, explaining its shortcomings regarding epistemic invisibility, and the real-world impact of the field. In the following section, we want to look at how war caused disabilities as a form of colonial subjugation. In the last section, we will look at the case of Israel-Palestine and how the state of Israel, since its establishment in 1948, has consistently used the maiming of Palestinians as a colonial tool. The history of this practice has been marginalized in historiography but is essential to understanding the conflict today.

Collective Banner. Photo by Wan-Shin Lai.

Why Global History?

In this section, we will introduce the field of Global History and explain why we expect more from it. To introduce this relatively new field of study, we will use a text with rhetoric that is very familiar to us as it was written by our own professor. Sebastian Conrad’s What is Global History seeks to define a field which remains up for debate.[3] However, as Conrad’s definition and work are incredibly relevant to our studies, we have followed the definition and lens present within his work. Conrad’s global historical approach looks to place events and phenomena in a wider context, moving these events into a global context, which allegedly minimizes the Eurocentrism of the previous discipline of “World History.” Essential for our argument, Conrad highlights the need for Global History to “engage systematically with the issue of structured global transformations and their impact on social change” and be more than the universalized transnational history of “happy stories” or encounters.[4] Global History has also been used as “a response to social challenges and to demands to create a more inclusive, less narrowly national perspective on the past.”[5] Additionally, Global History was born to minimize the Eurocentrism present in “World History,” which often views history as moving on the temporal timeline of the West transferred onto “the Rest,” and moves further to avoid regional/national centrism of any kind.[6] However, Conrad’s global historical approach and MA program located in Berlin might produce a situation in which “the West” tries to historiographically heal “the Rest.” Despite this, there is great potential through different case studies for the field of Global History to examine previous oversights.

Conrad writes extensively about countering methodological nationalism and fragmentation by using Global History. We believe that Global History includes making visible systems of power used to fragment, dislocate, displace, and erase certain peoples from national and Global histories; an idea that is in line with Conrad’s plea “to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the interactions and connections that have made the modern world.”[7] Those most frequently silenced in historiography are the disabled. While some academics have tried to examine disability through a Global History lens, it is far from addressing the issue directly. We found only two works, both books by Professor Esme Cleall, directly linking disability to Global History, and both agree that disability history needs a “global moment.”[8] This notion of viewing disability through a global lens is what currently exists regarding disability and global studies, but not a distinct Global History analysis of disability.[9] Cleall has also acknowledged the critique that Global History has not paid enough attention to the power dynamics that shape “exchange, connection, integration and mobility,”[10] the pillars of Global History.

Otherwise, the theme of disability in academia is limited to a specialized subfield within disciplines like Disability History, Gender Studies, and recently, scholars linking Postcolonial history and Disability history. However, accusations have been leveled at Disability History for its tendency to omit Black voices,[11] and for white experiences constructing the theories within disability history.[12] There is a clear gap[13] and an important one to fill when it comes to writing a history of disability that moves away from simplifying disability as a status or identity and looks at it as a complex subject that requires an intersectional approach.[14] In comparison to Global History, some might argue that social history or gender history theories are better suited to focus on discourses of inclusion and rights-based approaches that “refute disability as lack, as inherently undesirable, and as the sign, evidence, or fetish of injustice and victimhood.”[15] However, Global History is positioned to analyze how identities and locations correlate to the increase or decrease of disability risk. Disability risk is how intersecting identities, including but not limited to race, class, religion, gender, and birthplace, carry more risk of becoming disabled to some people rather than others, depending on power disparities.[16] These dimensions, precisely, can be seen in disabilities caused in colonial contexts. This risk of becoming disabled is what we will focus on in the following section.  

Part 2: A Short Global History of Colonialist maiming practices

Analyzing Maiming as a Colonial Practice: One Approach to Global History

In this section, we will use our lens as Global Historians to select one example through which we will analyze disability; to be specific, we will look at colonially produced disabilities. These are disabilities that come from colonial militaries and rulers injuring, maiming, or mutilating people who resist, civilians and the populations under their control, occupation or rule; direct or indirect. We will do this by examining the power structures and practices that framed the relationship between Western colonial regimes and the disabilities existing in the communities they colonized. From here on out, in Parts 2 and 3, we are arguing that:

1. Colonialist Regimes have purposefully inflicted disability onto individuals as part of their efforts to subjugate people under their control.

2. Historical analysis of forced disablement in colonial contexts has not been connected globally, thus allowing it to reappear in real life under different covers (self-defense, fighting terror, etc.).

3. Global History’s inadequate interaction with colonial-caused debilitation is an indicator of a failure to step away from euro-centricity and to recognize how colonial pasts shape metropoles in the present.[17]

Here, we are building our case supported by arguments made in Intersectional Colonialities: Embodied Colonial Violence and Practices of Resistance at the Axis of Disability, Race, Indigeneity, Class, and Gender and from Global Histories of Disability. Both books investigate how disability has been constructed and analyzed through a colonial and Eurocentric lens. For example, right at the beginning of Intersectional Colonialities, we are invited to question the normalization of the colonialist practice of having “one’s humanness and personhood constrained by inherently violent (yet accepted) systems, structures, policies, and practices.”[18] We will present examples of these colonialist systems and practices in this section. In Global Histories of Disability, Cleall notes that the connection between colonialism and disability is critically undertheorized. What currently exists has been written by literary critics, sociologists, and political scientists; historical analysis needs to be expanded.[19]

Drawing colonialism and disability together in historiography requires a global perspective in order to counter the narratives of disability being a personal tragedy. Furthermore, a global perspective enables historians to prioritize the examination of habitual degradation and debilitation of people. Scholar Garland-Thomson attributes disability to the “randomness of fate,” but this is not the case for all those debilitated through colonial settling, as war and imperialism create situations where physical and social suffering is systematically created.[20]   

There are many examples of how colonial regimes used mental and physical mutilation as a tool of control. These examples are expansive, and not only limited to the settler colonialist societies, explored later in the Palestine case study. The ‘histories of mass disablement’ from the transatlantic slave trade, from whipping to head trauma, branding, and maiming as punishment[21] to the deliberate use of mutilation in acts of neo-colonialism and imperialism in the context of the United States of America are examples of this. The debilitating aftermaths of the United States’ indiscriminate nuclear bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be seen as a massive overstep of American imperialism. The use of Agent Orange indiscriminately across society in Vietnam causes disability until the present day. These acts of warfare caused mass civilian casualties, disabling people and, in turn — the population. The imperial US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq were pursuits indiscriminately targeting and disabling civilian life. Before both American interventions, high levels of war-related disability existed, but the US invasion only exacerbated the rates of maiming and war-caused amputations, especially among children.[22] The practices of forced sterilization of Indigenous women in and during the former British Empire were acts of colonial maiming. The systematic maiming of the hands of enslaved rubber workers in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold II was used as punishment. Most people know a few of the former but probably have not looked at them through a comparative global lens. Beyond the typical perceptions of disability and concepts associated with it, such as acceptance, medicalization, or “rights-based” approaches[23], an analysis of the colonial continuity of rendering people “disable-able” is lacking. This would include researching “the legacies of colonialism, which include war, nuclear testing, the export of pollution, and the emergence of sweatshops,” which all “contribute to ‘the production of impaired peoples’” creating disabled populations in the past and today, and continued through healthcare disparities.[24]

Due to colonialism’s broad nature we will now narrow our viewpoint down further and look at disability at the intersection of settler-colonialism, specifically maiming caused by colonial attacks. To examine this intersection, we have chosen Palestine as a case study. First, because we found historical documentation in Jasbir Puar’s well-researched piece, The Right to Maim; and second, because of the current events in Gaza where we see the repetition of the same maiming practices, recorded in Puar’s text — in more intensity and to an incredibly horrific degree in Gaza. Below is our attempt to bring a newly but well-researched instance into the realm of Global History in order to inspire and create a jumping-off point for more research.

Tunis, December 2024. Photo by Georges Khalil.
Part 3: Maiming

In this section, we will hone in deeper on a specific instance of maiming in a settler-colonial context, Palestine.[25] The focus on Palestine complies with a Global History approach since globality does not necessarily mean the inclusion of multiple locations since utilising and learning from local and regional perspectives is one method to “challenge Western and colonial impositions of geo-political boundaries on [I]ndigenous peoples and territories.”[26] Furthermore, the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands, the USA and other Western powers’ support for the occupation, and the historical and present ethnic cleansing are related to how Western governments and media have rendered Muslims as the common enemy of the West. Thus, not only their lands but also their bodies and minds were in need of colonization. Ghassan Hage, a cultural anthropologist, refers to this process as “the globalization of the settler colonial condition.”[27] Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, a book linking the debilitating effects of American imperialism and settler-colonialism to Israel’s violence against Palestinians, is a demonstration of “the biopolitics of debilitation to its furthest expanse.”[28] Puar’s text provides us with the background research of this theory that settler-colonies produce disability to maintain their rule and occupations and is our reference point for the contemporary historical data regarding maiming in Palestine.

In Palestine, we see Israel causing debilitation and rendering some populations as “definitively unworthy of health and targeted for injury.”[29] Palestine is a case that is endemic to the colonial practice of rendering certain peoples “pre-disabled.”[30] Data collected on this practice primarily comes from the first Intifada from 1987—1993, the second Intifada from 2000—2005, and their respective aftermaths. Medical professionals and Palestinian human rights organizations noticed an Israel defense force (IDF)[31] pattern of “shooting to cripple,” noted extensively in Al-Haq’s report titled Punishing a Nation: Human Rights Violations during the Palestinian Uprising: December 1987– December 1988. After the first Intifada in 1987 and up until the recent genocidal[32] escalation of violence against Palestinians, Israel moved away from opening fire to kill towards opening fire to cause severe injury and bodily damage. They would begin by shooting targets “first at an 80-degree angle in the air, and then, with intent to injure, at the legs.”[33] An extension of this practice is the targeting of children to debilitate the population. Between 1987 and 1992, over forty-one thousand children were treated in Gaza “for gunshot wounds, injuries from beatings, and exposure to tear gas.”[34] Additionally, in 1992, the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP) reported that “89% of a random sample of 1,564 children between the ages of eight and fifteen had experienced raids by Israeli soldiers into their homes; 45% were subjected to beatings.”[35] This is a practice that has continued through to the present day as a result of the shift from shooting to kill pre-Intifada to shooting to maim until October 7, 2023. These actions extend beyond intifada-related military operations into day-to-day life. A Palestinian from Gaza who lost both of his legs in an Israeli airstrike in 2008 was later shot in the head in 2017 while protesting against US President Donald Trump’s decision to declare Jerusalem as the capital during the March of Return.[36] This example demonstrates Israel’s policy of maiming is part of a bigger system of oppression where even becoming disabled will not shield the person from further oppression, which can lead to death. Additionally, three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp, which holds Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, told CNN that “doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing.”[37] The PCBS reported “approximately 58,000 people with disabilities prior to October 7” in Gaza.[38] The 2023 Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO) reported that among the 1.3 million people in need in the Gaza Strip as at the end of 2022, approximately 21% had a disability.[39] It is important to note that the HNO figure is based on the findings of the 2022 Multi-Sector Needs Assessment (MSNA) by REACH, which reported that 21% of the 4,152 households surveyed in the Gaza Strip included at least one member with a physical or mental disability.[40] According to Puar’s research, the IDF has “shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill.”[41] In Gaza, where Israel also routinely attacks hospitals and healthcare services,[42] and under the precarious conditions of a lasting blockade since 2005, many civilians have been left “permanently disabled in an occupied territory” of destroyed social infrastructure and scarce resources.[43] These disabling actions and consistent targeting of healthcare infrastructure contribute to the biopolitical power that Israel wields over Palestinians leveraging their occupation.

The IDF has used the excuse of self-defense to maim children, weaponizing language to turn children into acceptable targets, designating them as “stone-throwers,” available to maim with plastic bullets.[44] The IDF has, since the first Intifada, adopted a policy of injuring children en masse rather than previously documented policies of killing their perceived perpetrator,[45] and openly admitting to these policies. Israeli sharpshooter Sergeant Raz of the Nashon Battalion, proclaimed, “I shot two people . . . in their knees. It’s supposed to break their bones and neutralize them but not kill them.”[46] Israeli politician Dov Wiesglass, in an interview, stated Israel’s policy toward Palestinians is “like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won’t die.”[47] This policy contributes to the idea of a humanitarian[48] military intervention deterring death by deliberate debilitation rather than outright killing their targets.[49] They avoid, in the West’s perspective, mass collateral damage, aka innocent civilian deaths, which the public is intolerant of, and resort to less visible techniques of maiming and destroying the population.”[50] These supposed “non-lethal” practices — starvation, rubber bullets, shooting limbs — form the false pretense that those wounded will fully recover, and allows for Israel to maintain the façade of a progressive, humanitarian, protector of the disabled.[51] The maiming of Palestinians of all ages and specifically the targeting of children through food insecurity, violence, “arrests, assaults, home invasions, witnessing of deaths, and the loss of familial and community infrastructure,” as they are considered, “always already terrorists” is a part of a greater policy to “locate, strip, and empty,” resistance to colonialism and imperialism before it can occur.[52] Children are targeted to disable the population as a whole and to devastate their futures. Rubber bullets are for kids, but real bullets are for adults. The children get to witness this and know that it is their future. This is all deemed a humane practice and is funded by the West.

Our study of disabilities as a tool of colonialism in Global History is generated from our deep conviction that academic work can and should contribute to everyday reality. It can and should be aggressively presented to offer the historical analysis that Conrad mentioned in his book, where “phenomena, events, and processes are placed in global contexts.”[53] What can be taken from the Palestinian case study is that disability and debilitation are tools of torture, subordination, oppression, and power in colonial and imperial contexts. In this case study, we have offered one example of how a Global History lens can analyze a phenomenon beyond just the inclusion and acceptance of disability. This allows an exploration of disability in colonial contexts, not resulting from accidental or ill-fated collateral damage but force. The move to disable civilian and combatant populations is an overt strategy of settler colonialism.[54] What needs to be explored further is the role of maiming not only in Palestine but also in other Western and non-Western settler colonial settings. Looking into debilitation and disability and its links to colonialism showcases how the eliminatory goals of settler colonialism are implemented in complex and multifaceted manners. One of the lasting implications of settler-colonialism are the debilitation of the Indigenous peoples.[55] Puar summarized the point perfectly in the last paragraph of her book: “until the main source of producing debilitation— the occupation—is ended,” the politics of maiming will continue.[56] Global History is positioned to examine the historical use of maiming in settler colonies and expand the practice to determine if these politics also exist in the same capacity under indirect colonial rule, imperial rule, and neo-colonial regimes today.

Conclusion

We are living in a reality that has been and it is becoming “increasingly shaped by disability.”[57]  Disability is an experience that often currently exists within a disabled/abled binary that leaves out the experience of debility and capacity. Often excluded from history are those who are medically, socially, and culturally disabled but also those who are not recognized as such but do experience debility, all of the people who exist within a “necro-reality,” a state of frequent or constant “terror and violence,” due to imperialism that is often left out of disability studies itself. This reality is something that Global History can and should cover with its methodological scopes but has not. While an additional argument for the need to examine disability has been that “everyone at some point in their lives will experience disability,” this should not be used to convince the burgeoning Global historian to invest in disability studies. Beyond notions of inclusion or exclusion from society (still important), disability and debility define power relations, historically, academically, and in real life today. Disability is a global phenomenon, condition, construction, and lived experience. Currently, there is a gap between lived Global History and what those who claim to be Global historians produce. Disability is a global occurrence; thus, its connections, comparisons, and causality are essential for the field to rise to its purported standard of avoiding Eurocentrism.[58] What Global historiography has failed to consider with disability histories is how disability history allows for an expanded perspective and approach within global histories. Subsequently, Global History can expand the field of disability history, similar to how disability is required within an intersectional analysis of subjects but is a field that must also be intersectionalized itself. In following trails of disability and debilitation to the source, one uncovers broader global themes.[59]

We have built bridges between our four main source materials, Conrad, Robel Afeworki Abay and Karen Soldatić, Cleall, and Puar, similarly to how we built a bridge between ourselves to offer a pathway forward for how Global History scholarship can find the causality of disabilities and sites of debility. We have planted a seed to begin uncovering the following elisions: how colonial powers have produced disability as part of their oppression, connected globally forced disablement in colonial contexts appearing in different euphemisms, and Global History’s current gap regarding disability histories. We echo Cleall in asserting, “the more global examples we have of the experience and construction of disability, the better we can understand the praxis and theory of what it means to be disabled.”[60] We have found extensive evidence that debility “is an exported product of imperial aggression”[61] in Palestine with the IDF’s policy of knee-capping, harming children with rubber bullets, inflicting blockade conditions that cause starvation, and destroying hospitals and means to recover post-IDF inflicted injuries. These practices of war-produced disability can be expanded globally to “effect a change in the organization and institutional order of knowledge,”[62] as Global History demands of itself.


Notes

[1] The Master of Arts in Global History ​​is based on a unique cooperation between the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute’s research area of Global History and colleagues working in historical area studies at the John-F-Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, the Institute of Islamic Studies, the Institute for Latin American Studies the Institute of East Asian Studies, and colleagues in Asian and African Studies and the history department at the Humboldt University Berlin. https://www.global-history.de/about/index.html

[2] For the purpose of this blog, we will be focusing on physical disabilities due to word count limitations.

[3] Conrad is a tenured professor and the Global History program advisor at FU and HU in Berlin and was also one of the first jumping-off points for our learning about the approach and perspective that is Global History.

[4] Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 71.

[5] Conrad, What is Global History, 2.

[6] Conrad, What is Global History, 5.

[7] Conrad, What is Global History, 5.

[8] Esme Cleall, (Ed.), Global Histories of Disability, 1700-2015: Power, Place and People (1st ed,), (Routledge: New York ), 2022, 2,  https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429323980; Esme Cleall, Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and Its Empire, c. 1800–1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2022.

[9] Examples of literature include but are not limited to: Meekosha, H. “Decolonising disability: Thinking and acting globally.” Disability & Society, 26(6), 2011, 667-682. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2011.602860; Hanes, R. (. p., Brown, I., Hansen, N. E., Taylor & Francis eBooks EBA, & Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z. (2017;2018;). In Hanes R., Brown I. and Hansen N. E. (Eds.), The routledge history of disability (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315198781; Afeworki Abay, Robel and Karen Soldatić. 2024. Intersectional Colonialities: Embodied Colonial Violence and Practices of Resistance at the Axis of Disability, Race, Indigeneity, Class, and Gender, edited by Robel Afeworki Abay. 1st ed. Oxford: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003280422; Grech, Shaun, Karen Soldatic, SpringerLink (Online service), and Springer Nature – Springer Social Sciences eBooks 2016 English International. 2016. Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook, edited by Shaun Grech, Karen Soldatic. 1st ed. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0; McKevitt, Christopher. 2008. Disability in Local and Global Worlds – Edited by Benedicte Ingstad & Susan Reynolds Whyte. Vol. 14. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

[10] Cleall, Global Histories of Disability, 9. 

[11] Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

[12] Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim; Debility, Capacity, Disability, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). doi:10.1515/9780822372530.

[13] The Journal of Global History, hosted by Cambridge University, has only 21 results for the keyword “disability.” However, this mainly brings up articles in which authors call a structure/city/government/economy “disabled” and not histories where disability studies are used as an approach or in which a study about disability as an identity or theme is analyzed. Additionally, the student-run journal of Global History, formed in 2015, has no articles dedicated to disability as a primary focus in a historical or global context. The field is young, and we hope to address its growing pains early.

[14] Cleall, Colonising Disability, 27.

[15] Puar, The Right to Maim, xix.

[16] Puar, The Right Maim,  xix.

[17] This refers to the Global History field in Western countries, most of which have colonial legacy that arguably has a big impact on what content and which voices are prioritized in academia.   

[18] Mapheyeledi Sibindlana, “Foreword,” in Intersectional Colonialities: Embodied Colonial Violence and Practices of Resistance at the Axis of Disability, Race, Indigeneity, Class, and Gender, edited by Robel Afeworki Abay. 1st ed. (Oxford: Routledge, 2024). doi:10.4324/9781003280422.

[19] Cleall, Global Histories of Disability, 5.

[20] Puar, The Right to Maim, 69.

[21] Cleall, Colonising Disability, 43-44.

[22] Puar, The Right to Maim, 91.

[23] Narrow focus on obtaining equal rights for disabled peoples rather than also fighting to end the roots of many war, colonial or enviromentally produced disabilities.   

[24] Cleall, Colonising Disability, 44.

[25] Settler colonialism is a structure, not a single event, and “seeks to destroy” or assimilate the Indigenous population and replace it and this is also seen in Palestine. From Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. doi:10.1080/14623520601056240.

[26] Cleall, Global Histories of Disability, 12.

[27] Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015), 8-10.

[28] Puar, The Right to Maim, 68. Biopolitics in this sense refers to the political power an oppressive force has to control the bodies and lives of an oppressed group. In Palestine biopolitics is enacted by Israel through, for example, the strict restrictions of food allowed into Gaza pertaining to a “humanitarian minimum” set by the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. In GISHA, “AAA 3300/11 Ministry of Defense v. Gisha “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines” Presentation,” Israel, 1 January 2008, found in https://www.egyptindependent.com/counting-calories-and-making-lemonade-gaza/.

[29] Puar, The Right to Maim, 68-69.

[30] Deleuze and Guattar, in Puar, The Right to Maim, 86.

[31] IOF is a term increasingly used by Palestinian human rights organizations, the Palestinian people themselves, and activists because Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory and the army exists to protect the settler-colonial project. 

[32] Omer Bartov, “As a Former IDF Soldier and Historian of Genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel,” Guardian, August 13, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov; Francesca Albanese, Anatomy of a Genocide – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 to Human Rights Council – Advance unedited version (A/HRC/55/73), Geneva, Human Rights Council, 25 March 2024, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976; The University Network, Genocide In Gaza: Analysis Of International Law And Its Application to Israel’s Military Actions since October 7, 2023, May 15, 2024 https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/genocide-in-gaza.   

[33] Puar, The Right to Maim, 130.

[34] Puar, The Right to Maim, 152.

[35] Puar, The Right to Maim, 151-152.

[36] The New Arab, “World Honours Disabled Palestinian killed while Protesting,” 7 December 2017, https://www.newarab.com/opinion/world-honours-disabled-palestinian-killed-israel.

[37] Patrick Gallagher, “Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center,” CNN (Sde Teiman, Israel), 11 May 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html

[38] Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), “Press release on the occasion of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, 3 December 2023.

[39] OCHA, “Occupied Palestinian Territory (oPt) Humanitarian Needs Overview 2023,” 25 January 2023. https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/occupied-palestinian-territory-opt-humanitarian-needs-overview-2023-january-2023.

[40] Reach, “Multi-Sector Needs Assessments (MSNA) 2022 – Key Findings: Accountability to Affected People (AAP)” 22 August 2023. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/multi-sector-needs-assessments-msna-2022-key-findings-accountability-affected-people-aap-july-2023-global.

[41] Puar, The Right to Maim, x.

[42] “The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), the main provider of emergency medical care in Palestine, reported 174 documented attacks on its ambulances during a period of approximately eighteen months from September 2000 to March 2002, damaging 78 out of 100 total available ambulances. Additionally, it reported 166 attacks on emergency medical technicians and heavy machine gun fire hitting the prcs headquarters.” Excerpt from Puar, The Right to Maim, 133.

[43] Puar, The Right to Maim, x.

[44] Puar, The Right to Maim, 109.

[45] James A. Graff &  ﻏﺮﺍﻑﺟﻴﻤﺲ,, “Crippling a People: Palestinian Children and Israeli State Violence,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 13 (1993): 46-49, https://doi.org/10.2307/521791.

[46] In Puar, The Right to Maim, 131.

[47] In Puar, The Right to Maim, 135.

[48] Puar, The Right to Maim, x, 140-141; GISHA, “AAA 3300/11 Ministry of Defense v. Gisha “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines” Presentation,” Israel, 1 January 2008, found in https://www.egyptindependent.com/counting-calories-and-making-lemonade-gaza/.

[49] Puar, The Right to Maim, 138.

[50] Puar, The Right to Maim, 142.

[51] Puar, The Right to Maim, 148.

[52] Puar, The Right to Maim, 152.

[53] Conrad, What is Global History, 5.

[54] Puar, The Right to Maim, 143.

[55] Puar, The Right to Maim, 149.

[56] Puar,The Right to Maim, 161.

[57] Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2024), 7.

[58] The 3 C’s of global history: Conrad, What is Global History, 70.

[59] Taylor, Disabled Ecologies, 7.

[60] Cleall, Global Histories of Disability, 7.

[61] Puar, The Right to Maim, 89.

[62] Conrad, What is Global History, 4.


References

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About the Authors

Zoe Wineck is a current MA Student in the Global History program at the FU and HU Berlin. They hold a BA in International Relations from the University of British Columbia. Zoe is interested in histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism and writing history using methods that challenge the Eurocentrism of historical narratives, including collaborative projects like those seen in their blog with Hundah Al Hari.

Hunadah Al Hariri is a Syrian feminist and a human rights activist. She has over 10 years experience working on projects focused on empowering the civil society, with special focus on women and persons with disabilities (PwD) in the Syrian context. Through working in different capacities with various Syrian and international organizations, she was able to gain a more indepth, cross-sector experience on Syrian civil society. She holds a BA in English literature from Damascus University and a MA in Global Affairs from Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi (BAU).


Other Recent Articles in the TRAFO Series New Avenues in Global History

Sebastian Conrad, New Avenues in Global History, 14.01.2025.


Citation: Zoe Wineck, Hunadah Al Hariri, Disability, Colonialism, and Global History, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 04.02.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/54690


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Forum Transregionale Studien (4. Februar 2025). Disability, Colonialism, and Global History. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Abgerufen am 18. Februar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/138hl


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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