Disability, Political Violence and Genocide

Introduction

The histories of disability and genocide have always been, and continue to be, intertwined. Murder, including systematic and politically sponsored murder of disabled people, has a long and shameful history that predates the concept of genocide being formalised.

After the horrors of the Nazi holocaust the term ‘genocide’ came to be broadly accepted, even though genocides had been perpetrated in previous eras. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the global community, and specifically the United Nations (UN), made efforts to prevent future genocides from occurring through various instruments. These efforts include the Genocide Convention – an international legal treaty adopted in 1948, that both defines genocide, and makes it a crime under international law. It demands of countries to stop genocide and punish the perpetrators. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), endorsed by the UN in 2025, is a global commitment to three pillars: individual state responsibility to protect citizens, that makes it incumbent on governments to protect their people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity; the responsibility of the global community to assist in building this capacity; and collective action by the international community if a state fails to protect its people. The International Court of Justice is the principal judicial organ of the UN, that permits states to lodge complaints against other states failing in their obligations. Yet, as laudable as these instruments and institutions are in their intent, they have proved ineffective in preventing mass atrocities from continuing.

Examples abound. The mass killings in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s were witnessed in real time. In the 2000s Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militias killed more than 200,000 people in Darfur, mostly from non-Arab ethnic groups. Myanmar’s military engaged in mass killings, sexual violence, and forced displacement of the Rohingya Muslim minority in 2016 and 2017. More recently, the Israeli military conducted what is by all definitions a genocide on the people of Gaza (Bartov 2025; Dana and Ayyash 2026; Shaw 2025).

In response to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad military campaign on Israel of October 7th, 2023, also known as the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, the Israeli military has killed over 73,000 and injured more than 173,000 Palestinians. The UN Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories found the current practices in Gaza and other Palestinian territories consistent with the characteristics of genocide (UN OHCHR 2026).

We present this special collection at this moment of the Gaza genocide, the ongoing violence in Sudan, and in a world in which hatred of the ‘other’, including the disabled ‘other’ is not only harmful, (Madriaza et al. 2025) and continuing, but in many quarters celebrated (Giroux 2026). As a disability studies journal, we believe it necessary to confront the issues of hatred, violence, and genocide in often creating various forms of disability; but also, its exaggerated impact on those already disabled. In the ensuing papers the notion of disability moves beyond individual disability, to disabling communities and state functions.

As De Vogli, Montomoli, Abu-Sittah and Pappé (2026) have noted, we may need more robust evidence fully to settle the question, for example, of whether Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history, but it does not take complex research methods to know that physical disablement as well as sensory and mental health impairments are an important part of the picture in Gaza, as in other genocide-affected, or slow violence-affected, regions (Al Shami and Nashwan 2025; Heszlein-Lossius et al. 2018).

Genocide and related forms of political violence include not only attacks on disabled people. They also produce debility and disablement in specific and intentional ways (see e.g. Puar 2017). War causes significant disablement, but also impacts those already disabled. Gazans who were disabled before the current war, have faced considerable risk because of difficulties in fleeing Israeli attacks rendering evacuation orders or warnings ineffectual. Physical destruction of paths and roads, and lack of transportation have made movement nearly impossible for disabled people. Thus, the interpretation of the definition of the clause in the Genocide Convention, which speaks to ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’ may have a lower bar for disabled people, who are more likely to face consequences of war.

The targeting and destruction of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centres mean that injured people often do not receive proper care, leading to higher rates of permanent disability. Even with the current ceasefire, a misnomer by all accounts, as people are still being killed, maimed, and disabled, with severe shortages of medical equipment, consumables, and medication. Essential items such as wheelchairs, crutches, and feeding tubes are randomly classified as ‘dual-use’ items, i.e. designed for civilian purposes but deemed to be potentially usable in combat contexts, and thus denied entry under the blockade.

The continuous mass attacks in Gaza, now close to its third year, have resulted in profound trauma, grief, significant psychological harm, and behavioural changes among children and adolescents, as well as widespread feelings of guilt and helplessness. Aside from mass physical disability among children, a large cohort of orphans now exist in Gaza: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family is a new term now used by humanitarian workers (Malhotra and El-Shaarawi 2025).

Genocide and political violence animate the present from Gaza to Ukraine to Sudan, to name but three examples. Through this special collection, the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research recognises the connections between violence, genocide, and disability, all of which have intertwined histories. We have sought submissions from parts of the world where the interface between political violence and disability has been under-theorised. Considering the ongoing crisis in Palestine it is no surprise that the special collection focuses on this region.

Outline of Papers

Abboud and Sherman integrate theories of state-building, political violence, and disability studies to explain the functioning of ‘disablement’ via ethnic cleansing and genocide using the colonisation of Palestine as a case study. These authors show how disability and genocide are entangled as part of what is now widely accepted as a settler colonial project (Weizman 2026). Disablement in this context refers to a deliberate strategy to manufacture impairment for political ends. In this sense, disability is not a byproduct of colonial conflict, but rather the goal of the colonising state. The authors identify a two-pronged disablement strategy, namely, creating disability in the population and disabling state functions. In their reflection on the Weberian state, they argue that Israel disables the Palestinian state and thus renders it unable to function. Yet, there is to date no Palestinian state and the facts on the ground, and Israeli’s leaders’ pronouncements, make Palestinian statehood impossible. The rapid growth in the number of settlements and settlers in the West Bank, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including the occupation of Palestinian homes (FMEP 2026), along with a far-right messianic Israeli government, make any form of statehood for the Palestinian people a fantasy. Large numbers of people have been disabled not only by the current genocide, but also by injuries sustained during deliberate Israeli attacks on peaceful civilians during the Great March of Return on the Gaza border protests in 2018 and 2019, and in fact throughout the Palestinian resistance over the decades. Even within this dystopian reality Abboud and Sherman argue for the rebuilding of Gazan society, including its health care system. While the future remains unclear, both the effects on, and contribution of, disabled people to the social, political, and economic aspects of life in Gaza will be of considerable importance going forward.

Amanie Issa similarly argues that disability in the context of Palestine is not a natural phenomenon but is a political outcome of militarized colonial policy. Disabling people is a strategy whose aim is to incapacitate resistance so that indigenous people can be replaced with a settler population. Such a strategy is in keeping with settler-colonial projects in various parts of the world, such as Australia, the United States, Canada, and South Africa. A crucial difference is that the Palestinian nakba (the destruction of Palestinian lives and territories, and mass expulsions at the time the State of Israel was created in 1948) was perpetrated in a period when the world had begun to embrace a human rights and democratic culture. The settler-colonial projects in North America and Australia cannot be undone, but new projects such as Zionism can and have been resisted by Palestinians. Issa argues that evacuation and humanitarian aid operated as mechanisms of slow extermination, a prospect that is both accurate, chilling, and reminiscent of previous genocides.

In their important contribution, Bondar, Shestopalova, and Barow shed light on the psychological experiences of people living in Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia. Focusing on these territories and their inhabitants, they demonstrate that even after de-occupation, much of Kherson (a city in southern Ukraine) remains uninhabitable due to ongoing insecurity, environmental degradation, and the collapse of essential services. Their contribution also illustrates how the destruction of homes and communities has produced forms of loss that are simultaneously personal, collective, and environmental, with long term or permanent consequences, as Weizman (2026) also shows vividly in his recent book.

In their provocative paper, Davradou and Karalioliou call attention to the ways in which Palestinians are constructed in the western imagination as ‘non-modern’ and ‘uncivilized’. This is premised on two false assumptions; the first of which is that western modernity is the sole criterion and standard for all humanity to determine progress, and second that Palestinian societies are monolithic. Such an essentialised and stereotyped construction of identity is typical of how oppressed and colonised people are perceived and characterised by colonising powers. This is then extended to the idea of an ‘uncivilised native’ prone naturally or inherently to violence. It strips colonised people of their full humanity, not dissimilar to how disabled people have been, and to some extent still are, characterised as being not fully human (Rasset et al. 2022; Sitruk et al. 2023). Palestinian resistance is often not seen as an appropriate response to colonisation but as a natural inclination that indigenous people have towards violence.

Meja Ikobwa’s analysis of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, The Book of Bones and Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana brings the past into the present and is a stark reminder that the past has not passed. Ikobwa shows that literary responses to genocide and debility can be marshalled to challenge and critique genocidal violence when it is presented as rational and bureaucratic. Here the parallel between Diop’s character Dr. Joseph Karekezi and Adolf Eichman is apparent. As in the works of Hannah Arendt, we learn again that perpetrators of genocide are not necessarily bloodthirsty killers and evil people out of step with accepted norms but often act in accordance with what they believe their bureaucratic systems dictate.

Concluding Comments

Disablement and colonisation have operated in tandem for centuries. Chillingly, in the Belgian Congo tribal chiefs were coerced to offer their people as ‘rubber slaves’ by representatives of the Belgian King Leopold. The local villagers were required to meet their quotas of rubber collection and, if they did not, would be punished with extreme brutality, mainly by amputation of hands, which constituted evidence to the authorities that slackers had been punished (Hochschild 1998). Such horrors were possible only with dehumanisation, similar to how Jewish, Hutu, Herero, and Bosnian populations were stripped of their humanity to enable horrific crimes in the various genocides that have been perpetrated across history.

The Israeli onslaught on Gaza is the most recent case of ethnic cleansing of indigenous people. Its relationship with disablement is as stark as it is horrific, and part of a long entanglement of ideas about bodily imperfection with regimes of murder.

We trust that this special collection brings into focus the undeniable relationship between political violence, genocide, and disability. It is reasonable to expect that injustice, persecution, and subjugation will continue to be a feature of our world. Humanity collectively must safeguard against further mass crimes by the powerful against the weak. Such efforts cannot be the preserve of states or international bodies, who in any event have revealed their ineffectiveness. Academics, publics, civil society, activist groups, and mass movements have made their voices heard, and these need to be amplified so that mass crimes, genocide, and intentional disablement end, and perpetrators brought to account. This special collection is as much a small and partial account of the entanglement of genocide and disability, as a call for the question of genocide be kept in mind as part of all the work of disability scholarship.