Evanescent and Emerging Spaces: Land/World Struggles of Palestinians and Guarani
This event will confront important and disturbing parallels between the genocides of Palestinians and the Guarani in South America, and the challenges of resisting neocolonial land theft and world grabbing.
This academic workshop will debate the enduring experiences of racism, aggression and displacement faced by Palestinian and Guarani communities (the latter living along the Brazil-Paraguay border). Both have endured the brutal pressures of state‑building, ethnic-based discrimination and exclusionary regional development. The processes have resulted in evanescent, but also emergent socio-spatial relations, which will be properly analysed.
The event will examine root causes, shared and divergent dynamics, and future pathways for justice, focusing on lessons from indigenous resistance to land grabbing and on how Wales can contribute to social, political, economic and environmental reparations (as well as radical and sustained transformations). Participants are called to engage critically, build cross‑border solidarities and translate these insights into concrete action, through advocacy, institutional pressure and sustained support for struggles for land, dignity and self‑determination.
Against the backdrop of an evolving literature on the geography of racism and indigeneity, the workshop focuses on the politico‑identitary responses of ethnic nations facing acute violence (including spurious real estate development) whose position differs from that of migrant or minority groups within a single nation‑state. Their ‘in‑between’ status across fragmented territories often intensifies discrimination while simultaneously strengthening claims for restoration, compensation and socio-spatial continuity. Through close engagement with representative organisations and public authorities, the event will develop a comparative framework structured around four interconnected objectives:
- Examine how state-building, frontier-making, and regional development act as catalysts for the marginalisation of ethnic nations across borders.
- Interrogate the dynamics of ‘emerging spaces’, including agency and contradictions, and explore restorative and reconnection strategies.
- Analyse the specific reactions of split indigenous nations to territorial dismemberment and land-related injustices.
- Jointly reflect on and theorise sub-national and cross-border responses to racism, and systematically disseminate insights through academic and policy-making engagement.
Through comparative analysis of analogous situations of injustice and marginalisation, this workshop will contribute to global debates on democracy, sovereignty and decolonial futures.
The event is FREE and OPEN to both the academic community and the general public. It will take place on 22–23 April in the School of Geography and Planning, Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University.
Event details and proposed programme here: https://events.cardiff.ac.uk/view/evanescent-and-emerging-spaces-land-world-struggles-of-palestinians-and-guarani/