Resisting Post-Truth Politics as Epistemicide: Learning from Trans*,Indigenous American and Palestinian Lived Experiences

Abstract

Building upon Galpin and Vernon’s 2023 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) piece, this article extends the notion of post-truth politics as discursive violence to post-truth politics as epistemicide in order to make sense of global crises in 2024. Reflecting on this political moment, it highlights the ways in which trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities are some of those who have been particularly targeted by the eliminationist logics that underpin Western modernity. What is new, it notes, is the existence of social media and new media as components of the hybrid media system, which both facilitate subaltern agency and reproduce oppressive colonial logics and violence. Interrogating attempts to erase the aforementioned communities at the ontological level, both in body and in law, the article aims to learn from the ways in which these groups have shared knowledge from their lived experiences and ways of being, resisting a political context that attempts to deny their existence. Studying power/resistance in relation to the hybrid media system, we reflect on possibilities for change in this distinctly cataclysmic global political moment.

Keywords

colonialism epistemicide post-truth politics hybrid media Indigenous Palestinian trans*

We are currently undergoing a uniquely challenging moment in world politics, with identity-based and military conflicts around the world threatening peace, stability and economic prosperity. On October 7th 2023, Hamas launched an attack on Israel in which 1200 Israeli civilians were murdered and several hundred were taken hostage in what was the deadliest attack in the state’s history (BBC News, 2024; Rozdilsky, 2024). At the time of writing in June 2024, Israel has been continuing its assault on Gaza for 8 months, with over 36,731 Palestinian civilians killed and 83,530 injured so far (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 2024) in actions that likely amount to genocide, as Israel has defied the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ’s) ruling to prevent genocide from occurring (Human Rights Watch, 2024). Simultaneously, Indigenous communities continue to experience the ongoing impacts of colonial genocides that attempt to erase them and their ways of being (Whitt and Clarke, 2019: 6–7) and trans* people continue to be subject to eliminationist rhetoric and policies around the world. This is notably occurring in the context of the 2024 US and UK election campaigns (e.g. see Hansford, 2024; Stoop, 2024), where hard-won rights are under attack from far-right alliances and media organisations. Addressing The British Journal of Politics and International Relations’ 25^th Anniversary Special Issue’s call for authors to reflect on 2024 as a ‘potential inflection point’, we conceptually build on our recently published BJPIR article ‘Post-Truth Politics as Discursive Violence’ (Galpin and Vernon, 2023) to consider how the phenomenon that is often labelled as ‘post-truth politics’ relates to this moment of global crisis. To do this, we investigate the relationship between colonial logics, the hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2017), acts of Western state or state-sponsored violence and knowledge production by trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities.

In particular, we argue that post-truth politics can constitute epistemicide, occurring in online and offline contestation over the capacity of these communities to exist both in body and in law as citizens, with citizenship figuring as the minimum requirement for legitimised knowledge production in a state-centric international system. These groups continue to exist despite the endurance of colonial epistemes which attempt to erase them (Phipps, 2021; Upadhyay, 2021; Wynter, 2003) and have gained increasing visibility in recent years through social media and the broader hybrid media system by sharing knowledge of their lived experiences (Galpin, 2022), including those of oppression. This has often prompted a violent backlash from the state, with power/resistance operating at the ontological level in terms of the ability of minoritised communities to physically exist, to form their own ways of being/existence and to disseminate knowledge based on their lived experiences. We interrogate attempts to erase the existence of trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities both physically and discursively as knowledge producers, alongside these groups’ attempts to resist this.

We have chosen these communities as they are some of the most targeted groups in the current political moment due to the actions of Western governments. As such, learning from these communities means rendering the links between democracy, coloniality, post-truth politics and epistemicide clear. We focus on Western countries to contest depictions of liberalism as peaceful and democratic and due to the historic and ongoing role of these countries in erasing non-Western modes of being and knowing on a global scale.

It is also important to note that the current forms of violence levelled against these communities are not equitable. Nevertheless, all these communities are experiencing processes of genocidal and epistemicidal erasure to a greater or lesser degree, which we situate within the context of Western modernity. As trans* people are dispersed throughout societies, violence against them often goes more unnoticed than that against racial or ethnic groups. Yet, the overlaps between genocidal and transphobic logics and actions are well-established, including systematic erasure (Brown, 2021), denying the conditions of existence (Hsu, 2024) and discourses of toxification (Owen, 2022). While processes of genocide seem to be currently underway in Gaza, the physical erasure of Indigenous communities largely occurred in the past and are often overlooked. In response, scholars and activists identify anti-Indigenous genocide as ongoing through the denial of cultural and political rights designed to maintain the genocidal status quo (Wakeham, 2021).

Here, we must also emphasise that the communities under discussion are not mutually exclusive and that attempts to portray them as separate and oppositional are often imbricated in processes of colonial violence (e.g. see Puar, 2013; Rahman, 2014). In this article, we look at the lived experiences of three communities, which we treat as distinct for the purposes of this argument. This approach allows us to connect what are often seen as dispersed and unrelated forms of violence to the epistemic framework of Western modernity and its eliminationist imperatives. Doing this, we briefly outline our understanding of post-truth politics as discursive violence (Galpin and Vernon, 2023) before extending this to the notion of post-truth politics as epistemicide and the multiple ways in which trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities resist discursive and material patterns of elimination.

Post-Truth Politics as Discursive Violence

In our initial article, we analysed the way in which online abuse of academics staged by newspapers on social media constituted a form of post-truth politics as discursive violence during UK Brexit debates (Galpin and Vernon, 2023). We defined post-truth politics as a ‘historically particular’ climate of public anxiety, distrust and suspicion around the legitimacy of knowledge and ‘truth-tellers’ in public life (Harsin, 2018: 2), involving a ‘hegemonic struggle’ to define contemporary politics (Farkas and Schou, 2018: 300, 309). This context is inextricably linked to the news-making assemblages associated with the hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2017: 73). With contemporary newspapers depending upon an ‘outrage economy’ (Phipps, 2021: 85) that generates visibility on social media, we interrogated the types of comments about academics/experts generated by right-wing newspaper articles posted on Facebook. We argued that online abuse constitutes bordering of legitimate types of knowledge that we refer to as ‘epistemic modes’ (Galpin and Vernon, 2023: 5; see also Valaskivi and Robertson, 2022), distinguishing between criticisms of both forms and bodies of expertise. Comments responding to articles about White heterosexual male academics tended to engage with what they are doing and their mode of knowledge production (Galpin and Vernon, 2023: 13). Women, LGBTQ+ or racialised individuals tended to be criticised on the basis of who they are as bodies of expertise, with comments either invoking identity-based stereotypes, highly sexualised language or, in extreme cases, dehumanising them and sanctioning physical violence (Galpin and Vernon, 2023: 16). Using Momin Rahman’s (2010) queer Muslim as intersectionality framework, we showed how this misogynistic, homophobic and racist abuse framed women, LGBTQ+ and racialised academics as incompatible with the figure of ‘the expert’, reimposing traditional understandings of ‘the academy’ as the domain of White cisgender heterosexual men and masculinised knowledge.

We build upon this understanding of post-truth politics as a gendered, sexual and racialised form of discursive violence but extend our analysis to subjects who experience their very existence questioned and actively resist this. This first involves expanding on our established understanding of academics as legitimised knowledge producers. Beyond academics, journalists, civil society organisations and political actors contribute to the formation of public knowledge. Fundamentally, however, the ability to create knowledge about one’s own lived experience is a key aspect of citizenship. Tendayi Bloom’s (2023: 9) concept of non-citzenship addresses not an ‘absence of citizenship’ but a particular relation to the state or international system in which people ‘must live out their life despite that system’, while also not being seen as potential experts and interlocutors in discussions about the structures that affect them (Bloom, 2023: 49–50). In the contemporary media age, what Bloom describes as non-citizen power can be exercised via social media by creating knowledge about one’s lived experience. Focusing on the cases of trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities, we call attention to the ways in which they have used the hybrid media system to resist physical and often lethal violence that reflects broader systems of dehumanisation/discrimination. These ideological systems invoke age-old colonial logics that try to preserve exclusive understandings of citizenship and humanity (Du Bois, 1925; Vernon, 2024b; Wynter, 2003), framing targeted groups as subhuman/monstrous to facilitate violence against them (Foucault, 2003: 256; Mbembe, 2003; Phipps, 2021). They also often circulate through overlapping, interwoven and contradictory news-making assemblages via the same hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2017: 73) that we outlined as staging violence against minoritised academics (Galpin and Vernon, 2023).

Post-Truth Politics as Epistemicide

Epistemicide refers to ‘the systematic destruction of rival forms of knowledge’, attacking the value systems and ways of knowing/being associated with a particular people (Bennett, 2007: 154; Patin et al., 2021). This concept has been used to unpack Western epistemic eliminationism and forms of resistance towards it by scholars of decoloniality (e.g. see Mills and LeFrançois, 2018; Phiri, 2024; Varela and Rojas, 2020) and Indigeneity (e.g. see Little, 2023; Nielsen, 2022; Sonkqayi, 2023), in particular. A significant proportion of this directly criticises the academy as central to the elimination of non-Western modes of being/knowing (Bennett, 2015; Grosfoguel, 2013; Hall and Tandon, 2017), as well as devaluing knowledge stemming from lived experiences (Patin et al., 2021: 1031; Phyak, 2021) or texts that do not conform with the ‘authoritative plain style’ expected of ‘factual’ genres (Bennett, 2007: 152), including those that are dominant in the legacy media. Furthermore, some of the literature studies the overlaps between epistemicide and material acts of genocidal violence (Grosfoguel, 2013; Muñoz, 2013; Phiri, 2024; Price, 2023), with the two often deeply interlinked through a nexus of eliminationist colonial logics. Where this article fills a gap is by interrogating instances in which both material and discursive acts of violence constitute epistemicide, with the aim of preventing the sharing of knowledge generated by the lived experiences of trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities via the hybrid media system.

Post-truth politics as epistemicide involves an assemblage including online and offline narratives and actions that question the fundamental existence of minoritised groups, attempts to strip them of basic citizenship rights and violence that targets their physical existence. This assemblage specifically targets the ability of the aforementioned groups to exist as legitimate producers of knowledge; that is, to exist in body and as citizens who enjoy the right to legally exist and claim rights, including speaking in public fora.

Aspects of this assemblage are both old and new; in the 1980s, Stuart Hall (2018: 91) famously argued that media institutions are central to the production, articulation and transformation of racist ideologies. More contemporarily, digital media perpetuate asymmetries of power through the digital divide between the Global North and South and the exercise of surveillance and control by social media companies (Kumar and Parameswaran, 2018: 351). Despite this, new opportunities for resisting epistemicide exist in the contemporary hybrid media context. This is made clear by trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities, who show that they and their value systems/beliefs continue to exist in the face of extreme violence and sharing knowledge drawn from their lived experiences, including attempts to erase their existence. Through this, minoritised groups gain a greater capacity to generate and share knowledge, while ‘long-standing patriarchal, White and heteronormative structures of power’ (Galpin and Vernon, 2023: 5) attempt to silence them.

The concept of epistemicide clearly relates to attempts to erase the lives, culture and knowledge production of Palestinian and Indigenous American communities. Knowledge generated by these groups and shared in both online/offline forums often involve highlighting their lived experiences of brutal violence at the hands of the state. These violent actions are only rendered possible by the relegation of these groups to non-citizen status (Bloom, 2023) and by Western ontologies that designate racialised groups as sub-human (Mbembe, 2003; Phipps, 2021; Quijano, 2007; Wynter, 2003). These lived experiences, in turn, contest epistemic frameworks that are central to Western modernity; namely the naturalness of the state, of border regimes and of settler-colonial logics, which all require a significant amount of racist violence to uphold.

While it is not as immediately obvious, violence against trans* folk are also enabled by similar modern epistemologies. For trans* folk, while they might be from Western countries, their gender identity is framed as exogenous to the nation and the project of modernity. Heteronormativity, defined by the social embeddedness of heterosexuality (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 543), emerged from attempts to establish patrilineal land inheritance in early modern societies (Freedman, 1997: 288–289). This was then exported around the world through hetero-colonialism, understood as the judging of Indigenous people according to Western heteronormative standards and the liberation of them from sexual and gender practices that were misunderstood as homosexuality (Delatolla, 2020: 149). This constituted a genocidal process through which Indigenous populations who were perceived as not conforming to binary understandings of gender or broader hegemonic norms of heterosexuality were erased (e.g. see Lugones, 2018: 18; Morgensen, 2010; Picq, 2019), hence why it is impossible to separate gender and sexuality from decolonial approaches to political violence (Vernon, 2022, 2024a). A clear example of such violence was British colonisers’ attempts to ‘exterminate’ the Hijra community in India, who are often understood as being third gender/trans in Western cultural discourse, having perceived their revered status as a threat to colonial authority (Hinchy, 2019: 9). The Hijra remain relegated to a social position where their life is persistently under threat in the present day, rendering the connections between anti-Indigenous and anti-trans* eliminationist logics clear.

While heteronormativity endures in postcolonial contexts, the Global South continues to be viewed through Orientalist (Said, 1978) stereotypes as queer in Western cultural discourse, evidenced by the overlapping racial and sexual meanings attached to figures including ‘the Black man’ (Delatolla, 2020: 151; Fanon, 1987 [1952]: 157), ‘the migrant’ (Heimer, 2020: 178; Weber, 2016) and ‘the terrorist’ (Puar, 2007: 37; Weber, 2016), with these stereotypes often conflated (Vernon, 2024b: 150). In the last two decades, we have seen the emergence of homonormative/nationalist norms of acceptability (Duggan, 2003; Puar, 2007) in the West, but these mirror heteronormative institutions, gender norms and structures (Delatolla, 2020: 155), resulting in trans* people figuring as ‘impossible’ within them (Rahman, 2010; Stryker and Evans, 2024). This explains why trans* communities have been targeted in culture war debates that frame them as a threat to the nation, civilisation and even humanity itself. This is also connected to the framing of migrants and other racialised figures as perverse, as Western states defend the current global order and its foundations in heteronormativity (Butler, 2024: 8).

In the next section of the article, we illustrate this through a small selection of case studies, focusing on the experiences of the aforementioned groups, the threat that they pose to Western modern epistemologies and the imbrication of this with extreme state or state-sanctioned violence against them. In particular, we study resistance towards post-truth politics as epistemicide in the UK by trans* people, by Indigenous American communities and in Gaza by Palestinian civilians, all of whom have mobilised the new opportunities presented by the hybrid media system in the production of knowledge that contests colonial attempts to erase them and their ways of being. The lived experiences of these communities are diverse, but collectively they highlight alternatives to the eliminationist imperatives associated with Western modernity.

Trans* People in the UK

The rights and existence of trans* people in the UK have been under increasing attack, driven by a hostile press and online anti-trans mobilisation (Baker, 2019; Galpin et al., 2023; Gwenffrewi, 2021; McLean, 2021) and leading to a 186% rise in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes over the last 5 years (Stonewall, 2023). The impact on trans* people is significant, including measures to prevent trans young people from accessing gender-affirming healthcare (Andersson and Rhoden-Paul, 2022), government guidance to schools identifying gender non-conformity as a safeguarding issue (Department for Education, 2023), attempts to roll back rights to non-discrimination legislation (Allegretti, 2023), persistent attempts to block gender self-identification measures (BBC News, 2023) and the failure to recognise non-binary as a gender identity. While these measures attempt to roll back trans civil liberties established in the late 1990s and early 2000s, discrimination against trans* people has remained embedded in key social institutions throughout, including citizenship and marriage, which depend upon fixed and binary understandings of gender. Moreover, trans* and queer people have been othered and discriminated against under a broader assemblage of nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence and literature which constructed them as objects of medical and carceral intervention on the basis of ‘psychic hermaphrodism’ (Foucault, 1976 [1990]: 44), establishing a discursive terrain through which modes of normative/deviant gender and sexuality could be policed or erased. This context is an enduring one that challenges the existence of trans* people at the ontological level; as Briar Dickey (2023: 41) has found, contemporary anti-trans media discourses assert that trans* people are not real, and as such have no basis to advance rights claims.

It is in this political context that non-binary artist Sam Smith released their new song ‘I’m not here to make friends’ (Smith, 2023). While the surface-level meaning of the song is about finding a lover on a night out, the furore that was to follow gave the song a much deeper meaning. In the music video accompanying this song, Smith (2023) dressed in body-positive feminine clothes, appeared alongside drag queens, engaged in camp dance moves with a male dance troupe and celebrated queerness both visually and lyrically. As an A-list celebrity, Smith is arguably the most famous non-binary person in the UK, and their choice to celebrate their identity and queerness in this public manner constituted a defiant act of resistance in the context of an overwhelmingly hostile public sphere.

Reflecting on this case, it is significant that transgender people make up only 0.5% of the UK population (Office for National Statistics, 2023). Given this, media representation is particularly important for this community as most people are likely to only come into contact with trans* people via mediated sources. We therefore chose the case of Sam Smith as it formed one of the clearest examples of power/resistance playing out in the mediated public domain, with mainstream coverage of trans people often excluding trans voices and agency. In responding to the context of transphobic oppression, Sam Smith’s defiance helps to create ‘collective consciousness and willingness for articulation’ in online trans communities (Priya and Kumar, 2020: 39), potentially leading to vital trans networks of care that can ensure survival (Galpin et al., 2023; Malatino, 2020).

Reflecting well-established queerphobic tropes, Smith’s video was quickly denounced as vulgar/perverse on social media (Swash and Collins, 2023) and in the right-wing media, with journalist Alex Phillips calling it ‘unhealthy for society’ (Carter, 2023). Smith themselves also spoke about the transphobic violence they regularly suffered in the street in the wake of the video’s release, highlighting that this is a common experience for transgender and non-binary people (McGeorge, 2023). The video was also criticised as inappropriate for children, despite the plethora of sexualised cisgender content on YouTube, again reflecting queerphobic tropes of protecting children from the danger of queer culture, which is a product of being a queer (in this case non-binary) person in a heteronormative society. Since then, Smith has toured their brand of queer performance art with a global series of concerts and has performed at highly public events including the BRITS. They have also released a song entitled ‘vulgar’ with Madonna, which could be interpreted as a Foucauldian reverse discourse (Foucault, 1976(1990): 101), reclaiming right-wing perceptions of their identity. Moreover, in the wake of transphobic speeches at the Conservative Party Conference, Smith posted a message of affirmation and support for transgender and non-binary people on social media (Condon, 2023). Smith’s commitment to producing media content that draws on their lived experience as a non-binary person therefore constitutes resistance towards epistemicidal attempts to erase the physical existence and lived experiences of trans* people from the British public sphere.

Indigenous American Communities

The second community that we discuss as resisting post-truth politics as epistemicide are Indigenous American communities. Indigenous people in different communities around the world have been targeted since the colonial civilising mission with a nexus of genocidal and epistemicidal violence, as settler-colonial states have sought to erase them and their ways of being from existence (Wilderson, 2010; Wolfe, 2006: 387). Describing the close relationship between genocide and cultural assimilationism in the United States, Carasik and Bachmann (2019: 97) note that in colonial North America, the need for land to facilitate capitalist expansion initiated ‘brutal efforts to control and annihilate native populations’ through massacres, forced displacement and concentration on reservations. This was followed by ‘more humane’ efforts at eradicating Indigenous culture, including through residential schools which aimed to ‘civilise’ native children by separating them from their families and indoctrinating them with Christian values (Carasik and Bachmann, 2019). In the United States, then, genocide and epistemicide have gone hand in hand and are still ongoing in insidious ways (Grosfoguel, 2013; Price, 2023: 18). This has produced the present-day situation in which communities based around the maintenance of Indigenous culture, traditions and ways of being are often confined to remote reservations with poor socioeconomic opportunities and services.

A key element of the United States’ settler-colonial elimination of Indigenous people and culture, Angelique Eaglewoman (2009: 556–557) notes, was the expansion of settler colonists into what is now known as the US-Mexico border area, displacing and erasing the various Indigenous communities that existed here, alongside their collective worldview including principles of environmental stewardship, of balance within an interdependent universe, kinship and clans as the basis of governance. Eaglewoman (2009: 569) further notes the case for Indigenous people appealing to the United Nations (UN) on the basis that the US-Mexico border wall is destroying cultural, sacred and burial sites, as well as militarising tribal lands in contravention of Indigenous principles of stewardship (Eaglewoman, 2009: 570–571). She has also produced extensive online videos to share knowledge of ‘being a Native in the field of law’ and of using treaties and Native traditions to contest settler-colonial oppressions (Eaglewoman, 2024). These interventions, while some of them were made some time ago, are more important than ever as the US carceral capitalist and settler-colonial project continues unabated (Davis, 2003; Davis et al., 2022), including the ever-increasing fortification of the US-Mexico border. The latter takes place within a context of intensive right-wing media attention, particularly on broadcast television and social media, to the ‘border wall’ and the ‘threat’ of ‘illegal immigration’ from Central America (e.g. see Jaramillo-Dent and Pérez-Rodríguez, 2021). Often reproducing myths of American exceptionalism (Santa Ana, 2016), such coverage responded to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and remains a key topic for debate in the run up to the 2024 Presidential election.

Using the rejection of the settler-colonial status quo to directly inform online and offline activism on US border violence, the ‘no one is illegal on stolen land’ campaign uses Indigenous communities’ intergenerational lived experiences of genocide, epistemicide and dispossession to challenge the very categories of legality/illegality, calling the ontological legitimacy of the United States as a sovereign state into question. Through this campaign, they have managed to generate a significant amount of media attention in recent years, including through legacy media (Levin, 2019; Monkman, 2017), social media (Chavez, 2023; Xiuhtezcatl, 2023) and the sale of branded merchandise online (Etsy, 2024). By challenging the violent border practices and legitimacy of the United States through public online and offline campaigns, Indigenous activists exert political agency of which the settler-colonial campaign is designed to deprive, raise awareness of and politicise their distinct cultural practices/worldviews and express solidarity with other negatively racialised groups. With a possible impending second Trump presidency, it is significant that both Indigenous people (Este, 2020) and migrants (Amnesty International, 2020) had their rights significantly rolled-back under Trump’s presidency, with this justified by Trump’s use of racist slurs, including accusations of criminality, on social media (BBC News, 2019; National Immigration Law Centre, 2017; Trump, 2019). Social media therefore remains a key site in which contestation over the political rights, identity and acknowledgement of Indigenous people and migrants plays out, with this having real consequences for the capacity of these groups to exist safely or at all in US civil society. Ongoing online and offline Indigenous activism that contests the political legitimacy of the United States is therefore another crucial case of a minoritised group resisting post-truth politics as epistemicide.

Palestinian Civilians in Gaza

The last group we discuss as resisting post-truth politics as epistemicide are Palestinian civilians, the extensive violence against whom has been impossible not to notice in recent months. The indiscriminate nature of Israel’s war in Gaza has now been widely criticised by even its closest allies, the UK and US, after multiple waves of forced displacement, attacks on refugee camps, the total destruction of the majority of the Gaza strip, the bombing of hospitals and the severe restriction of the flow of aid into the territory. It is notable, however, that both countries only stepped up their criticism after the killing of Western aid workers by Israel (GOVUK, 2024; The White House, 2024), with the ICJ’s (2024) ruling that states must take all measures to prevent genocide from occurring seemingly having little impact. While committing mass atrocities, the Israeli government has maintained that it is only targeting Hamas, calling civilian deaths ‘collateral damage’ (HuffPost, 2023), and insisting that it is responding to international pressure on increasing the flow of aid, despite clear evidence to the contrary (Tétrault-Farber and Mackenzie, 2024). When considering the epistemicidal dimensions of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) actions in Gaza, it is significant that the Israeli occupation has gone beyond mass violence; with not a single mosque or university left standing in the Gaza strip, these acts indicate an attempt to permanently erase Gazan culture and society.

With the advent of hybridised media, states have adjusted their public diplomacy and propaganda strategies at times of conflict (e.g. see Manor and Crilley, 2018; Mor, 2007). Both Israel and Hamas have long used social media to disseminate emotional propaganda that documents destruction, injury and death (Seo, 2014). Recent reports show that the Israeli government has paid for social media adverts targeted at Europeans and Americans to gain support for its Gaza offensive, having been viewed millions of times (Martin et al., 2023; Ramirez, 2023). While Hamas has also posted its own propaganda (Martin et al., 2023), this is unlikely to have had the same impact; the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a significant Twitter/X following outside of Israel (Manor and Crilley, 2018: 374), while Human Rights Watch (2023) has reported that Meta has been censoring peaceful posts in support of Palestine across the world.

Despite this, the case of Palestinian civilians in Gaza demonstrates the possibilities for resistance in the contemporary media landscape. The Internet has long served as an important tool for Palestinian identity construction and mobilisation (Aouragh, 2012), and in the current conflict, Palestinian civilians and journalists have documented Israel’s actions in real time online. Israel’s insistence that it is not targeting civilians has been refuted through extensive video footage and images shared through personal accounts, activist groups (e.g. see Palestine News, 2024; Palestine Online, 2024) and legacy media news agencies through their traditional outputs and online platforms (e.g. see Al Jazeera, 2024; The Guardian, 2024). One particularly significant example of the latter was a footage of the moment Israeli forces shot dead a civilian who was part of a group waving a white flag in a designated ‘safe zone’ (ITV News, 2024). This was an act of violence that has become unexceptional since the full-scale Israeli occupation but has shocked the international community due to the character of the footage, with it subsequently used to quiz top US and UK officials (ITV News, 2024). It is important to remember, however, that it is not only death and destruction that Palestinian civilians have documented online. On TikTok, young Palestinians have been using the hashtag ‘#dayinthelife’ to chronicle their everyday lives in Gaza. In showing what they eat, how they access supplies, do chores, socialise and find community, young Gazas offer an ‘alternative view of survival’ that demonstrates their humanity to the outside world (Tolentino and Scott, 2024).

In light of the extensive media coverage of Israeli war crimes, it seems as though IDF personnel have engaged in a concerted effort to target members of the media, in contravention of international law, with over 75% of journalists killed in 2023 killed in Gaza (Acosta, 2024). Speaking in February 2024, Ivan Šimonović, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, highlighted the case of Wael al-Dahdouh, whose wife, two children and grandson were killed in an Israeli bombing in October 2023, who endured a drone attack that killed his cameraman in December 2023 and lost another son, who was also a journalist, along with another journalist in January 2024 (United Nations, 2024). He further noted that journalists wearing press vests and in well-marked vehicles had come under attack, indicating ‘. . . that the killings, injury, and detention are a deliberate strategy by Israeli forces to obstruct the media and silence critical reporting’ (United Nations, 2024). In summary, the commissioning of mass violence against civilians, the wholesale destruction of Gazan society and institutions and the deliberate killing of journalists who are covering the conflict are clear evidence of an attempt to eliminate the Palestinian body-politic and its ways of being, including knowledge generated by living in a genocidal context that would incriminate the Israeli state.

As the US and UK continue to sell weapons to Israel, civilians and journalists continue to share their experiences of the conflict online, highlighting their continued existence and resistance towards the violence that is designed to eliminate them and their culture. We hope that the sheer incompatibility of the scale of mass violence with the ongoing international liberal discourses of humanitarian aid, humanitarian pauses and diplomatic efforts will be a tipping point in highlighting colonial violence and modernity’s eliminationist epistemologies (Du Bois, 1925; Mbembe, 2003; Upadhyay, 2021; Wynter, 2003). As Ali Bilgiç (2018) notes, even acts of savourism can be acts of brutal violence where they perpetuate oppressive colonial regimes. Limited acts of humanitarian assistance from Western policymakers while they continue to facilitate the Israeli occupation of Gaza undoubtedly falls within this category.

Conclusion

This article has highlighted the existence of post-truth politics as a form of epistemicide which attempts to discursively and materially erase the capacity of minoritised groups to exist as legitimate knowledge producers. It has focused on online and offline acts of violence that attempt to erase trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities both in body and in law as citizens. Long-standing processes of colonial violence are clearly epistemicidal in character, but what is new is their legitimisation and contestation through the contemporary media landscape. As this article has argued, these groups resist attempts to erase them and their ways of being at the ontological level by documenting and sharing their lived experiences, including of eliminationist violence.

Following Tendayi Bloom’s (2023: 69) notion of non-citizenship, which calls for deference to communities who have been dehumanised as ‘experts by experience’, we have focused on the ways in which the aforementioned communities have resisted post-truth politics as epistemicide by sharing their lived experiences via the hybrid media system. This constitutes a forum in which online and offline narratives of (non)citizenship circulate, reflecting both the presence of and resistance towards modernity’s historic systems of oppression and marginalisation (Mbembe, 2003; Upadhyay, 2021; Wynter, 2003). Despite this, it offers new opportunities for minoritised groups to (1) exert political agency that epistemicidal violence is designed to deprive them of and (2) highlight the extent to which Western modernity is a fundamentally violent project, contesting its ideological coherence and legitimacy.

As trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities have shown, documenting existence within the digital media context can resist eliminationist hierarchies of power that are exercised through the hybridised media system and, with it, state apparatuses that often interact with these or reproduce them materially. Notwithstanding the well-documented violent nature of social media for minoritised groups, we also argue it constitutes a vital arena for the production of subaltern, marginalised knowledges. Only by foregrounding Indigenous, trans*/queer, feminist and de/pre-colonial ways of knowing/being can we highlight the violence that is endemic to our current global order and envision possibilities for change. We hope that the disciplines of international relations and political science will increasingly incorporate these insights in order to challenge epistemicidal patterns in public debates.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback on the piece.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Patrick J. Vernon

Charlotte Galpin

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