ENTRE COLONIALISMO E NEOLIBERALISMO. Táticas de dominaçao no Brasil e na Palestina/ BETWEEN COLONIALISM AND NEOLIBERALISM: TACTICS OF DOMINATION IN BRAZIL AND PALESTINE

Abstract

This article proposes a qualitative comparison between the Palestinian and Brazilian territories, using the concept of settler colonialism as a framework of approximation — a concept that establishes, in both territories, logics of elimination which, although manifest differently, share a common objective: territorial and population control of regions considered strategic for the maintenance of US neoliberal hegemony, which is now taking on increasingly authoritarian contours. In both cases, one observes the continuous reproduction of a racialized “internal enemy”, a category that legitimizes practices of militarization and the distribution of death as a regime of state power. We analyze how this strategy unfolds in each context: in the Palestinian case, through a policy of colonization that has today given rise to genocidal practices; in the Brazilian case, we examine the so-called “war on drugs”, adopted as a tactical instrument of territorial, subjective, and social control — revealing the presence of colonial violence at the core of neoliberal democracies.

Keywords: Palestine; Brazil; Settler Colonialism; Neoliberal Neofascism; War on Drugs.

Dafne Melo is a psychoanalyst and translator. She holds degrees in Journalism and History and a specialization in Psychoanalysis. She is a PhD student in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research is dedicated to listening to the memories of Palestinians of the diaspora, in Brazil, regarding the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. She is a member of the collective Desorientalismos.

Jana Koosah is a psychologist and PhD student in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research sits at the intersection of mental health, psychiatric critique, and psychosocial studies, investigating different responses of mental health systems to crisis situations, with particular attention to the forms of governance, control, and counterinsurgency produced by psy knowledge. She is a member of the collective Desorientalismos and has been developing research on mental health in the context of the Palestinian genocide, and the ethical-political implications for thinking about Latin America.

Rômulo Ballestê Marques dos Santos holds a PhD in Psychology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, with an internship at Columbia University in New York, and is a Professor in the Psychology Department at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul/Pantanal Campus. He conducts research in the areas of Social Psychology and Political Psychology, with an emphasis on the relationship between neoliberalism and subjectivity.