Son[i]a #446 

Omar Jabary Salamanca (Valladolid, 1979) is a writer, teacher, and organizer whose work explores how power operates through the ordinary systems that shape everyday life. An Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the Free University of Brussels and a founding member of The Kitchen and University Workers for Palestine, Omar recounts in his work how infrastructures are constitutive of the logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, as well as a vital terrain for land-based practices of anti-colonial resistance. Thus, roads, electricity, water systems, and railways become sites of struggle.

He introduces the concept of infrastructural violence to describe how harm is produced through seemingly banal arrangements, such as segregated pathways, checkpoints, donor-driven development plans, and legal systems that fragment space and responsibility, forms of violence that remain difficult to contest precisely because they appear technical rather than political. 

In Palestine, a road is never just a road: infrastructure shapes who can move, who must wait, and who is rendered visible or erased… disposable. Moving across archives and lived experience, in this podcast, Omar traces these trajectories within a long historical arc that predates the Oslo period, from Ottoman railways to British Mandate concessions, oil pipelines, and electricity companies in Jerusalem. We talk about the elasticity of infrastructures, social reproduction, and the witnessing of violence and silencing today. 

With the support

_{Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.}