bram j de smet

I’m the project’s PI. I have a PhD in Peace and Conflict Research. My dissertation introduces slow erasure as a way to understand how settler-colonial violence works gradually and structurally to undermine Indigenous life, identity, and futures. Instead of focusing on sudden acts of mass killing, he shows how harm accumulates through everyday practices like restricting movement, fragmenting land, suppressing knowledge, and targeting bodies through injury, imprisonment, and control. Grounded in long-term ethnographic work in Palestine, the study illustrates how Zionist settler-colonialism steadily weakens Palestinian presence and possibility—yet also highlights the resilience found in practices of sumud, such as cultural preservation, land cultivation, education, and everyday acts of staying put. By naming slow erasure, the dissertation offers a clearer language for recognising often-ignored forms of violence and contributes to broader conversations on justice, Indigenous survival, and decolonial futures. I also have a background in robotics, so there’s very much a nerd inside me.