This lecture series interrogates the relationship between territory and violence in the present. Building on the 2025 lecture series “The Question of Genocide”, “Territory and Violence” examines the entanglements of legal, historical and political trajectories that underpin the making of territories through mass violence. Territory is not simply land. Territory is the outcome of transformations of land (and sea) into sovereign property — a legal-political ordering of space that shapes access to resources, re-orders property relations, and legal control. Territory is thus a legal-political project that enables and legitimizes processes of dispossession and the enclosure of commons. Through interventions from anthropology, geography, architecture, and law, the speakers will highlight how territory is produced, claimed, governed and resisted in contexts of colonialism, war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
