structural gaslighting | icj case of gaza genocide: south africa vs. isr**l

US Secretary of state Antony Blinken recently stated “south Africa’s genocide submission against isr**l distracts the world from important efforts for peace and security.”

These statements are a form of structural gaslighting and it is imperative we name this as a tool of colonial violence. Structural gaslighting occurs through ideological and regulatory structures and political and media discourse, reinforcing the realities of the powerful while undermining the lived realities of those who suffer and/or seek to resist oppression.

People engage in structural gaslighting when they invoke epistemologies and ideologies of domination that actively disappear and obscure the actual causes, mechanisms, and effects of oppression.

Structural gaslighting enables dominant social groups to both retain oppressive systems of belief and sabotage conceptual resources that subordinated social groups could use to convey the nature of their oppression and thereby promote resistance. Structural gaslighting is in fact a vital element of apparatuses of oppression and the epistemologies of domination that reinforce and sustain them. It is more ubiquitous than the familiar form of gaslighting and causes harm on a scale that exceeds individual psychology.

Structural gaslighting is a tool of colonial violence. Name it when you see it.

S O U R C E S

We are grateful to the works of Shelley Tremain (2020), Structural Gaslighting, Epistemic Injustice, and Ableism in Philosophy, Biopolitical Philosophy; Legacy et al., (2023), Infrastructural gaslighting and the crisis of participatory planning, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space; direct excerpts of which informed the content for this blog post.