Imperialists Scorch the Earth

Over the past few days, imperial forces have, once again, openly allied themselves with the expansionist genocidal entity in their ongoing aggression on Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. We are well aware that the zionist politics of occupation and land grabbing historically converge with the economic interests of global imperialism. But their latest attacks, which set the region ablaze, come at a moment of unprecedented complicity from our own states.

We cannot stress enough the gravity of the moment: a colonial-imperial alliance is attempting to annihilate any form of resistance or counter-narrative to its deadly game plan. Meanwhile, the West Bank is being annexed; Lebanon is being invaded and occupied from the South; and Gaza is still under genocide.

We vehemently oppose any and all normalization with a colonial project that has killed and displaced our people, grabbed our land, and depleted us of our resources. We categorically reject the heinous instrumentalization of feminist popular uprisings from the Global South (Iran in this case) to justify bombing them. In fact, we refuse to address our analysis to the imperial west altogether, and would like to instead provide a space for political thought and reflections beyond senseless, war-mongering propaganda that serves imperial interests. In the same vein, we find it important to analyze the role the gulf countries have been playing in global capitalism through the oil trade and military bases, and their subsequent involvement in genocides, massacres, and the deliberate impoverishing of colonized peoples. What this landscape signs off is the profound disconnect between anti-colonial struggles and popular uprisings on the one hand, and the colonial roots and capitalist aspirations of the modern nation-state on the other hand.

At Kohl, we are calling for contributions in a new format: we would like to read and publish pieces of political analysis that allow us to piece together the different ways in which global imperialisms are connected in our region and beyond, while remaining anchored in our different locations. We are ideally looking for texts that focus on one or more facets of the ongoing imperial war (historical, current, or potential), such as land, oil, trade, popular uprisings, migration/displacement, the arms industry, military sites, state formations… in order to push past the fragmentation of our respective struggles and narratives.

We are accepting texts and abstracts throughout the month of March, which you can email to submit@kohljournal.press. Please note that we are happy to accept shorter pieces, personal essays, as well as voice-recorded commentaries that we can help you turn into written text. We encourage submissions in Arabic, and also accept texts in English.

We look forward to reading and engaging with you. 

If you have the financial capacity to support Kohl at this time, we are accepting donations to be able to pay our contributors who are writing from a place of precarity, and to continue translating our publications. Please get in touch at info@kohljournal.press. An online donation system is under way.