The right to maim

Jasbir K. Puar examines how the Israeli state, and biopolitical power more broadly, deliberately maintains Palestinian populations in a state of injury and debility rather than killing outright — a calculated "right to maim" that lets the occupier claim humanitarian restraint while inflicting mass disability.

Bringing disability studies into conversation with theories of biopolitics, settler colonialism and security, Puar argues that debility itself has become a target and a tool of control, exposing the racial and geopolitical hierarchies embedded in who is allowed to be "able" and whose bodies are made to bear injury.