“Geographies of Resistance” across Italy and Lebanon: grassroots practices for the liberation of Palestine against military occupation.

This contribution investigates experiences of civil disobedience and grassroots resistance opposing policies that support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, with a focus on geography as a dimension where social transformation and practices of spatial re-signification take place. Starting from the premise that Israeli territorial control extends well beyond the borders of historic Palestine (Yftachel 2006), the research interrogates the spatial configurations through which occupation operates across Lebanon and Italy. These two contexts are directly implicated, albeit in different ways and at different scales, in dynamics of occupation and militarization (Rech et al. 2015), as well as in the implications of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon lives in a condition of ghettoization within refugee camps and it recognizes their militarized perimeter as the primary device of control – both material and symbolic – shaping its existential condition. In this context, the so-called spatial violations (Maqusi 2020) or squatting (Sanyal 2011) are ways to conquest new spaces for autonomous action understood as spaces of existence, autonomy, and resistance. These practices, alongside memorial and cultural commemorations, constitute a widespread strategy aimed at subverting imposed boundaries and reclaiming alternative forms of transformation that sustain political imaginaries of resistance (Sayigh 1978; Khalili 2004; Davis 2017). Italy, on the other hand, emerges as a European country complicit in Israeli imperial policies, while simultaneously functioning as a laboratory of dissent and cultural resistance, where social movements, collectives, and activist networks develop strategies, actions, and counter-narratives designed to radicalize perspectives and raise public awareness about the urgency of breaking dependence on military institutions and the state (Esu 2020). The analysis highlights intersections and points of contact between practices enacted in both territories, outlining the contours of a broader “geography of resistance” (Spanu 2023) capable of re-signifying territories themselves, thus displacing them from colonial registers of possession and dispossession (Byrd 2019: 207), as well as from logics of militarization and occupation. Such experiences embody forms of “counter-hegemonic globalization” (de Sousa Santos 2007) that open alternative and decentralized spaces for developing new critical theories and transformative practices. In seeking to contribute to anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic academic knowledge, the article draws on Decolonial Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, Diaspora Studies and Critical Military Geography. Methodologically, ethnographic research and participatory action-research guide the project, aiming to restore epistemic centrality to marginalized subjectivities and to transform conditions of exclusion into resources for resistance and critical production (de Sousa Santos 2007).