Cairo Papers Talk Series | Palestine: Confronting Genocide — Faster Than Mourning: AI Killing, Existence and the Struggle Over Time

In the age of artificial intelligence, both information and death are produced and executed with unprecedented speed. The emergence of "remote killing" technologies collapses the temporal distance between decision, action and death, creating conditions in which killing becomes nearly instantaneous and indiscriminate. This acceleration destabilizes philosophical traditions that conceptualize death as an ever-present possibility structuring human existence. In Palestine, technological violence reconfigures the temporality of death, stripping it of the slowness and ritual once integral to mourning and replacing it with accelerated forms of erasure. This work advances the scholarly discussion of the temporality of death by critically examining the temporality of technology, killing and death.

Ghadir Awad of Michigan University will center the Palestinian experience before and after October 7 within broader debates on genocide, necropolitics (Mbembe) and the dromology of war (Virilio). Drawing on qualitative discourse, this work traces the multiscalar impacts of technologically driven violence: from immediate destruction through bombardment and assassination, to protracted dispossession under occupation and siege, to dispersed forms of silencing and neglect, arguing that the accelerated erasure of Palestinians through technological violence is continually countered by resistance infrastructure, where the temporality of killing fails to uproot. In doing so, it foregrounds temporality itself as a central terrain of existential struggle, reframing the contest not only over life and death but over the very conditions by which they are temporally structured.

About the series: 
Palestine: Confronting Genocide
Cairo Papers in Social Science, The American University in Cairo

More than two years since the onset of the most recent genocide in Palestine, suffering, destruction, starvation and massive displacement have remained an everyday reality in Palestine. The vast numbers of the dead, the wounded and the missing continue to rise, along with the ruination of all aspects of living, from buildings, infrastructure, to food, water, health, educational and religious institutions. What does it mean to live and to witness a genocide? What does it mean to describe an everyday of genocide? How can the current genocide be situated in the global political cartography of power? Have previously recognized categories and paradigms, such as international law, humanitarian law, democratic rule, morality and ethical responsibility, among others, been emptied out of meaning? How do we read the current moment in the long durée of settler colonialism in Palestine, imperial desires and resistance? Is this genocidal moment unprecedented or an intensification of a long process of extermination and subjugation that has been unfolding for decades? How to understand what is happening in Palestine next to what is happening in Syria, in Sudan, in Yemen, in Libya, in Lebanon and Iraq, and so on? What have been new registers of resistance, as they have been unfolding throughout the years? How do the social sciences and humanities confront the possibilities and limits of knowledge in the face of the horrible and the unfathomable of genocide?