How colonial extraction and militarised borders weaponise grief: Funeral rituals as sites of systemic resistance in conflict zones
Original framing: “Working unseen to frame risk and ritual in a conflict-zone funeral - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The criminalisation of funerals in conflict zones traces back to colonial strategies of divide-and-rule, where collective mourning was policed to prevent organised resistance. In Algeria, French colonial forces banned funeral processions during the 1954–62 war to disrupt nationalist mobilisation, a tactic mirrored today in Gaza, Kashmir, and Myanmar. The AP’s framing echoes colonial logics by treating funerals as 'security threats' rather than sites of political agency, ignoring how state violence manufactures the conditions for 'conflict-zone' funerals in the first place.
The AP’s framing of funerals in conflict zones as 'risk management' obscures how colonial extraction, militarised borders, and extractive economies converge to criminalise mourning, reducing grief to a logistical problem rather than a site of resistance.
Historically, states have policed funerals to disrupt organised resistance, from French colonial Algeria to today’s Gaza, where each funeral procession is a rebuke to settler-colonial erasure. Indigenous epistemologies—from Māori *tangihanga* to Palestinian *janaza*—treat funerals as acts of defiance, where burial sites encode histories of land theft and communal autonomy. Marginalised communities, particularly women and indigenous peoples, are disproportionately targeted for conducting these rituals, yet their knowledge systems offer alternatives to state violence, such as restorative security models that demilitarise end-of-life care. The solution lies in decolonising funerary practices through legal recognition, transnational solidarity, and truth commissions that expose how states manufacture 'conflict zones' to justify perpetual war.