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Bram J. De Smet

I’m Bram J. De Smet. I hold a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies. I hold a master’s degree in International Conflict and Security from the University of Kent.

My PhD dissertation introduced slow erasure as a way to understand how settler-colonial violence works gradually and structurally to undermine Indigenous life, identity, and futures. Instead of focusing on sudden acts of mass killing, he shows how harm accumulates through everyday practices like restricting movement, fragmenting land, suppressing knowledge, and targeting bodies through injury, imprisonment, and control. Grounded in long-term ethnographic work in Palestine, the study illustrates how Zionist settler-colonialism steadily weakens Palestinian presence and possibility—yet also highlights the resilience found in practices of sumud, such as cultural preservation, land cultivation, education, and everyday acts of staying put. By naming slow erasure, the dissertation offers a clearer language for recognising often-ignored forms of violence and contributes to broader conversations on justice, Indigenous survival, and decolonial futures.

My postdoctoral research Solidarity under Exhaustion examines how solidarity navigates exhaustion, despair, and repression while sustaining infrastructures of care and imagination. Since October 2023, Palestine solidarity organising has shifted from sporadic protests to sustained, confrontational action, forging new coalitions, tactics, and imaginaries. These shifts unfold amid exhaustion: organisers face burnout, publics are overwhelmed, and governments remain complicit through silence or alignment with Israeli policies. Here, solidarity is also endurance: activists sustain themselves emotionally and relationally when efficacy feels uncertain.

I also hold a degree in robotic engineering from HOGENT University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

I’m a board member at the European Peace Research Association & council member of the International Peace Research Association

I maintain a database of peace institutes, academic journals related to peace studies, and peace-related MA programmes at Peace Research Institute.

Academic fields of interest: anarchism, necropolitics, torture, gender, grievances, violence, bio/body politics, hope, resistance, vulnerability, settler colonialism, decolonisation, slow erasure, weaponsisation of care, genocide by attrition, solidarity, mutual care, social ecology and communalism.

Current projects
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  • Solidarity under Exhaustion: This postdoctoral project examines how solidarity navigates exhaustion, despair, and repression while sustaining infrastructures of care and imagination. Project starts March 2026.

  • FoRE/HOPE: What can everyday resistance and hope teach us about social change? In the face of increasing authoritarianism and social exclusion, there is an urgent need to understand how people deal with oppressive structures and experiences of violence and exclusion in everyday life. Resistance and hope are central to this, as both are practises and aspirations that influence each other.

Affiliations
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  • Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP): GOCEP studies various forms of everyday violence, especially in relation to colonial histories and the prevalence of coloniality in various sites of political and societal crises. We examine diverse geographies of violence - prolonged crises, environmental conflicts, wars - and their multiple relations to imperialism, settler colonialism, and colonial ways of knowing and being as they emerge through the everyday entanglements. While covering various themes, we are particularly interested in embodied materialities, everyday ecologies, and the atmospheres of violence, especially how they appear in ways of undoing power through the irreducibility of the human and non-human to power. The multidisciplinary group is based on Regional Studies, Tampere University.

  • Tampere Peace Research Institute: TAPRI is a multidisciplinary and international research centre whose mission is to conduct high quality research on the causes of war, on non-violent resolution of conflicts, and on conditions for peace. In accordance with the present research agenda, the focus of TAPRI’s research is peaceful change.

Contact
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