Just as...counter insurrectional wars...are always undergirded by a genocidal exterminatory impulse, historically, such wars have always been justified by the supposed absence of a common bond of humanity between the colonizers and the colonized.

This is the reason why their aim has usually been the total erasure of indigenous people's past, the annihilation of their collective memory and the destruction of the basic infrastructures thanks to which they sought to maintain a semblance of personhood. 

Where this exterminatory logic has not been pushed to its final conclusion, various killing projects have taken shape and complex strangulation tactics have been put in place with a view to intensifying the suffocating conditions which enslaved, colonized or racialized classes have been subjected.

Achille Mbembe