“Like trapped animals, human beings turn in circles. A place of collision, of spaces where lives come crashing against large and small walls, barriers and checkpoints, leaving behind them debris of time and, often, bodies in pieces, under the effect of multiple states of siege, untimely closures, repeated blockades and, when necessary, fragmentation bombs, in short desolation. Humanity in a cage, Palestine in general, and Gaza in particular, have become the emblems par excellence for humanity in a cage. They are the great laboratories of a regime of brutalization nearing technological completion and seeking to globalize. It is a question of generalizing and extending, on a global scale, the methods refined in the context of the management of “occupied territories” and in other predatory wars.

This regime of brutalization is based on the extreme fracturing of spaces deliberately made uninhabitable, the intense cracking of bodies constantly threatened with amputation, forced to live in hollows, often under rubble, in the interstices and unstable fissures of environments subjected to all sorts of devastation, abandonment, in short, universal dissection. If we have indeed entered a reticular world, it is at the same time made up of enclaves, zones of erasure, including memory, dead ends and shifting, mobile and diffuse borders. It is worth repeating: the dissection of spaces which is its corollary is, itself, a key element of the contemporary regime of universal predation.”

Achille Mbembe

“Ordinarily, the Earth refers to a spatial category, to an expanse. It is made of a more or less firm ground, landscapes, reliefs, depths and foundations, traces, enclosures, wastelands, sanctuaries. It is understood, we think, in a bundle of directions (east, west, south, north). Made from mineral or vegetable matter, that is, soil, it is round and therefore circumscribed. And, above all, it is inhabited. As such, humans in particular, exert their hold on it mapping it according to the surveyor’s cadastre and exploiting it. They cultivate it and perhaps take care of it. Their life and their destiny play out on this ground. A common home, it is the residence of humans and other species, the object of a primitive sharing between all beings and, from this point of view, both their shared cognomen (common name) and their maternal body.

There would therefore be, behind the generic image that is the ‘Earth’ something of the order of a specific power — a foundational power, of that on which the work or project, the form and its author, stands. But also something of the breadth, the depths and roots — the root, if not the place of origin of all things, that whose limits escape the gaze, that which we mine and which serves as a fundamental shelter for those who inhabit it. Although circumscribed, the Earth would actually beckon to the unlimited.… in the background, surrounded by a dark night, the Earth would always remain distinct from its inhabitants….in its substance and materiality…” 

Achille Mbembe

Living spaces as weapons
The text is saying that in today’s world, violence isn’t just about hurting bodies directly. It’s also about wrecking the very places people live—bombed-out cities, camps, slums, unstable zones. Spaces are intentionally made uninhabitable so that survival itself becomes a form of torture.

Bodies always under threat
People aren’t just “alive,” they’re precariously alive. There’s always the looming threat of losing limbs, being buried under rubble, or otherwise being violently reduced. So existence is fragile, on edge.

Fragmented environments
Instead of one stable world, we live in a fragmented patchwork of broken zones: enclaves (pockets of people cut off), erased areas (where history and memory are wiped out), dead ends (no exit, no future), and unstable borders (always shifting and uncertain).

Universal predation
All this isn’t random chaos—it’s part of a larger system of exploitation. By fracturing people and their environments, power makes populations easier to control, displace, or consume. The “universal dissection” is the method: cut everything apart, keep it unstable, and feed off the ruins.

So in plain language: the world is being systematically broken into unstable fragments where people are forced to live in constant precarity, and that brokenness itself is a strategy.

Can the Earth’s "unlimited" character—its resistance to full human control—serve as a foundation for alternative politics? The tension between Mbembe’s two visions—the Earth as a cage and the Earth as a common home—is not just theoretical but practical. The path forward lies in simultaneously resisting the cages and building the commons:

• Resistance: Dismantling the systems that fragment and brutalize.


• Creation: Cultivating spaces where the Earth’s shared, foundational character is lived and defended.

This is not a linear but a dialectical process, where each act of resistance opens space for new forms of sorge, and each experiment in commoning strengthens the struggle against enclosure.

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Final Thought: Mbembe’s work reminds us that the Earth is both the site of our greatest violences and of profound possibilities. The challenge is to live this paradox—to see the cracks in the cage not as endpoints but as openings, and to treat the Earth not as a territory to be divided but as a home to be shared. The movements and practices above are not utopia; they are already happening, often at the margins. The question is how to scale them, connect them, and make them irresistible.

LLM