Domicide and the Politics of Home In Turbulent Times

This session examines domicide as a critical lens for understanding violence, displacement and spatial injustice in turbulent global contexts. Building on the foundational work of Porteous and Smith, who conceptualised domicide as the killing of home (Porteous & Smith, 2023), recent scholarship has expanded the term to capture state‑led, militarised and market‑driven processes that unmake dwelling and belonging. Operating through war, occupation and infrastructural erasure, domicide produces landscapes where the home becomes a target of political power (Rabbat et al., 2025; Ram & Handel, 2024). Beyond conflict zones, scholars highlight how urban renewal, mega‑projects and speculative development similarly dismantle the material and social foundations of home, often under the guise of modernisation or resilience (Guo & Omar, 2026; Zuberi, 2026).

This session invites papers that interrogate domicide as a social, political and spatial phenomenon. We welcome contributions that analyse its mechanisms—legal, bureaucratic, military, financial or discursive—and its differentiated impacts on communities. We also encourage work that examines resistance to domicide, including practices of everyday repair, collective organising, counter‑mapping and alternative housing models that seek to reassert the right to dwell.

By bringing together theoretical, empirical and practice‑based perspectives, the session aims to deepen understanding of how domicide is enacted and contested across diverse contexts. In doing so, it positions the destruction of home not as an exceptional event but as a patterned feature of contemporary governance, conflict and urban transformation.