Technologies of Colonialism and Solidarity

IWM, Vienna
April, 28 - 29. 2025

This conference aims to critically position Russian colonialism not as an isolated phenomenon but as an integral part of the international project of colonial expansion, which encompasses both collaboration and competition between Western and non-Western empires. Encompassing the intersections of colonial warfare, resource extraction, surveillance, occupation, and other colonial technologies, our collaborative initiative aims at thinking with multiple histories and presents of decolonial resistance.

Consisting of three panels – technologies of occupation, technologies of persistence and technologies of implication –, the conference brings together researchers, artists and activists to analyze ways and methods of colonial violence and develop the methods of translocal solidarity.

Full Program

Beyond Resilience: Rethinking Solidarity and Resistance Through Palestine and Ukraine

Svitlana Matviyenko and Malaka Shwaikh in Conversation

What new insights emerge when we think of Palestine and Ukraine in conversation with one another? In this dialogue, Svitlana Matviyenko and Malaka Shwaikh will critically examine the limits of the discourse of “resilience”—a term that often obscures the structural conditions of violence. They will explore how imperial subjects become implicated in sustaining colonial regimes, thereby reinforcing global systems of domination. By analyzing these mechanisms, the speakers will articulate solidarity not as a sentiment, but as a method of resistance—an active challenge to colonialism embedded within broader international structures of imperial expansion.

The conversation is a keynote event of the Technologies of Colonialism and Solidarity conference

Recording

Vincent E.