by Leela James

The Ecosystem of State Violence

State power is a broad beast. Depending on where you sit in the class structure or your level of political conscientisation, ¹ you may believe that only the military or police use violence as a tool of control, or that democracy amounts to a sausage sizzle every four years. But state violence operates as an ecosystem, with different sectors using different forms of violence.

For example, we recognise the kinetic violence of war. But we may only recognise the violence of our health system after watching a loved one languish on a Medicare waitlist. We may recognise the violence of Centrelink’s punitive welfare bureaucracy, or of the criteria used to determine who accesses the NDIS, only once these issues intersect with our lives.

State power operates through two interdependent mechanisms: repressive force (police, military, prisons) and ideological production (media, education, culture). As Louis Althusser argued, the state secures its rule not just by the threat of violence, but by shaping what we accept as normal, reasonable, just, and inevitable. ²Neither mechanism works alone. Together, they reproduce existing social relations, dictating how we view different countries and whether they are entitled to our solidarity.

For generations, this ecosystem has trained us to place conditions on our solidarity. We learn to ask: Is this victim innocent enough, sympathetic enough? Do they belong to the right political or religious category? Do they condemn the right things? These questions are not natural; they are manufactured. And nowhere have their consequences been exposed more clearly than in the West’s response to the violence in West Asia: the ongoing genocide in Gaza, escalating violence in the West Bank and Southern Lebanon, and the Western-imposed war of choice on Iran.

If we can understand how we were socialised to look away from Palestine for 78 years, how we were taught to treat Palestinian suffering as debatable, conditional, or somehow complicated, we can then understand how we have been socialised to do the same with Iran, and with urgent issues closer to home. The same machinery operates across Australian society: the same internalised hierarchies of grief and solidarity, the same refusal to extend solidarity to those deemed unworthy by the architects of empire and the colony.

The Uneven Distribution of Violence, and the Contradiction It Exposes

The state violence we experience depends on our proximity to it. For example, data shows that Aboriginal people and poor people are disproportionately over-policed. ³ Further disaggregation of the data reveals that when Aboriginal people and poor people are in close proximity to police during or after arrest, Aboriginal people become more vulnerable to police violence than non-Aboriginal poor people. Meanwhile, most middle-class people live without experiencing police violence, because our material conditions shape how police operate in our lives.

Yet dramatic moments do occur when police violence intersects with white middle-class women. When white middle-class women are murdered, a media frenzy ignites. ⁴ The national community is appropriately infuriated. The victims’ families, domestic violence non-profits, and civil advocacy sectors mobilise. The political class launches inquiries, meets with communities, and boosts funding. ⁵ The media frames the violence as an aberration to be reformed, rather than a system of violence inherent to our economic and political order.

Reality-test this: Why does the system respond this way to violence inflicted on white middle-class bodies, yet it treats the disproportionate violence inflicted on Black and poor bodies with barely any curiosity? Why does violence against white middle-class bodies generate the emotional affect that demands accountability, while the same violence against Black and poor bodies with increasing frequency, intensity, and proximity, raises no such demand?

Of course, there are moments of outrage when violence is inflicted on Black bodies, when police violence produces such anger and grief that Aboriginal families demand settlers stand in solidarity with them. In those moments, the political class and police unions respond in defence of the violence. Inquiries may occur; recall the 2019 case of officer Zachary Rolfe shooting Kumanjayi Walker three times in his bedroom. ⁶ However, the 2025 Deaths in Custody data gives us a clear indication of how the population has metabolised the normalisation of violence on Black bodies.⁷

This is the central contradiction of liberal democracy. It promises universal freedom, equality, justice, human rights, parliamentary democracy, press freedom, reconciliation, and multiculturalism. When state power transgresses these values, when it bombs, starves, or occupies, we are taught this is an aberration, a mistake; a failure of implementation, not of the system itself. The solution, we are told, lies in corrections: better leaders, more oversight, reform from within.

This same contradiction, which operates at both the domestic and international levels, is not a bug but a feature. It cannot be reformed; if it could, we would have achieved it long ago.

Palestine, Iran, and the Logic of Violence

Palestine clearly revealed the architecture of this distortion. For 78 years, the world was told that Palestinian resistance should be seen as inexplicable violence, rather than a response to settler colonialism. As Mohammed El-Kurd writes in his book Perfect Victims, it is a colonial tactic to blur the truth by starting a story with “secondly,” effectively erasing the “firstly” that provides the full context and history of the issue. ⁸ This linguistic trickery enables a narrative that legitimises colonial crimes while criminalising the colonised.

We can see how this trickery was applied in response to the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation, which atrocity propaganda manufactured by the media framed as unprovoked violence, rather than resistance to 78 years of colonial subjugation and an operation intended to free some of the over 10,000 Palestinians detained by Israel. We can see this same process being played out on Iran. Western aggression is framed as “global stability”; Iranian self-defence is framed as “aggression.” The violence of empire is rendered natural and just, while the violence of those who resist it is rendered incomprehensible.

El-Kurd uses the term “politics of appeal” to describe how the Western narrative systematically elevates certain victims while rendering others invisible. ⁹For example, during the Gaza genocide, Israeli death and injury received disproportionate coverage, while Palestinians, if they were mentioned by the media at all, had to be meticulously differentiated from the resistance as civilians. While referring to Palestinian civilians is legitimate, the interchangeability between the categories of “Hamas resistance fighter” and “Palestinian civilian” is weaponised to entrench harmful narratives that deny Palestinians their internationally coded right to use armed resistance against their occupier. This framing is used by the political class and the media to legitimise Israel’s genocide. The question “Do you condemn Hamas?” becomes an interrogation tool designed to test our submission to the imperial world order.

We have watched the same process unfold with Iran. Western media frames Iran through the narrow lens of its own interests, erasing how the many thousands of Iranians have come out onto the streets daily, forming human chains around civilian infrastructure in a show of solidarity with their government and its legitimate right to self-defence against a Western-imposed war. And, like the political and media response to the Al-Aqsa operation, we are expected to believe that the current war is a justified response to inexplicable Iranian violence, erasing decades of Western-imposed wars, sanctions, and destabilisation.

Again, we see that “I stand with the Iranian people, not the state” serves the same purpose as “Do you condemn Hamas?” The demand that we frame our solidarity only in Western-approved terms before it is deemed acceptable (whether this demand is made by the media, politicians, or civil organisations) is a trap. It is designed to foreclose solidarity by repetitively testing and confirming our commitment to the global system of imperialism.

Reality-testing, again: Why are US-imposed sanctions on Iran, which target medical and health care access, causing unnecessary deaths from treatable diseases, framed as “maximum pressure” rather than as collective punishment and an act of war? Why is the US assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, alongside much of his close family, treated as a legitimate act of war? How can the triple-tap bombing of an Iranian primary school, which killed 175 children and teachers, also be treated as a legitimate act of war by both the political class and the media? Yet Iranian retaliation is framed as aggression. We must ask ourselves, is Western-imposed violence legitimate? Or is it barbaric violence hidden behind an atrophied mask of universal human rights?

Dialectics: The Scientific Law of Contradiction

Western liberal values (universal rights, equality, etc.) and imperial violence aren’t opposite forces; they’re mutually defining. Liberal prosperity depends on extraction, yet our rhetoric obfuscates the violence. Those unresolved contradictions are what drive today’s global instability. Dialectics is the science of how internal contradictions force change, from ancient sea snails to industrial revolutions.

Idealism, which underpins liberal media and politics, inverts this. It says great thoughts (usually from great white European men) reshape the world. Marxists reject that. Thought alone isn’t enough. Transformation emerges from the unity of human consciousness, material conditions, and their contradictions.

Change is inevitable, but its form depends on us. Neglect the core contradiction, universal human rights versus exploitative extraction, and daily abuses (bombings in West Asia, legal repression in Australia, and so on) build up. They don’t slowly become a new system. They accumulate quantitatively until they hit a tipping point, triggering a sudden qualitative rupture, not from outside attack, but from the structure imploding under its own weight. ¹⁰

Thus, we have a choice: consciously resolve the contradiction through revolutionary action, or wait until the rupture happens violently on its own.

Where to From Here?

When one contradiction is resolved (whether by revolution, disobedience, collapse, or the sheer weight of its volatility), it does not disappear once and for all. It transfers and discovers itself in conflict with new contradictions. The process does not end; it transforms the world around and within us.

This is not cause for despair, but for clarity. We either confront the contradiction now or later, otherwise its rupture is inevitable. Palestine has fractured its primary contradiction, and it has revealed an Iranian contradiction. Further, both Palestine and Iran have exposed deep contradictions within our own settler colony, such as the expansion of police violence upon previously protected classes. While the fear of police violence and lawfare may cause confusion, anger, and despair, its remedy, our call to action, is one of political clarity.

Psychic Militancy: Refusing the Terms

Our task is not to convince the national or global system to correct itself. The system cannot correct or reform itself; these contradictions are features, not bugs. Our task is to understand the dialectical process, refuse the terms of our own conditioning, and align ourselves with the material reality of this moment.

Lara Sheehi, a psychoanalyst who works from a decolonial and anti-imperialist praxis, describes reality-bending as the systematic effort to distort historical-material conditions, creating a reality that allows settler-colonial and imperialist logics to go unchallenged. She describes the process of internalising the imperialist and colonial narrative as the way in which the system invites us to absorb its logic, to mistake liberal ideology for ignorance, and to believe that explanation will produce reform. We come to believe that if we explain the injustice clearly enough, do the research, form campaigns, march in the streets, et cetera, the system will correct itself. This is not naivety, but the system producing in us the exact response it wants and needs in order to stabilise itself in times of disruption.

Sheehi speaks of psychic militancy: the practice of refusing the terms of settler-colonial and imperialist psychic intrusion. ¹¹Name the violence, name the perpetrator; correct the narrative. Affirm Palestine’s legal and moral right to armed resistance, and the Islamic Republic’s internationally recognised right to defend its sovereignty. Affirm our inherent right to name the imperialist and colonial violence that shapes our material conditions, despite the state’s threat of violence.

As Sheehi put it in a recent interview: “Fear is never not there. The moment you try to free yourself is the moment the brunt of the violence comes down on you the hardest. And yet, that is where I want to live. That’s the vibrancy of life and our political commitment.” ¹²

For those of us in the West, political commitment means acting not despite fear but with it. It requires that we understand that the system’s aim is affective disablement: to confuse, frighten, and exhaust us into passivity; to make us believe our solidarity cannot make a difference, or that it comes with too high a risk; to convince us that the suffering of the “unworthy” is simply too complicated to take a stand for it.

Collective Refusal: Withdrawing Consent Together

Refusal is the practice of withdrawing consent from the system’s demands, its lies, its timelines, its negotiations, and its definition of what is reasonable. Collective refusal creates crises for power because power depends on compliance, especially from those seen as previously reasonable, pliable, and obedient.

In their study of Palestinian mental health practice, Lara and Stephen Sheehi document the politics of refusal: the communal practice of refusing to accept the terms of settler-colonial logic. Clinical networks function as “the psychotherapeutic commons,” a method of engaging in the communal practice of sumud (steadfastness). ¹³

When we refuse together, not as individuals but collectively, we expose the system’s lies and force a rupture.

The lesson for solidarity with Iran is clear. The system demands that we distinguish between “good Iranians” (those who oppose their government in Western-approved ways) and “bad Iranians” (those who legitimise their government’s right to defend their sovereignty). It demands that we see sanctions as pressure rather than collective punishment, and war as life and freedom. It demands that we place conditions on our solidarity, which only reproduces and strengthens the imperial and colonial world order.

Collective refusal means rejecting these demands. Extend solidarity to the Iranian people and state without preconditions, not because you agree with everything they do, but because solidarity is for people, states, and populations under attack. Refuse to let the question “Do you condemn the Islamic Republic?” function as a filter that legitimises imperialist assault. Understand that when the empire imposes war on Iran or Yemen, and genocide on Palestine and Lebanon, it is forcing us to metabolise and reproduce the normalisation of violence.

Conclusion: Decolonising the Psyche. The Aboriginal Question and a Call to Action

We cannot speak of Palestine and Iran without speaking of the Aboriginal question. The same machinery that erases Palestinian and Iranian sovereignty operates daily on this continent. The state violence that bombs schools in Tehran is serviced by the state power here that over-polices Aboriginal communities, sends Aboriginal children to prison, inflicts deaths in custody, enforces poverty, restricts access to health care and disability services, and invests our retirement funds into the machinery of imperialist war. The media that frames Iranian defence as aggression, and Palestinian resistance as atrocity, is the same media that frames violence on Aboriginal bodies as an aberration, protest as lawlessness, and free political speech as hate. The same political class that denies Iran and Palestinians the right to sovereignty is served by the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and, increasingly, of the civil rights previously afforded to the broader population.

The contradiction between the ideal of universal liberal values and the reality of colonial violence is not somewhere else. It is here. It is in the broken treaties, the deaths in custody yet to come, the children removed, the languages lost, the land never ceded. For generations, Aboriginal people have been the living contradiction that liberal Australia has managed, contained, and deferred, just as Palestine was managed, contained, and deferred. But contradictions do not disappear; they accumulate, intensify, and rupture.

The genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran have accelerated the rupture of contradictions, and have made visible the machinery that was hidden by proximity. The psychic conditioning that teaches us to look away from Palestinian suffering is the same conditioning that teaches us to look away from Black deaths in custody. The hierarchies of grief that render Iranian children unmournable are the same hierarchies that render Aboriginal children unmournable. The demand that we condemn Hamas before we can speak of Gaza is the same demand that we replace Indigenous sovereignty with reconciliation politics.

To decolonise our psyche is to refuse this conditioning. It is to recognise that the defensive violence we condemn in West Asia serves the same violence we tolerate at home. It is to understand that solidarity is not a progressive gesture, but a recognition of shared struggle. It is to stop asking whether the victim is innocent enough, the resistance legitimate enough, the cause uncomplicated enough, and to simply refuse to participate in the process that demands those questions.

The call to action is this: Withdraw your consent. Refuse the terms. Extend solidarity without conditions to Palestine, to Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, and to the Aboriginal struggle for self-determination on this land. Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for the right formulation that makes empire or the colony comfortable. Do not wait for the system to correct itself; it will not.

Instead, join the collective refusal. Learn from the psychic militancy of those who have always known: Aboriginal Truth-telling, the Palestinian sumud, the Iranian people and state who refuse to go quietly under a sky of bombs. Understand that fear will be there; act anyway. The contradictions are rupturing. The question is whether we will face that rupture with political clarity, or continue to reality-bend and metabolise the violence, to reproduce the hierarchy, and to defer facing our own inevitable rupture of contradiction.

As Rana Nashashibi reflected after years of dialogue initiatives that went nowhere: “No matter what, dialogue will not change reality.” ¹⁴ Real solidarity is not about finding the right formulation, but about aligning practice with refusal. It is about becoming, collectively, the rupture.

REFERENCES

1. “Conscientisation” (or conscientização in Portuguese) is the process of developing a critical consciousness of the social and political forces that shape one’s life. Paulo Freire popularised this concept in his influential 1968 work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (Continuum, 1970). ↩︎
2. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-186. ↩︎
3. Data from various Australian sources consistently show disproportionate policing of Aboriginal people. A 2025 report based on Victoria Police data found that Aboriginal people were ten times more likely to experience force or threats of force from police, and officers were thirteen times more likely to use Tasers on those perceived to be Aboriginal (“Use of Force,” Racial Profiling Data Monitoring Project, accessed 30 June 2026, https://www.racialprofilingresearch.org/use-of-force). Similarly, NSW data showed that Indigenous Australians were involved in approximately 45% of use-of-force incidents, despite comprising only about 3.4% of the population (“First Nations People Bear the Brunt of NSW Police Use of Force,” Redfern Legal Centre, published 31 July 2023, https://rlc.org.au/news-and-media/media-releases/first-nations-people-bear-brunt-nsw-police-use-force).
   ↩︎
4. Scholarly research confirms this pattern. A critical discourse analysis of Australian news media found, in the case of Jill Meagher, that “discourses of the victim’s ideal White femininity” framed her murder as tragic and newsworthy, whereas cases involving Aboriginal or racialised women received far less coverage (Chelsea Hart and Amanda Gilbertson, “When Does Violence Against Women Matter? Gender, Race and Class in Australian Media Representations of Sexual Violence and Homicide,”
   Outskirts
   39 (2018): 1-31. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/when-does-violence-against-women-matter-gender/docview/2313711561/se-2?accountid=12528). The Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health similarly observes that “the experiences of white, middle-class women often make front page news,” while marginalised communities are rendered invisible (“Whose Lives Are Grievable?”, Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health, published May 2024, https://www.mcwh.com.au/whose-lives-are-grievable/). ↩︎
5. 
   Following widespread protests over gendered violence in 2024, Australian governments announced multiple funding packages. The Albanese government invested over $4 billion in women’s safety initiatives, destined for crisis housing and legal assistance (“Minister Plibersek Press Conference at YMCA Canberra,” Minister for the Department of Social Services, published 4 March 2026, https://ministers.dss.gov.au/transcripts/18776). State governments also committed substantial funding for these services: South Australia announced an investment of $674 million over ten years (https://dpc.sa.gov.au/resources-and-publications/building-safer-futures-sa-government-response-to-the-royal-commission-into-domestic-family-and-sexual-violence), Victoria allocated $123.2 million in its 2025-26 budget (https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/49e8e4/contentassets/d75667487de84976b086a00f12386b9f/prevention-of-family-violence-.pdf), and Western Australia has invested more than $550 million since 2017 (https://magentamarshall.com.au/archive/plan-for-rockingham/fdv-funding-boost/). ↩︎
6. On 9 November 2019, Warlpiri and Luritja teenager Kumanjayi Walker was shot three times at close range in his home in Yuendumu, NT, by constable Zachary Rolfe, who was later charged with murder but acquitted at trial. The case became the first time an Australian police officer was charged with murder over a First Nations death in custody since colonisation. ↩︎
7. The 2025 deaths in custody report from the Australian Institute of Criminology found that 33 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people died in custody in 2024-25—the highest number since records began in 1979-80 (Merran McAlister, Hannah Miles, and Samantha Bricknell, Deaths in Custody in Australia 2024-25 (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2025), https://doi.org/10.52922/sr78199). Since the 1991 Royal Commission, over 600 Indigenous people have died in custody. Aboriginal deaths accounted for 29% of all prison deaths, far exceeding their share of the population. ↩︎
8. Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Books, 2025), 73. El-Kurd draws on Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s observation that starting with “secondly” erases the “firstly”—the initial violence of settler colonialism. ↩︎
9. El-Kurd, Perfect Victims, 43-48. For El-Kurd, “the politics of appeal” describes how Western narratives require the colonised to perform innocence and victimhood in ways acceptable to empire, while systematically excluding those who assert their right to resist. ↩︎
10. V. I. Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics,” in Collected Works, vol. 38 (Progress Publishers, 1976), 357-61. Lenin defines dialectics as “the splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts,” insisting that development is the “struggle” of opposites and that the unity of opposites is “conditional, temporary, transitory, relative,” while “the struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute.” ↩︎
11. Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press, 2026). See also Sheehi’s public lectures and podcast appearances, in particular “Maintaining Psychic Militancy Amid Repression,” Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, 28 October 2025 (https://www.patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism/posts/starting-now-142243265), and “The Case for Psychic Militancy,” Sumud Podcast, 27 February 2026 (https://sumudpod.com/episodes/lara-sheehi-the-case-for-psychic-militancy-sumud-podcast-w-dr-ed-hasan/). Sheehi’s concept of psychic militancy involves the active, collective refusal of the psychological warfare and ideological violence that systems of domination lodge inside us to exhaust and demobilise resistance. ↩︎
12. Sheehi, “Maintaining Psychic Militancy Amid Repression.” ↩︎
13. Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi,
    “Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine” (interview), Jadaliyya, published 14 March 2022, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/43950. ↩︎
14. Nashashibi, quoted in Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi,
    Psychoanalysis Under Occupation
    :
    Practicing Resistance in Palestine
    (Routledge, 2021), 142. Nashashibi’s reflections came after years of participating in dialogue initiatives that she concluded could not substitute material change. ↩︎