David

“The minimalist role of national governments in housing supply has been reinforced by current neo-liberal economic orthodoxy as defined by the IMF and the World Bank. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed upon debtor nations in the late 1970s and 1980s required a shrinkage of government programs and, often, the privatization of housing markets. However, the social state in the Third World was already withering away even before SAPs sounded the death knell for welfarism.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

“The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a “Third World” in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural “semi-proletarianization,” the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

“En Colombia, el país que más violencia sufre, el ochenta y cinco por ciento de los muertos es víctima de la llamada violencia común, y sólo el quince por ciento muere por la llamada violencia política. ¿No será que la violencia común expresa, de alguna manera, la impotencia política de las sociedades que no han podido fundar una paz digna de su nombre?”
― Eduardo Galeano

“Israel's establishment in 1948 realized Jewish Zionist settler sovereignty in Palestine. And its acceptance as a UN member state normalized the sovereign exception, justifying the erasure of Palestinian peoplehood. The 1948 war and the demographic and territorial shifts it engendered, were the culmination of a process that had begun at least three decades before. The transformation of Palestine into Israel helps illustrate international laws utility in advancing settler colonial ambitions and in consolidating their gains.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine