War, discrimination, and environmental destruction all leave lasting injuries that shape how people and communities act politically, yet these different forms of harm are rarely studied together. This project argues that current thinking about injury is too narrow—focused mainly on physical wounds from conflict—and misses how humiliation, habitat loss, and damaged infrastructure also drive political behaviour. The researchers aim to build a new theory that treats injury as a relational experience: something felt in the body, shaped by culture and materials, and entangled with global systems. Using case studies from the global south, they will examine how injuries to bodies, homes, and environments become political issues, how institutions manage or fail to manage them, and what ethical questions arise. The research is primarily fundamental in nature. It does not promise a direct practical tool or policy fix. Instead, it offers a conceptual framework for understanding why some harms spark political action while others remain invisible. This kind of foundational thinking could eventually reshape how governments, aid organisations, and human rights bodies design responses to suffering—by recognising that injury is never just physical, and that its political consequences ripple far beyond the initial wound.
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The concept of injury has multiple iterations and manifestations. It can point to injured bodies as casualties of war. It can refer to injured pride or humiliation, as products of discriminatory practices and 'hate speech'. It can apply to the destruction of habitats and environments, human actions that produce immediate and long-term suffering. We often confine the concept to casualties of war, yet these other forms can be as devastating to human life and well-being, their impact manifest well beyond their moment of occurrence. If we define injury in embodied, socio-cultural, and sociomaterial terms, as this project intends, we can trace its impact politically; in terms of the emergence and expression of political agency and the form and directionality such agency takes, and in terms of how the discursive and institutional structures designed to variously mitigate, govern, and repair are navigated and mobilised. The project places the analytical and empirical lens on injury, with the aim of providing a new theorisation that, for the first time, uses a relational understanding that integrates the intersection of embodied experience, with socio-cultural and socio-material dynamics. Using case studies based in the global south, and reflecting injuries to bodies, lived spaces, infrastructures, and habitats, the project's objectives seek to reveal: 1) the topographies of injury and the global entanglements implicated in their production; 2) the processes whereby injury enters political discourse and contestation; 3) the structures that govern the impact of injury normatively and politically; and 4) the ethical implications of the theorisation and empirical investigation proposed. The original contribution of the project derives from its theorisation, based as it is on a relational epistemology and ontology, and its empirical investigation, tracing the path between injury and the political, drawing on qualitative methods (based on textual, oral, and visual sources).
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