This article examines electoral abstention in unequal societies through a moral economy lens, drawing on original interviews and observations in South African townships. It argues that abstainers are characterized not by apathy, but by a political subjectivity of ‘evaluative exit.’ This arises when the erosion of the moral contract – driven by corruption and service delivery failures – undermines the ballot’s status as a tool for social transformation. Findings show that the perceived absence of moral politicians diminishes the expressive benefits of voting, rendering formal participation a site of inefficacy. Contrary to theories of clientelist mobilization, material hardships are reframed by citizens as moral grievances against the political system, prompting a reorientation of political energy toward repertoires of action like community self-help and protest. Evaluative exit represents a significant, but potentially reversible, disconnection from electoral channels, affirming the persistence of political agency rather than its negation.

This article approaches Al-Khiam Detention Center as a site of individual and collective injury, one whose distinct histories have been strategically appropriated by multiple political entities. It argues that the visual, as practiced by artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, brings to the surface traces of personal and individualized experiences of incarceration which would have otherwise remained buried. This article first provides a historical overview of the birth of Al-Khiam, identifies the role multiple political actors have played in the construction and reconstruction of its material, symbolic, and ideological significance, and then examines the implications of Hezbollah’s museification of it, a process premised primarily upon homogenized notions of resistance. This article finally contends that the visual intervention enables a political contestation of the symbolic re-mediation of Al-Khiam, while producing a genealogical-archaeological understanding of its many temporalities, and a palimpsestic discovery of its accumulating pasts.

We inhabit worlds in conflict, manifest in irruptions of violence and political turmoil both within and across state boundaries. These are also worlds of injury impacting on individuals and communities, discourses and institutions, including the juridical and normative ordering of the global. The book unravels the question of how war relates to politics, locating it in a conceptual formulation that the book refers to as ‘worlds in conflict’, understood in terms of four analytical categories: violence, people, words, and things. Challenging the idea that war can be confined to a limited spatio-temporal horizon, the book situates war in relation to complex intersections of embodied, sociocultural, socio-political, juridical, and material dynamics. Written in a time of tremendous global uncertainty where major wars have come to challenge the liberal and postcolonial international order, the book provides a new understanding of the complex interplay of the subjective and material, the discursive and institutional, through which conflict and its articulation in war are implicated in the making and re-making of our worlds.

On the theme of visual methods, aesthetic theory, and understandings of war and the political, see Vivienne Jabri. 2024. War, the Aesthetic, and the Political. In War and Aesthetics, ed. Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.