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about

I’m Bram J. De Smet. I hold a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies. I also hold an degree in robotic engineering from HOGENT University of Applied Sciences and Arts and a master’s degree in International Conflict and Security from the University of Kent. My research delves into the slow erasure of indigenous peoples’ identity, agency and episteme, examining these processes as forms of genocide by attrition sustained through body politics and biopower. My postdoctoral project, Solidarity under Exhaustion, looks at how solidarity navigates exhaustion, despair and oppression while maintaining infrastructures of care and how state complicity reshaped activists’ political perspectives and democratic imaginaries.

I’m a board member at the European Peace Research Association & council member of the International Peace Research Association

I maintain a database of peace institutes, academic journals related to peace studies, and peace-related MA programmes at Peace Research Institute.

Academic fields of interest: anarchism, necropolitics, torture, gender, grievances, violence, bio/body politics, hope, resistance, vulnerability, settler colonialism, decolonisation, slow erasure, weaponsisation of care, genocide by attrition, solidarity, mutual care, social ecology and communalism.

Current projects
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  • Solidarity under Exhaustion: This postdoctoral project examines how solidarity navigates exhaustion, despair, and repression while sustaining infrastructures of care and imagination. Project starts March 2026.

  • FoRE/HOPE: What can everyday resistance and hope teach us about social change? In the face of increasing authoritarianism and social exclusion, there is an urgent need to understand how people deal with oppressive structures and experiences of violence and exclusion in everyday life. Resistance and hope are central to this, as both are practises and aspirations that influence each other.

Affiliations
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  • Tampere Peace Research Institute: TAPRI is a multidisciplinary and international research centre whose mission is to conduct high quality research on the causes of war, on non-violent resolution of conflicts, and on conditions for peace. In accordance with the present research agenda, the focus of TAPRI’s research is peaceful change.

  • Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP): The Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP) studies various forms of everyday violence, especially in relation to colonial histories and the prevalence of coloniality in various sites of political and societal crises. We examine diverse geographies of violence - prolonged crises, environmental conflicts, wars - and their multiple relations to imperialism, settler colonialism, and colonial ways of knowing and being as they emerge through the everyday entanglements. While covering various themes, we are particularly interested in embodied materialities, everyday ecologies, and the atmospheres of violence, especially how they appear in ways of undoing power through the irreducibility of the human and non-human to power. The multidisciplinary group is based on Regional Studies, Tampere University.

Contact
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