Killing Birdsong by Mona Chalabi and SITU Research

If you had wandered around the Iraqi city of Fallujah in the winter of 2004, you would have seen what happens when a city is ravaged by bombs. You would have seen the miles of rubble made from the 70 percent of the city’s homes that were damaged or destroyed. The wreckage would also contain the remnants of at least one-hundred mosques, six-thousand businesses, and nine government offices.(1) These buildings were destroyed by US–made and US–driven tanks and bombs.

Fallujah has not recovered, and neither have its residents. Twenty years is not enough time to rebuild and repair devastation on this scale. Meanwhile, outside Iraq, the US leaders who claimed these acts were justified by the existence of weapons of mass destruction (which turned out not to exist) have continued on with their careers. Outside Iraq, there are no consequences for this destruction.

After October 2023, I began working with the team at SITU Research to find homes that had been destroyed in Gaza—a search that quickly expanded to Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and other countries where US weapons have contributed to the destruction of housing. I was learning about domicide. To understand more about the meaning of this word, and about what accountability looks like, Brad Samuels from SITU Research and I spoke with the UN special rapporteur on the right to housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal.

—MONA CHALABI

MONA CHALABI What led you to housing as an area of focus?

BALAKRISHNAN RAJAGOPAL I am from India. One of the major issues when I was a young student was India’s large-scale infrastructure projects, like dams which ended up displacing hundreds of thousands of people, resulting in the destruction and submergence of their homes. They would often end up as displaced people wandering the country and then later as the urban poor in many of the emerging cities. As a student in India, I became very engaged with issues like this.

I began to ask, Why isn’t mass destruction of housing treated as a bigger wrong globally? By talking to people who lost their homes, it began to dawn on me that the emotional, psychological, and cultural connections they have, not just with the land but with the landscape of the territory that they are living on, is much more than simply four walls, or a roof, or even a neighborhood. It’s something that connects them with the area where they live. And they deeply, deeply miss it. Since then, I’ve been researching the loss of homes and the displacement of communities, either due to major development projects or because of conflict and violence, such as the wars in Gaza. And thirdly, because of increasing risks due to climate change. These three factors are driving mass displacement and loss of housing around the world.

CHALABI You’re describing those early experiences of witnessing the destruction of housing. Was “domicide” part of your vocabulary back then?

RAJAGOPAL No, it was not. This was in the 1990s. One of the first publications using the term “domicide” was actually by two Canadian scholars who were studying people massively affected by dam projects.(2) I’ve been familiar with the term for many years. But armed conflict is not a context in which domicide has been put forward so far. No one with an international law background has called for its recognition as a crime under international law. I was the first one to do it.

CHALABI Why do you think no legal professionals have come forward with that language?

RAJAGOPAL I think it shows man of the biases that exist among the legal elite about what they think matters. Part of the problem is that a lot of legal professionals come from elite backgrounds, where the idea of having a home is not a big deal. It’s like having air to breathe—it just exists.

Notes:

(1) Dahr Jamail, “Seven years after sieges, Fallujah struggles,” Al Jazeera English, January 2012.

(2) J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith, Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001).

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)