domicide

English

Etymology

Coined by J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith, from domestic +‎ -cide or domicile +‎ -cide or -icide.

Pronunciation

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Noun

domicide (plural domicides)

1. The deliberate destruction of a home or homes.
   • 2001, J. Douglas Porteous, Sandra E. Smith, Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, McGill-Queen’s University Press, page ix:

     Currently, no word exists for the action of destroying peoples’ homes and/or expelling them from their homeland. We suggest the neologism “domicide,” the deliberate destruction of home that causes suffering to its inhabitants.

   • 2012, Katherine Brickell, “Geopolitics of Home”, in Geography Compass, 6(10), p. 577:

     The work of Porteous and Smith (2001, 64) is central here to understanding what is coined "domicide", the deliberate destruction of home, which in its "extreme" form involves "major, planned operations that occur rather sporadically in time but often affect large areas and change the lives of considerable numbers of people".

   • 2017, Yunpeng Zhang, “‘It Felt Like You Were at War’: State of Exception and Wounded Life in the Shanghai Expo-Induced Domicide”, in Katherine Brickell, et al, Palgrave Macmillan, editors, Geographies of Forced Eviction: Dispossession, Violence, Resistance, page 98:

     Inspired by Katherine Boo (2012, p. 251) who contends that "better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated only when we know more about ordinary lives", I draw on the displacees’ testimonials collected from formal and informal settings and examine their intense, layered and complex experiences of losing homes and communities, or domicide.

   • 2023 December 7, Patrick Wintour, “Widespread destruction in Gaza puts concept of ‘domicide’ in focus”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     Domicide, a concept increasingly accepted in academia, is not a distinct crime against humanity under international law, and the UN special rapporteur on the right to housing tabled a report to the UN in October last year arguing that “a very important protection gap” needed to be filled.