Didier Fassin

“Why, then, is it so crucial to have ethnographies of urban policing? The answer to this question certainly becomes clearer now. It is not simply that ethnography provides a sort of immersion in the world of law enforcement, allowing us to understand what happens when the police are in the field. It is perhaps more importantly that it produces a vision of a world that has been made either invisible or opaque to most of us.”
― Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing

“Without a doubt, what will haunt memories the longest, including perhaps in Israel itself, is how the inequality between lives has been paraded on the stage of Gaza, ignored by some and legitimized by others. That this supreme injustice - one life being worth less than another - is widespread in our world is a reality evident in peacetime and wartime alike. But there is hardly any previous instance in which the governments of Western countries so ostentatiously avert their eyes from it, to the extent of justifying it and silencing the voices that criticize it.”
― Didier Fassin, Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza