Ecofeminism and the Cultural Affinity to Genocidal Capitalism: Theorising Necropolitical Femicide in Contemporary Greece

Abstract

Resilient necrocapitalism and the zombie genre of representations of current dystopias are persistent in their political purpose in producing changes in the social order to benefit plutocracies around the world. It is through a thanatopolitical lens that we should view the successive losses of life, and this zombie genre has come to represent a dystopia that, for political purposes, is intended to produce changes in societies which have tolerated the violent deaths of women. This article focuses on contemporary Greece and proposes a theoretical framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that reflects a global gendered necropolitical logic which equals genocide. Such theoretical assemblages have to be situated within intersectional imperatives and tacitly as the result of the capitalist terror state performed in an expansive and direct immediate death, exacerbated by the lingering slow social death of the welfare state. The article contends that the scripted hetero-patriarchal social order of the necrocapitalist state poses a unique political threat to societies. With the silence of the complicity of the state, what is necessary is the creation and spread of new political knowledge and new social movements as resilient political tactics of resistance. This article foregrounds an ecofeminist perspective on these issues and considers ways through which new pedagogies of hope can counter the gendered necropolitics of contemporary capitalism in Greece.

1. Introduction: Social Necrophilia and Perpetual Crises in Contemporary Greece

Contemporary research on femicide and gendered violence should not suffer fools gladly in having to disguise its poignancy and immediacy, or censor societal exasperation in the age of rage over the deaths of women, frequently through intimate partner violence (IPV). The concept of ‘feminicide’ used in this article draws from a UN Women and UNODC research brief (2023) that refers to the killing of women and girls, while the term ‘femicide’ is used for all types of gender-related killings.

However, to be even more precise:

Femicide is not simply the murder of females, but rather specifically, the killing of females by males because they are female. As a form of genocidal violence, femicide functions to define gender lines, enact and bolster male dominance, and to render women chronically and profoundly unsafe.

Feminicide is a political term. The concept encompasses more than femicide because it holds responsible not only the male perpetrators, but also the state and judicial structures that normalise misogyny. Hence, feminicide connotes not only the murder of women by men because they are women, but also indicates state responsibility for these murders whether through the commission of the actual killing, toleration of the perpetrators’ acts of violence, or omission of state responsibility to ensure the safety of its female citizens. Globally, feminicide is a genocidal crime that exists because of the absence of guarantees to protect the rights of women (Guatemala Human Rights Commission 2013).

This article is situated within the context of Greece. In this article, I theorise a contemporary phenomenon of capitalism leading to the construction of a new phase of metapatriarchal oppression and coercive control leading to the recurrent murders of women in Greece through instances of IPV that I call ‘femicidality as gendered social necrophilia’, and by extension, I view ‘feminicide as genocide’. Thus, the article explores how patriarchal biopolitics, control, and power have emerged in contemporary Greece, but also aspires to find concrete solutions to eradicate such violence as part of reigniting a sociological imagination of social and gender justice.

The manifestations of crises in Greece have been characterised as ‘perpetual’ in not only financial or economic realms, but also political and social, impacting on deeply rooted cultural values and societal processes shaping the country’s trajectory (Tsekeris et al. 2015; Christou 2018b; Kokaliari 2018; Katsanidou and Lefkofridi 2020). The Greek society has been characterised as one in a ‘prolonged state of suffering, precariousness, and transition’ (Tsekeris et al. 2015) given contemporary social challenges and changes that have altered ‘traditional’ societal narratives of ‘Greekness’ with protracted austerity having triggered existential and societal crises. This is because crises do not simply contain themselves in impacting everyday life but have a social life of their own (Hall 2019, 2020), and thus are more thoroughly understood through feminist analyses, feminist ethics, and intersectional affectivity approaches to the social and cultural analysis of austerity politics (Pearson 2019; Christou and Bloor 2021). It is within this context of crises that a dramatic rise in femicide in Greece has emerged (Karakasi et al. 2023).

Until recently, femicides in Greece were officially recorded as ‘honour killings’ with the national media categorising them as ‘crimes of passion’, and only belatedly in 2020 did the Greek police action a system of registering crimes of intimate partner violence and domestic violence, collating data about the gender of the victims and perpetrators, as well as the relationship between them. As the de facto undeclared war on women in Europe, the unprecedented increase in femicides in Greece reached a staggering 187.5% within a year between 2020 and 2021 (notwithstanding indications of underreporting by police; Georgiou (2023)). The proportions of female victims of domestic homicides are increasing fourfold, a phenomenon that has been declared ‘as the gravest current issue to be interpreted and addressed’, and by some scholarship attributed to the ongoing Greek financial crisis and pandemic-related increases in alcohol and drug consumption (Karakasi et al. 2023, p. 120).

Within this context, it is shockingly vile to read a news article report describing a group of senior Greek coastguard officers who, while having a work-related routine video call, felt that it was appropriate to open the meeting with a persistent wave of femicide jokes. It is reproduced here verbatim (AFP 2022):

“I told my wife, you better behave or I’m getting a pilot’s licence. She froze!”.

[sniggered one officer in a video leaked this month by a local news portal after a Greek helicopter pilot murdered his wife last May]

“That’s the way to teach them, my friend,”.

[replied another participant]

“Didn’t all little girls want to marry pilots when they were young?”.

[laughed a third officer]

The mockery they lavished on was none other than the murder of the 20-year-old Greek student of British and Filipino heritage, Caroline Crouch, who was murdered as she slept by her husband, Babis Anagnostopoulos, a pilot, who for over a month deliberately lied and tried to present the murder as a botched burglary, eventually confessing to a crime that sparked extensive outrage in Greece and internationally. Caroline Crouch’s murder was one of many dozens of similar cases in Greece in the last few years, including gruesome rapes and killings, such as those of American scientist Suzanne Eaton on the island of Crete in 2019, and at the time of writing this very paper, that of the Polish 27-year-old hotel worker Anastazja Rubinska in June 2023, among very many more.

Nikolaos Vrantsis (2021) has been researching femicide in Greece in relation to housing and has spoken to a number of women who were reluctant to share their experiences, but when they did, their experiences revealed the domestic space, instead of a safe haven, transformed into a space of torture:

The femicides that have belatedly begun to be named and recorded as such, the successive murders of women, their shocking banality, show how entrenched and socially pervasive patriarchy is in Greek society, how “natural” murder is as a solution given by men who consider themselves exercising their “natural” rights to their property. There are thousands of men who feel they have every right to control, oppress, abuse and sometimes kill their wives, their girlfriends, their children, for reasons of “non-conformity”. What has created this idea can be sought in the history of Greek society and the state, in the widespread micro-property that favoured unequal intra-family relations, in the role of the state that governed mainly through the management of the micro-household that revolved around the male “householder” and which normalised the invisible exploitation of women.

The extraordinary increase in femicides in Greece during the pandemic led the Greek government to the decision to create support services within police departments and resource them with a dedicated phone number for easy access. Speculations as to why there was such a remarkable increase during the pandemic (and lockdown) period align with the results and data from other studies such as the UN Women (2021) Rapid Gender Assessment surveys on the impact of COVID-19 on violence against women (VAW RGAs) in 13 countries. Socio-economic stressors such as employment and external stressors such as food insecurity and family relations have a significant impact on experiences of violence or feelings of safety overall. Thus, the pandemic became a dual crisis context especially for gender-based violence surging amongst displaced women, migrants, and refugees during COVID-19, with economic devastation and border closures exacerbating the situation during the lockdown periods.

The Greek minister for gender equality urged victims in 2021 to ‘speak up’ amidst the wave of domestic violence, launching a campaign to encourage survivors to access help and support as femicides had risen dramatically (Smith 2021). Yet, the rates of femicide are increasing, and misogyny as a matter of the ecology of patriarchy and capitalism is a pivotal global issue and one that in the case of Greece requires a conceptualisation to make those links explicit and subsequently brought to the attention of policymakers, the law, and educators. This intervention extends earlier research building on that on societal crises and inequalities (Christou 2018b) while drawing on ‘informal conversations’ (Swain and King 2022) conducted over the past eighteen months (spring 2022–summer 2023) to supplement interactional setting discussions during academic workshops in Greece at Greek universities on the theme of ‘geographies of femicides: gendered violence as genocide’, as well as secondary source material. The article theorises the links between genocidal capitalism and necropolitical femicide in contemporary Greece while offering reflections on how the state can focus systematic attention to educating towards reforming society in eliminating gendered violence. In deconstructing how fascism works, Jason Stanley (2018) focuses on propaganda and rhetoric, centring on the tropes and narratives that drive fascist politics. Such tropes and tactics include the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, anti-egalitarianism, victimhood, the sexual anxieties of heteropatriarchy, anti-cosmopolitanism, and fascist attitudes toward work including opposition to unions.

The next section develops the key theoretical framings through an ecofeminist cultural politics lens, and in this context, situates the problems created by patriarchal capitalisms and the solutions that can be envisaged in juxtaposition to the destructiveness of the former.

The section that follows the next pushes forward those solutions through theorising a gendered approach to understanding femicide as genocide, thus linking genocidal capitalism with necropolitcal femicide, as illustrated through insights from conversational and other secondary empirical material.

The conclusion makes a case for a socialist ecofeminist future through a global overview of its application.

2. Ecofeminism, Cultural Politics, and Patriarchal Capitalisms: Situating Solutions and Problems

Cultural politics is an analytical framing of politics in society that recognises ‘the cultural’ as a vital site for political struggles over meaning, wherein different societal groups negotiate questions about identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusion. There are also wider intersections when it comes to patriarchal capitalisms that produce additional structures of domination emanating from colonialist, ableists, and heteronormative positions, and thus conceptualising oppression intersectionally recognises such complexity (Grosfoguel et al. 2015). At the same time, intersectional approaches to oppression have a transformative potential while keeping in mind that for researchers, the process of grappling with these issues can be traumatic and cathartic, and reflexive and revealing, in the making and in the undoing, and unpicking and unpacking, and of course, is ongoing with struggles as academic activists strive to create a healing space in the midst of mapping gendered violence (Christou 2016, p. 39; 2018a). In other words, theorising is an important grounding to apply intersectional perspectives to oppression and exclusion, but also important in creating healing spaces in advocacy and activism that are applicable to diverse groups experiencing gendered violence.

Another challenge that has been articulated in the academic literature is that of convincing (socialist) colleagues that contemporary anti-capitalist (and anti-colonial) ecofeminism speaks to the lived experiences of most of the oppression experienced in contemporary times. This definition makes it clear:

Ecofeminism is the recognition of and struggle against capitalists’ racist colonization and exploitation of (that is, extraction of profits from) nature and women. Ecofeminism, insofar as it is characterized by efforts to unite the exploited across historic social divisions (e.g., waged and unwaged), is the revolutionary way to an ecosocialist, post-capitalist future.

(Brownhill and Turner 2020, p. 1; italics in the original)

Additionally, an ‘ecosocialist ecofeminism’ has been enriched by the care and direction that indigenous women’s movements across the world have contributed in making radical grassroots struggles united within the strength of diversity and related affective materialities (Christou 2019, 2022). At the same time, generations of abusive and controlling behaviour toward Indigenous and Aboriginal women, victims of homicide and genocidal policies controlling their resources and land, are all colonial manifestations of sexual and gendered violence, combined with silencing, traumatising, and murdering Indigenous girls and women (Luoma 2021; McKinley and Knipp 2022).

If we are to outline the key challenges and gaps in combatting femicide in Greece, they can be summarised in terms of the state’s direct responsibilities to protect victims by preventing violence so that it does not result in femicide. But before protection orders can be actively monitored with authorities taking accountability for compliance, we need to recognise that there is a clear lack of a gender, let alone intersectional, perspective in law, justice practice, and social and public policy. Frameworks for eradicating violence should be based on gendered and intersectional dynamics framed as violence against women within multiple social categories, with migrant and disabled persons frequently being more vulnerable (Tastsoglou et al. 2021), and with frontline professionals lacking the training and intersectional understanding to support them adequately. It is then necessary for a feminist research perspective to diversify understandings of gendered violence by focusing on its intersections with social inequalities and transnational structural factors, such as insecure migration status (Vasil 2023). Inextricably linked by the threads of gendered forms of violence in capitalist-patriarchal societies is what has become habitually recognised as femicide, an outcome of genocidal capitalism. While I do not assume a biologically naturalised and essentialised perception of a coherent category of ‘woman’ as a descriptive entity (and, by extension, inclusive beyond cis women, lesbian, trans, non-binary, and so on) in the sense of both sex and gender as normative and constructed categories, it is precisely the normative and gendered imposition that shapes the socio-economic, cultural, historical, and political framings of inequity and division. Thus, gendering as theorising takes into consideration men’s gendered violence against both women and men, as without addressing such violences in patriarchy, we are disregarding the interrelatedness of strategies that genocidal capitalism creates for such violence to occur. Theoretically connecting feminism, capitalism, and ecology through socialist ecofeminism as a starting point for the subordination and violence against women, as well as ecological catastrophe, is a political and philosophical position (Oksala 2018) that must be met by a political alliance between feminist and environmental struggles so the eradication of capitalism can materialise.

The case of Greece is one where a decolonial and postcolonial Black feminist critique can unveil the coloniality of patriarchal power through the affective habitus of power in gendered ideologies of indigeneity (Christou 2022; Tsibiridou 2022). The regulation of women through the hierarchies, inequalities, and bordering of female bodies shapes and motivates ‘gendered geographies of power’ (Mahler and Pessar 2001) within communities in Greece, in both urban and rural spaces. As Tsibiridou (2022, p. 15) compellingly declares in describing the circumstances applicable still to modern Greek society:

Female bodies had to endure invisible borders of modesty and decency, enclosures, amputations, and honor crimes; practices that draw upon customs, rituals, and representations producing female otherness and second-class citizenship in the framework of modern states. In such a context, matriarchy within patriarchy as male superiority/supremacy and technologies of domination matters. In a palimpsest way priority is given to husbands through modern romantic love and to dictators and oligarchs running the state and the capitalist economy, along with a patriarch God, who guarantees moral individual ethics of gender segregation and heteronormativity. Domestic violence is multiplied at the expense of female bodies as long as they claim visibility and independence, resorting to actions of disobedience and claiming emancipation in the name of civic virtues and human rights … Any vindication of emancipation, following the dispositions for submission, often collides with strong denial by female bodies themselves to recognize the invisible borders of the local patriarchal colonial order. Going back to modern Greek reality and bearing in mind the local dysfunctional patriarchalist coloniality of male honor and female otherness and/or modesty, as well as similarities with those of migrants and refugees … encounter with European colonial genealogies and technologies over subaltern bodies, which are usually female ones.

Capitalism and patriarchy are neither autonomous systems nor identical, namely, they are, mutually dependent, as capitalism in its current form is structurally patriarchal because it fundamentally needs the appropriation of women (of their work and their bodies; Eisenstein (1999)). Patriarchal systems which seek to uphold male supremacy in both social and economic terms and public and private spheres are thus foundational as tools of capitalism. In understanding the connection of the COVID-19 crisis and patriarchal capitalism, the concept of the political economy of ‘racialized patriarchal disaster capitalism’ is applicable and has theoretical implications of their analysis for feminist conceptualisations (Foster and Foster-Palmer 2023).

Additionally, there is a strong degree of responsibility that the institution of family in Greece has when it comes to victims of violence, reflecting dysfunctionality and oppression, either within or outside periods of economic crisis (Christou 2016; Glyniadaki and Kyriazi 2019). Frequently, the family either cannot financially support victims to leave their abusers or they convince victims of the ‘normalcy’ of abuse as a short-term period of ‘friction’ that will be passing, while underscoring the superiority of the ideal of a cohesive nuclear family that requires protecting reputation and persevering in order to maintain honour and avoid stigma. Moreover, law enforcement might even discourage victims by using psychological manipulation of forgiveness and thinking about what will happen to the children growing up without a father (Glyniadaki and Kyriazi 2019) and in a context of disruption. Fractured family relations and elements of dysfunctionality are more visible and outspoken in contemporary Greece when previously patriarchal relations, familial violence, and incest appear equally in measure in research, daily newspapers, and films (Aleksic 2016; Papanikolaou 2022; Toropova 2021).

Moving from individual responsibility to the collective again, feminism, similar to socialism and any other solidarity-based movement, emerges as resistance to inequalities, which combined patriarchal and capitalism exclusionary power creates and that profoundly shapes not just socio-economic development, but also the deathscapes of those on the margins. An uneven development and inequity of resources in a neo-colonial approach, which is the trajectory of contemporary capitalist development, impart the structural limitations for the emergence of any kind of dignity to life. Despite the modern integration of Greek women in public spheres of the economy and their socialisation into a range of professions, the major part of social reproduction and the division of labour remains unequally a burden for most women, some of whom manage to cope with generational support in lieu of a diminishing welfare state (Christou 2018b). To invoke the capitalist centre for conditions that demand equality is but an illusory conceptualisation that commodity relations can create equal relations. Women’s reproductive labour has always been devalued and their contribution within historic and contemporary periods of industrial development also ignored (Federici 2009; Federici et al. 2021; Cohen 2018). While Greece might appear to be an intriguing case as a ‘semi-peripheral’ economy and at the same time an EU member state, straddling between the Orient and the West in the European imagination, and despite legacies of commercial, manufacturing, and shipping bases, it remains anchored in a significant patriarchal agricultural economy that sees women’s roles as auxiliary, but not central to the Greek economy. All this is wrapped in layers of a post-war historicity that is dominated by the trauma, memory and politics of the civil war, a counter-revolution, im/migration, and the struggle to topple a military dictatorship, and within the antecedent class struggles that remain in disarray while the middle classes are disappearing in the age of prolonged and perpetual austerity. Eliciting the historical peculiarities as above is not to declare a distinctiveness of the Greek condition, and to thus fall within the traps of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2002), but to highlight that the liminality of the Greek case requires even more community-building. The next section focuses on the ways forward toward that direction.

3. Gendering Genocidal Capitalism and Theorising Necropolitical Femicide: Ways Forward

The premise of necropolitical femicide is one that has a common denominator: that of genocidal capitalism and misogynistic behaviour. It should be assumed that ‘misogyny is, as a whole, a matter of ecology’ (Brownhill and Turner 2020, p. 3). My premise for the ways forward is grounded in what I perceive to be ‘new pedagogies of hope’ for Greece, where training, educating, and teaching about gender violence happens with and for a gendered-driven social justice to centre and emerge (cf. McLean 2023). While there are nuances and challenges to designing such provisions, whether it be in the curriculum or communities (e.g., from epistemological to ethical, ontological to pedagogic, and pragmatic to practical), it is navigating the principles of ethical communicology and collective empathetic reflexivity that could extend to a blueprint for frontline professionals. And this requires a national strategy plan that will incorporate such pedagogies of hope into the prevention plans to combat femicide and gendered violence, is aligned to clear objectives and evaluations, is supported by adequate funding and resources, and is staffed by experts to be implemented consistently. As this contribution is an academic article and not a policy brief, it is outside the scope of this article to pinpoint the precise steps that educators, the government, and policymakers in Greece should follow to activate and actualise such a programme of intervention to address the issues above. The highlights in this section are conceived as solutions suggested to be translated into specific policy measures and thus need to be received as such.

One of the primary elements in activating a programme of societal reform is ringfencing the funding dedicated to these measures which would also aid the collation of reliable statistical data on all forms of gendered violence and on both victims and perpetrators and their relationship, shared by relevant authorities to coordinate action with aligning the cooperation of relevant agencies and stakeholders. The latter would include addressing the appalling stigmatisation and stereotypical and sexist language used by some media outlets, frequently victimising further the victims, institutionalising such verbal and print violence, and often normalising its occurrence. This requires the recognition of double and triple violence against victims as traditional and conservative, capitalistic-driven social and cultural norms become conduits to entrenched views that require dismantling and replacing with gender-sensitive and accurate reporting in a post-truth and tabloid context where complete and independent reporting is seriously lacking in Greece. Sensational reporting and the objectification of girls and women through sexualised stories of abuse are another way that necrocapitalism operates to make money and dehumanise victims through (mostly private broadcast and print) media necropolitical production. Recent research (Kissas and Koulaxi 2023) reveals the emotional engagement with femicide victims as appearing on Facebook and Instagram and indicates the escalation of populist critique and moral ambivalence, while grassroots opposition to misogynistic behaviours, although extending inclusive and empowering reflections, also stands limited in structural narrations of gendered violence.

In other words, all spheres of public life where the zombie genre of capitalism has moulded institutions of governmentality and control for value extraction require full reform, be that in health, social policy, local government, education, and media. There is a long-standing scholarly assertion that capitalism breeds violence and must be eliminated through a global system of social justice (Gordon 1997), but as capitalism has built itself on violence to reproduce and defend private property, extraction, and power, only through communities of care and solidarity can it be replaced.

Thus, what I theorise here is a phenomenon that I call ‘femicidality as gendered social necrophilia’, and by extension, I view ‘femicide as genocide’.

While frequently the law has failed to capture sexist ideologies and gendered violence, going back to the definition of femicide, although no consensus exists on what acts constitute ‘femicide’, the concept is advanced by scholars (Hefti 2022, pp. 1–2) ‘as a female-specific international human rights violation’ exposing different aspects of femicide: ‘a pattern of multiple acts targeting a female social group based on their gender, with the effect of objectifying, subordinating, humiliating, or instilling fear in women, ultimately placing women and girls in a subordinate social status, where such violence remains unpunished by the State. Committed by non-state actors, VAWG has traditionally been viewed as a domestic and family matter. This work clarifies that States are responsible for femicide when they tolerate and facilitate a system in which perpetrators can harm a female social group with impunity’ (Hefti 2022, pp. 80–81), with genocidal acts against female groups overlooked for long. On the other spectrum, the current genocide definition lacks the full coverage of the mass atrocities against women and girls, further lacking specificity, limiting protection, and by and large requiring full reform. In nuancing the conceptualising of femicide, we need to focus on the holistic social destruction of women as the targeted group, and thus, a new genocide framework that equates femicide with gendered social necrophilia, and hence, femicidality as the political connotation of this kind of genocide enabled and exacerbated by capitalism. In the latter case, while conscious acts of extermination are not what we are alluding to, it is the destructive domination and social control under capitalism that amalgamates an architecture of necropolitical ecologies that constructs a human rights-based conceptualisation of femicide.

Another important understanding through the literature (Kouta et al. 2018) is the socio-cultural dynamics influencing femicide, such as that cultural practices shape how femicide emerges within communities and countries, but also how women survivors remain trapped in the ‘politicological’ logic of femicide that creates a political–patriarchal prison for them denying them the right to live safe lives (Daher-Nashif 2022). Social and cultural factors, as much as economic and political, can increase risk of violence and death, exposing the interconnection between these elements and individual experiences. This is a multi-dimensional set of causes of femicide, but the cultural perspective is one containing capitalism’s patriarchies and toxic masculinities. Such cultural factors as honour, shame, family values, etc., and an in-depth awareness of the power dynamics of these dimensions facilitate our understanding of the social and political implication of genocidal capitalism leading to femicide. Within this context, it is once again imperative to situate the vulnerability of migrant and refugee women at levels where the intragroup, community, and societal dynamics intersect.

Finally, another way forward conceptually is by emplacing everyday gendered violence within the context of the wider social economy and structural violence, but simultaneously making links between the state and the global regimes of the non-recognition of social reproduction (cf. Elias and Rai 2019). This connection can be seen as a manifestation of ‘violence regimes’ (Hearn et al. 2022) and a descriptor of the multiple forms of violence that women face in everyday life as they are forced to engage in levels of colonial and capitalist power structures and institutions. These institutions through their complicity of state and capital enable the killings of women and girls. Highlighting the structural and institutional causes of such killings should go beyond constructing women as victims of violence, while emphasising that levels of resistance exist where women and LGBTQIA2S+ people can engage in.

Therein lies a constitutive relationship between racial capitalism and violence as an analytic lens to femicidality supporting more efforts for robust scholarship at the intersections of gendered power and the necropolitics of capitalism. This analytical connection illuminates how gendered violence is embedded in capitalist relations and how an ecofeminist, socio-cultural ecological lens can advance an intersectional critical analysis. Through this focus, we also need to understand that the solutions to erasing gendered violence require a political stance, one that is grounded in ecofeminist socialist principles. To highlight the key contributions of this direction, ecofeminism indicates the core difference between humanity and nature as one reflecting gendered difference through power hierarchies and interconnected oppressions that are gendered. As a culmination of power through socio-political ideologies, such as capitalism, an ecofeminist conviction presupposes a cultural differentiation to structural oppressions as shaped through the spatial and temporal realities in the specific country where gendered violence emerges. These social dominations are of feminist concern since power structures exist because capitalism itself needs elimination. The destruction of nature and gendered oppression will perpetuate if capitalism’s power structures continue to proliferate. This is an ecological matter involving ethical issues and should be of concern for communities and societies and requires political action of a no violence social movement to transform, replace, and reinvent humanistic approaches to equity, equal relationships between individuals, and equal relationships between humans and nature.

Thus, the interconnectedness between societal actors and nature is a perspective that matters and through a materiality that is politically networked, analogous to the way collectivist realities of dismantling capitalism can emerge.

4. Conclusions: The Case for a Socialist Ecofeminist Future

As I finalise this article at the end of the summer of 2023 in between fieldwork in Greece for another project, I have a daily hope that I can leave the field without having added one more femicide in the long list that has accumulated since the pandemic. As I glance at the morning papers on the 28th of August, I read that the 41-year-old woman who had been fighting to stay alive since January 2022 following severe beatings by her partner, a judo trainer, that led to her 7-month coma and ultimately to her death, has just passed away (Avgi Newsroom 2023). Olga briefly came out of her coma opening her eyes, but she could neither speak nor move. Her partner has been sentenced to ten years in prison with the court granting him parole for good behaviour. This last loss of yet another woman at the hands of her partner–murderer is not another statistic, but a blunt reminder that femicide is an ‘uncharted’ crime and the Greek government has to be placed under stark pressure to introduce femicide as an offence in the country’s penal code. The unprecedented number of women being brutally murdered by their partners is growing and this is genocide by another name.

Community equity eco-labs organised at the municipal level as a ‘sustainability-solidarity-social justice space’ for education, interaction, dialogue, and creative involvement at the local level, and especially involving interactions between majority and minority groups, ‘Greeks’, and migrants across genders, generations, ethnicities, abilities, etc., are an imperative to action as a national strategy plan. These endeavours should be financed by the state and take place at least on a quarterly basis, including arts-based approaches and leisure activities. Compulsory secondary and tertiary educational modules can serve as direct educational interventions to prevent gender-based violence (and for homophobic violence in schools, see Liodaki et al. (2023) for a harrowing snapshot of what Greek secondary education teachers are revealing).

Documenting ongoing violence throughout education can be articulated in the experiences of educators who seek to counteract this by identifying and embedding these structural violences in their pedagogies (e.g., colonial/Brant 2023). These might present pedagogical sites as spaces for unsettling conversations to take place (Christou 2021; Christou and Michail 2021) when students are prompted to articulate deep reflections embracing their positionalities as they relate to the manifestation of violence inside and outside the classroom. These are co-created spaces of feminist care ethics and praxis in co-production for deep engagement and socio-political action and resistance to emerge.

It is important that systematic interventions take place and are embedded in academic curricula, so that they have a positive impact on the prevention and reduction of gender-based violence from early ages in schools up to university, inclusive. When such interventions and trainings are integrated into the public space and educational curricula, they can promote the active participation of students and the community, making relevant adaptations to specific groups and contexts. Such programmes can have a positive impact on raising awareness of gender violence, stimulating consciousness over social and gender justice, overcoming stereotypes and exclusionary stigmas towards minorities, girls, and women, and improving relationships in neighbourhoods and classrooms, thus reducing violent behaviours as well as empowering vulnerable groups.

The state needs to take accountability for the fact that there is a social continuum where gender-based violence, domestic violence, and intimate-partner violence can result in femicide, so focused policies have to be developed to prevent sexist and misogynistic behaviours which are institutionally embedded and perpetuated in public life. Further parameters of state accountability include protecting those girls and women who are at risk, providing support, and creating safe spaces for them. But this also requires an immediate criminal recognition of femicide so it is included in the penal code and in turn excludes any extenuating circumstances for perpetrators, instead allowing for sentencing with programmes of rehabilitation. This in turn would require more financial support by the state for women’s and feminist collectives, NGOs, and youth organisations that support a multi-fold approach for the prevention and elimination of femicide by involving all spheres of public life and civil society from academia, artists, journalists, social workers, etc.

An ecofeminist-ecosocialist future is the only alternative to the widespread disillusionment of the electoral spread of the far right across Europe and the rest of the world. The radical solidarity to prevent the further loss of life has to replace the silence and apathy to women’s bodies being piled up in the statistics of detrimental and avoidable losses. This is an imperative against necropolitical capitalism, and a pathway to a more affective activism renewal of feminist and anti-fascist struggles in contemporary Greece (Christou 2023) by building an ecological commoning that is post-capitalist and feminist in its approach to the commons (Sato and Soto Alarcón 2019; Cátedra Pulea 2019). These are processes of a feminist ethics of care that sees ‘community’ being reproduced through the reinvention of collective alternative forms to capitalism that centre social reproduction, solidarity, and gendered politics of transformation for equity and safety from the violences of genocidal capitalism and the femicidality the latter has sustained.