Sheepish settler colonialism? Irus Braverman, ‘The New Jewish Shepherd: Land Grabbing and Redemption in the Occupied West Bank’, American Anthropologist, 2026

07Nov26

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the recent deployment of sheep and grazing practices by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The wave of herding outposts that has swept through the West Bank recently involves the use of Jewish-owned sheep to undermine and dispossess Palestinians and to re-indigenize the settlers in their place. The sheep have thus become potent yet clandestine agents of control as well as animated technologies for producing, instilling, and normalizing biblical and spiritual imaginaries of the landscape and of the Jewish people as authentically belonging to it. Backed by the state, the settlers’ mundane shepherding activities have already enabled the largest land grab in the occupied West Bank since 1967. My article contemplates this new “shepherding revolution,” as the settlers call it, situating it amid sheep-related practices in other settler colonial contexts and vis-à-vis shepherding in the state’s early years. Ultimately, I argue that studying Jewish shepherds in the West Bank expands our understanding of settler colonialism and illuminates how sheepwashing practices that position settlers as ecopastoralists are used to justify violence in the eyes of the occupying regime, exacerbating the problematic settler ecologies practiced here.


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Indigenous resistances: Linda Tabar, The Indigenous Anti-Colonial: A Palestinian Resistance Tradition and a World Beyond Settler Colonialism, Duke University Press, 2026

07Nov26

Description: In The Indigenous Anti-Colonial, Linda Tabar explores the radical tradition in which Palestinians remain defiant and undeterred as they hold onto their world and resist settler colonialism. Using a living archive of memory and oral knowledges to trace this long tradition, Tabar outlines the way Palestinians refuse and counter Zionist efforts to erase Palestinian presence and history from the land with an unyielding resistance that is distinctly Indigenous, shaped by Palestinians’ bonds with the land and the world that they built with it. This Indigenous anticolonial radical tradition produces its own imaginaries of liberation that seek a world beyond settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, constructing alternative conditions for freedom. As Israeli settler colonialism accelerates its attempts to eradicate the Palestinian people and the horrors of its genocide in Gaza are broadcast to the world, Tabar puts Palestinian conceptions of liberation at the center of conversations around settler colonialism.


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A settler for protection: Samuel Furphy, ‘Protector of Settlers? Charles Symmons and Aboriginal Protection in Western Australia, 1840-1855’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2026

07Nov26

Abstract: This article charts the colonial career of Charles Symmons (1804–87), the inaugural Protector of Aborigines (1840–55) in Perth, Western Australia. British Imperial policies for the protection of Indigenous peoples emerged in the mid1830s, in the wake of the abolition of slavery and following the recommendations of the Select Committee on Aborigines that reported in 1837. Symmons was one of many protectors appointed in the Australasian colonies in the years that followed. He is notable for his approach to this task, principally because he placed as much emphasis on the protection of British settlers as he did Aboriginal people. This approach derived in part from the local conditions of the remote colony, which had a small population and a tenuous economy, but it can also be explained by Symmons’s background and the circumstances of his appointment. Unlike colleague protectors elsewhere in the antipodean colonies, he was not strongly motivated by a philanthropic or evangelical spirit. He is an important early example of a Protector of Aborigines, because he embodied a shift in Aboriginal policy in the mid-nineteenth century, whereby the humanitarian impulse of the 1830s was subordinated to the practical aim of safeguarding settler safety and economic interests.


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Genderising settler colonialism: Éloïse Décoste, ‘The Indian Act and the Gendered “Logic of Elimination”‘, McGill Law Journal, 71, 4, 2026, pp. 1001-1035

07Nov26

Abstract: One central feature of the Indian Act, still in force today, is the federal government’s unilateral power to define who is legally recognized as an “Indian.” For most of the Act’s history, First Nations women who married non-status men lost their status, could not transmit it to their children and were forced to leave their communities. In contrast, First Nations men retained their status and could transmit it to their non-status wives and their children. This article examines this legislated regime of genderbased discrimination and argues that it exemplifies how structural violence against Indigenous women has always been integral to Canada’s settler colonial fabric. To support this argument, it traces the trajectory of the “marry out” rule from pre-confederation laws through the 1951 reform of the Indian Act. The article then demonstrates how the imposition of a Victorian model of gender relations undermined Indigenous women’s roles and advanced settler colonialism. Finally, it shows how gender-differentiated harms persist despite the formal repeal of the discriminatory provisions in 1985. The article concludes by underscoring the need for a gendered lens in evaluating the legacy of the Indian Act, particularly as efforts to harmonize Canadian law with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples raise fundamental questions about the Act’s future.


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Federalism is settler colonialism: Zachary Jericho Couture, ‘Weaponizing Federalism for Settler Colonialism: Canadian Court (Mis-)use of Federalist Prinicples against Indigenous Jurisdiction’, McGill Law Journal, 71, 4, 2026, 1177-1217

07Nov26

Abstract: Canadian scholars and political thinkers have long contemplated how federalism might be used to enhance and foster legal pluralism and respect for diversity. Yet, as argued here, Canadian courts often work to deny Indigenous legal jurisdiction by leveraging constitutional principles associated with federalism. This article traces what might be called the “weaponization” of federalism to deny Indigenous jurisdiction in four parts. First, I outline the theory and legal importance of federalism as it relates to Indigenous sovereignty. Second, in using the framework of “jurispathy,” I discuss how Canadian courts deny recognizing the independent existence of Indigenous laws, even when it is in the pleadings before them and relevant to the trier-of-fact. Third, I explore how the Supreme Court of Canada, in the 2024 Dickson v. Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation decision, denied the validity of Indigenous constitutionalism, and in turn suggested that Indigenous self-governance is, at least partially, an emanation of Canadian government jurisdiction. Finally, courts have upheld a paternalistic account of section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which allocates “Indians and lands reserved for Indians” to the federal government. This is despite the fact that, when taking into account the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Treaty of Niagara, there is basis to reinterpret section 91(24) not as jurisdiction over a peoples, but a duty and responsibility to them (as opposed to over them).


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Colonies for like-minded people: David R. Como, ‘Castles in the Air: Sectarian Puritanism, the Revolutionary Caribbean and the Forgotten Colony of New Warwick, Trinidad’, History, 2026

05Nov26

Abstract: This article examines an overlooked attempt to colonize the island of Trinidad during the English Revolution of the 1640s. This project was engineered by a consortium of radical puritans, seeking to create a protected enclave in the New World for separatists, anabaptists and other sectaries. ‘New Warwick’, as the colony was called, quickly collapsed, but reconstructing the Trinidad enterprise allows for the examination of important developments in the history of the English Atlantic, including the rise of religious divisions in parliament’s civil-war armies; the interplay between the revolution and events in England’s Atlantic colonies; the colonial policy of parliament during the wars; the emergence of pockets of religious toleration in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the English Atlantic; the radical shifts in the political economy of the West Indies during the formative rise of a regime centred on sugar and enslaved labour; and the conflicts that roiled the English Caribbean after the regicide, resulting ultimately in the consolidation of the newly integrated Atlantic empire under the English Republic during the era of the first Navigation Act (1651).


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The tradwives of the settler imagination: Terra Sage Wallin, The Grammar of Return: Tradition, Gendered Performance, and Moral Formation in the Digital TradWife Movement, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2026

05Nov26

Abstract: This thesis examines how “return” operates as a grammar of moral formation in the digital TradWife movement. Across Instagram, TikTok, conferences, influencer accounts, and land-based communities, calls to return to tradition, femininity, the home, God, the body, and the land organize a moral world in which recently assembled practices come to feel inherited, coherent, and true. This thesis asks how performances that often appear hypocritical, nostalgic, or overly staged become persuasive, how audiences participate in sustaining them, and how their affective appeal becomes tied to broader projects of gender hierarchy, Christian nationalism, racial belonging, and settler attachment to land. Methodologically, the thesis draws on digital ethnography, close reading, platform analysis, and performance theory. Its archive includes TradWife and homesteading content collected from Instagram and TikTok between 2024 and 2026; the online persona and comment sections of Christ With Cali; the platformed gender discourse of Savanna Faith Stone; Turning Point USA’s 2025 Young Women’s Leadership Summit; and Return To The Land, a white identitarian settlement project in Arkansas. The analysis brings these materials into conversation with scholarship on religion and media, affect, ethical formation, invented tradition, professional wrestling, Christian nationalism, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty. The thesis argues that return becomes powerful through repetition, participation, and scale. In digital TradWife media, tradition is staged through kayfabe: a performed reality sustained by creators, audiences, critics, and platforms. Viewers may believe, expose, mock, defend, or parody the performance, and each form of engagement helps keep the world of return available. As these scenes circulate, fabricated heritage becomes a lived orientation. Practices such as modest dress, submission, raw milk consumption, fertility preparation, sourdough baking, and domestic labor come to function as signs of ethical alignment. Under platform conditions, this process becomes algorithmic traditionalism: the circulation of traditionalist signs through affective intensity, ambiguity, ragebait, and engagement-driven visibility. The argument culminates in the claim that digital TradWife domesticity translates larger political and theological imaginaries into intimate form. Blood names lineage, fertility, and reproductive futurity; soil names stewardship, sacred inheritance, and land made morally available; sourdough names the repetitive domestic labor through which continuity is maintained and passed forward. In the case of Return To The Land, the grammar of return becomes territorial, organizing ancestry, membership, education, reproduction, and settlement into a project of white ecological belonging. Placed alongside Indigenous accounts of return, revitalization, refusal, and sacred land protection, this settler return appears politically uneven. Return can authorize possession and sustain obligation. It can make longing feel like belonging while also binding people to responsibilities already present in land, ceremony, sovereignty, and ancestors. Ultimately, this thesis shows that return functions as a formative grammar within digital TradWife culture. Through return, subjects learn how to feel, desire, inhabit, and defend a world that appears old precisely because it is being continually remade.


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Documentarying settler colonialism: Azraf Chowdhury, ‘The lens of resistance: Using No Other Land (2025) and The Settlers (2024) as contemporary documentaries to understand the Israeli settler project’,  Journal of Global Faultlines, 13, 2, 2026, pp. 155-179

05Nov26

Abstract: This article investigates how contemporary documentary films construct political, visual, and narrative understandings of the Israeli settler project, which is an ongoing settler-colonial project that is sustained by territorial expansion, displacement, and the structural domination of Palestinians. While scholarship has examined settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel, less attention has been given to how contemporary documentaries narrate and visualize this evolving project. The research question is: how do the documentaries No Other Land (2024) and The Settlers (2025) narrate and visualize the expansion of the Israeli settler project, and what do they reveal about the broader political, ideological, and colonial structures that sustain and normalize settlement expansions? Analyzing No Other Land (2024) and The Settlers (2025), the study analyzes how first-person, collaborative, and long-form documentary practices challenge dominant narratives, expose settler violence, and highlight human security concerns such as personal, economic, and community insecurity. Analysis of No Other Land, directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, showed that the film visualizes settler colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than an isolated event. Scenes of home demolitions, filmed with handheld cameras, created emotion and gave the film a sense of authenticity. The documentary foregrounds Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) through the portrayals of families who refuse to leave their homes, while exposing the collaboration between Israeli settlers and soldiers during attacks on Palestinian homes. In contrast, The Settlers, directed by Louis Theroux, interrogates the ideological and political forces driving settlement expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The study concludes that contemporary documentaries serve as powerful tools of political critique and public understanding of the Israeli settler project. Together, they demonstrate how documentary film can shed light on the mechanism of settler colonialism, challenge dominant Israeli and Western framing of this conflict, and contribute to broader debates on occupation, settler violence and resistance.


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Settlers see ‘surplus land’: Myrzantay Zhakyp, ‘Communicating Colonial Space: How Imperial Discourse Produced “Surplus Land” in the Kazakh Steppe’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2026

05Nov26

Abstract: This article examines how Russian-language press debate and official statistical reporting produced, disputed, and operationalized “surplus land” in the Kazakh Steppe and adjoining Turkestan territories. It analyzes 43 items reproduced in the Turkestanskii sbornik: 37 newspaper and publicistic texts and six Resettlement Administration studies published between 1885 and 1915. Rather than treating the archive as a unified imperial voice, it distinguishes advocacy, regional criticism, and official calculation. Claims made availability plausible; counterclaims exposed instability; statistical practices converted disputed assumptions into surveys, pastoral norms, tables, maps, and calculable surpluses. A comparison with Port Phillip in 1835 distinguishes Crown authorization of possession from the calculation of pastoral requirements. Communicative legibility is a general process of making representations actionable across genres. Its colonial configuration here joined imperial authority, the subordination of Indigenous territorial claims, and settler allocation, rather than constituting a mechanism exclusive to colonial governance.


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An Irish island in the bush … Ronan McDonald, ‘Hy-Brasil in Australia: Irish myth and settler belonging’, Southerly, 81, 1, 2026, pp. 234-244

03Nov26

Abstract: ‘She is Eutopia, she is Hy-Brasil.’ It is a strange and luminous thing to say of Australia. Hy-Brasil was the phantom island of Irish legend, glimpsed intermittently through Atlantic mist and long associated with westward longing, prophecy, and imagined renewal. In Bernard O’Dowd’s long Federation poem ‘The Bush,’ however, this drifting Irish island is relocated onto the Australian continent. A legend of apparition and non-arrival becomes a name for settlement, arrival, and national destiny.


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