The settler local state and its representation: Karen Bird, Abbey Forbes, Gloria Liu, Maïa Rousseau, ‘Talk matters: local council debates over electoral reform for Indigenous representation in Canada and New Zealand’, Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance, 30, 2025

04Jan26

Abstract: This study looks at recent city council debates over introducing Indigenous seats in Canadian and New Zealand municipalities, asking whether debate is respectful and focused on relevant issues, and agreements are decisive and consequential. Despite very different national contexts and local government systems, overall we find similar arguments across the two countries. And while deliberation is generally civil and principled among councils as a whole, individual councillors who voted against Indigenous representation tended to argue in ways that are potentially polarising. We relate our observations to wider arguments about the exclusion of urban Indigenous peoples from local policymaking and the importance of making rational inputs available for citizens’ judgement and decision.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settler state and the settler people: Richard Howson, Charles Hawksley, Nichole Georgeou, ‘Gramsci and “The Voice”: Closing the Gap Between “The Social” and “The Political” in Australia’s failed 2023 Referendum on Indigenous representation’, International Gramsci Journal, 6, 2, 2025

04Jan26

Abstract: On 14 October 2023, Australians voted down a referendum proposal that would have acknowledged the place of Indigenous Peoples as First Peoples in the Australian Constitution, and which would have provided Indigenous Peoples with a “Voice” to the Australian Parliament. While some commentators chose to label the defeat as proof of Australia’s inherent racism, in this article we argue the failure of the referendum on the Voice was ultimately a lost opportunity for the Australian government which organised the vote but then refused to provide the moral and intellectual leadership to educate the public as to exactly why the Voice was required. As such it failed to demonstrate the leadership required of an stato integrale (integral state), in particular its educative functions. In this article we first outline the origins and evolution of the Voice referendum proposal before then explaining our methodology, method and positionality in writing about this topic. Thirdly, we subject the central texts of the referendum to a Gramscian analysis before finally we detail the referendum result and position the vote within Australia’s changing demographic structure. Throughout the article, we argue a Gramscian analysis of the Voice referendum demonstrates the reality of a gap between what we describe as the social (the people) and the political (the state), one that is more complex than accusations of racism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonial violence is gendered: Emily Grafton, Amber Fletcher, ‘Settler Colonial Saskatchewan and Gender based Violence Against Indigenous Women’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 12, 2, 2025

04Jan26

Abstract: Women and gender nonconforming people living in Saskatchewan, Canada, face staggeringly high rates of gender-based violence (GBV). These rates are disproportionately experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit or gender-queer individuals, and can be attributed to both historical and ongoing settler colonial practices. This article provides a structural analysis linking GBV against women and gender nonconforming people to the province’s settler colonial politics. Drawing together theoretical and empirical sources, we provide a conceptual synthesis that connects macro-level political and sociocultural ideologies to past and present colonial events. We analyze relevant legislation, policy, provincial budgets, peer-reviewed scholarship, industry-related reports, and media documents. As such, this article argues that GBV perpetrated against Indigenous women is central to settler colonial violence, enabling the settler state to foster settler colonial expansion and Indigenous dispossession, which are power imbalances in urgent need of redistribution. These settler colonial mechanics are readily observable in Saskatchewan, a province at the forefront of settler colonial development in Canada, partly through these disproportionate GBV rates.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settler colonial future is bleak: Stefanus Galang Ardana, ‘Whose Apocalypse? Unfuturability and the Politics of Settler-Colonial Futurity in Western Apocalyptic Narratives’, Retorik, 13, 2, 2025

03Jan26

Abstract: This paper argues that reading Western settler-colonial apocalyptic narratives—including films, video games, and novels such as The Road, the Fallout series, Children of Men, and Interstellar—through the lens of unfuturability reveals their underlying political function. I distinguish between “apocalypse-as-genre,” the spectacular collapse imagined in these works, and “apocalypse-as-structure,” the slow violence already endured in places such as Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua. The analysis identifies three recurring settler-colonial tropes that work to secure the future as a racially exclusive domain: the reimagining of land as an emptied frontier, the rebirth of the hunter-hero through righteous violence, and the salvation of the future through a settler adoption fantasy. These tropes function as a form of “white property” by controlling who inherits futurity. In response, unfuturability is proposed as both an analytic and an ethic: a political refusal of the colonial future that opens space for plural, relational worlds already being built through Indigenous land stewardship, Black mutual aid, and decolonial archival practice. By using unfuturability to name and critique these narrative patterns, this paper offers a framework for reading apocalyptic culture beyond the horizons secured by settler futurity.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The port, and the settler hinterlands: Olivia Irena Durand, ‘Labour, trade, and settler colonisation: the role of Odessa and New Orleans on new imperial peripheries’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

03Jan26

Abstract: The Russian Empire’s conquest of Southern Ukraine in the 1780s inaugurated an era characterised by the convergence of internal and external colonisation. This southward expansion granted Russia access to lucrative maritime trade routes and established a fertile agricultural frontier on Ukrainian lands. Contemporary observers likened the colonisation of the Black Sea steppes to overseas imperial projects, drawing direct comparisons between ‘New Russia’ and the American West. These parallels rested on shared features of settler colonisation, unfree labour regimes, and the export of staple commodities. As Odessa emerged as a key port city, this article situates its early development within the broader history of settler colonialism by comparing it to New Orleans and its influence over the Mississippi Basin. Between 1800 and the 1860s, both cities became major economic centres, serving as gateways for immigration and capital due to their geographical locations and inflows of foreign investment. Yet their shared reliance on bound labour also proved a structural vulnerability, hindering commercial modernisation and industrial diversification. By placing Odessa’s economic trajectory in a transatlantic framework, the study highlights how Russian settler colonialism shaped labour relations, commerce, and the integration of Southern Ukraine into global economic networks.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settler’s cosmopolitanism (cosmosettlerism): Fabián Flores Silva, ‘Kantian Cosmopolitanisms Encountering Isolated Indigenous Groups: Between Ambiguous Anti-colonialism and Risky Oversight’, Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 45, 3, 2025

02Jan26

Abstract: This paper compares Kant’s cosmopolitan right with the Kantian-rooted cosmopolitan proposals of Seyla Benhabib and Jacques Derrida, assessing their ability to support South American isolated indigenous groups’ claims to reject external intrusion in their lands, as a way of counteracting damaging settler-colonialist dynamics. It argues that despite Kant’s cosmopolitan right, which includes a problematic racialized and teleological aspect that precludes understand it as a full anticolonial perspective, it primarily endorses non-state peoples with a right to reject external requests for hospitality. Conversely, the ethical commitments in Benhabib’s and Derrida’s cosmopolitan propositions for the sovereign states to accept external solicitations for hospitality not only neglects isolated indigenous claims but may unintendedly contribute to their physical and cultural destruction. The tension that emerges between Kant’s minimalist focus on international peace and the justice-oriented perspectives of contemporary Kantian thinkers underscores the need for cosmopolitan theories to more effectively engage with the struggles of indigenous peoples.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settler’s anthropocentrism (settlerocentrism): Avlokita Sodhi, ‘The Settler’s Gaze: Patrick White and the Problem of Anthropocentrism’, Literary Endeavour, 2025, 119-123

02Jan26

Abstract: This paper interrogates the complex negotiation of anthropocentrism within the literary imagination of Patrick White. While his oeuvre is celebrated for its profound engagement with the Australian landscape, this analysis argues that White simultaneously employs and subverts the settler-colonial gaze, exposing the inherent violence of an anthropocentric worldview. Through an ecocritical and postcolonial lens, this study deconstructs White’s narrative strategies in key works such as Voss and The Tree of Man. It examines how his protagonists—from the megalomaniacal explorer Voss to the pioneering Stan Parker—initially impose a hermeneutics of domination upon the land, perceiving it as a space for conquest, spiritual trial, or material utility. However, White systematically dismantles this gaze. The Australian environment is not a passive backdrop but an active, agential force that resists, transforms, and ultimately obliterates human pretensions of mastery. This paper traces the progression from a colonizing perspective to moments of ecological reckoning, where the human subject is rendered vulnerable and re-situated within, rather than above, the more-than-human world. By foregrounding the land’s formidable alterity and its capacity to erode ego and identity, White’s fiction performs a crucial critique. It reveals the spiritual and ecological poverty of anthropocentrism, suggesting that a tenuous, fraught coexistence, predicated on a recognition of human insignificance, is the only alternative to the settler’s doomed project of domination.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

And now, ending a massive year in settler colonialism (and inaugurating the Permanent Observatory on Settler Colonialism): Ohio Barbarian, ‘We Are All Indigenous Now: How financial cleansing supplanted ethnic cleansing in the United States’, 29/12/25

30Dec25

A settler, who thinks like a settler and responds like a settler in the face of a settler crisis: access the Substack post here.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Inconceivable! (The factory of settler colonialism): Mohamad Kadan, ‘The Impossible Factory: Dependency and Elimination in Israel’s Settler-Colonial Economy (1956–1960)’, Middle East Critique, 2025

30Dec25

Abstract: This article examines the failure of the Bal-Gharbieh factory in the late 1950s, an industrial venture proposed under Israeli military rule, to show how ‘economic development’ operated as a tool of elimination through dependency. It argues that understanding the Palestinian economy in Israel requires integrating two frameworks: dependency theory, rooted in Marxist critiques of development, and the logic of elimination in settler-colonial studies. Modernization in Arab villages functioned as a discourse of collaboration with select Palestinian figures and local leaders, reinforcing dependency, while simultaneously undermining their authority – as in the case of Fares Hamdan – by restructuring Palestinian economic and social life. Drawing on archival documents, government reports, and community narratives, the study shows that the factory, promoted as a step toward modernization, was designed to dispossess land, dismantle peasant structures, and control surplus labor. The factory’s rapid collapse was not the product of poor planning but of the settler-colonial state’s policies toward Palestinian citizens. Its failure, shaped by the involvement of local Zionist actors and companies seeking to exploit Arab labor, highlights how development projects intersected with elimination. This case complicates conventional narratives of Israeli development and dependency by showing how military rule extended control beyond the state and how minor Zionist actors reinforced settler-colonial structures.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Fe(de)ral settler colonialism: Éléna Choquette, ‘Settler Federalism and the Conditions of Indigenous Autonomy: A Comparative Study’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2025

30Dec25

Abstract: This article examines how different federal configurations can shape Indigenous autonomy across three cases: The United States, Canada, and Australia. While federations might seem better equipped than unitary states to share sovereignty with Indigenous peoples, they often entrench settler authority by internalizing Indigenous affairs, thereby limiting Indigenous self-government. Through a comparative historical analysis, this study shows that Indigenous autonomy is enhanced when settler governments externalize Indigenous affairs—treating them as nation-to-nation relationships through treaties or constitutional agreements. The article identifies two mechanisms that support such externalization: aligning Indigenous affairs with settler powers over foreign relations and separating them from settler control over land and resources. Drawing on constitutional and jurisdictional history, the study offers a novel framework for understanding how federal systems can either constrain or support Indigenous self-determination in the US, Canada, and Australia, highlighting the promise of treaty federalism as a path toward greater Indigenous jurisdiction and autonomy.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts

Archives

stats for wordpress