It wasn’t me! (the stories the settlers tell): Sami Lakomäki, ‘Imagining a Birkarl conquest: mediated violence and the cultural construction of colonialism in Sápmi’, Acta Borealia, 2026

07Apr26

Abstract: At the turn of the seventeenth century Swedish Crown officials popularized a violent story describing how men called Birkarlar had long ago conquered the Sámi people and their homeland, Sápmi. Since then, the story has enjoyed widespread popularity in both Sweden and Finland, and it has been retold for a variety of political, academic, and artistic purposes by diverse Swedish, Finnish, and Sámi narrators. While the Birkarl conquest is today considered a fictional invention, the stories depicting it open an important window into a very real historical process: the construction – and deconstruction – of colonial power and ideologies in Sápmi. Drawing from the growing scholarship on the role of mediated violence in colonialism, this article scrutinizes how stories about a violent Birkarl conquest have participated in Swedish and Finnish colonialism in Sápmi from 1600 to the present. It argues that the stories have engaged with three important processes in Sápmi’s colonial history: colonial state-building, efforts to define the place of the Sámi within the colonial state, and debates over the morality and persistence of colonial rule in Sápmi. Moreover, the stories reveal important connections between Swedish and Finnish colonial imagination and broader currents in European colonial ideologies.


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Slavery in the settler colony: Zoë Laidlaw, Jane Lydon (eds), Legacies of British slavery in Australia and New Zealand, Manchester University Press, 2026

07Apr26

Description: This book investigates the legacies of British slavery beyond Britain, focusing on the colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and explores why this history has been overlooked. After August 1833, when the British Parliament abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape, former slave owners were paid compensation for the loss of their ‘property’. New research shows that many beneficiaries had ties to other parts of the British Empire, including the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Through a range of case studies, contributors to this collection trace the movement of people, goods, capital and practices from the Caribbean to the new Australasian settler colonies. Chapters consider a range of places, people and themes to reveal the varied ways that slavery continued to shape imperial relationships, economic networks and racial labour regimes after 1833: from the life stories of those travelling from the Caribbean to the new settler colonies, to the extensive links between Caribbean slavery and the mid-nineteenth-century development of colonial industries such as pastoralism, and Queensland’s sugar industry. For the first time, this collection tracks reinvestment in the new colonies and experiments with ‘free’ labour championed by colonisers with strong financial or personal links to Caribbean slavery. It shows that colonisers’ connections to Caribbean slavery shaped their approach to First Nations peoples in seeking to exploit their land, control their labour and meet anti-colonial resistance with lethal violence.


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Peace catechism and settler colonialism: Ilan Pappe, ‘The Failure of the “Peace Orthodoxy”: A Critical Review of the Israel–Palestine Peace Process’, The Maghreb Review, 51, 2, 2026 pp. 156-163

06Apr26

Abstract: The attempts to solve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict had already begun during British rule over Palestine (1918–1948) and were reignited after 1967, under the guidance of the USA, with rare occasions, such as during the Oslo Accord, when European countries or the UN took the lead. Whoever was in the driving seat adhered to a catechism, defined here as the Peace Orthodoxy. This was a set of presumptions, detached from the history and the reality on the ground, that not only failed to bring peace, but also created more despair and consequently violence. This paper will examine the basic assumption of the Peace Orthodoxy and will also offer a counter approach and language to the failed project of the Peace Orthodoxy.


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Securitisation and settler colonialism: James M. Hundley, ‘Border Securitization as Settler Colonialism’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal , 49, 1, 2026, pp. 81-102

06Apr26

Excerpt: In a well-known short story by American-born Canadian author Thomas King, the narrator’s mother drives up to the border with her daughter in the car, attempting to cross into Montana. The Canada Border Services Agency officer asks, “Wow, you both Canadians?” “Blackfoot” is her reply. After a discussion about the agent knowing a Blackfoot person, she asks again. “Citizenship?” “Blackfoot” again is the reply. “‘I know,’ said the woman, ‘and I’d be proud of being Blackfoot if I were Blackfoot. But you have to be American or Canadian.” While this is a fictional short story, there are plenty of instances of this situation occurring not just for the Blackfoot/Blackfeet (the designation depending on whether one is referring to the nation in what is now Montana—Blackfeet—or Alberta—Blackfoot), but also the Haudenosaunee in the New York, Ontario, or Quebec region, the Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest, and others across the continent. What these instances of division, citizenship, and frustration have in common is the international border. From a state-centric position, international borders mark the power of the state to control movement, bestow citizenship, and define those who reside within its territory. In North America, particularly the Canada–United States border, there is little concern about a military threat. However, “risky others” remain a concern for both countries due to the real or perceived threat from potential terrorists, migrants, smugglers, and, because of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples. These fears have only grown in the past two decades as the state continues to present Indigenous peoples, and others, as a threat to justify and extend its imperialist agenda. Though regularly ignored by settler politicians, Indigenous perspectives continue to challenge this statecentric position.


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Zoometric and settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Zoometrics and the Dogs of Gaza: Species, Race, and Settler-Colonial Violence’, Theory & Event, 29, 2, pp. 347-375

06Apr26

Abstract: Zoometrics—the shifting hierarchies that calibrate value between the more-or-less human and the more-or-less animal—is a core technology of settler colonialism. Such hierarchies govern life and death, authorizing both violence and care. Drawing on the literature on posthumanism, more-than-human geographies, political ecology, Black and decolonial studies, and critical animal studies, this project identifies strategies of humanization, dehumanization, and feralization performed in Gaza through companion, free-roaming, and military dogs, especially since October 2023. Most acutely, I trace how conceptual violence through zoometrics precedes, and often precisely predicts, physical violence. I write about dogs not to center their suffering over that of Palestinians, but to reveal how species difference intersects with race to rationalize and justify extreme atrocities. At the same time, the dogs in Gaza are not mere metaphors; they are living beings with relations and capacities that matter and resist.


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Carceral and settler colonialism: Michelle Brown, ‘Abolition is ceremony: Christianity, carcerality, and the Cherokee Mission School’, Incarceration: An international journal of imprisonment, detention and coercive confinement, 2026

06Apr26

Abstract: The Indian mission school, with its haunting institutional merge of Christianity and education, marks how carcerality and its categories structure not only the Native boarding school, educational, and child welfare systems that follow in what is now the United States, but the carceral state itself. Indeed, this material and ideological punishment infrastructure is a prerequisite for the politics of genocide, fascism and authoritarianism. These ongoing colonial projects that we live with today make historic sites of settler care, learning, and religious fervor, penal harbingers for the carceral moment we live in. This article examines this settler project through the evangelizing “mission” of Valley Towns Baptist Mission school, the largest and most popular settler mission among the ᏣᎳᎩ/AniKituwah/Cherokee people. As a key point of first contact with forms of settler colonialism and Christian supremacy, the school emerges as a contested site where evangelical practices, logics, and ideologies systematically sought to eradicate Cherokee knowledge, life ways, and spiritual cosmologies. Amid ongoing counter-archival efforts to unravel the fate of family ancestors who attended this school, I draw from official and legal documents, Native elder stories, land walks, and Indigenous scholarship that unveil a field of carceral christianizing cruelty and enduring strands of life flourishing cosmologies. These tensions continue to shape how Cherokee and Indigenous peoples address harm and harm-doing without prisons and jails, laying out some of the world’s most abiding and foundational ways into struggles for communal healing, safety, accountability, and abolitionist plotting for power.


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Acoustic and settler colonialism: Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, Acoustic ColonialismL Acts of Mapuche Interference, Duke University Press, 2025

06Apr26

Description: In Acoustic Colonialism, Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante examines the role of sound in Chilean and Mapuche cultural production over the last two centuries. Cárcamo-Huechante theorizes sound as a territory of racial, patriarchal, and colonial hegemony as well as of Mapuche struggle, agency, and response to what he calls “acoustic colonialism.” From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Chilean literature, radio, and other media have exerted a historic role in disseminating distorted visual and sonic representations of the Mapuche. The enduring effects of what Cárcamo-Huechante defines as the colonial ear—the entry point for these misrepresentations—reflect the logic of the Chilean settler nation-state. In response to these aural and sonorous figurations, contemporary Mapuche writers, artists, and activists have produced their own literary, radiophonic, vocal, and musical expressions. The voices, sounds, and discourses of these Mapuche productions contest and disrupt the acoustic colonialism that has dominated the soundscape of the territory designated in present-day cartography as central and southern Chile. 


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A settler colony nearby: Rachel O’Sullivan, Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective, Bloomsbury, 2023

05Apr26

Description: This book examines Nazi Germany’s expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our understanding of the Nazi regime. However, as opposed to solely concentrating on violence to investigate whether the Holocaust can be located within wider colonial frameworks, Rachel O’Sullivan utilizes a broader approach by investigating other aspects, such as discourses and fantasies related to expansion, settlement, ‘civilising missions’ and Germanisation, which were also intrinsic to Nazi Germany’s rule in Poland. The resettlement of the ethnic Germans-individuals of German descent who lived in Eastern Europe until the outbreak of the Second World War-forms a main focal point for this study’s analysis and investigation of colonial comparisons. The ethnic German resettlement in the Reichsgaue laid the foundations for the establishment and enforcement of German society and culture, while simultaneously intensifying the efforts to control Poles and remove Jews. Through this case study, O’Sullivan explores Nazi Germany’s dual usage of inclusionary policies, which attempted to culturally and linguistically integrate ethnic Germans and certain Poles into German society, and the contrasting exclusionary policies, which sought to rid annexed Poland of ‘undesirable’ population groups through segregation, deportation and murder. The book compares these policies – and the tactics used to implement them – to colonial and settler colonial methods of assimilation, subjugation and violence.


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Settler colonialism is an ecology: Charis Enns, Brock Bersaglio, Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya, University of Toronto Press, 2024

05Apr26

Description: Settler Ecologies tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio use immersive methods to reveal how animals and plants can be enrolled in the reproduction of settler colonialism. The book details how ecological relations have been unmade and remade to enable settler colonialism to endure as a structure in this part of Kenya. It describes five modes of violent ecological transformation used to prolong structures of settler colonialism: eliminating undesired species; rewilding landscapes with species desirable to settler ecologists; repeopling nature to create seemingly more inclusive ecologies and capitalize on biocultural diversity; rescuing injured animals and endangered species to shore up support for settler ecologies; and extending settler ecologies through landscape approaches to conservation that scale wild spaces. Settler Ecologies serves as a cautionary tale for future conservation agendas in all settler colonies. While urgent action is needed to halt global biodiversity loss, this book underscores the need to continually question whether the types of nature being preserved advance settler colonial structures or create conditions in which ecologies can otherwise be (re)made and flourish.


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Settler colonialism in Kashmir: Goldie Osuri, Settler/colonialism in Kashmir: Sovereignty, Catastrophe, Indigeneity, Manchester University Press, 2026

03Apr26

Description: Sovereignty, Catastrophe, Indigeneity examines Indian rule in occupied Jammu and Kashmir through the lens of settler-colonial geopolitics. Engaging with settler-colonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies, the book traces how European sovereignty was shaped through settler-colonial practices that proved catastrophic for Indigenous worlds and helped generate today’s climate crisis. It argues that India draws on these same mechanisms in governing Kashmir, thereby fuelling ecological harm and reinforcing a global settler-colonial order. Analysing the India–China rivalry, Kashmir’s political economy and India’s indigenisation of Hindu sacred geography in the region, the book reframes Kashmiri resistance as an Indigenous anti-colonial struggle. By exploring the intersections of sovereignty, catastrophe, Indigeneity and ecology, it positions Kashmir within broader debates on settler-colonialism and planetary crises.


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