Soviet-settler Territorialism: Gamze İme, ‘The Crimean Jewish Autonomy Project of the 1920s–30s’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 77, 1, 2026

12Apr26

Abstract: In the 1920s the Soviet Union launched the Crimean Jewish Autonomy Project as part of its korenizatsiya (indigenization) policy to integrate minorities into socialism. By promoting Jewish agricultural settlement and granting limited cultural autonomy, the state sought to weaken Zionism and foster a unified Soviet identity. Crimea thus became a testing ground for Soviet social engineering in managing ethnic diversity. Yet the initiative imposed ideological constraints, reshaping Jewish identity within socialist boundaries. The project ultimately revealed both the ambitions of Soviet nationality policy and its inherent contradictions.


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Decolonial ruralisation in the settler colony: Ettore Santi, Ethan Matthews, ‘Ruralization as decolonization: Land, property, and possibilities in North America’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2026

12Apr26

Abstract: Recent scholarship in human geography has proposed the framework of geographies of ruralization to describe rural elements that are persistent, resonant, and pervasive amidst urbanization. This concept has primarily emerged through empirical studies in the Global South, where village-based societies have been rapidly transformed by megaregional urbanization. This commentary brings ruralization into the context of the Global North, specifically rural New England, where modern property regimes have profoundly shaped the rural landscape. Drawing on examples from Massachusetts – where colonial property regimes were first tested and codified – we argue that ruralization in the North today might be understood as an ongoing, processual challenge to the settler-colonial structures of land tenure that have historically defined rural space. We highlight three pathways toward this decolonizing ruralization in the region: autonomy, reparation, and rematriation. These efforts constitute an ‘ecosystem of possibilities’ in which rural actors reclaim embodied relations with the land against colonial enclosure and the ongoing financialization of rural land.


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Militant ignorance to settler colonialism: Lara Fricke, German Militant Ignorance towards Palestinian Experiences of Israeli Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2026

12Apr26

Abstract: This thesis investigates the German discourse surrounding Palestine. Using a conceptual framework combining ignorance, Orientalism and coloniality of power, it complicates previous research into the topic by unpacking the intricate connections between German Holocaust memory and Germany’s position of power within colonial power dynamics. To capture the ways in which both act together to create Germany’s discourse on Palestine, it develops the concept of militant ignorance which it defined as an active production of ignorance which militantly prevents an acknowledgement of ‘threatening’ knowledge and the reality it depicts. This research locates and identifies this German militant ignorance, its mechanisms and roots. In order to do so, it conducts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of news articles, broadcast contributions, social media posts, open letters and official statements relating to three case studies. These case studies are three discursive events surrounding Nemi El-Hassan in 2021, School for Unlearning Zionism in 2021 and Achille Mbembe in 2020. Each case study presents an incident of a cancellation, defunding or disinvitation campaign against individuals and groups voicing Palestinian experiences of Israeli settler colonialism and therefore (re)produces the epistemic and discursive erasure of Palestinians. The thesis finds that German militant ignorance is produced and maintained through ostracisation and persecution of those presenting Palestinian experiences of Israeli settler colonialism, and through epistemicide against the very body of knowledge of colonial realities in Palestine. It finds that this militant ignorance is rooted in both, German memory culture and its affects, and colonial power.


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The settler triangle: Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh, ‘Dromore and Trillick: revolution and reaction on a colonial frontier, 1906–22’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

12Apr26

Abstract: This article analyses the experience of partition in the borderlands of Dromore and Trillick, County Tyrone (1906–1922), through the lens of Veracini’s settler-colonial triangle. Using census data, Irish-language sources, IRA and Cumann na mBan records, and government archives, it shows how republican mobilisation drew on cultural revival to articulate a decolonial, anti-sectarian project, while loyalism functioned as the local expression of settler-colonial dominance. The study demonstrates that the Ulster Special Constabulary – armed, funded, and politically protected by the British state – used systematic coercion to secure Unionist rule and enforce the new border. The resulting asymmetry reveals partition not as a democratic compromise but as an imperial settlement sustained by state-backed settler-colonial violence.


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It’s an improvement! (no it isn’t): Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Book Review: Settler Colonial Sovereignty: Visions of Improvement and Indigenous Erasure by Liam Midzain-Gobin’, International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2026

10Apr26

Excerpt: Settlers routinely imagine empty spaces when they think about what they are doing in the countries they seek to possess. They can only do so by foreclosing Indigenous lifeworlds, and they are typically enthusiastic foreclosers. Liam Midzain-Gobin’s Settler Colonial Sovereignty opens with a reference to Canadian politician Alexander Morris’s 1858–1859 call for a Nova Britannia to be established in British North America (3–5). Morris was an inveterate denier of Indigenous sovereign organisation, and he was certainly not alone.1 While this vision of emptiness has been noted in much of the literature appraising settler aesthetics and perception, until now, it had not yet been analysed for what it says about settler cosmologies. Cosmologies are usually appraised in relation to Indigenous collectives, but Settler Colonial Sovereignty reverses this normalising assumption and queries the stories about the fundamental order of the world the settlers tell themselves and everyone else who will listen. Cosmology now operates in the semantic area ideology once operated in—it is about how we make sense of the world—but these are not times for terminological quarrels, and what matters is that Midzain-Gobin is able to develop a crucial insight: if we take settler cosmologies into consideration, and if we understand the effects of the initial emptiness the settlers uncomprehendingly perceive in the land, then we can perceive a constant discursive refrain, a logic that still informs settler utterances, despite genuine and less genuine contemporary attempts to achieve Indigenous “inclusion.” It is the logic of improvement. The logic of improvement, we learn, is fundamentally based on settler cosmologies and ways of knowing (as explained in chapter 1). Importantly, the knowledge production that emanates from the logic of improvement is seen as “apolitical,” and a form of “common sense” (49). After all, who does not like improvement? As the book progresses, we realise that the logic is relentless: whether the state demands that Indigenous people conform to settler expectations, whether it sets out to delimit First Nations reserves and is unprepared to receive Indigenous sovereign inputs (as explored in chapter 2), whether it develops and reforms land and resource monitoring schemes (as detailed in chapter 3), or whether it collects data regarding Indigenous individuals and groups so that it can craft better and more targeted policy interventions (as charted in chapter 4). The logic of improvement underpins settler knowledge production and settler power, and is therefore the foundation of settler sovereignty: a specific sovereign formation that characterises the settler colonial polity. Midzain-Gobin observes that the logic of improvement “structures the very ways” settlers conceive of “what is possible” (9). It structures their knowledge and the governance systems they are determined to impose. Lands and territories can be the subject of improvement (usually by settlers), and Indigenous individuals and their collective institutions also become the target of improvement policies. This is the stuff of coercive assimilation, and it is deadly. But the settlers’ policies and governance mechanisms are also the subject of constant improvement: the settler state, we realise, is not averse in principle to improving its operations because improvement is still, even in an age of Indigenous inclusion, the very language of its cosmological foundation. The settlers are still heading towards their country: once, they literally moved towards it; now, they move metaphorically. One day, they believe, the settler state will finally be capable of containing and representing the Indigenous collectives it is now containing and repressing. This is the cunning of the logic of improvement: it flexibly applies to the contemporary integrative or reconciliationary settler dispensation and to past coercive attempts at improvement. Improvement is the “ideational core of settler colonial worldmaking,” Midzain-Gobin argues (22). A consideration of the logic of improvement makes the relentless constancy of the settler polity manifest. Midzain-Gobin’s sources and archives deal with Canadian settings, but his method and findings are relevant for the study of all the settler colonial polities. The settlers, after all, share a cosmological orientation—one result of being collectives that are heading towards their countries, unlike all other collectives, which are constituted by peoples who come from their countries. The logic of improvement may therefore accompany Patrick Wolfe’s logic of elimination, a formulation that kickstarted Settler Colonial Studies as an autonomous field of research about two decades ago. Attending to both logics enables an examination of the continuities in settler colonial policies and governance, but the two logics may also be considered in their interaction. Settler Colonial Sovereignty‘s most valuable analytical offering may indeed lie in an appraisal of the two logics’ sequential and concomitant operation: improvement by elimination in a primary or originary “frontier” moment, and elimination by improvement in successive, more settled, and much “improved” eras.


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The settlers’ ‘dream’: Neerej Dev, ‘From Rivermind to Care Homes: Settler Dreams and Britain’s Care Crisis; the cannibalistic business model depicted in Common People holds up a mirror to Britain’s predatory social-care infrastructure’, Economic & Political Weekly, lXI, 11, 2026, pp. 71-72

10Apr26

Excerpt: The so-called “settler dream” referenced here differs from the broader migrant aspiration. It signals a particular fantasy of arrival, rooted in Britain’s colonial hangover. One that has made you believe in the transition from periphery to metropole, not only to work but to belong. Academics like Nandita Sharma and Aihwa Ong have shown how this fantasy is shaped by postcolonial hierarchies and stratifi ed citizenships, in which legal belonging is contingent, conditional, and constantly repriced. Unlike traditional settler colonialism, where land and status are extracted from others, here it is the migrant’s own future— labour, savings, even love that is steadily devoured.


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Auctioning settler colonialism (mobilising preaccumulation): Reinoud Vermoesen, ‘A world without stuff? Public auctions in a colonial setting: Kingston (New York) in the seventeenth century’, in Bruno Blondé, Anne Sophie Overkamp, Jon Stobart (eds), Auctions and Households in the Eighteenth-Century World: Comparative Perspectives from Across the Globe, 1700-1850, Routledge, 2026

10Apr26

Abstract: This chapter explores what the second-hand market looked like in a setting characterised by a constant scarcity of consumer goods. It focuses on an early modern colonial context: the Hudson Valley in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. This was a period when small settlements fought against the elements, against hostile natives, against other settlers, and sometimes even against each other. It examines how auctions were organised, who participated in them, and what was ultimately sold. The analysis centres on 21 auctions which took place in Esopus–Wiltwijck–Kingston between 1664 and 1667. The auctions comprised 330 different lots―including real estate, agricultural output and implements, farm animals, transport items, textiles, furniture, kitchen utensils, luxury items and arms―and involved all strata of colonial society. In a society where goods were scarce and where life was characterised by high mobility, auctions were the perfect medium for colonists who wanted to settle down, but also for those who only briefly lived in a colonial settlement. It was the circuit par excellence for a commodity market that lacked a developed retail sector. Backed by well-developed institutions, such as the local aldermen’s courts, it allowed settlers to easily sell and purchase goods. This contribution shows how auctions contributed to the construction of a colonial society.


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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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