Settler colonialism as peer review: Nimrod Lin, ‘Zionist comparisons to settler colonies before 1948’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: The present article examines comparisons made by Zionists between the Zionist colonization of Palestine and other cases of settler colonialism before 1948. Four main findings emerge from these comparisons: one, Zionist intellectuals often used comparison as a way to develop theories of colonization or to make sense of their relationship with Britain and the Palestinians. Secondly, the most involved comparisons centered on British settler colonies in Africa because Zionist commentators recognized that white settlers in Africa faced similar challenges. Thirdly, Zionist intellectuals were especially interested in labor policies. They believed that a large Jewish working class was vital for the creation of a Jewish majority and that a Jewish majority was vital for the survivability of the colony. Finally, Revisionist Zionists were especially prolific colonial comparison-makers and had an intense affective relationship with the British Empire. Although they have self-mythologized as colonial rebels in the 1940s, in the 1920s and 1930s, Revisionist Zionists often expressed solidarity with British settlers and concern for the future of the British Empire.


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The monogamous settler: T. J. Tallie, Conjugal States: The Queerness of Nonmonogamy in Settler Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2027

28Sep26

Description: How the rhetoric of monogamy was weaponized against Indigenous and queer lives by colonial powers in the nineteenth century. While marital monogamy is often posited as inevitable and essential, it was in fact a negotiated practice inflicted onto occupied lands to enforce social control and white settler reproduction. Conjugal States makes an ambitious and far-reaching investigation of how colonizers used monogamy to symbolize modernity, weaponized against Indigenous communities in South Africa, New Zealand, and British Columbia—and how this process was complicated by the emergence of the Mormon Church. In Conjugal States, T.J. Tallie reveals how the queer destabilizing potential of Mormon polygamy in the nineteenth century clashed with the broader aims of colonization, resulting in legal action against plural marriages and fears of Mormon “contamination” in other settler spaces. As colonial powers attempted to delineate and justify their occupation, monogamous marriage became a key method of performative civilization. By analyzing the fraught debates concerning gender, marriage, belonging, and race that arose between British settlers, Christian missionaries, South Asian migrants, and Indigenous peoples in contested territories around the world, Tallie reveals how marital practices and prohibitions shaped the contours of colonial life. A deeply archival work, Conjugal States illuminates how both monogamous marriage and colonial power were predicated on the precarity of their own control. Tallie tells the story of the enormous repercussions of this global phenomenon, providing a history of sexuality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous peoples that charts varied forms of native resistance to settler incursions.


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Indigenous peoples define health as self-determination (I know, right?): Laura Gemmell-Sinnott, Miriam Laugesen, Robin Quigg, ‘How do Indigenous peoples define health? A systematic review of definitions across Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States’, Qualitative Research in Health, 2026, #100874

28Sep26

Abstract: Indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia, the United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand experience persistent and preventable health inequities driven by colonisation, systemic power imbalances, and the imposition of Western biomedical frameworks that fail to reflect Indigenous understandings of health. A systematic literature review was conducted using the PRISMA-2020 protocols, identifying 644 records in Scopus and PubMed, of which 31 studies met the final eligibility criteria. Five themes emerged: holistic wellbeing; cultural knowledge; connection to land; relationships; and self-determination. Across the included studies, findings indicate that many Indigenous communities hold different perspectives of health. Dominant Western frameworks, including the World Health Organisation definition of health, remain insufficient to accommodate Indigenous health needs. This study offers a new perspective on how Indigenous communities define and conceptualise health and examines the implications for reorienting health policy and practice to better reflect community- and culture-driven, self-determined definitions of wellbeing.


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More food for settler thought: Molly Stollmeyer, Kristen Lowitt, Catherine Littlefield, Charles Z. Levkoe, Peter Andrée, Patricia Ballamingie, ‘Motivations driving settler food movement organizations in Canada to engage with Indigenous peoples’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: Food systems, in terms of the processes, structures, and relationships that bring food to our plates, are deeply embedded in historical and ongoing processes of colonialism. In settler colonial countries, this reality is contributing to growing attention to and engagement with Indigenous peoples and communities in food systems scholarship and practice. This paper asks: what motivates settler-led food movement organizations to engage in relationship building with Indigenous peoples and communities and their associated food system concerns, and what effects do these motivations have for food systems governance? We address these questions by drawing upon interviews with settler-led food movement organizations across Canada. We consider the intrinsic and extrinsic factors – encompassing experiences, values, and flashpoints – that move settlers to act or provoke a response. Our findings identify reconciliation, land relations, and knowledge systems as three interconnected themes shaping motivations for settlers to build relationships with Indigenous peoples in food systems governance. Overall, this research advances more participatory food systems governance that takes the distinctiveness of Indigenous rights and worldviews seriously. Our analysis speaks to the need for settlers to clarify motivations, shift toward ever more meaningful action, and remain self-reflexive.


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Settlers representing settlers: Cole Virk, The settler culture of colonial spectacle: A study of settler colonial erasure and assimilation of Indigenous representations, PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: This investigation examines how settler colonialism obscures Indigeneity behind the settler Indian caricature. Making Indigenous presence visible, legible, and accessible within the settler colonial landscape of South Florida when attributed within settler colonial Indian representations around tourism. To analyse how settler colonial structures create these Indian representations, this thesis explores the ancestral land of the Seminole and Miccosukee peoples. In this, the field of study does not analyse Indigenous representations but rather settler Indian representations. To perform this, I draw on settler colonial theory, decolonial thought, and Indigenous scholarship. This introspection allows the research to situate and understand colonialism as an enduring structure that continues to organise space, memory, and visual culture in the present. While also being grounded in a decolonial methodological orientation, the thesis engages with urban and rural environments, tourist infrastructures, and public-facing cultural sites across South Florida to examine how representations are colonially manipulated. Through attention to visual, spatial, and textual forms, I examine and display how Indigenous representations circulate within everyday settler spaces, not as contemporaneous political subjects, but as aestheticised symbols that appear detached from land, history, and futurity. Thus, by situating South Florida as a site where spectacle and colonial power intersect, this research contributes to wider conversations in decolonial geography, visual culture, and Indigenous studies. Overall, this work highlights the need to reconsider the unfettered display and consumption of Indigenous representations. This remains central to the reproduction of the settler colonial order of assimilation and erasure. Thus, an active acknowledgement and engagement with the coloniality of representation is needed that frames Indigenous peoples within their own economic, social, and representational sovereignty.


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Redestricting other peoples: Robert Vargas, Paola Del Toro, Christina Cano, Xing Zhang, ‘Settler colonialism and community protection from redistricting’, Geoforum, 2026, #104830

28Sep26

Abstract: Much research on the urban racial politics of redistricting focus on the period of the “redistricting revolution” after 1965. This study takes a more historical approach to this topic by asking: how have select communities within cities managed to avoid ever being redistricted from their founding in the 19th century to the present? Using digitized ward boundaries from Chicago and Milwaukee from their founding to the present, we discovered the importance of the legacy of settler colonialism for answering this question. Specifically, logics of settler colonialism have protected select communities in Chicago and Milwaukee from ever being redistricted through three mechanisms: 1) settlement formation, 2) state law protection, and 3) litigation protection. We conclude by discussing the implications for studying the urban racial politics of redistricting.


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Doubts about settlerhood: Timothy S. Forest, ‘Muddied Waters: Crofter Colonisation and the Contingency of “British” and “Scottish” Whiteness in 1880s New Zealand’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: The British and the Aotearoa New Zealand governments in the mid-1880s proposed a trial colonisation of Scottish Hebridean crofter fishing families in the southernmost Otago province. These settlers were envisioned as more than mere labour; they were intended to develop a nascent export fishing industry while rehabilitating themselves from a perceived state of poverty and malaise. In doing so, the project sought to restore faith in the vaunted images of British and Scottish imperial ‘might’ that had come under unprecedented stress. Yet, the scheme imploded within a year without a single crofter settled. Using under-examined archival records, newspaper accounts, and parliamentary debates, this article brings this forgotten attempt at state-sponsored social engineering to light. It argues that the project’s fall was driven by growing doubts that the Hebrideans could indeed return themselves, Otago, and New Zealand to a reified past, or whether this was something the colony even desired. Both grew ascendant, causing the ‘Othering’ of the Hebrideans. This affords a broader investigation into how Scottishness, Britishness, and whiteness were not automatic entries to privilege, but conditional performances. The Hebrideans ‘muddied’ multiple binaries – settler-indigenous, Anglo-Saxon-Celt, Pākehā-Māori, traditional-modern, metropole-periphery, core-borderland – a confuson necessitating their exclusion, not just in 1885 New Zealand, but continuing into contemporary narratives surrounding settler colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and identity formation.


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Mobile settlers: Prue Laidlaw, D. H. R. Spennemann, C. Allan, ‘The Role of Itinerancy in Australian History: Rethinking the Settler Narrative’, Australian Historical Studies, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: This article introduces ‘mobile settler colonialism’ to challenge historiographical frameworks that equate colonial progress with settlement and permanence. Examining itinerant workers in colonial Australia (1850–1914), it demonstrates that mobile labour – including Chinese hawkers, Afghan camel drivers, Indian merchants, shearers, and railway navvies – was foundational to colonial capitalism. During the 1880s wool boom, 20,000 itinerant shearers processed wool worth over £20 million annually, more than two-thirds of the colony’s total export value. Yet archives documented these workers through regulation, criminalisation, and death records, framing itinerancy as deviant while depending on it economically. This article further argues that mobile settler colonialism operated through a hierarchy of movement in which some itinerancies were celebrated as civilisational and others criminalised according to race, class, and legal status. Circulation and dispossession were mutually constitutive: the erasure of mobile lives reflects the settler colonial logic equating legitimacy with permanence, property, and whiteness.


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Humanitarian settler colonialism: Pietro Stefanini, ‘Populating Colonized Palestine: The Role of Humanitarianism in the Demographic Project of Zionist Settler-Colonial Replacement, 1938-52’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: This article examines how international humanitarianism facilitated the expansion of Zionist settler colonization in Palestine throughout the mid-twentieth century. By reading historical materials both along and against the archival grain, the author traces a contentious debate between Zionist settlers and Arab nationalists in a range of international arenas over whether the humanitarian plight of the Jews of Europe should justify the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands. The author shows that despite initial British resistance to adopting the humanitarian framework to populate Palestine with Jewish settlers, the internationalization of humanitarianism during and after World War II allowed imperial institutions, including the League of Nations and International Refugee Organization, to create a hierarchy of victimhood where the persecuted Jew superseded the unfortunate Palestinian. He concludes that this nascent global humanitarian regime helped constitute the demographic project of Zionist settler-colonial replacement in Palestine.


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Anti-racism mandates that promote racism are a reliable disappointment: Soma Chatterjee, Shirin Shahrokni, ‘Keeping Palestine out of anti-racism: A critique of institutional equity, diversity and inclusion mandate’, Critical Sociology, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: Drawing from examples across Canadian postsecondary institutions and school boards since October 2023 Hamas military action against Israel, we discuss how institutional Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) mandates not only failed to address anti-Palestinian racism (APR) but were effectively mobilized against Palestine solidarity actions. We focus on, first, the casting of Palestine solidarity actions as “unrelated” and “far-off” from the grounded realities of racism and settler colonialism in Canada, and secondly, the silencing of such actions through affective claims of “safety”, “wellbeing” and “harm reduction” etc. as interconnected “mechanisms of erasure”. We argue these examples of Palestine exception to anti-racism are buttressed by Canada’s long-standing “settler colonial contract” with Israel, and the state’s multicultural variety of anti-racism which normalize racism as local and specific, and remediable through liberal institutional actions. Race and racism, thus, are abstracted from their foundations and investments in global imperialism, raising concerns about the prospects of transnational solidarity, and generally about anti-racist futures.


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