Abstract: This project engages long-standing paradoxes surrounding the German imaginary of Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island by moving the study of ‘Indianthusiasm’ beyond predominant Eurocentric frames. Indianthusiasm gained its prominence as a broader GermanEuropean infatuation with North American indianness, largely centering on “playing indian” within Europe’s many hobbyist scenes. Too little attention has been paid to the ongoing political functions of self-indigenization within contemporary German and European national(ist) movements. Despite Germany’s undying yearning for ‘indigenousness’ through fictionalized indian narrative across media, pop-culture, and politics, the relevance of Indigenous critiques and critiques of Indigeneity in Germany often remains contested. I therefore scrutinize the structural factors that condition the hyperpresence of indian imagery, symbolism, and rhetoric in German public discourse but simultaneously disconnect them from structures of Indigenous dispossession and erasure like settler colonialism, self-indigenization, and genocide. Applying Critical Discourse Analysis, I problematize Indianthusiasm as a cultural placeholder for German exceptionalism that inverts settler-colonial logics of (self-)indigenization as a nativist politic of normalizing, redeeming, and securing white supremacist and heteropatriarchal modes of German sovereignty. While the desire for a racial-territorial prerogative to eliminatory dominance animated Germans’ performance as Aryan indians during the Third Reich, settler-colonial politics of ‘indigeneity’ continue to shape contemporary German politics of reconciliation, remembrance, and rehabilitation via redemptive performances: as also moral-territorial claims to dominance. By proving the breadth of Indigenous Studies’ theories, methodologies, and disciplinary commitments applicable beyond settler-state boundaries, this project calls to center Indigenous sovereignty (of critique) as a necessary component of the critical study of whiteness in Europe.


Abstract: This article makes the case for studying fin de siècle geopolitical thought from the margins—at the Nordic periphery. While recent scholarship in the history of international thought has revisited canonical figures or turned to non-Western contexts, the Nordic margins of Europe have remained largely unexplored. This article addresses that lacuna by examining the geopolitical thought of Jón Ólafsson, an Icelandic journalist, transatlantic migrant and settler colonialist. Writing from Iceland and within Icelandic-speaking communities in North America, he engaged with and reworked dominant Anglo-Saxonist discourses of imperial federation. Blending these ideas with emerging geopolitical themes, Ólafsson developed an ambitious, Darwinist vision of geopolitical transformation: a world shifting from a European system of nations to one dominated by global racial empires. While adopting the racialized logic of Anglo-Saxonism, he extended its boundaries on the grounds of transnational whiteness—proposing a imperial federation encompassing the Teutonic race to both safeguard smaller nationalities against rising “alien” powers and empower the Anglo-Saxons in the race to enclose the world’s interiors. A reluctant Teutonist, Ólafsson was sharply critical of Anglo-American imperial conduct toward weaker states, but concluded that moral principles had to adapt to the evolutionary imperatives dictating the future shape of world order. By reconstructing these arguments, the article contributes to efforts to globalize the history of international thought, demonstrating how creative and critical geopolitical imaginaries emerged from peripheral actors beyond the traditional canon.






Abstract: This article offers a historically grounded contribution to the debate on the relationship between Zionism and settler colonialism. Rather than determining whether Zionism should be defined as a settler-colonial project, the study employs settler colonialism as an analytical lens to examine how Zionist actors – specifically the Irgun (Hebrew: Etzel, National Military Organisation) – experienced and conceptualised their position within the colonial environment of Mandatory Palestine. Focusing on a key transitional moment in the 1930s – 1940s, this article trace the shifting consciousness of the Zionist Right as it moved from reliance on the British Empire to an increasingly confrontational stance, culminating in the Irgun’s anti-British revolt under Menachem Begin. This study utilises Irgun and Revisionist leaflets, circulars, pamphlets, and internal directives to reconstruct the organisation’s evolving self perception. The findings challenge narratives that portray Zionist actors as denying the settler-colonial dimension of their enterprise. Instead, an explicit adoption of colonial discourse, including comparisons with British settler societies and the positioning of Jews as ‘European settlers’, is revealed in the Revisionist and early Irgun phases. At the same time, these sources expose a fluid identity spectrum between ‘settler’ and ‘native’, shaped by contemporary colonial classifications and claims of historical rootedness. The article’s central contribution lies in demonstrating that the Irgun’s shift from cooperation with Britain to anti-imperial struggle was not a rupture but a gradual, dialectical transformation in settler colonial consciousness. Beyond the Zionist case, the study proposes a refined model for understanding how settler societies negotiate tensions between dependence on the metropole and the development of independent identity, highlighting how highly different modes of self-understanding can coexist within the same political movement, it thus invites reconsideration of the temporal and ideological dynamics that shape settler-colonial identity formation.



Abstract: The hallmark of sovereignty is not only effective control over space, but effective control over time. In settler colonial states, time is the vector through which the state defends its perpetual existence against the inconvenient fact of pre-colonial and continuing Indigenous presence. Adjudication in common law systems is a powerful mechanism for defending settler sovereignty because of the rules that bind facts to law. Evidence rules determine how adjudicators come to know the past and stipulate some of the past as knowable. Whether through eyewitness, documentary, or expert evidence, evidence rules make the past “present” in the present, without interpretation or mediation. Through legal technique, the legal process produces temporal sovereignty. First, the action of writing history in judgment presumes and reifies the state’s continuity through time. This reaffirms the settler state’s perpetually contested sovereignty. Second, history written into judgments creates pasts from which the state’s jurisdiction is imagined to flow. Thus are codified foundational myths about state domination over Indigenous life. Third, the mechanics of citation and precedent cause a judicially-legitimated past to repeat as fact. Writing in a present challenged by rival Indigenous legalities, the judge is bonded by legal techniques into writing histories that are declared to correspond to the past and that iterate into the future. Telling stories through law is how the state occupies time.





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