Sovereignty is an unequal relation: Amy Swiffen, ‘Contesting sovereignty: Indigenous legal and political responses to settler colonialism in Canada’, in Marinos Diamantides, Michel Rosenfeld, Giuseppe Martinico (eds), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Sovereignty, Elgar Online, 2026, pp. 95-112

29Jun26

Abstract: This chapter deals with the complex interaction between Indigenous sovereignty and state sovereignty within the context of settler colonialism in Canada. The author examines how European concepts of sovereignty have shaped and constrained Indigenous authority, with the Canadian legal system often seeking to limit the sovereignty of Indigenous nations, despite constitutional recognition of their inherent rights.


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Thoreau as settler disaster: Andrew Wildermuth, ‘Foraging, Forging, Forgoing – or, Thoreau as Settler Disaster in the Age of Walker and Apess’, in Linda Hess, Sylvia Mayer, Katja Sarkowsky, Christoph Straub (eds), Environmental citizenship: politics, practices, representations, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2026, pp. 69-83

29Jun26

Excerpt: In Concord, Massachusetts, a few years ago, I attended a two-week summer residency on the topic of Thoreau and social reform in the American Renaissance. On the final day, we discussed “Native American Rights in Antebellum America.” At the very start of the event, one of the event’s panelists, Linda Coombs, an historian and educator of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, began with a question: “What Native American rights?” The mostly White audience stiffened. Coombs laughed. “What rights, really?” She offered this like it was the punch line everyone had long known was coming. “It just doesn’t compute,” she said. It was clear that Linda Coombs was unimpressed with and disinterested in both Henry Thoreau’s person and work. She dismissed Thoreau with turns of phrases that were startling, even sacrilegious, to many in the room – in “The Concord Colonial Inn,” which Thoreau’s family once owned, and where a young Thoreau roomed while studying at Harvard – and where, for the last weeks, many of us, myself included, had worshipped at and swum in his and Transcendentalism’s shrines. Coombs, on the other hand, referred to him as a settler and mocked his fame for spending years on Indigenous land. She also asked why it was only on our final day that we focused on Indigeneity in North America. These and other inquiries exacted a certain speechlessness – a general liberal confusion, at a conference about reform, in good liberal Massachusetts – that became utterly pervasive, palpable, indeed, in this windowless room in Thoreau’s literal basement.


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Settler psychopathologies: Shakeel Anjum, Anissa Haddadi, ‘Symptoms and the Symptomatologists: A Study of Settler Psychopathology’, in Priyanka Chandra (ed.), Undisciplining IR: Beyond Mainstream International Relations, Routledge, 2026

29Jun26

Abstract: This chapter discusses how, in their refusal to become pathological objects, Palestinians transform into foremost symptomatologists and physicians of not only settler colonial and capitalist psychosis but also of the world. Breaking from the laws of discourse, they resist and isolate the capitalist machine and its fascist, paranoid desire from the world. The text traces the lineages of colonial pathology and outlines how Zionism inherits and embeds its paranoiac delirium of brute coldness and cruel genealogy onto the Palestinian social body. In the practical-discursive-extractivist frame of the racial, biopolitical, and just plainly psychopathological transatlantic phantasm, the Palestinians, otherwise absent from ethics, are at the centre of the political diagnosis of the world.


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Settler colonialism in Vietnam: Ngan ‘Hazel’ Le, ‘Indigeneity and Ecology in Vietnam: A Settler Colonial History’, Backstory, 2, 1, 2026

29Jun26

Abstract: This paper examines the complex nature of indigeneity in Vietnam within a broader settler colonial framework. While Vietnam’s 54 ethnic groups are officially recognized as minorities, the inhabitants of the Central Highlands—including the Co Tu, Jarai, Ede, and Cham peoples— are specifically identified here as Indigenous, owing to their status as original inhabitants of the southern mountainous regions. Drawing on chronological analyses of French colonialism, the U.S.-Vietnam War, and postwar Vietnamese government resettlement policies, I argue that Indigenous Vietnamese communities have faced overlapping and distinct forms of colonialism that have systematically disrupted their lands, livelihoods, and cultural histories. The concept of salt-water settler colonialism is used here to complicate the recognition of Indigenous identity in Southeast Asian contexts, where long-term European land occupation did not occur. Employing Espiritu’s method of critical juxtaposition, I compare the experiences of Co Tu women in Quang Nam Province with those of Pawnee and Lakota women in the United States. In both cases, Indigenous women emerge as central agents of ecological resilience, whose knowledge and practices offer essential models for contemporary climate justice. Centering Indigenous women’s narratives is crucial to understanding the entangled relationships between colonialism, Indigeneity, and the environment.


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The roots of settler colonialism: Aysha Sana, ‘Olive Trees, Resistance, and Colonial Contestations in Palestine: A Political and Ecological Analysis’, in Priyanka Chandra (ed.), Undisciplining IR: Beyond Mainstream International Relations, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: Olive trees, emblematic of Palestinian identity, resilience, and sustenance, occupy a central yet precarious role in the ongoing colonization of Palestine by Israel. The proposed paper explores the ecological, cultural, and political significance of olive trees in the Zionist settler-colonial project. The destruction of over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees since 1967 reveals a deliberate strategy to dispossess Palestinians of their land, disrupt food sovereignty, and undermine their deep-rooted connection to their homeland. While olive groves are crucial to Palestinian livelihood and symbolize sumud (steadfastness), they are also targeted as “enemy soldiers” in a legal and ideological battle over land ownership. The chapter examines the paradoxical use of olive trees in Zionist narratives, first as symbols of a biblical homeland and later abandoned in favor of European pines to erase Palestinian history and conceal Nakba atrocities. Through literary and artistic works, like those of Mahmoud Darwish and Sliman Mansour, olive trees emerge as “sites of memory,” preserving Palestinian narratives against erasure. Simultaneously, Israel’s monocultural afforestation, environmental exploitation, and the uprooting of olive trees for settlement expansion demonstrate ecological imperialism and environmental Nakba. It also analyses the ideological tensions within Zionism, where the destruction of olive trees contradicts both Jewish religious laws and environmental claims, further exposing its colonial ambitions. The paper looks into how olive trees, beyond their economic and symbolic roles, stand as a powerful counter-narrative to Zionist myths, asserting the enduring presence and resistance of the Palestinian people. Through these trees, the struggle for Palestinian liberation intersects with the broader fight for environmental justice, challenging ongoing acts of both genocide and ecocide.


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Translation across space and meaning: Katsuya Hirano, Daniel Abbe, ‘Settler-Colonial Translation: “Civilization” and the Ainu Voices’, in Talal Asad, Jun’ichi Isomae, Naoki Sakai, Katsuya Hirano, Gouranga Charan Pradhan (eds), Beyond the Untranslatable: Theorizing Postcolonial Translation, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: In this chapter, I examine how imperial Japan’s settler colonization of Hokkaido produced a regime of translation that effectively rendered the Indigenous Ainu people a vanishing race. Focusing on Kyosuke Kindaichi, the founder of Ainu linguistic studies, and his relationship with his Ainu assistant, Yukie Chiri, I maintain that the contemporary translation practices of Japanese linguists functioned as a mode of domination, enabling the settler-colonial logic of dispossession and elimination to masquerade as a civilizing mission aimed at liberating the Ainu. I show that this paradoxical logic of liberal humanism—simultaneously erasing and claiming to protect—was structured by the binary of humanitas and anthropos as argued by Naoki Sakai, as well as by Talal Asad’s concept of the violence inherent in secular translation. By situating the regime of translation within these theoretical frameworks, I highlight how linguistic practices can reproduce systemic violence and explore the broader ethical and political dimensions of translation under settler-colonial conditions.


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Environmental settler colonialism: Kristi Leora Gansworth, Otto Muller, ‘Not your blood, not your soil: Land and belonging in colonial matrices’, in Lise Benoist, George Edwards, Bernhard Forchtner, Balša Lubarda, Sonja Pietiläinen, Kjell Vowles (eds), Global Far-Right Ecologies, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: This chapter outlines key framing narratives and iterative practices of settler colonialism and its project of erasure and replacement. It uses these frameworks to analyse facets of recent US white supremacist moves including the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally and 2021 Capitol Insurrection along with right-wing representations of American history and their manifestation in the Executive Orders of the second Trump administration. Gansworth and Muller argue that the neofascist upturn in right-wing politics is a contemporary amplification of settler colonial frameworks that shape American identity and land relations writ large. The authors suggest that a meaningful refusal of this authoritarian shift requires a divestment from the fundamental narratives of American settler exceptionalism. Embodied relationalities and adaptive, enduring social configurations persist among Indigenous communities, despite centuries of colonial dispossession, offering political ecologies entirely outside of that presented by the settler state.


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Unsettled? Kendra E. Fortin, Bryan S. R. Grimwood, Corey W. Johnson, Jennifer Holman, Helle C. Haven Petersen, Victor Mawutor Agbo, Peggy Vacalopoulos, ‘Divinity and unsettling tourism memories’, Leisure, 2026

24Jun26

Abstract: In this article, we examine intersections of tourism, settler colonialism, and Christianity through a collaborative, unsettling approach. Framed by settler colonial theory and postcolonial theology, and drawing on collective memory work involving Settler-Christian graduate students in Canada, we illuminate how religious travel experiences are constructed in relation to settler colonialism. More specifically, our article interrogates Settler-Christian travel memories to reveal a discourse of divinity structured by contested meanings of service, land, evangelism, and material religiosity. In foregrounding memory as method and site of inquiry, we critically analyze religious tourism as a space for unsettling Settler identity, negotiating responsibilities, and reflecting on theological complicities. The participatory methodology encourages critical self-location and co-creation of knowledge, highlighting the transformative potential of collaborative research in confronting settler colonialism within faith-based leisure travel. The research extends critical tourism scholarship by illuminating ethical and spiritually situated responsibilities that Settler-Christians grapple with to envision decolonial futures.


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Still Indigenous: Freddy Cabral, We are Still Lipan: Identity Erasure, Settler Colonialism, Historical Memory and the Persistence of the Non-Reservation Lipan Apache, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at El Paso, 2026

24Jun26

Abstract: This dissertation challenges the long-standing historical narrative that the Lipan Apache disappeared in the late nineteenth century. Instead, it argues that the non-reservation Lipan Apache survived through strategic adaptation, mobility, kinship networks, and cultural continuity across the United States-Mexico borderlands. By examining the Lipan experience under Spanish colonial rule, Mexican governance, the Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas, this study demonstrates that shifting political regimes consistently pursued Indigenous land, labor, and subordination through structures of settler colonialism and racial hierarchy. Using the frameworks of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide studies, oral history, and autoethnography, this dissertation shows how military campaigns, legal systems, racial classification, and archival erasure worked together to marginalize the Lipan Apache and to legitimize settler expansion. However, these systems failed to eliminate Lipan identity. Instead, many Lipan families responded by migrating to Mexico, intermarrying, adapting their language, participating in Catholicism, and concealing their identity within Mexican and Mexican American communities. What many historians interpreted as a disappearance was often a deliberate survival strategy. Methodologically, this dissertation combines archival sources with oral testimonies, family interviews, and community memory to reconstruct histories often absent from official records. These sources reveal that Lipan identity endured through storytelling, kinship, ceremonies, and intergenerational knowledge transmission into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately, this study contributes to Indigenous, borderlands, and Texas historiography by reframing Lipan history from extinction to endurance. It demonstrates that Indigenous survival does not depend on reservation boundaries or federal recognition but can persist through community, memory, and cultural practice. The continued presence of the Lipan Apache exposes the limits of settler colonialism and challenges narratives equating invisibility with absence.


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The language of settler colonialism: Katya Kredl, ‘Québec’s Bill 96: A Case Study of Indigenous Cultural and Political Dispossession’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 23-38

24Jun26

Abstract: This article examines Bill 96 (now Law 14; 2022), a language law enforcing French as the official language of Québec, in relation to language hierarchization and Indigenous dispossession. While this bill impacts all non-French speaking individuals in Québec, it carries especially important implications for the Indigenous Peoples residing on this territory whose languages are already endangered. In this article, I explore Bill 96 as an extension of settler colonialism that legitimizes white settlers as founders and that assimilates through language. Using previous Canadian language laws as a guide, I demonstrate the dangers of exclusionary language policies. From insular decision-making strategies to strict legal enforcement, these types of policies are grounded in dominant, colonial logic and have the potential to eradicate vulnerable cultures. Using political discourse analysis (PDA), I argue that this bill ultimately threatens the survival of Indigenous cultural and political structures in Québec. Finally, I reflect on Indigenous languages as a tool of refusal to settler colonialism.


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