Weird settler colonialism: Isabelle Hesse, ‘Speculative Histories and the More-Than-Human: Weirding Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Australian Fiction’, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2026

10Mar26

Abstract: In From the Wreck (2017), Australian author and environmentalist Jane Rawson imagines that her great-great-grandfather George Hills, one of the survivors of the shipwreck of the SS Admella, is rescued by a more-than-human shapeshifting being, who subsequently destabilizes his identity as a settler living in colonial South Australia. In this essay, I argue for the importance of bringing together speculative histories, the New Weird, and critical ocean studies, whose intersections are embodied in the more-than-human being asa character in Rawson’s novel. I suggest that this constitutes an important critical tool for interrogating the ways in which we remember settler colonial history in Australia, especially a history that is depicted as independent of the environment and one that marginalizes the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. In this way, I demonstrate how the New Oceanic Weird as a genre can highlight reciprocity on an individual and a collective level to emphasize the entangled and reciprocal histories between the human and the more-than-human alongside those of settler colonialism and environmental destruction.


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The law of the settler: Brenna Bhandar, ‘The Antinomies of Settler Colonialism and International Law: Between Juridifiction and Juridicide’, The Palestine Yearbook of International Law Online, 2026

10Mar26

Excerpt: The momentous legal case brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa at the end of December 2023, and first heard by the Court in January 2024, has renewed long-held debates over the political importance, efficacy, limits, and potential of international law to meaningfully address the most egregious forms of human rights violations, in this instance, genocide. South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel “concerning [Israel’s] violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” and alleged that “Israel’s acts and omissions in relation to Palestinians violate the Genocide Convention.”1 The hearings, broadcast live, garnered the attention of tens of thousands of people globally. They were covered widely in the media and, even if only momentarily, held out the hope that an ICJ order that indicates provisional measures could persuade, if not compel, at least some nation states to halt their direct material and indirect political support for the genocide of Palestinians. International law (IL) was front and center in the global public discourse on Israel and Palestine and, to a great extent, has remained there. It has become a sort of fixture, a companion to the vociferous, creative, and militant forms of protest that have engulfed university campuses, city streets, union meetings, and community halls the world over.


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Consumption: Yale D. Belanger, Alli Moncrieff, ‘Disrupting the small Alberta settler city: supervised consumption and the limits of belonging’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

10Mar26

Abstract: This article examines the contested politics surrounding the supervised consumption site (SCS) in River City, highlighting how harm reduction spaces have become flashpoints of settler-colonial anxieties about Indigeneity, visibility, and urban governance. Despite clear life-saving benefits, local political and business elites framed the SCS as a threat to the city’s moral and economic order rather than a site of care, which underlines how settler colonial logics impose conditions on Indigenous urban presence, demanding sobriety, compliance, and invisibility, and how these demands undermine inclusion efforts. By analyzing elite discourse on the SCS, this article explains why harm reduction policies in settler-colonial urban settings must move beyond narrow health and expansive public safety frameworks and engage with the ethical and political realities of colonial histories.


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Slow erasure: Bram De Smet, ‘Slow Erasure: Identity, Agency & Episteme in Settler-Colonial Genocide by Attrition’, TAPRI Studies in Peace and Conflict Research, 113, 2026

10Mar26

Abstract: This thesis introduces and develops the concept of slow erasure to describe the layered, structural, and ongoing processes through which settler-colonial regimes seek to eliminate Indigenous identity, agency, and episteme. Building on and expanding the frameworks of genocide by attrition and cultural genocide, slow erasure captures the accumulative and often invisible forms of violence that operate through spatial control, epistemic suppression, bodily harm, and bureaucratic governance. While the concept is broadly applicable to other settler-colonial contexts, this thesis grounds its analysis in the case of Palestine, examining how Israeli settler-colonialism systematically unmakes the conditions that sustain Palestinian presence, memory, and resistance. The need for this concept arises from the insufficiency of dominant legal and scholarly frameworks to capture the diffuse, long-term nature of genocidal violence in settler-colonial contexts. Traditional definitions of genocide, rooted in physical extermination, fail to grasp the epistemic, cultural, and relational dimensions of erasure. By centring slow erasure, this work situates Palestinian experiences within a broader global pattern of settler-colonial genocide as a structure rather than an event. The thesis shows how settler-colonial regimes seek to dismantle the conditions that sustain Indigenous life, undermining cultural memory, severing ties to land and community, and erasing knowledge passed through generations. Through this framing, slow erasure emerges as both a theoretical tool and a political intervention, demanding that we reckon with genocidal violence in its less visible, yet no less devastating, forms. Ethnographically grounded and theoretically engaged, this research traces how Israeli settler-colonial power manifests through policies of confinement, incarceration, surveillance, destruction of heritage, and the weaponisation of care and death. Yet the thesis does not only dwell in erasure; it foregrounds resistance. It examines how Palestinians resist slow erasure through sumud (steadfastness), expressed in both overt and subtle ways: in prison education, hunger strikes, the cultivation of land, the defence of religious spaces, and the preservation of culture. These acts are profound assertions of life, memory, and futurity. Resistance is not framed as reaction but as ongoing presence—relational, embodied, and epistemic—challenging the settler state’s efforts to disappear the Indigenous. Ultimately, this thesis argues that slow erasure is not just a descriptive concept but an urgent analytic for peace research, genocide studies, and decolonial thought. It compels scholars and practitioners to attend to the quiet, bureaucratised, and systemic forms of violence that threaten Indigenous communities, not only in Palestine but globally. Recognising and naming slow erasure shifts the focus from moments of spectacular violence to structures of dispossession and survival, demanding an expanded moral and political vocabulary. In doing so, this work contributes to a broader call for solidarity, critical accountability, and a radical rethinking of what justice and liberation must entail in settler-colonial worlds.


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Being in the world in the colonies: Rohan Price, Being in the Colonies: Singapore Western Australia Tasmania, Peter Lang, 2026

10Mar26

Description: In this unique, provocative and wide-ranging work, author Rohan Price explores the colonial experience of Western Australia, Tasmania, and Singapore with reference to four concepts: Being, Legality, Convenience, and Fate. At its heart are case studies of violence between white settlers and local Indigenous populations in Western Australia and Tasmania, and the Japanese invasion of Singapore during the Second World War. Within each of these case studies, Price focuses on acts of violence to determine the level and extent of Being, Legality, Convenience, and Fate. Across these experiences, Price finds that the resistance offered by many inhabitants to their colonial overlords creates disturbing challenges for both philosophy and history. Being in the Colonies adopts an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, encompassing philosophy, history, and law, and making extensive use of oral testimony. It applies a revealing ontological claim that competitive struggle, violence and resistance yield a form of Being that is temporary, relative and always hard-won.


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The colony goes bananas: Nicole Khayat, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat,, ‘Bananas and the imaginary of progress: Eco-nationalism and agro-capitalism in Mandate-era Palestine’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 9, 1, 2025, pp. 53-74

10Mar26

Abstract: This article examines the role of banana plantations in the settler-colonial, capitalist transformation of Mandate-era Palestine. A microcosm of Zionist settlement and Indigenous Palestinian resistance, the cultivation of bananas reveals competing visions of development and national legitimacy, rooted in the cultural politics of ecological and economic nationalism. Framing banana cultivation in Palestine as a site of eco-nationalist struggle, the article details the convergence of capitalism, agriculture and ecology at the heart of the Zionist-Arab conflict. While bananas were not new to Palestine, efforts to significantly expand production under the British Mandate were constrained by the region’s poorly suited soil and climate, giving rise to competing discourses of scientific knowledge and cultural rootedness. Neither native to Palestine nor grounded in biblical tradition, bananas evoked in the settlers an ersatz ‘secular’ imagination of their inherent capability and expertise, which clashed with the lived reality of the Indigenous people’s deep familiarity with the local ecology and comparative agricultural success. Drawing on extensive primary sources, the article traces scientific discourses and cultural representations of banana cultivation in the districts of Beisan and Jericho, shedding new light on the ways in which agriculture shaped the Zionist-Arab conflict, including the role of the Palestinian capitalist class in resisting settler-colonial dispossession. The article thus explicates the role of bananas in uneven regional development and the struggle for control over land, demonstrating the usefulness of eco nationalism as a lens to better understand economy and ecology as tools of capital accumulation and control.


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The colony is on fire: Marijn Nieuwenhuis, Mikko Joronen, ‘Colonial pyrotechniques in Palestine: Arboricide and fiery dispossessions’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 9, 1, 2025, pp. 334-356

10Mar26

Abstract: In this article, we examine how fire—a triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen—functions as a settler colonial tool of destruction closely linked to techniques of elimination and replacement. In Palestine, we conceptualise fire as part of a broader set of pyrotechniques—elemental practices that devastate more than bodies and infrastructures by targeting and eroding the environmental conditions that sustain Palestinian lifeworlds. Drawing on ideas from elemental politics and world-making, we show how settler fire attacks materially and physically transform landscapes into desolate spaces, rendering them legible and available for colonisation. Fire is deployed not only by civilian settlers shielded by the Israeli state but also by the state itself through practices of ‘pyroterror’. Palestinians—’People of the Olive Tree’—are simultaneously dispossessed by fire and framed as ‘pyroterrorists’, revealing the racialised asymmetries embedded in colonial logics of security and dispossession. Finally, we examine the contradictions of afforestation and other landscape-engineering techniques through which settler colonialism grounds its presence and expands by overwriting Indigenous ecologies and ways of living. We argue that fire—both in its destructive and transformative capacities—is central to the ongoing expansion and maintenance of settler colonial frontiers in Palestine.


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The root cause of settler colonialism: Moss M. R. Berke, ‘The Cruel Optimism of Mass Tree-Planting Initiatives: Settler-Colonial Environmentalism and the Affective Allure of Tree Planting’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2026

07Mar26

Abstract: Placing Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” in conversation with Tuck and Yang’s work, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” this paper examines affective attachments to mass tree-planting efforts, which encourage unquestioned faith in these initiatives, serving to enable their persistence despite their consistent failures. This paper questions how affective attachments to mass tree-plantings teach publics to remain invested in the ability of settler-colonial institutions to solve climate crises, thereby ensuring that climate crises remain meaningfully unaddressed. Drawing together decolonial scholarship, affect theory, Indigenous thought and scholarship on environmental education, I demonstrate that mainstream tree-planting initiatives do not challenge the logics that permit forest and land degradation, but in fact, reproduce these logics. Rejecting a model which considers the act of planting trees as a success in and of itself, I instead ask what is missed when the planting of a tree is more important than the life of the forest.


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Global networks of anticolonial resistance: Bronwyn Carlson, Tristan Kennedy, Madi Day (eds), Global networks of Indigeneity: Peoples, sovereignty and futures, Manchester University Press, 2026

07Mar26

Description: There are approximately 370 million Indigenous people in the world, belonging to 5,000 different groups, in 90 countries worldwide. Indigenous people live in every region of the world. As ‘being Indigenous’ is increasingly acquiring a more globalised focus, terms such as ‘Indigeneity’ are useful to refer to our membership of the global community. As Meran argues, ‘Indigeneity’ has come to presuppose a sphere of commonality among those who form a world collectivity of ‘indigenous peoples’ (2009, 303). Similarly, Maaka and Fleras (2005, 20) argue that, while Indigeneity has traditionally implied a relationship or tension between Indigenous peoples and politics, and colonial governments, the term also now encompasses connections between Indigenous peoples through shared experiences of colonialism. This volume comprises 13 chapters that seek to answer what it means to be Indigenous in an increasingly globalized and connected world. It challenges the notion that Indigeneity can only be defined in relation to colonialism and speaks to the way in which Indigenous people draw on relationality to strengthen our connections and support each other as we imagine a future in which we are thriving.


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Polish settler colonialism: Ben Van Zee, ‘A Kulturkampf comes to Curitiba: the political cultures of partitioned Poland and Polish emigrant colonialism in Brazil’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

07Mar26

Abstract: Starting in the 1890s, expansion-minded Polish nationalists advocated the settlement of the Brazilian state of Paraná, hoping to create a bridgehead for a ‘New Poland’ in South America. This article examines why, around 1900, colonialists began framing the Polishspeaking settlements of Paraná as another front in the ‘culture wars’ that pitted German and Polish nationalists against each other in the eastern regions of Prussia. Presenting the colonial cause as an extension of the nationalist ‘cultural struggle’ in Europe, Polish colonial activists sought to capitalize on popular support for resisting Germanization. The article enriches Polish colonial history by highlighting a parallel transformation in colonial thought. As colonial boosters borrowed from the playbook of European mass politics, they overhauled their political vision for Polish communities in Brazil. They abandoned their earlier aim to forge an independent state and recast their political designs as a democratic, federative effort to establish Polish cultural autonomy within the Brazilian state. The rising prominence of federalist policies, practices, and political ideas in relation to demands for national autonomy in the Habsburg and Romanov Empires shaped this federalist turn of the Polish colonial idea, revealing the lasting impact of partitioned Poland’s political cultures on Polish settler colonialism overseas.


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