Registration! Ekaterina Zmyvalova, ‘An informational tool, not a legal guarantee: the federal registry of Indigenous persons in Russia’, The Polar Journal, 2026

13Oct26

Abstract: The establishment of a Unified Federal Registry of Individuals Belonging to Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of Russia in 2022 was a necessary step to regulate the rights of Indigenous peoples. The lack of a formal procedure for verifying Indigenous identity had hindered the implementation of their rights and complicated resource monitoring by environmental and law enforcement agencies. This gap previously allowed non-Indigenous individuals to exploit Indigenous rights, leaving legitimate members unprotected. The Registry aimed to streamline the process of claiming rights, facilitating the realisation of social and economic entitlements, including the protection of traditional habitats, customary ways of life, and territorial self-governance. The idea behind creating the Registry was to allow Indigenous individuals to establish their ethnic identity once, avoiding the need to repeatedly submit documentation when accessing rights related to traditional subsistence activities and state support. However, judicial practice shows that the Registry has not fully addressed the issue of formalising Indigenous identity and access to rights. It functions primarily as an informational tool, rather than a legally binding one, limiting its effectiveness. Courts continue to rely on discretionary interpretations and additional documentation, highlighting the ongoing challenges faced by Indigenous groups, like the Shor, in asserting their rights.


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Transferring Indigenous peoples: Olivia Doyle, Hiroshi Maruyama, ‘”Why did our ancestors have to leave home?” Revisionist and decolonial histories of the 1875–1876 forced relocation of Karafuto Ainu and the struggle for human dignity and rights’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 2026

13Oct26

Abstract: Under the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875–1876, 841 Ainu were forcibly removed from their homes in Karafuto and relocated to Tsuishikari in Hokkaidō. This article centres Ainu experiences of relocation when narrating the so-called ‘Northern Territories’ dispute between imperial Japan and Russia. It offers a decolonial historiography, including unpublished family histories from Karafuto Ainu descendants, to counteract the prevailing historiography’s over-reliance on colonial sources, which minimise the forced relocation and its consequences for descendants. One such consequence is the contested repatriation of ancestral remains. Karafuto Ainu descendants demand their return, while Japanese public institutions resist the descendants’ authority to make the demand. This conflict exemplifies the broader colonial legacy of institutions, ranging from universities and museums to the legislature, disregarding Karafuto Ainu rights. Responding to this erasure, the article amplifies Karafuto Ainu leadership and challenges historical revisionism to support their claims to dignity, Indigenous rights and cultural resurgence in the context of settler-colonial violence.


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Land taking: Hidayat Maamache, Moussa Loucif, ‘Features of the French Colonial Trajectory in Algeria: Land Policy as a Case Study’, Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 13, 2, 2026, pp. 660-670

13Oct26

Abstract: The acquisition of Algerian lands constituted one of the foremost objectives of French colonial policy in Algeria. The colonial authorities did not confine themselves to employing various forms of coercion and violence to establish control over both the land and its inhabitants; they also resorted to expropriation and confiscation in order to deprive Algerians of their principal means of livelihood, namely land, through the implementation of an inequitable land policy. In order to provide a legal framework for these practices of dispossession and confiscation, the colonial authorities enacted a series of land laws and regulations that granted them the legal authority to appropriate large areas of Algerian land. This policy gave rise to a succession of legislative measures, the most significant of which are examined in this study.

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Violence in all directions: Areej Sabbagh‐Khoury, ‘Decolonizing Epistemological Violence: Settler Colonialism and Intracommunal Violence and Crime in Palestinian Society in Israel’, Sociology Compass, 2026, #20:e70247

13Oct26

Abstract: This paper critically examines production of knowledge about intracommunal violence and crime within Palestinian society in Israel, highlighting the relationship between power structures and epistemological frameworks. It centers the ontological relationship of power to settler colonial structures, interrogating how knowledge is shaped within domination and resistance. The paper identifies two paradigms: the first, a cultural/pathological paradigm that frames violence as a manifestation of cultural or social dysfunction; the second, an ethnic‐minority/liberal paradigm, which attributes violence to inequality and social stratification, positioning Palestinians as a marginalized minority within a liberal state. It then introduces a third burgeoning paradigm, the settler colonial and apartheid paradigm, conceptualizing violence as a consequence of structural dispossession, systemic neglect, and “organized colonial abandonment.” Drawing on a systematic review of academic, NGO, and journalistic reports in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, the paper demonstrates how certain paradigms reinforce dominant narratives that stigmatize Palestinian society in Israel while obscuring the Israeli settler state’s role in sustaining violence and Jewish supremacy. It further highlights the key role of Palestinian NGOs, activists, and journalists in challenging two hegemonic frameworks and producing counter‐knowledge. By advocating anti‐colonial epistemology within social sciences, the paper calls for centering counter‐ hegemonic knowledge production, affirming indigenous struggles for epistemological and material decolonization.


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Marxism and the ‘colonies properly so called’: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Marxism and Settler Colonialism: A Protracted History’, Fudan Journal of the Humaniies and Social Sciences, 2026

12Oct26

Abstract: The analysis of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination and a focus on class are not mutually exclusive. This article outlines a protracted tradition of Marxian, Marxist, communist, and Indigenous reflection on colonisation and settler colonialism. It argues that this tradition is indigenous to Marxism.


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Formal policy vs. settlement? John Ferejohn, ‘Early democratic land policy’, Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2026

11Oct26

Abstract: This paper examines American public land policy from the colonial period through the antebellum era, emphasizing the gap between formal policy and settlement on the ground. Early national policymakers faced competing objectives: generating revenue from western lands, promoting orderly territorial expansion and facilitating landownership among independent farmers. Federalists, and later Whigs, generally favored revenue-oriented policies and sales to large purchasers, while Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats increasingly favored policies benefiting small settlers. Yet neither approach adequately accounted for the limited administrative and coercive capacity of the early American state. Settlers routinely occupied desirable land before surveys and legal sales, establishing claims through possession and improvement. Because the federal government lacked the resources to prevent or reverse this process, Congress repeatedly accommodated squatters through preemption measures that transformed unauthorized settlement into recognized property rights. These practices drew on colonial precedents and were reinforced by a republican and Jacksonian ideology associating independent landownership with citizenship, equality and opposition to monopoly. By the 1841 Preemption Act, episodic concessions to squatters had effectively become permanent policy. Early American land policy thus demonstrates how limited state capacity and settlers’ actions shaped the public domain more powerfully than formal policies enacted in Washington.


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Even the Apocalypse is not the end of the story: Julia Siepak, ‘Resurgent Ecologies: Indigenous Eco-Apocalypse in Waubgeshig Rice’s “Moon of the Turning Leaves”‘, Textus, 2, 2026, pp. 203-222

11Oct26

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Waubgeshig Rice’s speculative novel Moon of the Turning Leaves (2023) that explores its commitment to representing resurgent Indigenous futures and ecologies in the face of environmental catastrophe. Written within the convention of Indigenous futurism, the novel depicts Anishinaabe futurity amid anthropogenic environmental change, inherently linked to colonialism. Drawing from theorisations of colonisation as an Indigenous peoples’ apocalypse, the reflection centres on the ways of homing post-Apocalypse through reliance on traditional Indigenous ways of knowing and the Anishinaabe concept of return, biskaabiiyang. Indigenous mobility in the Anthropocene is approached as a strategy grounded in Indigenous intellectual traditions of adaptation and futurity.


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Settler newspapers, Indigenous histories: Gyorgy Toth, Brian Hosmer (eds), Special Issue: Native American History through Newspapers, European Journal of American Studies, 21, 3, 2026

11Oct26

Excerpt from the introduction: For decades, scholarship in Indigenous Studies has grappled with using and interpreting newspapers, journals, and other forms of printed media. Questions of voice, authority, and purpose interweave with the instruments and articulations of colonialism. They also speak to misplaced and misleading binaries that situate Indigenous peoples at odds with modernity, in this sense through modes of communication. To be sure, media distorts voice, often representing the colonial gaze. Still, even the most mediated sources can prove useful as historical documents, sometimes revealing Native constructions of the world, engagements with modernity, and including the deployment of colonialist systems of communication and memory to serve Indigenous ends. While there is a continuing need for the mapping of colonialism through print culture, it is also crucial that Native American History and Indigenous Studies be informed by rigorous studies of Native American world-making through print.


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Inclusive, yes, but into violent relations (on violence against Indigenous women): Debbie Bargallie, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Performing inclusion: How settler institutions regulate Indigenous women through epistemic violence’, in Asher Flynn, Freya McLachlan Kyllie Cripps, Jacqui True (eds), Eliminating Violence Against Women: A Handbook for the Indo-Pacific Region, De Gruyter, 2026, pp. 277-290

11Oct26

Abstract: This chapter argues that violence against Indigenous women extends beyond interpersonal or physical harm to encompass institutional and epistemic forms of violence embedded within settler-colonial systems. Through empirical insights from the Stay in Your Lane and Make Us Count projects, we reveal how universities, funding bodies, and workplaces reproduce colonial hierarchies under the guise of inclusion. Drawing on Spivak’s concept of epistemic violence and Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, we examine how Indigenous women’s knowledge, leadership, and authority are systematically devalued, appropriated, or erased. We show that diversity initiatives often operate through interest convergence, granting inclusion only when it benefits white institutions and that citation, authorship, and research funding structures serve as regulatory mechanisms of epistemic control. Racial literacy is advanced as a critical intervention: a praxis for diagnosing and disrupting institutional racism and for centring Indigenous sovereignty, knowledge, and leadership. We conclude that eliminating violence against Indigenous women in professional contexts demands structural transformation not symbolic inclusion—requiring a redistribution of power, recognition of Indigenous epistemic authority.


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Generational formations: Silvia Pasquetti, Jemima Repo, Hala Shoman, ‘Permutations of settler colonial rule in Gaza: A generational approach’, Political Geography, 2026, #103682

11Oct26

Abstract: This article mobilises generation as a lens for theorising and examining the contingent and permuting character of settler colonial formations, with a specific focus on Gaza. Generation, we argue, calls attention to settler colonial rule as situated and embodied, and temporalities of survival and resistance as layered and heterogenous. We draw on 20 interviews collected just after the 2021 bombings to foreground the reflections of young Palestinians who have grown up in, and never left, a Gaza blockaded and repeatedly bombed by the Israeli settler state. Specifically, we examine how young Palestinians, through reflections on how their generation faces a changed form of settler colonial rule, appraise and “stitch together” the temporalities of past dispossession, their present-day experiences of oppression and resistance, and futures of anti-colonial struggle and liberation. As a whole, we illuminate the importance of studying generational reappraisals and renegotiations of survival and resistance among Palestinians in and beyond Gaza as they struggle against a highly unstable and fragmented settler colonial formation.


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