What if it was post-traumatic settler disorder? A Zoom event with Lorenzo Veracini, University of Sydney, 20/10/26 at 17:00

15Oct26

Abstract: Settlers are weird. They are supposed to be ‘natural men’, and ‘all the world was once America’, but they are. It is unsurprising, and the job of all ideological representations is to turn specific modes of domination into ‘natural’ occurrences. Settlers are inherently unbalanced and easily ‘unsettled’. It is not a coincidence that the ‘settler’ is a settler and not a ‘settled’ …


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Acknowledging that Land Acknowledgements are kind of useless? Lachlan McNamee, Kyle Peyton, ‘Effects of land acknowledgements on non-Indigenous audiences in Australia and the USA’, Nature Human Behaviour’, 2026

15Oct26

Abstract: Land acknowledgements—formal statements recognizing Indigenous custodianship of land—are widespread in Australia, where they originated, and have been gaining traction in the USA. Proponents argue they raise awareness of Indigenous histories and build support for reparations, but causal evidence is limited. Here randomized experiments on non-Indigenous populations in Australia (N = 1,724) and the USA (N = 1,773) find that exposure to land acknowledgements increases awareness of local Indigenous groups but can reduce interest in Indigenous culture and heritage. We find no significant effects on a range of political attitudes, including collective guilt and support for reparations. Additional experiments (N = 3,638) suggest that the adoption of land acknowledgements provides small reputational benefits to institutions facing public scrutiny. Costlier practices—such as financial compensation and Indigenous participation in decision-making—have significantly larger effects. These findings suggest that land acknowledgements primarily improve organizational reputation rather than generate sociopolitical change.

Response: Settler states increasingly offer Indigenous peoples symbolic recognition, such as land acknowledgements, instead of political power or resources, yet the effects of these gestures are untested. Peyton and McNamee’s experiments in the USA and Australia find that land acknowledgements raise awareness of Indigenous peoples but reduce interest in learning more.

Note: all this is published in Nature (the journal, not the actual thing)!


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Digital settler colonialism: Arees Bishara, ‘From Settler Colonialism and the Remote-Control Occupation: Tech-Innovation, Neoliberal Zionism, and Digital Sumūd in Times of Genocide’, 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, 2026

15Oct26

Abstract: This article theorizes how the convergence of technological innovation and military strategy has reconfigured the Israeli occupation into digital settler colonialism, intensified after October 7, 2023. Extending digital colonialism debates, the study shows Israel’s innovation economy operates as both national project and global business model, embedding the tech sector in genocidal violence. Grounded in settler-colonial studies, digital colonialism theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, and Bauman’s analysis of institutional violence, it conceptualizes a remote-control occupation produced through the military–academic–tech nexus under neoliberal Zionism. Drawing on thematic content analysis and interviews with Palestinian technologists (2020–2024), the article identifies three modalities of digital elimination: physical (AI-assisted targeting), economic (military R&D in global markets), and epistemic (digital censorship). Consequently, Palestinians cultivate digital sumūd—networked practices of endurance and resistance.


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Settlers draining the swamp! Anthony E. Carlson, Perilous Waters: Settlers, Swamps, and the State, 1775-1920, University of North Carolina Press, 2026

15Oct26

Description: What swamps can tell us about race and power in the United States. Wetlands—particularly swamps—have evoked contradictory responses from different groups in the United States, from the early republic to the end of World War I. White, enslaved, and Indigenous peoples alternately envisioned swamps as future agricultural paradises, uninhabitable wastelands, portals to freedom, spaces to gather vital resources, eugenic sanctuaries, and future homes for settlers. This contested, evolving thinking shaped how Americans interacted with swamps, and Perilous Waters addresses how those interactions influenced their management. Anthony E. Carlson shows how settlers demonized swamps as one of the gravest environmental impediments to agricultural expansion and the establishment of secure and stable communities. In doing so, they enlisted the knowledge, resources, and authority of the state to organize institutions that enabled drainage and erased any vestiges of prior occupation and usage. By the mid-nineteenth century, drainage had become a paramount public policy objective, giving rise to new social institutions and the mobilization of state resources to assist settlers in fashioning dry, healthy, and domesticated landscapes. After 1900, all levels of government worked to implement cooperative social institutions and systemize environmental and technological knowledge to facilitate drainage and accelerate the transformation of the nation’s wet spaces into farms and crop fields.


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A literal ungrounding: Eyal Weizman, Mark LeVine, A. Dirk Moses, Melanie S. Tanielian, ‘The Earth Is Turned into a Weapon of War: Discussing Eyal Weizman’s Ungrounding’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2026

15Oct26

Excerpt from the interview: Dirk Moses: ‘The foundation for the book, Ungrounding, is the work you’ve been doing with your team at Forensic Architecture. Can you tell us about Forensic Architecture and the work that you and your team do there?’ Eyal Weizman: ‘Forensic Architecture started as a university-based research agency around 2010, but it rests upon a longer experience of documenting the spatial realities of settler colonialism in Palestine. Through publications such as, Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture and Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, a method of reading architecture (in an expanded sense: buildings, roads, bridges, the kind of physical terrain, the transformation and design of the physical terrain) started to evolve. And so did techniques of mapping its destruction: the transformation of the built environment as a means of colonization, occupation, control, etc. The work is typified by following very minute details, such as specific lines in the drawings of Israeli planners and architects as they design roads and settlements, showing how you can commit a war crime by drawing a line on a drafting table. So Forensic Architecture avant la lettre, began to document realities – both settler colonial and manifestations of state power in other places …’

Description of the book being discussed: A devastating, meticulous account of the history of Israel’s destruction of Gaza from an acclaimed architect and investigator Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel. In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the ‘deep cartography’ of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised – and how Israel’s actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide. Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.


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The heritage of settler colonial ‘Oslo’: Claudia Vlad, Cultural Heritage in Palestine: Practices of Grassroots Resistance Under Settler Colonialism and the Oslo Agreements Impasse, PhD dissertation, University College Dublin, 2026

14Oct26

Abstract: Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, this thesis explores the role of cultural heritage in Palestine within the context of ongoing settler colonialism and the Oslo liberal peace model. Palestinian cultural heritage is a vibrant arena of resistance, situated between loss, displacement and neoliberal visions of a future “state-to-be”. Despite enduring decades of dispossession, violence, and external interventions, the practices surrounding Palestinian heritage flourished, showcasing heritage’s role in envisioning decolonial imaginaries against erasure and occupation. The research is guided by three main questions: (1) How does discourse shape cultural resistance about land in both local and global contexts? (2) In what ways do Palestinian heritage organisations reproduce the land as a site for an envisioned national future, utilising cultural heritage as a tool of resistance and spatial reimagination? (3) What are the “trade-offs” faced by these practices given the evolution of settler colonialism and the current impasse of the Oslo framework? The study begins by engaging with Smith’s concept of the “Authorized Heritage Discourse” (AHD) and the ideological role of human rights. It shows that Palestinian practitioners do not simply adopt global, supposedly neutral paradigms such as AHD and human rights frameworks; instead, they strategically repurpose these discourses to gain legitimacy, amplify Palestinian narratives, and carve out space for decolonial perspectives within international settings that often marginalise Palestinian voices. Building on theoretical frameworks from Anderson and Chatterjee, the research further explores how Palestinian heritage practitioners transcend Western models of nation-building by reimagining community and territory in innovative ways. Against settler colonial strategies of erasure and the commodification of heritage (museumification and “Disneyfication”), Palestinian NGOs enact “deruination”, transforming heritage sites into living, communal spaces. These practices are embodied and communal, grounded in everyday nationalism and the ethos of sumud, or steadfast perseverance in the face of dispossession. Finally, the thesis addresses the complex political terrain and the “trade-offs” inherent in resistance through heritage work, particularly in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. The Oslo process institutionalised a Palestinian “state-to-be” without sovereignty, deepening Israeli control and dependence on international donors. The rise of the liberal peace paradigm has professionalized and fragmented Palestinian activism, privileging project-based work and individual gain over collective resistance. Mechanisms such as the “Anti-Terrorism Clause” are analysed as tools of governance that depoliticise and regulate Palestinian activism, including heritage organisations, through conditional aid and biopolitical controls. Despite these limitations, Palestinian heritage organisations are not passive. They actively negotiate, resist, adapt, and sometimes subvert donor and Oslo-imposed limitations through hybrid strategies – pragmatic negotiation, everyday acts of refusal, and creative reinvention. Therefore, I showcase how the struggle for liberation remains ongoing and aspirational, with resistance constantly being renegotiated within the shifting boundaries of power, conditionality, and settler colonialism.


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On mass violence (and in places on settler colonialism): Nerina Weiss, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Linda Green (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Mass Violence, Routledge, 2027

14Oct26

Description: Interrogating the complexities of mass violence in contemporary society, this handbook reconceptualizes the accumulation, intensity, and temporality of mass violence – rather than depending on numbers alone – to develop a critique of mass violence adequate for our times. The Routledge International Handbook of Mass Violence critically engages with classic political, sociological, psychological, and strategic paradigms to ask how violence operates when it is temporally diffuse, socially obscured, and institutionally normalized. This volume is thematically organized to explore the theories, strategies, legacies, memories, perpetrators of mass violence, and investigates topics that were previously considered to lie beyond the scope of studies of mass violence such as the carceral system and environmental damage. Contending with questions of justice and reconciliation, and issues surrounding burials and exhumations after mass violence, this book explores an extensive range of international case studies to determine the boundaries of the concept of mass violence and how instances of mass violence are categorized. This volume promotes an intellectual interchange that broadens our understanding of mass violence beyond the instrumental and orchestrated violence perpetrated by political and state actors, and will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, law, and politics with interests in mass violence.


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On genocide and settler colonialism and on Canada and genocide and settler colonialism: Andrew Woolford, Genocide in Canada: A Critical Approach, Fernwood Publishing, 2026

14Oct26

Decsription: “Is it genocide?” Too often the answer to this question requires killing fields, death camps, gas chambers, and massacres. Genocide in Canada directs us instead to the relationships through which groups of people persist as a people. Andrew Woolford’s critical approach pinpoints the many forms of violence that can and are used to destroy peoples. Woolford explores settler colonial genocide in Canada, overcoming the limitations of the traditional genocide concept and its legal formulation and demonstrating that settler colonialism threatens the existence of Indigenous Peoples. Framed as a sociology of collective life, this book focuses on assimilative education such as occurred through residential schools. It examines how the residential school system was implemented by the settler state to deal with the “Indian problem,” intending to destroy Indigenous Peoples’ culture and relationships with family and territory, to eliminate them as peoples. Woolford traces the genocide debate in Canada, illuminating the blind spots and assumptions that disguise settler colonial patterns of group destruction. He exposes the deeply flawed genocide denialist claims about residential schools as many cling to a redemptive story of Indigenous-settler relations that absolves Canada of anything more than a “dark chapter” or “mistakes.”


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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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