Settler colonial studies revisited: Jay Lalonde, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Colonialism’, in Maddalena Marinari (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Migration Studies, OUP, 2026

15Apr26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a theory, policy, and practice in which settlers create new political orders on lands dispossessed from Indigenous peoples. Typically, an empire seeks to remove Indigenous inhabitants and replace them with settlers from the metropole in order to generate revenues from land sales, bolster sovereignty claims through occupation of territory, and, eventually, provide staples to help feed the metropole. In order to gain the land necessary for settler colonial projects, settlers need to remove Indigenous peoples: either through genocide, by restricting or removing Indigenous sovereignty and land base, or by conceptual erasure and forcible assimilation into the settler citizenry. While colonial settlement has existed since at least the beginnings of European colonization in the 15th century—and potentially much earlier—it has defined especially the 19th and early 20th centuries. British settler colonies (especially Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) have all enforced similar policies of settler colonial dispossession. After providing a summary of the emergence of settler colonial studies as a discipline and definitions of settler colonialism, this article focuses mainly on settler colonial policy in Canada and British settler colonies generally. It shows that colonial settlement created a settler society based on the redistribution of land dispossessed from Indigenous nations to settlers perceived as desirable, and shaped immigration policy to recruit large numbers of settlers from Europe, ideally able-bodied farmers. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between colonial settlement and migration. Topics include dispossession and displacement; doctrines of discovery and occupation; imperial competition over colonies; the Homestead Act and the Dominion Lands Act; terra nullius; whiteness and desirability; and the emergence of “white settler colonies,” “neo-Europes,” and the “Angloworld” in the 19th century.


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Asian settler colonisers: Hana Maruyama, ‘Asian Diasporas and US Settler Colonialism’, in Maddalena Marinari (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Migration Studies, OUP, 2026

15Apr26

Abstract: Given the diversity of Asian diasporas, these communities hold varied and complex roles in and experiences of US settler colonialism, settler militarism, and racial capitalism. Many Asian diasporas came to this country as removable and excludable “alien” labor or as refugees, each with their own colonial and imperial relationships with Europe, the United States, and other Asian countries. With their labor frequently exploited in the service of US settler colonialism and racial capitalism, they and their descendants have a tenuous place within these structures and have at times fought for inclusion in ways that bolster rather than challenge the colonial and racist underpinnings of these systems. Key historical moments and themes connecting Asian diasporas and Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, ordered roughly chronologically include: early Asian and Indigenous encounters and Asian “firsting” narratives; how Asian immigrant labor and immigration exclusion policies naturalized white settler sovereignty; settler carceral systems and state narratives of redemption; environmental and militarized colonialisms from the American Southwest to the Pacific.


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Italian settler colonisers: Emanuele Ertola, ‘Italian Settlers and Decolonization’, in Maddalena Marinari (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Migration Studies, OUP, 2026

15Apr26

Abstract: The migration and adaptation of Italian settlers during and after decolonization offer valuable insights into the sociopolitical dynamics of empire’s end and its enduring legacies. Italian settlers navigated diverse trajectories, including repatriation to a war-torn metropole; adaptation to postwar Italy’s socioeconomic challenges; and continued settlement in former colonies such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Libya. These experiences reveal how colonial systems unraveled over time, complicating narratives of decolonization as a singular political event. Instead, Italian decolonization emerges as a prolonged and multifaceted process, shaped by migration, identity, and memory across generations and geographies. Comparative perspectives situate the Italian case within broader global patterns of settler colonial transitions, highlighting similarities and differences with other colonial powers, such as France, Portugal, and Britain. Theories from settler colonial studies frame this analysis, emphasizing the persistence of colonial structures and the challenges of dismantling settler hierarchies. Repatriation, often framed as a return to the homeland, was marked by logistical, economic, and emotional complexities, blurring the boundaries between exile and homecoming. Meanwhile, those settlers who remained in former colonies grappled with precarious positions in postcolonial societies, negotiating shifting power dynamics and evolving social relationships. This exploration underscores the importance of understanding decolonization not merely as the transfer of sovereignty but as an ongoing transformation embedded in cultural, economic, and institutional frameworks. The trajectories of Italian settlers, whether repatriating to Italy or remaining in former colonies, can only be fully understood within the context of decolonization as a long-term process. By examining these experiences over an extended timeline, it becomes clear how migration, memory, and identity intertwined to shape the collapse of Italy’s colonial empire and its enduring legacies in both metropolitan and postcolonial societies.


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The last settler frontier? Jess Arnett, Settler Imperialism: Alaska Natives and the Myth of the Last Frontier, De Gruyter Brill, 2026

15Apr26

Description: How Alaska redefined US colonialism through Indigenous resistance and legal innovation. Long treated as the symbolic “last frontier,” Alaska was, in fact, the United States’s first experiment in overseas empire. Settler Imperialism reveals these concepts as fictitious stories promoted by government officials and offers a sweeping history of Alaska Native legal and political struggle in the face of a colonial structure that defied the norms of US expansion. Examining Alaska as both a settler and imperial space, Jess Arnett challenges familiar narratives of American growth, sovereignty, and law. Following the 1867 Treaty of Cession when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, the federal government refused to sign treaties with Alaska Natives, excluded them from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and denied the region designation as Indian Country. These departures from standard Indian policy created legal ambiguity that enabled new opportunities for land dispossession and resource extraction by state and corporate interests. Focusing on history from the late nineteenth century through the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Arnett uncovers how the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Indigenous nations navigated—and contested—Alaska’s peculiar legal terrain. Members of these communities forcefully petitioned for US citizenship, mobilized Indigenous legal orders, and engaged selective federal Indian law to assert land rights and political authority. By placing Alaska at the center of US colonial history, Settler Imperialism turns a critical lens to the evolution of America. To understand US expansion, race, and legal formation, one must understand Alaska first as a proving ground for empire, not the last frontier.


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Indigenous oral history is needed: Mohammed Nijim, ‘Indigenous Epistemologies and Decolonising Genocide Research on Palestine’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 25, 1, 2026

15Apr26

Abstract: In the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, more scholars have begun to examine the situation in Gaza in particular from a genocide perspective, like never before. Given this proliferation of scholarship on Gaza/Palestine, this article addresses some of the fundamental issues that should be considered when addressing genocide in Palestine. Although the Israeli colonial policies are context-dependent, Gaza must be viewed as part of the overall settler- colonial context of Palestine. I argue in this paper that genocide research on Palestine, while scant until late 2023, has not adequately engaged Palestinian oral history and Indigenous epistemologies to theorise and examine settlers’ genocidal violence. I contend that Western scholarship in general drew on biased Israeli accounts that amplify the settler’s voice and discount the victim’s experiences. Rigorous genocide research should centre the voice of the latter through Indigenous oral history. I argue that the adoption of settlers’ narratives, in some cases though unwittingly, led to the reproduction of Zionist discourses. While the case of Palestine should be grounded in Indigenous frameworks, I stress the importance of examining the historical role of the empire in enabling settlers’ violence in Palestine. Raphael Lemkin highlighted the links between settler-colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. However, I suggest that Lemkin’s legacy should be further studied to decolonise him. Ultimately, I address three crucial issues in international law, including the Genocide Convention, that would decolonise the field and transform it into a site of liberation and hope for oppressed groups.


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Cloning acceptable indigeneities: Debbie Bargallie, ‘Producing the “good Indigenous employee”: cultural cloning and the reproduction of sameness in the Australian workplace, Ethnic and Racial studies, 2026

13Apr26

Abstract: Australian workplaces, particularly the Australian Public Service (APS), reproduce institutional whiteness through the cultural cloning of Indigenous employees. While Indigenous underrepresentation is widely acknowledged, less attention is paid to the regulatory terms under which inclusion operates. Drawing on Philomena Essed’s concept of cultural cloning and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorisation of the “good Indigenous citizen”, this paper theorises the figure of the “good Indigenous employee” as produced through institutional practices that reward compliance and proximity to whiteness while suppressing critique. Based on qualitative interviews with Indigenous APS employees, a four-part conceptual framework is developed – cloning at the gate, cloning within, cloning upward, and de-cloning as refusal – to map how Indigenous employees are recruited, contained, promoted, or excluded according to their alignment with dominant institutional expectations. Refusal is foregrounded as sovereign resistance that disrupts what Charles W. Mills terms the racial contract structuring recognition, legitimacy, and conditional inclusion within Australian workplaces.


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Picture this (i.e., a settler colonial citizenship): Fay Anderson, Jane Lydon, Melissa Miles, Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), Picturing Citizenship: Images, Belonging and Colonial Legacies in the Settler Nation, Bloomsbury, 2025

13Apr26

Description: For many, the conditions and privileges of citizenship, and the access it provides to equal civil, political and social rights, are taken for granted. Yet citizenship always implies histories of inclusion and exclusion and in settler nations with colonial roots, the history of citizenship is entangled with the legacies of colonisation. Looking beyond its legal definition to the wider historical processes through which citizenship and its associated ideas of rights and belonging have been imagined, debated and found lasting form, this collection considers the unique role of visual culture in defining, contesting and advancing ideas of citizenship in settler national contexts from the 19th century to the present day. Addressing citizenship’s particular entanglements with colonial histories in contemporary settler nations, the collection considers how images have shaped the meanings and experiences of citizenship from the colonial era, through periods of mass global migration to contemporary geopolitical change and debates on Indigenous rights and recognition. Contributors explore the role visual culture has played in imagining or interrogating ideas about belonging, rights, civic identity, and the ideal citizen in societies that continue to grapple with their settler colonial origins. They ask how image-making may be used to negotiate or contest the limits of citizenship, whether as a legal or as an imagined cultural category, and the role of visual culture in building relationships between citizens, non-citizens and the state. This collection will provide a new and compelling history of citizenship and the ways it has been defined, not only by historicising citizenship’s visual imagery but by exploring its present effects and legacies.


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Soviet-settler Territorialism: Gamze İme, ‘The Crimean Jewish Autonomy Project of the 1920s–30s’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 77, 1, 2026

12Apr26

Abstract: In the 1920s the Soviet Union launched the Crimean Jewish Autonomy Project as part of its korenizatsiya (indigenization) policy to integrate minorities into socialism. By promoting Jewish agricultural settlement and granting limited cultural autonomy, the state sought to weaken Zionism and foster a unified Soviet identity. Crimea thus became a testing ground for Soviet social engineering in managing ethnic diversity. Yet the initiative imposed ideological constraints, reshaping Jewish identity within socialist boundaries. The project ultimately revealed both the ambitions of Soviet nationality policy and its inherent contradictions.


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Decolonial ruralisation in the settler colony: Ettore Santi, Ethan Matthews, ‘Ruralization as decolonization: Land, property, and possibilities in North America’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2026

12Apr26

Abstract: Recent scholarship in human geography has proposed the framework of geographies of ruralization to describe rural elements that are persistent, resonant, and pervasive amidst urbanization. This concept has primarily emerged through empirical studies in the Global South, where village-based societies have been rapidly transformed by megaregional urbanization. This commentary brings ruralization into the context of the Global North, specifically rural New England, where modern property regimes have profoundly shaped the rural landscape. Drawing on examples from Massachusetts – where colonial property regimes were first tested and codified – we argue that ruralization in the North today might be understood as an ongoing, processual challenge to the settler-colonial structures of land tenure that have historically defined rural space. We highlight three pathways toward this decolonizing ruralization in the region: autonomy, reparation, and rematriation. These efforts constitute an ‘ecosystem of possibilities’ in which rural actors reclaim embodied relations with the land against colonial enclosure and the ongoing financialization of rural land.


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Militant ignorance to settler colonialism: Lara Fricke, German Militant Ignorance towards Palestinian Experiences of Israeli Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2026

12Apr26

Abstract: This thesis investigates the German discourse surrounding Palestine. Using a conceptual framework combining ignorance, Orientalism and coloniality of power, it complicates previous research into the topic by unpacking the intricate connections between German Holocaust memory and Germany’s position of power within colonial power dynamics. To capture the ways in which both act together to create Germany’s discourse on Palestine, it develops the concept of militant ignorance which it defined as an active production of ignorance which militantly prevents an acknowledgement of ‘threatening’ knowledge and the reality it depicts. This research locates and identifies this German militant ignorance, its mechanisms and roots. In order to do so, it conducts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of news articles, broadcast contributions, social media posts, open letters and official statements relating to three case studies. These case studies are three discursive events surrounding Nemi El-Hassan in 2021, School for Unlearning Zionism in 2021 and Achille Mbembe in 2020. Each case study presents an incident of a cancellation, defunding or disinvitation campaign against individuals and groups voicing Palestinian experiences of Israeli settler colonialism and therefore (re)produces the epistemic and discursive erasure of Palestinians. The thesis finds that German militant ignorance is produced and maintained through ostracisation and persecution of those presenting Palestinian experiences of Israeli settler colonialism, and through epistemicide against the very body of knowledge of colonial realities in Palestine. It finds that this militant ignorance is rooted in both, German memory culture and its affects, and colonial power.


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