The incomplete state of the settler colonial state: Ahmed Nabwy, ‘Architecture of hegemony: Israel as a colonial outpost and deferred statehood in the Middle East’, Third World Quarterly, 2026

21Sep26

Abstract: This article argues that the Middle East’s incomplete state-building is not merely due to cultural or institutional ‘failure’. Instead, it results from an external architecture of hegemony, organised around Israel as an advanced colonial outpost. By combining neo-colonial theory, Agamben’s state of exception, securitisation theory and settler-colonial studies, it develops the concept of ‘deferred statehood’. This describes a condition in which the region’s states exist but are structurally prevented from consolidating. The paper shows how permanent emergency, security-driven governance and fragmented sovereignty are reproduced through Western backing for Israel’s qualitative military edge and exceptional diplomatic status. Israel acts as a hegemonic metronome, dictating a tempo of crisis that structures regional political time and obstructs democratic consolidation. In this reading, the region is not ‘lagging behind’ modernity. It is held in suspension by a system that requires its unfinishedness.


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Settler colonialism is disabling: Amanie Issa, ‘Beyond the Body Count: Gender, Disability, and the Settler Colonial Logic of Genocide in Gaza’, Violence and Genocide Research, 2026

21Sep26

Abstract: This paper examines the genocide in Gaza as a critical site for theorizing the intersection of settler colonialism, disability, and gender. It advances the premise that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, manifesting through ongoing processes of erasure, dispossession, and bodily governance. Moving beyond frameworks that quantify violence solely through death tolls, the paper argues that the Zionist settler colonial regime enacts genocide through mechanisms of disablement that are deeply gendered. Drawing on decolonial disability research and Native feminist theories, this paper highlights how Palestinian women with disabilities face compounded forms of violence while underscoring the urgency of dismantling settler colonial structures that produce disability as a strategy of elimination. The paper further affirms the necessity of decolonizing disability studies, positioning Palestinian liberation as integral to disability justice and offering insights that extend beyond the Palestinian context to global struggles against ableist, gendered, and settler colonial violence.


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The geoeschatology of settler colonialism: Ophira Gamliel, ‘Zionist Land Fetishism and Genocidal Iconoclasm’, Palestine/Israel Review, 2026

21Sep26

Abstract: The article argues that Israel’s genocide is grounded in political theologies originating in early-modern Europe alongside colonial exploration and expansion. It characterizes Israel’s genocide as iconoclastic, due to settler-colonial land fetishism that originated in the millenarian–messianic alliances between Christians and Jews in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The article traces the evolution of Judeo-Christian knowledge production from burgeoning European long-distance maritime networks, building on Delno West’s (1992) concept of geoeschatology. It demonstrates how epistemic erasure of Indigeneity stems from imagined biblical landscapes in the works of Jewish scholars throughout the centuries of colonial expansion. Arguing that the Judeo-Christian construct is a structural feature of settler-colonial societies, the article analyzes the theological license for the epistemic and physical erasure of Indigenous populations by Zionist settler colonialism. It follows the development of Judeo-Christian alliances around the coproduction of geoeschatological knowledge between the 1500s and the 1900s, centering on the works of Jewish scholars such as Abraham Farissol, Menasseh Ben Israel, Naphtali Hirtz Weisel, and Naḥum Sokolow. This intellectual history is entangled with Hebraist networks of Catholics and Protestants alike, demonstrating shared knowledge systems and continued support of the Zionist settler-colonial project and its ongoing genocide.


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Shifting borders of settler colonialism: Gholam Khiabany, Milly Williamson, ‘Settler colonialism and border regime: the overlapping narratives of slavery and Palestine’, Cultural Studies, 2026

21Sep26

Abstract: Despite imperial states tightening their borders and their rapid securitization and militarization to stop the ’flood’ of migrants and asylum seekers, the reality is that borders have never been fixed. Yet borders appear as naturally given to ’home’ populations. But if we move away from a mere focus on the movement of people over borders for safety and security and reframe the issue by bringing into focus the movement of borders over people, a different vision of borders emerges, where borders create, regulate and sustain violence, dependency and inequality. The history of settler colonialism is effectively the history of the movement of imperial borders over indigenous populations. Moreover, settler colonialism has long been entangled with capitalist expansion and slavery. This article examines the issue of borders moving over people in the light of this entanglement and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. It explores key aspects of the historic link between slavery, settler colonialism and imperialism. We argue that such a comparison is not novel; recent scholarship has focused on links between settler colonialism and slavery (Coates [2024]. The message. New York: One World; Mishra [2025]. The world after Gaza: A history. London: Penguin.), while others explore the similarities between current immigration enforcement with Fugitive Slave Acts in the U.S.A. (McKanders [2012]. Immigration enforcement and the fugitive slave acts: Exploring their similarities. Catholic University Law Review, 61 (4), 921 954.), and others raise the question of ’social death’ in relation to slavery (Patterson [1982]. Slavery and social death: a comparative study. Harvard University Press). This article assesses the centrality of borders in dividing the world and the oppressed in the interest of imperial powers and capital. It focuses on a neglected element in debating borders and examines some of the shared elements and interlocked histories of borders, racism, social death and genocide.


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Sociologists for Palestine: Gala Rexer, Kirsteen Paton, Karis Campion, ‘Sociology in the Times of Genocide’, The Sociological Review, 74, 5, 2026

18Sep26

Excerpt: The genocide in Gaza, in that sense, stands in for our global past and future. As Baconi (2024) writes, Gaza is ‘the abject of our time’, a place that signifies for Israel and the West the threat of terrorism, barbarism, backwardness and racialised overpopulation. Gaza offers a ‘blueprint’ for how settler colonies (and nation-states writ large) can become liberal democracies despite being founded upon the dispossession, disenfranchisement, occupation and extermination of others (Baconi, 2024). Given the long history of Israeli settler colonisation and violence (Khalidi, 2020), this transnational perspective on Palestine has existed long before the current genocide (see Frey and Rogaly in this collection). As Alex Lubin (2014) attests, the violence of the 20th century positioned Palestinians, Black Americans and Jews in the diaspora as the ultimate Other vis-a-vis modernity and its central institution, the nation-state. A shared understanding of imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy as global phenomena is key to these ‘geographies of liberation’, and continues to shape 21st-century shared struggle.

Sociologists for Palestine:

Universities in the U.S. have been tools of colonization, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism by participating directly and indirectly in land dispossession, weapons technologies, colonial governance, and racialized exploitation. Today, universities continue to participate in warmaking through investments in weapons technologies, internships and training programs, and research and design collaboration with state governments and corporations. This article lays a foundation for understanding the role of universities in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and provides sociologists with frameworks for action. We draw on our experiences as members of the organizing committee for Sociologists for Palestine (S4P) and from our expertise in racial capitalism, settler colonialism, militarism, and higher education. We use specific examples of ways that universities in the U.S. are implicated in the current genocide and structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and the tools that academics can use to resist these practices and reclaim our universities. Drawing on our experience organizing with S4P and on our campuses, we will discuss possibilities for building broad based movements to demand that academic institutions live up to the ethical principles that they claim to embrace. We focus on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaign as it relates to the American Sociological Association, but situate this work within a broader vision of transformation geared toward the decommodification, decolonization, and indigenization of higher education.


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Kinship as an introduction to Ineigeneity? Rene M. Ramirez, Kinship: Settler Families and Indigenous Communities, PhD dissertation, Loyola University, 2026

17Sep26

Excerpt: The topic of kinship is often invoked by indigenous theorists when discussing the unique relationship that indigenous peoples hold to land. The Indigenous philosopher, Brian Burkhart, defines kinship as a “function of locality and an extension of the meaning of being-from-the-land.” That is, kinship is simply a fact of our being from a land. Unlike migrants and settlers who may reside on and own the land under settler colonialism, those indigenous to it share a special connection which cannot be reproduced or accessed by others.


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Settlers have only one future: Jess Maginity, Prophesy and Propaganda: Rational and Relational Epistemologies in Right-Wing and Anishinaabe Science Fiction, PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2026

17Sep26

Abstract: Whether they want to be or not, science fiction writers act as social theorists. By juxtaposing two diametrically opposed traditions of science fiction, major works of right-wing sf and major works of Anishinaabeg sf, this dissertation argues that how we come to know what we know determines the kinds of futures we are capable of imagining. While Indigenous futurist novels model the importance of navigating multiple perspectives, right-wing novels model the importance of doubling down on a supposed truth. In each of the Indigenous novels that I study, relationships are the key to meaningful knowledge and a desirable future. In each of the right-wing novels that I study, a privileged discourse is the source of valuable knowledge and the guide for survival. This dissertation shows that an epistemological framework that depends on a set of rules to provide infallible truth is much more amenable to justifying subjugation and genocide than one which accepts a reality complicated enough to accommodate diverging interpretations. In a very real way, the difference between these two sets of texts is simply that one demands the future and the other demands a future.


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Dilapidated settler structures: Madeleine J. S. Léger, Vicious Dilapidation: On Crumbling Settler Places in the Maritimes, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2026

17Sep26

Abstract: This dissertation is about places—what they are, why they matter, and how they contribute to making the world we share. I chart a triangular relationship between built materialities, histories, and social imaginaries to articulate how places come about, expand and constrain possibilities, and shape communities and projects. I focus on contested places to account for, and critique, settlers’ placemaking practices in colonized landscapes, with a particular attention to those processes on Mi’kma’ki, Wolastokuk, and Peskotomuhkatik, or what are commonly called the Maritime Provinces of Canada. The dissertation proceeds through an investigation of dilapidating settler structures in these places and the practices that sustain them. In Chapter One, I examine settlers’ nostalgic engagements with abandoned barns to problematize settler romanticizations of colonized landscapes. Chapter Two is about covered bridges and the difficulties of preserving places by holding onto their material components. In Chapter Three, I consider community negotiations around the construction of the Confederation Bridge to introduce my enactive account of placemaking and theorize placial change. This account explains what places are and why they matter; it also articulates the ways settler placemaking contributes to colonization. Chapters Four and Five are about the aboiteaux of the Chignecto Isthmus. Through an investigation of their history, I articulate an account of placial health and differentiate “places” from “nature”; through an investigation of the present threats they pose to the Isthmus in light of rising sea levels, I explain how histories constrain available possibilities for healthy placemaking in the present, and I chart some short-term avenues for enacting healthier places in an unjust world.


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AI targets Indigenous peoples: M. S. Khan, Y. El-Lahib, A. Al Ashoor, ‘AI and Medical Colonialism: Complicities, Tensions, and Contradictions’, in C. El Morr, A. Saab, E. Salem Sokhn (eds), AI for Epidemic Preparedness, Springer, 2026, pp. 483-498

17Sep26

Abstract: In this chapter, we interrogate how artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been used as a tool to facilitate medical colonialism in global health contexts. While often framed as a neutral tool in health and medical care, we disrupt conceptualizations of AI as separate from contemporary issues of colonial and imperial control. Drawing on critical scholarship, we disrupt claims of AI as solely contributing to the betterment of communities by situating it within its contemporary applications that intensify medical colonialism. Particularly, we conceptualize AI as part of a broad technological infrastructure that utilizes health data in processes of datafication and automation as tools of surveillance, experimentation, and subjugation in contexts such as Canada, Gaza, and New Zealand/Aotearoa. In doing so, we point to the ways in which AI development and deployment are part and parcel of the current Western colonial and imperial project that seeks to dominate the Global South. Specifically, we demonstrate how health priorities are used to justify and facilitate the normalization of violence against individuals and communities using mechanisms such as Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) or constructing a Genocidal Surveillant Assemblage (GSA). To set a decolonial agenda for global health, the chapter asserts that medical practitioners and health care institutions must challenge the techno-specificities of their field, thereby contending with the realities of AI in extracting and exploiting patient data. We use data sovereignty as a framework to move forward and unsettle the ways in which the ownership, access, and use of patient data or data collected from communities more broadly may transform issues of data collection and governance. Ultimately, this discussion calls into question the role and functions of AI as part of health care technologies and practices that are intensifying coloniality at large.


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Consent and consultation against settler colonialism: Priscylla Joca, Rebeca Macias Gimenez, ‘Learning about Democracy through Disputes over the Meaning of Indigenous Consent and Consultation’, Democratic Theory, 2026

17Sep26

Abstract: Disputes over the meaning of Indigenous consultation and free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) are disputes about democracy. When states reduce these processes to procedural compliance, they collapse plural democratic traditions into a single, statecentric framework. This article explores how Indigenous democratic consultation and consent practices stem from self-determination, rooted in Indigenous cosmopolitics and legal orders. It examines self-determination through historic treaties, international human rights, and domestic law in Canada and Brazil, then analyzes autonomous FPIC protocols from Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Building on Tully, Napoleon, Rivera Cusicanqui, and Mills, the article demonstrates that state-centered consultation cannot engage with Indigenous cosmopolitics. Through treaties and protocols, Indigenous peoples have coordinated across incommensurable legal orders, enacting democracy as the coordination of plural legal and political traditions.


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