Anxious, mate? Felicity Castagna, ‘How Australia’s ‘invasion novels’ have reflected our cultural anxieties around race’, The Conversation, 18/09/26

22Sep26

Excerpt: The “invasion novel” has always been a persistent and popular sub-genre of Australian fiction. In fact, one of our earliest novels was William Lane’s alarmist, didactic White or Yellow (1888). In this novel, white Australians are enslaved by Asians, after contemporary governments allow a large number of migrant workers into the country.


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Nakba Settler Colonialism: Samir Abed-Rabbo, ‘The Nakba as Settler Colonial Catastrophe: Displacement, Erasure, and Historical Denial’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 2026

22Sep26

Abstract: This essay examines the Nakba through the analytical framework of settler colonialism, arguing that the mass displacement and fragmentation of Palestinian society in 1948 constituted not merely a humanitarian consequence of war, but also a structural process of demographic transformation and territorial consolidation. The Nakba may be discussed within broader theories of settler colonialism by analyzing expulsions, village destruction, refugee production, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian presence through spatial, legal, and symbolic mechanisms. Further, the essay explores how the political structures established through the Nakba became institutionalized rather than reversed, producing an enduring condition of statelessness, exile, and unequal authority that continues to shape Palestinian life today. It also examines the persistence of Palestinian claims to return, restitution, and historical recognition, arguing that the passage of time does not erase the legal, moral, or historical dimensions of dispossession. In comparing Zionist narratives of national restoration with Palestinian anticolonial critiques, the study highlights the tension between competing claims of self-determination and historical justice. Finally, the essay argues that denial of the Nakba functions not only as a rejection of historical facts, but also as an attempt to delegitimize Palestinian historical experience and political claims. Recognition of the Nakba remains essential to any meaningful framework for justice, equality, and reconciliation in Palestine.


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Self-determination yeah-nah: Caroline Elizabeth Dunton, Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘Self-determination and Settler Colonial Incoherence in the Liberal International Era’, International Journal, 2026

22Sep26

Abstract: Throughout the history of the United Nations, there has always been tension between its liberal ideas of self-determination and sovereignty, especially during the process of decolonization and changes in its membership, as well as in its response to protracted conflicts and ongoing colonial occupations. As a middle power, Canada has been consistently engaged with the UN and has been a vocal proponent of the political ideology at its heart: liberal internationalism. As a settler colonial power, Canada, too, has a variety of tensions in its policies around self-determination and sovereignty, both domestically and internationally. This paper traces the ideational history of how Canada has operationalized the concept of self-determination by examining Canada’s voting patterns on Palestinian self-determination. We read the pattern in the context of broader concepts and logics of empire and settler colonialism, drawing on the concept of incoherence to make sense of both the continuity and change in Canada’s treatment of selfdetermination, both in relation to Palestinian statehood and as a viable liberal principle in the current moment of uncertainty in international order.


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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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