Expropriation, inequality, settler colonialism (in the long run): Jeremy Bowles, Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Michael Olson, ‘”To Hell or to Connacht”: Expropriation, Inequality, and Local Legacies of Settler Colonialism’, International Organization, 2026

10Sep26

Abstract: Violent upheavals in landownership following conquest often change not only the concentration of land across individuals, but also the inequality of its distribution between groups. We argue that variation in landowners’ group identity has important implications for the provision of local public goods. We test this claim by studying the aftermath of the Cromwellian Settlement in seventeenth-century Ireland. Leveraging the lottery-based allocation of expropriated Catholic land to distinct groups of English Protestants, we find significant local variation in the extent of Protestant landownership. Drawing on rich original data, we find fewer local public goods in the long run in areas with more Protestant elites, with the largest reductions in goods that were either directly elite-funded or disproportionately benefited the Catholic majority. The results illustrate how conquest reshapes not just institutions but also long-run local inequalities, and highlight the distinct consequences of between-group inequality for the provision of public goods.


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Data centres settle the land: Megan A. Carney, ‘”No One Drop for Data”: Restoring Metabolic Relations amidst Parasitic Settler Colonialism’, Antipode, 2026

09Sep26

Excerpt: Data centers are at the heart of metabolic injustices proliferating across much of the periurban and rural United States. Amidst this data center boom and its concomitant AI revolution, it is no surprise that the people and places most vulnerable to their myriad harms are the same people and places that have resisted centuries of colonization, extractive capitalism, land and livelihood dispossession, and environmental injustice. Tech billionaires and their allies at various scales of government argue that the expanding data-industrial complex is necessary to support the insatiable appetites of AI into the future. But at what and whose cost?


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Living and naming: Yacoub Al-Qasasfa, ‘Colonialism, the Politics of Naming and Lived Toponymy: Identity Struggle and Symbolic Erasure in Palestine’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 25, 2, 2026, pp. 215-247

09Sep26

Abstract: This article examines toponymic transformations in Palestine, exploring how naming practices shape spatial identity in contested geographies. Moving beyond viewing renaming solely as top-down dominance, the research adopts a comparative approach situating Palestine alongside Ireland and South Africa to unpack mechanisms of ‘Memoricide’ and symbolic resistance. Utilising qualitative methodology integrating historical discourse analysis with in-depth interviews, the study proposes the original concept of ‘Palestinian Lived Toponymy’. This framework explores how the relationship between name and place is continuously reshaped through daily mobility and inherited memory, rather than remaining a static map inscription. Findings indicate that toponymic change has evolved into ‘Digital Colonialism’ through navigation algorithms, while revealing community responses ranging from cognitive resistance to functional adaptation. The study concludes by emphasising ‘toponymic literacy’ as a vital tool for steadfastness (Sumud) against symbolic erasure, offering a critical assessment of how new technology and language generated global solidarity with Palestine and its lived toponymy.


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De-growing settler colonialism: Elena Gomez, ‘Degrowth and the Indigenous ecopoetics of dg nanouk okpik’s Blood Snow’, Textual Practice, 2026

09Sep26

Abstract: This article considers the ways poetry can attend to the tensions and compatibilities between degrowth and Indigenous sovereignty within a broader ecopoetics framework. Both Indigenous sovereignty and degrowth movements reject growth-based economic models and propose alternative future models that reimagine social and economic systems for planetary survival. At the same time, Indigenous activists are suspicious of settler-led ecological proposals that reproduce the violent hierarchies of settler colonialism. This article considers the distinctions and connections of these spheres through the Indigenous standpoint in contemporary lyric poetry. Through an analysis of key poems from the 2022 collection Blood Snow by Iñupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, this article finds that Indigenous subjectivity constructed within a place-based ecopoetic mode emphasises not only the specificity of natural environments but also the complex and multivalent relations that link social, economic and ecological spheres. Such a construction provides an essential intervention into degrowth discourse that might move towards a decentring of Western perspectives.


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The crime of settler indigenisation: Olivia Meier, ‘Playing Pretend: Why Indigenous Identity Fraud Demands a Crime’, UBC Law Review, 59, 2, 2026, pp. 465-508

09Sep26

Excerpt: This paper argues that Canadian law inadequately addresses Indigenous identity fraud, failing to prevent individuals from falsely claiming Indigenous status for personal or professional gain. It advocates for legal reform by proposing a stand-alone offence that incorporates Indigenous-led verification and proportionate penalties to prevent fraud, while upholding Indigenous cultural integrity and judicial fairness.


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Settler colonialism from the cities: Jiaxiang Liu, ‘The Japanese Paradigm of Settler Colonial Urbanism: Imperial Hokkaidō, Korea, and Manchuria’, Geography Compass, 2026

07Sep26

Abstract: This study examines Japanese settler colonialism through a comparative analysis of Hokkaidō, Korea, and Manchuria. Rather than treating these cases as a unified model of Japanese settler colonial practice, it suggests a potential paradigm, characterized by state-led colonial expansion and land appropriation, non-displacement exclusion of natives, and the reorganization of pre-existing social relations into new settler colonial orders. This formulation highlights the specificity of Japanese settler colonialism in Asia in relation to dominant Western models, while also showing how its practices varied across the cities of Sapporo, Seoul, and Anshan under different political-economic and ideological conditions. Drawing on the broader global transition in settler colonial forms from the 19th to the twentieth century, this study also reveals a historical transformation within Japanese settler colonialism, from the Hokkaidō model characterized by a settler majority, to the later colonial formations of Korea and Manchuria, where Japanese settlers remained privileged minorities ruling over much larger local populations. Meanwhile, this article underscores the significance of Indigenous agency in settler colonies by showing how Indigenous peoples contested, negotiated, and compromised within urban space. It is hoped that this paper will serve as a foundation for future geographers to apply a settler colonial perspective in more extensive studies of Japanese colonialism in Asia.


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The settler colonial archetype: Hanine Shehadeh, The Thousand-Year Crusade for Palestine: Zionist Christianity and the Settler Jew, University of California Press, 2027

07Sep26

Description: The Thousand-Year Crusade for Palestine traces how Europe’s conversion to Christianity—a religion foreign to its geographical core—forged the continent’s identity around a single fixation: the reconquest of Palestine. From crusading violence through the Protestant Reformation to French Republican nationalism, Hanine Shehadeh shows how Christian Europe built its idea of sovereignty, honor, and belonging by casting Jews and Arabs as its constitutive opposites—a redemptive formation that gradually racialized Western Christianity itself. Shehadeh argues that this Zionist Christian formation is the foundation of Western modernity. It is from within this history of Zionist Christian formation, not against it, that Jewish Zionism emerges at the close of the nineteenth century. Reading the French Revolution alongside Napoleon’s campaign to conquer Palestine, Shehadeh argues that Jewish Zionism absorbed the colonial-racist terms of European modernity—accepting the diasporic Jew’s alleged degeneracy and proposing redemption through empire in Palestine. The State of Israel emerges, in this light, not as a refuge from European history but as its most durable export.


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The feral cats of settler colonialism: Christopher M Kelty, ‘Cats v. birds: Settler delegations and arbitrary domination in Los Angeles’, Critique of Anthropology, 46, 3, 2026, pp. 358-377

07Sep26

Abstract: This article tells the story of a conflict among “trap-neuter-return” experts, environmentalists concerned about the ecological impacts of free-roaming cats, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Animal Services from 2008 to 2020. The conflict included a lawsuit, an environmental impact report, detailed models of cat population dynamics, and the question of whether sterilizing cats reduced the number of cats in the city. The story is told through a mix of fieldwork conducted around this issue in Los Angeles between 2017 and 2025, and historical and government documents. The article uses the analytics of more-than-human resistance to try to understand better how resistance, and governance, involving more-than-human Los Angeles is unfolding. I argue that the concept of arbitrary domination, and a focus on the specifically American settler-colonial relations of delegated governance can best make sense of the situation.


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The violent friendly settler frontier: Alexandra Ludewig, Clint Bracknell, ‘Rehabilitation on a Friendly Frontier: John McKail, Settler-Colonial Violence, and the Making of Respectability in Early Western Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 2026

07Sep26

Abstract: Tracing the trajectory of indentured labourer John McKail, who arrived on the first ship bringing settler colonists to the Swan River Colony in 1829, this paper challenges the binary between peaceful and conflictual frontiers and demonstrates their structural interconnection. Indeed, McKail characterises well how settler colonialism absorbs, masks, and rehabilitates violent actors. McKail’s trajectory from frontier violence in Perth to respectability in Albany demonstrates the adaptive mechanisms of settler colonialism, whereby legal ambiguity, social reinvention, and the selective use of Aboriginal and overseas intermediaries enabled the consolidation of settler authority in so-called friendly frontier zones. McKail’s rise to German Consul and ultimately to Parliament exemplifies the performance of respectability, whereby contemporaries and subsequent generations through their influence in courtrooms, council chambers, newspapers, and archives, as well as through civic honours, validate new identities. McKail’s transformation illustrates how respectability operated as social licence enabling settlers to overwrite frontier wars, entrench local authority, and narrate benign origins.


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Settler regrowth: Elliott Michael Reichardt, The second growth: Indigenous resurgence, settler adaptation, and the possibility of repair in the forests of the Canadian North, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2026

07Sep26

Abstract: The Second Growth examines the future of forests, authority, and life in the Nak’albun/Fort St. James region of northern British Columbia, Canada. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I develop the concept of “second growth” to describe emergent non-colonial relations among regenerating forested landscapes, Indigenous peoples, and non-Indigenous peoples. Borrowed from forestry, the term names renewal after disturbance without implying restoration to an untouched past. I demonstrate that Indigenous resurgence has ruptured the settler colonial status quo of northern Canada, creating new forms of social relations. This resurgence has enabled Indigenous Peoples to exert authority within shared landscapes, which in turn allows non-Indigenous peoples to reimagine their futures and lives within, or supported by, Indigenous sovereignty. It is this capacious and transformative dimension of Indigenous resurgence that I describe as the second growth. Across five substantive chapters encompassing four ethnographic cases, I develop a theoretical approach to studying such “middle grounds”: the unstable spaces where colonial relations are challenged, partially reworked, or unevenly reproduced. I show that Indigenous resurgence can create conditions for repair, but that such repair remains vulnerable to ecological crisis, extractive capitalism, settler backlash, and resurgent Canadian nationalism. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the future of life in the forests of the North will depart from settler colonialism, taking shape through Indigenous authority, negotiated coexistence, dependency, and renewal within the North’s industrial landscapes.


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