Settler feudalism: Law&history: Clare Davidson, ‘Feudalism as comparative jurisprudence: F. W. Maitland and medievalism in Australian land law’, Law & History: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society, 12, 1, 2026, pp. 1-30

23Aug26

Abstract: Nineteenth-century legal practitioners across the British Empire reasoned with ideas of premodern England, including feudalism, Anglo-Saxons and the Nor- man Conquest. This article analyses the practice of legal medievalism in colonial Australia in conversation with the work of Cambridge legal historian Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906). Along the way, it suggests a small typesetting error in his and Frederick Pollock’s (1845-1937) two-volume The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, first published in 1895. Maitland developed a new way of understanding premodern English law that helps characterise how it had previously been taken up in imperial contexts. His analysis of feudalism as a post-medieval mode of comparative jurisprudence helps explain the significance of legal records and political debates about feudal orders across the British Empire and especially in the Australian colonies. In Australia, legal practitioners and politicians instrumentalised the concept of ‘feudalism’ when debating its significance as the foundation of property and social relations in newly settled communities. Drawing on Maitland, this article considers the development and legacy of ‘feudal’ land law from the colonies of Australia to the early twenty-first century and argues that legal medievalism in historical and modern Australian law warrants further investigation as a distinct historical practice.


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The double alienation of settler colonialism: Sujatha Fernandes, ‘Beyond Wage Work: Rethinking Alienation in Indigenous Migrant Labor’, Journal of Labor and Society, 2026

23Aug26

Abstract: Marx’s theory of alienation posits that under capitalism, when labor is no longer directed to meet immediate needs but belongs to a master, then producers are estranged from their labor. Marx’s humanist theory is ever more relevant today when a new wave of subsistence producers, a majority of them Indigenous peoples, are being dispossessed from their lands, cut off from subsistence production and forced to migrate for work. In Marx’s view, rural subsistence producers would disappear into the class of an urban proletariat, as the main agent for change. In this article, I rethink the concept by exploring the role played by three non-alienated activities in opening a terrain of struggle under capitalism. Subsistence production has not disappeared, but coexists with two other kinds of unalienated activity among Indigenous migrant workers: social labor and creative practice. Unalienated labor is a space to contest capitalist labor relations, a stage for rehearsing ways of being for alternative futures.


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Resistances deSPITE settler colonialism: Chelsea Watego, Kevin Yow Yeha, Jamal Nabulsi, David Singh, Alissa Macoun, Elizabeth Strakosch, Scaring the shit out of the colony: Sovereignty, solidarity, survival … and spite’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2026

23Aug26

Abstract: In this article, we argue for the power of spite in building a BlackPalestinian antiracist collective driven by Indigenous sovereignty. Reflecting on key moments in our work together in Magandjin/Brisbane, we argue that spite generates sovereign action via its insistence on survival in spite of and to spite the colony. Because this form of antiracism does not require permission it always escapes domestication, and ultimately insists on joy, love and full humanity in the face of violence.


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The settler colonialism of sociology: Dean Ray, ‘Settler-Colonial Structure and Indigenous Agency’, Sociological Theory, 2026

23Aug26

Abstract: Settler-colonial theory has become an influential framework in sociology. Yet its central claim—that settler-colonialism is an enduring structure organized by a “logic of elimination”—generates a theoretical paradox. If settler-colonialism is total, how can Indigenous agency be theorized without reproducing the structure it seeks to transcend? I address this tension by bringing sociological theories of structure and agency into dialogue with settler-colonial studies and Indigenous theory. Drawing on William Sewell Jr.’s conception of structure as the coupling of cultural schemas and material resources, I reinterpret two foundational concepts: the logic of elimination and the politics of recognition. Yet Indigenous theorists highlight forms of agency that exceed sociological accounts of action within a shared structural field. I therefore distinguish between interior agency, exercised within settler structures, and exterior agency, which sustains Indigenous worlds beyond them.


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A deliberate misconstruction (it seems obvious, but think about it: if the ‘settlers’ are not in charge, they are immigrants and there is no settler colonialism): Yehezkel Lein, Oren Yiftachel, ‘Estonia’s Russian Speakers: Contiguous Settler Colonialism and its Aftermath’, Europe-Asia Studies, 2026

23Aug26

Abstract: This article explores the enduring presence of Russian speakers in Estonia through the lens of a novel theoretical framework: contiguous settler colonialism. It highlights the settler colonial nature of the Soviet regime and posits that geographical contiguity between a metropole and its colony discourages settler self-determination and lessens the likelihood of mass exodus post-decolonisation. Settlers who remain typically develop hybrid identities that blend ethnic characteristics with attachment to the localities and independent states where they live. These identities enable settlers to resist assimilatory and exclusionary pressures from the new postcolonial regimes, as well as attempts by the former metropolitan states to mobilise them in volatile regional contexts.


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On the ideology of population replacement: Sarah Bracke, Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, ‘Een begripsgeschiedenis van de Germaanse tak van de ‘population replacement’ ideologie’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 139, 2, 2026, pp. 154-178

23Aug26

Abstract: The rise of omvolking as a political concept in the Low Countries raises questions about its history, and notably its genealogical connection to Umvolkung. This article traces the genealogy of Umvolkung, thus connecting contemporary population ‘replacement’ discourse to a larger German intellectual and political history. Through conceptual and archival analysis, we distinguish three interrelated strands in the conceptual development of Umvolkung: its emergence in völkisch-nationalist thought as anxiety over de-Germanization; its consolidation under National Socialism as a framework for Germanization, settler colonialism, and racial engineering; and its articulation within demographic-eugenic debates on declining birthrates. We argue that these different layers of signification were never fixed but changed through shifting scholarly, political, and institutional contexts, enabling the concept to persist beyond 1945. By providing current uses with a longer genealogy, this article contributes to ongoing discussions about the afterlives of National Socialist concepts and the role of historical knowledge in contemporary political discourse.


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Released into a prison: Sandra M. Bucerius, William Schultz, Leigh-Ann Waldropt-Bonair, Kevin D. Haggerty, ‘“Prison is routine”: Narrating release and reintegration in settler colonial Canada’, Punishment & Society, 2026

22Aug26

Abstract: This article examines how long-term prisoners in Western Canada narrate their anticipated re-entry to a settler-colonial society using a narrative approach to analyze 147 interviews with federally incarcerated people. The great majority of our participants describe experiencing child welfare and other types of state intervention when growing up; many are Indigenous. Instead of treating adaptation and reintegration as structural or behavioral processes, we foreground participant stories about work, health care, technology, and the meaning of “home.” These narratives anticipate employment discrimination, technological changes, and service gaps and translate them into expectations of or prospective justifications for reintegrative failure. Such efforts also recast prison as a more coherent and manageable space than life in “free” society. Considering these perspectives, we argue that re-entry entails a narrated crossing between two symbolic environments: the predictable carceral world and an unequal, surveillant, and often hostile society. This framework contributes to scholarship on institutionalization and the “pains of imprisonment” by showing how carceral habitus and colonial histories shape what release can plausibly mean. We conclude by arguing that approaching reintegration as a narratively mediated process allows for new ways to support both material barriers and the emotional and symbolic landscapes through which people imagine life after prison.


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‘Settler colonialism’ makes sense: Fernando Brancoli, ‘Palestine as political grammar: transnational solidarity in South Africa, Brazil and India’, Third World Quarterly, 2026

22Aug26

Abstract: Movements across the Global South increasingly mobilise Palestinian political vocabulary – apartheid, occupation, settler colonialism, Nakba – not merely as expressions of distant solidarity, but as analytical tools for interpreting their own conditions of domination. This article proposes the concept of Palestine as political grammar to analyse this phenomenon: the process through which categories elaborated through Palestinian resistance circulate transnationally and are translated into specific local contexts. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, Brazil and India (Kashmir) between 2023 and 2025, I trace how this grammar operates across three dimensions: semantic (vocabulary adoption), organisational (boycott, divestment and sanctions networks, delegations, coalitions), and epistemic (new ways of theorising local violence). The analysis reveals that Palestinian grammar circulates not through abstract ideology but through material infrastructures – weapons contracts, surveillance technologies, training programmes – that connect sites of racialised violence and create conditions for political recognition. I argue that this form of South–South solidarity challenges dominant models of transnational activism by operating horizontally between peripheralised communities, bypassing Northern mediation, and revealing connections already present in global security markets rather than bridging separate struggles.


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The apocalypse of settler colonialism, settler colonialism of the apocalypse: John Walter, ‘The 20 Pioneer Foods That Will Become Your Only Lifeline When SHTF and the Shelves Bleed Empty’, Substack, 19/08/26

22Aug26

Excerpt: Unthinkable numbers emerged from a recent agricultural consortium report—seventy-two hours separates metropolitan abundance from absolute scarcity. Not a season. Not a month. Three days of illusion before grocery stores transform from cornucopias into stripped metal skeletons. Analysts who’ve spent careers mapping supply chain fragility now whisper about older methods, buried beneath fluorescent hum and barcode scanners. Methods that predate refrigeration, globalization, chemical preservation. Methods forged by bleeding hands on the frontier. Those iron-willed migrants who carved settlements from wilderness didn’t merely survive—they established systems of sustenance that modern palates find alien, perhaps repulsive. Yet these foods represent the only viable bridge between starvation and survival when infrastructure evaporates. Climate cascades, economic tremors, geopolitical fault lines conspire to render current food paradigms obsolete with terrifying velocity. When rupture occurs, when trucks stop running and freezers warm into silence, we won’t return as poets or philosophers. We’ll crawl back as scavengers, desperate to remember what great-great-grandmothers knew by heart. Wrestling nourishment from decay becomes necessity. Coaxing calories from stubborn earth returns as skill. Storing summer’s abundance against winter’s starvation reemerges as survival itself. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s archaeology of the inevitable.


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South of settler colonialism? Ayala Levin, ‘The Location of Theory: Settler Colonial Knowledge Production, Among Other Interstices of Empire, and South–South Exchange’, Architecture, 6, 3, 2026, #137

20Aug26

Abstract: This essay complicates the distinction between of “North” and “South” as spaces of knowledge production—which usually entails the privileging of the South as an emancipatory space—by directing attention to Southern actors’ imbrication with forms of colonialism. It calls for situating both Northern and Southern actors within networks of global knowledge exchanges by critically examining their positionality vis-à-vis colonial relations domestically and internationally. More specifically, it asks how interstitial colonial positions gave rise to new centers of knowledge production and expertise in the postcolonial world. It considers these positions not as static identities but as strategic, adaptative, dynamic, relational, and contingent upon geopolitically determined itineraries of global exchange.


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