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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The settler colony in its memory: Jérémy Girardeau-Montaut, ‘Pied-Noir “Memory Without Territory” and the Trans-Mediterranean Politics of Colonial Reconstruction’, Oxford Middle East Review, 10, 1, 2026, pp. 69-90

07Sep26

Abstract: European settlers from Algeria (pieds-noirs) reconstructed Algeria after 1962 as a site of memory and imagined spatial continuity following the collapse of the French colonial project. Moving beyond narratives of repatriation and domestic integration, the article situates the pied-noir experience within MENA studies by treating Algeria as a postcolonial space whose afterlives continued to be shaped from outside its territorial boundaries. Drawing on memory studies and settler colonial theory, the article argues that the collapse of the French territorial sovereignty in Algeria displaced settler colonial subjectivity into memory instead of dissolving it. Through memoirs, association networks, commemorative practices, and claims of exile, pieds-noirs engaged after Algerian Independence in a process of reconstruction that recast their former political sovereignty into narrative authority. This “memory without territory” consisted in reimagining colonial Algeria as a lost homeland while bracketing indigenous experiences of colonial violence and operated as a post-territorial claim over Algerian history and space. The article foregrounds reconstruction as a form of post-imperial rearticulation and rejects the hypothesis of mere nostalgia. It shows how colonial identities adapted after decolonisation to produce narratives that blurred the boundaries between loss and responsibility, victimhood and privilege. Besides, it highlights the trans-Mediterranean dimension of this mnemonic sovereignty by analysing how Algeria continued to function as a symbolic reference point in French political and cultural debates long after independence.


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Collaborative settler colonial studies: Janne Lahti, introducing ‘Of settler colonial connections and collaborations: a book forum on Sidney Xu Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

06Sep26

Excerpt: Sidney Xu Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the Age of Empires (University of California Press, 2025) makes a significant contribution to settler colonial studies by expanding the cast and by making settler colonialism to be of connections and collaborations, oftentimes fragile, imperfect, and contested. In Lu’s analysis we get to read of settler colonialism that is multilateral, produced through cooperation among multiple imperial and national actors. This book shows how networks matter, how Japanese on the move became settlers not through direct Japanese territorial conquest, but through collaboration between the Brazilian state, Japanese imperial institutions, private companies, and global racial-capitalist logics. Thus Lu moves beyond the Anglo-phone emphasis of settler colonial histories while showing that settlers did not have to originate from the same imperial power that governed the territory, but how settler colonialism could be enacted through trans-imperial cooperation. In this Book Forum we asked scholars whose expertise blended Japanese, Asian, and Latin America, ranging from literature to local and global histories of diasporas and imperial mobilities to take a look and voice their views on Lu’s book. They were to raise what they perceived as important points in the book, to evaluate its premise, execution, and contribution. As a result, we have a lively set of views and arguments, multiplicity of voices, but also coherence and praise on the value and significance of Lu’s study. Pedro Iacobelli raises the question of colonial ownership by emphasizing how Lu unsettles linear narratives of Japanese history in Brazil, locating them instead within a dense web of inter-state collaboration, intersecting Japanese and Brazilian settler-colonial projects, and enduring ties between Japanese emigrants and Japan’s own settler ambitions. From a literary and methodological standpoint, Shannon Welch highlights how Lu provides a strikingly effective framework for tracing the interactive and overlapping workings of settler colonial power in the modern world. Building on this, John Hennessey underscores Lu’s careful reconstruction of the personal, institutional, and ideological linkages connecting Japanese settler colonialism in Asia to emigration to Brazil, demonstrating with rich empirical detail just how contingent and internally fractured Japanese settler positions were. Mariko Iijima similarly stresses that Lu repositions Japanese settler experiences within expansive global regimes of colonial expansion, land seizure, and racial governance, reframing them as integral – rather than peripheral – to the history of settler colonialism writ large. The Book Forum ends with Sidney Xu Lu’s self-reflective response, in which he elaborates on his views on the book’s purpose, the commentaries, and the broader connotations involved. This marks the third Settler Colonial Studies Book Forum, which we plan to continue as a sustained feature of the journal. The Forum aims to spotlight timely, innovative, and consequential new work in the field, and to place it in generous yet rigorous conversation with a diverse group of experts, in dialogue with the author. As with the previous iterations, we believe this Forum succeeds in bringing cutting-edge settler colonial scholarship into focused, energetic discussion.


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Settlers on the move; still settlers: Monique Woolnough, ‘Reproducing the French-Canadian Settler Collective in Ontario through French Language Rights’, Journal of Law and Social Policy, 38, 2026, pp. 64-86

04Sep26

Abstract: Much of settler colonial theory and studies in Canada has focused on the dominant British settler colonial power, with an emerging spotlight on Quebec. Little attention has been paid to French-Canadian settler colonialism in French-Canadian minority provinces such as Ontario. This research aims to make visible this gap in attention and begin to fill in its contours by understanding how the French-Canadian settler colonial project operates in Ontario through law. Through the application of Indigenous, settler colonial, socio-legal and critical feminist and race theories to a review of narrative themes in the jurisprudence of courts and tribunals interpreting Ontario’s French Language Services Act, including the purposes of the Act, the vulnerability of Francophones and the role of Francophone institutions, the author endeavors to explore the unique ways in which settler colonial consciousness is deployed, reproduced and reinforced in law.


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Indigenous people on the move; still Indigenous: Luis Sánchez-López, ‘Oaxacan Studies: Accompanying Indigenous Oaxacans in Oaxacalifornia’, Latino Studies, 2026

04Sep26

Excerpt: A new interdisciplinary field, which I am calling “Oaxacan studies,” has emerged and is offering important conceptual tools for thinking about Latinidad in local, transborder, and hemispheric contexts. While most of the Anglophone scholarship on Oaxaca has been produced by historians and anthropologists who are not native to the pueblos they write about, a generation of scholars that is Indigenous to Oaxaca’s pueblos is now writing about Oaxaca from the vantage point of migrants and children of migrants who were forced to grow up in diaspora. While these scholars have been trained in various disciplines, their work builds on the community-engaged scholarship produced by scholars such as Michael Kearney, one of the leading anthropologists in this field, who is credited with coining the term “Oaxacalifornia” (Kearney, 1995), the transborder political, cultural, and economic space where Indigenous Oaxacans live. When Kearney passed away in 2009, I was a new member of the Indigenous Binational Front (FIOB), a primarily Oaxacan transborder organization, and was asked to take three scholars (Devra Weber, Lynn Stephen, and Laura Velasco) from Los Angeles to Kearney’s house in Riverside County. Once there, we joined his family, FIOB activists, friends, and colleagues to mourn his passing. Those attending recounted how they had met him, the things he had done for Oaxacan migrants, and then we all sang “Canción Mixteca,” a song that expresses the deep sadness and longing of being away from one’s homeland. At the time, I was unaware of Kearney’s contributions to the field of anthropology and the study of transnationalism, but the regard that the Oaxacan paisanos had for him and the stories they shared of when he helped them in their organizing efforts taught me about the importance of establishing long and committed relationships with the community. In a recent publication, Leisy Ábrego (2024) noted that scholars who center the experiences and well-being of the people they conduct research with “aim to be in accompaniment,” meaning that there is an ethical and political responsibility to those people who serve as research subjects. While each individual Oaxacan scholar has their own relationship with their pueblo of origin and the communities they conduct research with, at the core of Oaxacan studies is this ethic of accompaniment that is anchored in the various social organizations created by the Indigenous Oaxacan community: hometown associations, cultural organizations, religious organizations, student organizations, autonomous political organizations, and nonprofit organizations. Building on Kearney’s legacy, this new generation of Oaxacan scholars is shaping the future of Latinx studies by offering not only new conceptual tools for thinking about Indigeneity within a larger conversation about Latinx heterogeneity but also providing a model of accompaniment that is responsive to the individuals they conduct research with, their pueblos, and their descendants, both here and there.


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The settler’s prohibition: Conner White, Publicans and other bloodsuckers: Enforcement of Indigenous prohibition in colonial British Columbia, 1849-1871, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2026

04Sep26

Abstract: For the entirety of their existence, the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia attempted to prevent entirely Indigenous peoples’ access to alcohol. Almost all historians who have worked in this period touch on the liquor issue, but none have set out to fully explain the means by which this control was enacted, and how people, both settlers and Indigenous, reacted to these endeavours. By exploring contemporary letters, newspapers, and journals, this paper will demonstrate the limits of colonial control and emphasize how important the quest to gain that control was. Exhaustive debate played out at every level to figure out the best possible way to prevent a single drop of alcohol from entering Indigenous hands. At the same time, settlers profited greatly off of the illicit trade, as demand for booze remained high. The Indigenous world was, at least somewhat, culturally transformed by the adoption of alcohol. Demand for it remained high as liquor became integrated into cultural activities, took on a symbolic role as an icon of resistance, and as a coping mechanism for those who experienced terrible loss during the smallpox epidemics that ravaged the population. This issue remains relevant today, as British Columbia underwent another failed prohibition in 1916, and continues to experience the ramifications of prohibition in the form of toxic drug deaths, both within Indigenous communities and without


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