The assumptions of settler colonialism need Mickey Mouse numbers: Joseph Francis, ‘How to Win a Nobel Prize Using Mickey Mouse Numbers: We Need to Talk about Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’, The Poor Rich World, 27/05/26

27May26

Excerpt: Even when awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences conceded that the key data in AJR’s most widely-cited article were “sometimes sketchy.” In their 2001 American Economic Review article “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” AJR had used the mortality rates of European settlers as an instrument for good institutions. Because they could not regress modern wealth on institutions directly (since wealth also affects institutions), they needed a variable that affected wealth only through its historical effect on institutions: an exogenous source of variation to identify causation. Settler mortality was supposed to be that variable. According to the Swedish economists, AJR’s data used “rough estimates on initial settler mortality,” but they still seemed to have successfully demonstrated that favourable disease environments allowed Europeans to establish good institutions with strong protections for property rights. For this reason, AJR argued, those former colonies where settler mortality had been low are wealthy today.


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Placemaking in the Indigenous new place: Kevin Pierce Wright, An Archaeological Study of Choctaw Placemaking in Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory, PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2026

27May26

Abstract: Beginning in 1831, the United States began to forcibly remove over 12,000 Choctaws from their homelands in the Southeast into Indian Territory. Despite the existing scholarship documenting the history of Indian Removal and the steps the Choctaw Nation took to form a new society, several broad questions exist within the Tribal community about the experiences Choctaws encountered during the initial decades of Removal. By examining the amptoba (pottery) from 19th-century homesteads in Oklahoma, this project examines the roles and ways in which Choctaw migrants used foodways to contend with the pressures of migration and settler colonialism. This project uses a mixed-methods approach to highlight migrant experiences and the relationships that families maintained with ancestral traditions. The results of archival, chemical, and morphological analysis reveal that while many families were prohibited from bringing cooking and serving wares with them along the Trail of Tears, many of these traditions were reconstructed in Indian Territory and used to form new relations. Furthermore, a comparison of archaeological contexts in which these objects were distributed in Mississippi and Oklahoma reveals that Indigenous placemaking efforts in Indian Territory relied heavily on the knowledge and actions of Choctaw women. Finally, this project argues that working in collaboration with descendant communities can lead to a more holistic anthropology and the production of knowledge that benefits living peoples.


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The problem and its resistance: Zahi Zalloua, To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian, Bloomsbury, 2026

25May26

Description: In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” In this profound response to that question,Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palestinian experience of being racialized as a problem.Zalloua argues that today’s anti-Blackness is not a lingering feature of a regrettable past that only occasionally manifests its ugly face. Rather, anti-Blackness permeates white civil society. Black being stands for the anti-human, its being is barred and degraded. And while Black being denotes criminality, Palestinian being denotes terrorism – a problematic being produced by Orientalism and used to legitimize oppression. Both the Black and Palestinian are framed as existential threats that undermine the very structures of white and Zionist dominance. To Exist as a Problem provides a searing critique of such assumptions, arguing that Blacks and Palestinians do exist as a problem, but a different problem than the one dictated by the petrifying white and settler gaze. They exist as a threat because the mechanisms of structural racism make them so. In order for racism to thrive, they must be othered in the profoundest sense. In asking how a politics can be constructed in the face of this hegemony, Zalloua constructs a model of solidarity that places Black lives and Palestinian liberation at the forefront of the anti-racist struggle.


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Colonisation, financialisation, violence: Hannah Forsyth, ‘Settler capitalism: new histories of colonisation, financialisation and violence’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

25May26

Excerpt: Due in part to the rise of settler colonial studies as a field, theoretical and empirical understanding of the dynamics of capitalism incorporates racial capitalism, defined as a totalising, global historical process that has forged (and continues to shape) political, social and institutional relations. Together the four histories here under review demonstrate how far thinking on connections between settler colonialism and capitalism has now progressed. These four books reveal developments in historical capitalism as the Anglophone settler-colonial world was established. The imperialist violence that Lenin perceived are shown to be connected to the logics of settler colonialism, which has in turn become embodied in the global financialised and technologised economy. These new works show the importance of the history of capitalism broadly and of racial capitalism, in particular, to the field of settler colonial studies.


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Family therapy and settler colonialism: Olga Smoliak, Carmen Knudson-Martin, ‘The Enduring Logics of Settler Colonialism in Family Therapy: A Case Analysis of Sociocultural Attunement’, Family Process, 2026

24May26

Abstract: Drawing on insights from critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and critical whiteness studies, the authors examine how settler colonial and white supremacist ideologies may continue to structure their own family therapy theorizing and
practice, with particular attention to the concept and practice of sociocultural attunement (SCA) as applied to Socio-Emotional
Relationship Therapy (SERT). SCA was developed within settler colonial structures and is increasingly promoted as a decolonial, anti-oppressive practice in family therapy. An anticolonial lens, paradoxically, makes visible the nature and extent of racial
settler colonial logics in SCA, highlighting the need for a more nuanced analysis of SCA (and other therapy practices) that acknowledges tensions and contradictions. The authors’ critical analysis invites reflection on the cultural and material conditions
in which family therapy concepts and practices are produced, circulated, and applied and illustrates how interrogating family
therapy concepts and practices can disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions, improve distinct forms of accountability for the impact of therapy, and reveal new targets for socially responsible work.


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Settler colonialism and genocide: Jacob Blau, Legal frameworks, intent, and the reality of its victims: examining process of genocide in Palestine through settler-colonialism, MA dissertation, Northeastern University, 2026

24May26

Abstract: Rigid legal frameworks of genocide have threatened the concept’s applicability to protracted forms of violence. This had led many historians and sociologists to avoid scholarly discussions regarding the nuances of the definition (intent, consequences, types of violence) that would allow more states to be held culpable for genocide. However, historical and sociological approaches into genocide, explored closely in this thesis, offer fluid understandings of the term that should inform the legal definitions. I apply this approach to Palestine and argue that Zionism’s goal to establish a majority Jewish state in an inhabited region exhibits an instance where the “slow violence” of settler-colonialism fits into a larger process of genocide. In doing, genocide’s origins are examined closely through the term’s architect, Raphael Lemkin, and how his neologism sought to include cultural and political forms of violence. While these types of violence should have been included in genocide’s definition, western powers lobbied to restrict the United Nations Genocide Convention (UNCG) to physical forms of violence so to remain blameless for past and future crimes against indigenous populations. I confront these exclusive definitions in legal and non-legal contexts by tracing the intentional dispossession, displacement, and removal of the Palestinian population first explicated by Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in 1895. In analyzing diaries, policies, and rhetoric of Zionist leaders, I examine intent in how the indigenous population was percieved as lesser- unable to cultivate or make use of their land, which later justified settler colonial violence. I look at how leaders advertised and lobbied Zionism and demonstrate that the ideology is laden with myths and falsehoods, and that it was driven by the tragic reality of antisemitism creating the notion that Jewish security through statehood was required regardless of the consequences. I provide a historical overview of this reality for Palestinians where Zionists displaced and dispossessed Palestinians through legal means- capitalizing on Ottoman legal reforms, an absentee land-owner class, and its alliance with the British Mandate, and violent means- coercion, fencing, and militancy. To be clear, Zionists enacted settler colonial expansion often illegally to undercut laws, often half-measures in the case of the Mandate, that aimed to restrict their territorial expansion. The settler colonial reality also saw the British-Zionist hegemony reject Palestinians their rights to self-determination through policy, exclusionary legal categorizations, attacks against political leaders, which facilitated the replacement of Palestinians with a Jewish population. While this hegemony ignored a Palestinian political future, resistance movements against Zionist settler colonialism and the British mandate were present throughout the process of genocide.


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The exogeneity of Indigeneity: Olivia C. Harrison, ‘Éric Zemmour and the Ambiguities of Indigeneity Available to Purchase’, boundary 2, 53, 2, 2026, pp. 67-93

24May26

Abstract: This article examines the colonial genealogies of anti-immigrant discourse in France through the case of Éric Zemmour, one of France’s most influential nativist politicians. It tracks the permutations of nativist discourse in Zemmour’s writings, from his little-known 2008 novel Petit frère (Little Brother) to his best-selling essay La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (France Has Not Had Its Last Word), which propelled his 2022 presidential run. What emerges from this case study is a fascinating glimpse into the colonial production of French nativism, from colonial Algeria to postcolonial France. In conclusion, the article turns to a controversial text that argues for a common recognition of the bifurcated indigeneity of Muslims and Jews of the Maghreb as a first step in claiming political belonging in postcolonial France, against French nativism: Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us (2016).


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Reconciliation must ‘truly benefit Indigenous peoples’: Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, ‘”We’re Going to Reconciliation the Shit Out of You”: Canadian Liberal Settler Violence and the Possibilities for True Reconciliation’, in Marcos S. Scauso (ed.), Indomitable Others and Liberal Violences: Critique, Contestation, and Resistance in World Politics, Bristol University Press, 2026, pp. 101-118

24May26

Abstract: This chapter critically examines the complexities settlers of color face in Canada as they navigate settler colonial society, emphasizing that assimilation into ‘whiteness’ remains unattainable and problematic. The author argues that genuine Reconciliation is not a comfortable task to be checked off, but a challenging, ongoing process requiring accountability, relationship-building, and a decentering of settler perspectives. Drawing on Indigenous scholarship, the text highlights Indigenous resurgence as a transformative reconciliatory framework, where the end goal is the revitalization of Indigenous nations and community knowledge systems. This resurgence, the author contends, should not depend on settler approval or be limited by colonial structures. Instead, it creates parallel paths: settlers must undertake the difficult labor of centering Indigenous voices and relinquishing self-interest, while Indigenous peoples reclaim relationships with land, kin, and tradition. Ultimately, Reconciliation should support Indigenous communities in building liberatory futures, rather than perpetuating settler hegemony or merely alleviating settler guilt. The work is iterative and complex, aiming to repair harm and foster genuine collaboration, setting the stage for future discussions on how Reconciliation can truly benefit Indigenous peoples.


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Settler technification: Sulagna Basu, ‘Settler militarism and technification: the case of the Navajo Code Talkers’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 2026

22May26

Abstract: This article builds on Juliet Nebolon’s conceptualisation of settler militarism (2024) to argue that settler militarism operates through the process of technification that emerges as a specific mechanism through which settler colonialism and militarisation seek to mutually constitute, legitimise, and conceal each other. By examining the Navajo Code Talkers program during the Second World War, I highlight how technification attempts to systematically transform Indigenous peoples, epistemologies, and sovereignties into technical resources that can then be militarily appropriated, operationally deployed, and rendered obsolete even as it obscures the political violence of this process under the guise of technical necessity. Crucially, through analysis of Navajo oral history interviews I contend that the process of technification must be understood as unstable, contested, and continually perturbed by Indigenous efforts to exceed, resist, and refuse its terms and the broader logics of settler colonial violence.


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Eugenics and the settler crisis: Heidi Nicholls, ‘Settler Sociology: Eugenic Responses to Imperial Crises in the 20th Century’, Sociology Lens, 2026

22May26

Abstract: In the twentieth century, academic concerns about changes in the racial demographics of the United States emanated from the potential crisis of settler colonial decline. In their references to previous empires, stories of contact between people groups, and changes in demographics, settler scholars worked to provide solutions to the ever‐present threat of racial difference. Two variants of eugenic responses aimed to predict the relationship between people(s) and the empire‐state. Early US sociology was central to these efforts. Scholars trained at the University of Chicago combined eugenic ideas with settler colonial ideologies of Indigenous erasure and elimination. They worked for the empire‐state as social scientists tasked with predicting the stability of the empire through notions of race. They argued for laws and programs that either criminalized interracial unions or promoted racial amalgamation. Seemingly contradictory strategies shared an ideology that the greatest crisis was the instability of the empire‐state. The impetus for eugenic projects, that states that not only rule over populations but can and should work to produce a certain kind of population amenable and useful to state rule, is still with us today.


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