Beyond the frontier is still settler colonialism: Hisham Bustan, Elia El-Khazen, ‘Between a rock and Israel: how Jordan’s water and energy arrangements advance settler colonialism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: This article seeks to reconcile two often-fractured understandings of Israeli settler colonialism: its intrinsic drive for elimination and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its ongoing expansionist strategy, which fosters dependency and ultimately ensures its gradual integration within the broader region. Using the water-energy infrastructural nexus in Jordan as a focal point, the article introduces a new analytical framework centred on three pillars – settler-colonial power, Washington-led international interventionism, and regional diplomacy. It argues that taken together these enable Israel to extend its colonial project beyond territorial borders, and to capture more far-flung territories and populations through energy and water infrastructure deals, thereby reshaping regional power dynamics in ways that have been underexplored in prior scholarship. The study is based on an examination of three intertwined infrastructural projects: the water arrangements established under the 1994 Wadi Araba Peace Agreement, the 2014–2016 Israeli-Jordanian gas deals, and the 2021 Prosperity Project.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Turquoise settler colonialism: Kristen Barbara Dorsey, From Mines to Native Jewelry Markets: Unravelling the Settler Political Economy of Turquoise, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: This thesis is an inquiry into turquoise, a mineral primarily used as a gemstone in jewelry, and one of many different significant materials used in Southwestern Native American cultures and traditions. Despite the diversity of Native jewelry form and materials, jewelry set with turquoise generally overshadows other types of Native-made jewelry as a coveted and collected object for non-Native consumers. This thesis examines settler desires for turquoise mined from Native homelands through time, starting with the territorial New Mexico colonial political economy of turquoise mining in the 19th century in which settler men attempted to construct a narrative that Native turquoise mines had been abandoned. The mineral is also collected for Victorian curio cabinets and displayed on the bodies of white settler women for whom the gem becomes their connection to dead Native sisters of the female settler imaginary. ii The mineral discussed in this thesis has saturated the Southwest Native American jewelry market for over a century. Today, Native jewelers navigate the enduring settler capitalist structure of the turquoise economy, where white mine owners control access to the uncut gem, and where commodified gems as jewelry function as they have since the 19th century as markers of a culture deemed to be of the past. The story of turquoise is the continuing story of Native dispossession: the theft of Native land and resources and the confinement of Natives to anachronistic space and time. It is also the story of refusal and Native contestation of the story of their disappearance and confinement to prehistory. Gender is central to this quintessential story of dispossession and settler capitalism. From the masculine settler subjects who claim the mines, to the white male ethnographers, to the white settler women who narrate and lend content to the imaginary story of the vanishing Indian and her fantasy of dead turquoise-wearing Native sisters, turquoise proves essential to the making of colonial subjectivities. When Native jewelers sell their turquoise creations in the Santa Fe jewelry market, they must navigate a colonial field of white mine owners and the trading post histories that mark Native labor, creativity, and jewelry as colonial commodities. Gender is central to how these colonial fields can be traversed. If the story of turquoise is the quintessential colonial story of theft and extraction in the Americas and elsewhere, in the Southwestern United States, the story reveals how a single mineral is extracted and commodified into an innocent gem that masks the story of conquest and dispossession. Transformed from a sacred object into an aesthetic object, turquoise tells the story of settler colonialism, revealing the specific gendered procedures and mythologies of settler property regimes in the Southwest.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler role playing (pretendsettling): Albert R. Spencer, Justin Bell, Allyson A. Duarte Vela, Tracie Hoops, Cody Spjut, ‘Dog Eat Dog: A Philosophical Exploration of Settler-Colonialism in Role-Playing Game’, The Pluralist, 21, 2, 2026, pp. 6-22

08Jun26

Excerpt: […] we propose that games are elemental. They embody the interplay of community, engagement, place, and relationality, serving as microcosms of the broader human experience. Games and storytelling are meaning-making processes that define our existence within natural and cultural environments. Role-playing games, like Dog Eat Dog, exemplify the elemental by immersing players in an existential narrative. Dog Eat Dogis not merely a game but an exploration of what it means to be human in an impossible situation. It invites players to reflect on their own responsibilities and roles within our intricate shared web of relationships. These reports present Dog Eat Dogas an example of how games and storytelling can serve as tools for understanding and transforming, through a medium that bridges philosophy, art, and social critique. The game’s structure is simple yet impactful. One player assumes the role of the Occupation, while all other players portray individual Natives of the island. The gameplay unfolds in a series of scenes, framed by a central dynamic: the Occupation enforces a growing list of rules, and the Natives must navigate these constraints to survive, resist, or assimilate. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Ecological settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Settler Legal Ecologies: The Colonial Governance of Nature’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: Settler ecologies are the processes by which settler administrations imagine, construct, govern, discipline, and police nature, nonhuman animals, and Indigenous or otherwise marginalized communities. This article focuses on the role of law in constituting and advancing settler ecologies. It examines how legal regimes animate the colonial administration of nature across multiple geopolitical settings, including Palestine-Israel, the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Kenya. Drawing on these diverse observations, the article identifies three central legal technologies of settler ecologies: juxtaposition, which refers to law’s capacity to generate and stabilize oppositional categories; frontier ecologies, which detail how doctrines such as terra nullius and legal instruments like protected areas expand and cement law’s reach into new materialities; and hyperlegality and criminalization, which transform the violence of conquest into a routinized apparatus of environmental governance. Together, these three legal technologies of settler ecologies trace a continuum—from law’s work of ordering and differentiation, through its territorial projection, and finally to the bureaucratic governance of life. The article concludes with just legal ecologies, exploring how Indigenous, local, plural, and more-than-human legalities might unsettle the premises and start to heal the traumas of settler ecologies, while affirmatively offering other ways of living with the earth. Throughout, the article illustrates that settler ecologies are not peripheral to law but foundational to law’s material conditions and conceptual underpinnings.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

More settler colonial reprocide: Hala Shoman, ‘Reprocide: examining the silenced gendered dimension of Israeli genocide in Gaza’, Journal of Gender Studies, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: Palestinians have endured decades of Israeli settler-colonial violence and, since October 2023, genocidal violence in Gaza. This article develops reprocide as a broader analytic framework for understanding the full range of reproductive violence and reproductive destruction enacted within settler-colonial and genocidal projects of elimination. Reprocide encompasses direct and indirect attacks on reproductive capacities, reproductive infrastructures, kinship relations, and the material and spatial conditions necessary for sustaining life, intimacy and collective continuity. I do not use reprocide to replace genocide; rather, I use it to clarify a gendered modality of elimination that is often obscured when immediate killing alone is privileged or when legal attention is limited to the prevention of births. Situated within feminist geography, geopolitics, and reproductive justice scholarship, the article shows how the destruction of hospitals, homes and conditions for intimacy links bodily harm to spatial strategies of elimination. Methodologically, the article draws on autoethnographic reflection and testimonies relayed to me by Palestinians in Gaza, triangulated with peer- reviewed scholarship. This article contributes to feminist geography and genocide studies by clarifying the relationship between space, embodiment, reproductive infrastructure, and futurity, and by arguing that reproductive and sexual violence against both women and men should be understood as part of reprocide.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonial carceral reprocide: Sarah A. Whitt, ‘Continuity of Spirit and the Carceral Continuum: Indigenous Women’s Experiences of Incarceration Across Settler Time and Space’, American Quarterly, 78, 2, 2026, pp. 263-288

08Jun26

Abstract: The modern history of incarceration in the United States has often been told as a story about the state exercising carceral control over populations—often, male—deemed “criminal” and confined in brick-and-mortar penal institutions. Yet Indigenous women’s divergent experiences of incarceration expand dominant historiographical renderings of “human caging” and illustrate the longevity of this settler structure, today. Reading across the grain of materials relating to a Menominee girl sentenced to the Leavenworth penitentiary in 1906 alongside letters written by incarcerated Indigenous women, published in a 1983 special issue of Sinister Wisdom, this essay illustrates the contours of a carceral continuum that has had an impact on Indigenous women across lifetimes and generations. The intimate stories examined here expand traditional definitions of the carceral and illustrate how those confined found ways to deepen the cracks of the carceral continuum, challenging the settler order.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

More subaltern settlers? Fernando Tavares Pimenta, ‘The Madeiran Diaspora in Southern Angola: The Chicoronho Community of the Huíla Highlands (1884-1974)’, Portuguese Studies Review, 2025

08Jun26

Abstract: This article highlights the history of the Madeiran diaspora in Southern Angola between 18 84 and 1974. More precisely, it seeks to reflect on the historical evolution of the settlement created by settlers from Madeira Island in the Huila Highlands, taking into account economic, social and political aspects, embodied in the formation of a white colonial community strongly rooted in African soil, whose identity, economic interests and political horizons were fully situated in Africa* Referred to as Cbicoronhos, the Madeiran settlers and their descendants were considered as constituents of a new “white tribe” in Angola. The Africanisation — on a political-identity level — of the Chicoronho community resulted in the assumption of a nationalist stance in favour of Angola’s independence, which materialised in the formation of a political movement named the Angolan United Front. However the complex process of decolonisation led to the implosion of this white colonial community, putting an end to this significant experience of settler colonialism. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Subaltern settlers? Eduard Gargallo, Jordi Sant, ‘A Central Periphery: Catalan Settlers and the Economy of Spanish Guinea (1778-1968)’, Historia Contemporánea, 81, 2026, pp. 405-438

08Jun26

Abstract: With this paper we present an analysis of a group of white settlers almost completely neglected by historiography, the Catalans that migrated to Spanish Guinea (present-day Guinea Ecuatorial). We highlight how in spite of being rarely involved directly in the administration of the territory, Catalans were determinant to its economic evolution. Through a constant and systematic lobbying in both Guinea and Madrid, Catalan individuals, companies and institutions managed to influence the colonial policies of the Spanish government and to control the production and export of the main Guinean crop, cocoa. For a long period, Barcelona was the capital of a small empire in Equatorial Africa, and a national minority in the metropole became crucial in a colonial territory. Our study wishes to contribute to the knowledge of Guinean history and to the understanding of the diverse European communities settled in Africa.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The ‘natural’ rights of settlers: Steven Sarson, ‘”When They Left Their Native Land, and Setled in America”: The Fairfax County Resolves, the Origins of Colonies and Empire, and the American Revolution’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 115, 2, 2026, pp. 31-49

04Jun26

Abstract: The Fairfax Resolves, invoking “the Laws of Nature and Nations,” are often portrayed as among the first statements of the colonists’ natural rights. The idea that civil law should be founded on natural law, however, dated back to Cicero and had long been invoked by colonial writers. Yet the Resolves played a pioneering role in mediating a dispute about how natural law underwrote the colonists’ civil rights. The first clause argued that if Virginia was a “conquered Country” then its “present Inhabitants are the Descendants not of the Conquered, but of the Conquerors” and thus inherited rights to property and self-government earned exclusively by their conquering “Ancestors.” During the revolutionary years, though, some writers, such as Virginian Richard Bland, further argued that the original “Adventurers” had created new and independent states rather than colonies (a “free state” theory of colonization), while others argued that the first colonists had settled under the authority of the crown (a “charter theory” of colonization). Free-state theory, with its claim for no original crown authority in American territory, had the advantage of making American independence easier to approve under the laws of nature and nations. But it remained controversial, and the Fairfax Resolves pioneered an ambiguous language about the origins of colonies that appeared later in the account of “the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here” in the Declaration of Independence. The Resolves’ conquest theory also had profound implications for Native Americans and westward expansion by shaping an American empire after the Revolution.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Lana Del Rey a settler colonialist! Bronwyn Ellerby, ‘White Femininity, Melancholia, and the Settler Colonial Aesthetic in Lana Del Rey’s America’ Motley, 4,1, 2026

04Jun26

Excerpt: Lana Del Rey, born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, is an 11-time Grammy-nominated American singer-songwriter, known for her melancholic depiction of America across landscapes of Las Vegas, New York and Old Hollywood. Central to her early albums Born to Die (2011), and Paradise (2012) is an exploration of American identity through the lens of longing, loss, and nostalgia. An abundance of academic analysis has centered around Del Rey’s music and Americana aesthetic as a critical performance of the neoliberal American dream (Crutcher 2019; Usmar 2014; Nurani & Ananda 2025; Kruger 2025). However, I argue that despite the transformative potential of Del Rey’s work, her discography ultimately perpetuates settler-colonial power structures and imaginaries through a nostalgic idealization of America and white femininity founded on colonial violence.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts

top posts today

Archives

stats for wordpress