The roots of settler colonialism: Aysha Sana, ‘Olive Trees, Resistance, and Colonial Contestations in Palestine: A Political and Ecological Analysis’, in Priyanka Chandra (ed.), Undisciplining IR: Beyond Mainstream International Relations, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: Olive trees, emblematic of Palestinian identity, resilience, and sustenance, occupy a central yet precarious role in the ongoing colonization of Palestine by Israel. The proposed paper explores the ecological, cultural, and political significance of olive trees in the Zionist settler-colonial project. The destruction of over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees since 1967 reveals a deliberate strategy to dispossess Palestinians of their land, disrupt food sovereignty, and undermine their deep-rooted connection to their homeland. While olive groves are crucial to Palestinian livelihood and symbolize sumud (steadfastness), they are also targeted as “enemy soldiers” in a legal and ideological battle over land ownership. The chapter examines the paradoxical use of olive trees in Zionist narratives, first as symbols of a biblical homeland and later abandoned in favor of European pines to erase Palestinian history and conceal Nakba atrocities. Through literary and artistic works, like those of Mahmoud Darwish and Sliman Mansour, olive trees emerge as “sites of memory,” preserving Palestinian narratives against erasure. Simultaneously, Israel’s monocultural afforestation, environmental exploitation, and the uprooting of olive trees for settlement expansion demonstrate ecological imperialism and environmental Nakba. It also analyses the ideological tensions within Zionism, where the destruction of olive trees contradicts both Jewish religious laws and environmental claims, further exposing its colonial ambitions. The paper looks into how olive trees, beyond their economic and symbolic roles, stand as a powerful counter-narrative to Zionist myths, asserting the enduring presence and resistance of the Palestinian people. Through these trees, the struggle for Palestinian liberation intersects with the broader fight for environmental justice, challenging ongoing acts of both genocide and ecocide.


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Translation across space and meaning: Katsuya Hirano, Daniel Abbe, ‘Settler-Colonial Translation: “Civilization” and the Ainu Voices’, in Talal Asad, Jun’ichi Isomae, Naoki Sakai, Katsuya Hirano, Gouranga Charan Pradhan (eds), Beyond the Untranslatable: Theorizing Postcolonial Translation, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: In this chapter, I examine how imperial Japan’s settler colonization of Hokkaido produced a regime of translation that effectively rendered the Indigenous Ainu people a vanishing race. Focusing on Kyosuke Kindaichi, the founder of Ainu linguistic studies, and his relationship with his Ainu assistant, Yukie Chiri, I maintain that the contemporary translation practices of Japanese linguists functioned as a mode of domination, enabling the settler-colonial logic of dispossession and elimination to masquerade as a civilizing mission aimed at liberating the Ainu. I show that this paradoxical logic of liberal humanism—simultaneously erasing and claiming to protect—was structured by the binary of humanitas and anthropos as argued by Naoki Sakai, as well as by Talal Asad’s concept of the violence inherent in secular translation. By situating the regime of translation within these theoretical frameworks, I highlight how linguistic practices can reproduce systemic violence and explore the broader ethical and political dimensions of translation under settler-colonial conditions.


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Environmental settler colonialism: Kristi Leora Gansworth, Otto Muller, ‘Not your blood, not your soil: Land and belonging in colonial matrices’, in Lise Benoist, George Edwards, Bernhard Forchtner, Balša Lubarda, Sonja Pietiläinen, Kjell Vowles (eds), Global Far-Right Ecologies, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: This chapter outlines key framing narratives and iterative practices of settler colonialism and its project of erasure and replacement. It uses these frameworks to analyse facets of recent US white supremacist moves including the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally and 2021 Capitol Insurrection along with right-wing representations of American history and their manifestation in the Executive Orders of the second Trump administration. Gansworth and Muller argue that the neofascist upturn in right-wing politics is a contemporary amplification of settler colonial frameworks that shape American identity and land relations writ large. The authors suggest that a meaningful refusal of this authoritarian shift requires a divestment from the fundamental narratives of American settler exceptionalism. Embodied relationalities and adaptive, enduring social configurations persist among Indigenous communities, despite centuries of colonial dispossession, offering political ecologies entirely outside of that presented by the settler state.


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Unsettled? Kendra E. Fortin, Bryan S. R. Grimwood, Corey W. Johnson, Jennifer Holman, Helle C. Haven Petersen, Victor Mawutor Agbo, Peggy Vacalopoulos, ‘Divinity and unsettling tourism memories’, Leisure, 2026

24Jun26

Abstract: In this article, we examine intersections of tourism, settler colonialism, and Christianity through a collaborative, unsettling approach. Framed by settler colonial theory and postcolonial theology, and drawing on collective memory work involving Settler-Christian graduate students in Canada, we illuminate how religious travel experiences are constructed in relation to settler colonialism. More specifically, our article interrogates Settler-Christian travel memories to reveal a discourse of divinity structured by contested meanings of service, land, evangelism, and material religiosity. In foregrounding memory as method and site of inquiry, we critically analyze religious tourism as a space for unsettling Settler identity, negotiating responsibilities, and reflecting on theological complicities. The participatory methodology encourages critical self-location and co-creation of knowledge, highlighting the transformative potential of collaborative research in confronting settler colonialism within faith-based leisure travel. The research extends critical tourism scholarship by illuminating ethical and spiritually situated responsibilities that Settler-Christians grapple with to envision decolonial futures.


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Still Indigenous: Freddy Cabral, We are Still Lipan: Identity Erasure, Settler Colonialism, Historical Memory and the Persistence of the Non-Reservation Lipan Apache, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at El Paso, 2026

24Jun26

Abstract: This dissertation challenges the long-standing historical narrative that the Lipan Apache disappeared in the late nineteenth century. Instead, it argues that the non-reservation Lipan Apache survived through strategic adaptation, mobility, kinship networks, and cultural continuity across the United States-Mexico borderlands. By examining the Lipan experience under Spanish colonial rule, Mexican governance, the Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas, this study demonstrates that shifting political regimes consistently pursued Indigenous land, labor, and subordination through structures of settler colonialism and racial hierarchy. Using the frameworks of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide studies, oral history, and autoethnography, this dissertation shows how military campaigns, legal systems, racial classification, and archival erasure worked together to marginalize the Lipan Apache and to legitimize settler expansion. However, these systems failed to eliminate Lipan identity. Instead, many Lipan families responded by migrating to Mexico, intermarrying, adapting their language, participating in Catholicism, and concealing their identity within Mexican and Mexican American communities. What many historians interpreted as a disappearance was often a deliberate survival strategy. Methodologically, this dissertation combines archival sources with oral testimonies, family interviews, and community memory to reconstruct histories often absent from official records. These sources reveal that Lipan identity endured through storytelling, kinship, ceremonies, and intergenerational knowledge transmission into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately, this study contributes to Indigenous, borderlands, and Texas historiography by reframing Lipan history from extinction to endurance. It demonstrates that Indigenous survival does not depend on reservation boundaries or federal recognition but can persist through community, memory, and cultural practice. The continued presence of the Lipan Apache exposes the limits of settler colonialism and challenges narratives equating invisibility with absence.


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The language of settler colonialism: Katya Kredl, ‘Québec’s Bill 96: A Case Study of Indigenous Cultural and Political Dispossession’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 23-38

24Jun26

Abstract: This article examines Bill 96 (now Law 14; 2022), a language law enforcing French as the official language of Québec, in relation to language hierarchization and Indigenous dispossession. While this bill impacts all non-French speaking individuals in Québec, it carries especially important implications for the Indigenous Peoples residing on this territory whose languages are already endangered. In this article, I explore Bill 96 as an extension of settler colonialism that legitimizes white settlers as founders and that assimilates through language. Using previous Canadian language laws as a guide, I demonstrate the dangers of exclusionary language policies. From insular decision-making strategies to strict legal enforcement, these types of policies are grounded in dominant, colonial logic and have the potential to eradicate vulnerable cultures. Using political discourse analysis (PDA), I argue that this bill ultimately threatens the survival of Indigenous cultural and political structures in Québec. Finally, I reflect on Indigenous languages as a tool of refusal to settler colonialism.


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Violence is a settler feeling: Michael Lechuga, The Far-Right Rhetoric of Dog Whistles: Settler Feelings and Unspeakable Acts, Palgrave, 2026

24Jun26

Description: This open access book and examines how far-right dog whistles fuel real-world colonial violence in Settler America. Contemporary attacks like the El Paso Walmart and Buffalo Tops shootings are not isolated acts of extremism—they are direct extensions of an ongoing settler colonial logic, echoing historical massacres like Sand Creek in their targeting of Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities. These contemporary acts are distinct: individuals move from coded signal to violence with little to no rational deliberation in between. Far-right media and rhetoric have become sophisticated emotional activation systems, bypassing reason entirely. Therefore, dog whistles operate on multiple registers simultaneously—triggering immediate reactions of fear, anger, and disgust while also tapping into a deeper, longer-simmering sense of grievance embedded in settler culture. The result is a media and rhetorical landscape where coded language activates violent political upheaval, manufacturing division, justifying elimination, and mobilizing violence all while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability. This book offers an urgent framework for understanding how that signaling operates, why it is so effective, and what it means for how we study political communication, media, and the ongoing project of settler colonialism in America.


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Settler colonial embeddedness: Joseph Rafael Kaplan Weinger, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Colonial Settlement, Splintered Sovereignty, and the Making of an Injurious Alliance, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: This dissertation develops a sociological account of colonial settlement by examining the historical formation and contemporary operation of the Israeli settler–state compact in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It asks how political projects that instrumentalize violence are carried out when the actors who advance them occupy disparate social and institutional locations, and how variable coordination shapes outcomes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Occupied West Bank among Israeli settlers, soldiers, state and military officials, and Palestinians living in the rural frontiers of Areas B and C, alongside semi-structured interviews and extensive archival research, the study reconstructs the processes through which territorial expansion and coercive governance are produced through interaction. The dissertation advances a theory of colonial embeddedness to capture the historically produced entanglement of state institutions and settler networks in the joint exercise of rule. Rather than treating settler–state alignment as given, it shows how this relationship is assembled through contingent yet patterned processes, including path-dependent institutional repertoires, learning through diffusion and adaptation, institutional transformation, and the empowerment of extra-state actors. These processes redistribute coercive capacity across formal and informal actors, producing what the study terms splintered sovereignty: a governing arrangement in which domination is delegated and unevenly coordinated. Empirically, the dissertation traces the evolution of Zionist settlement from its late-Ottoman and Mandate-era foundations through the territorial reconfigurations of 1948 and 1967 and into the contemporary West Bank. It argues that war functions as a critical juncture that reorganizes the conditions under which colonization proceeds, opening space for actors to reconfigure territorial rule and set durable trajectories of expansion. Colonial violence emerges through relational mechanisms: settler actors deploy territorial and vigilante violence and, together with state actors, give rise to deprivation, predation, constraints on social reproduction, and manipulations of futurity. Their articulation is mediated through mechanisms such as social appropriation, entryism, bureaucratic forbearance, and role collapse, which blur the boundary between state and non-state authority. Palestinian contention, in turn, reshapes these dynamics by delaying, disrupting, exposing, and possibly entrenching practices of domination. By foregrounding process over teleology, the dissertation shows that dispossession and displacement arise from shifting configurations of embedded rule. In so doing, it contributes to sociological debates on state formation, the organization of political violence, and the nature of colonial rule.


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Settlers in the north: Eugene Kontorovich, Erielle Azerrad, ‘Settlers in Syria: Turkey’s Population Transfers and the Geneva Conventions’, Emory International Law Review, 40, 2026, pp. 535-564

23Jun26

Abstract: This Article is the first work of legal scholarship to examine Turkish population transfers in northern Syria, which constitute perhaps the most aggressive movement of settler populations into occupied territory in current times. In particular, it examines the lawfulness of such movements under Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from “deport[ing] or transfer[ring] parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” In a series of major military operations beginning in 2018, Turkey has seized nearly 3,000 square miles of territory in two sectors in northern Syria and established control. While it receives scant attention in the Western press or in legal academia, Ankara continues to maintain its occupation of what it terms as “buffers” or security zones, apparently indefinitely. During its occupation of these areas, Turkey has overseen the movement of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people from within its borders into the occupied areas, significantly changing the delicate demographic balance there. The migrants are primarily Syrian Arab refugees previously residing in Turkey, internally displaced persons from elsewhere in Syria, and families of Turkishbacked Syrian National Army (SNA) fighters. But Turkey apparently has steered them to entirely different areas of Syria from those where they originate. This appears to be deliberate, using the Sunni Arab settlers to displace the local Kurdish populations and disrupt ethnic composition of formerly Kurdishmajority regions. Many of the migrants take over houses abandoned by Kurds, while in some cases Turkey or private Arab foundations have financed the construction of entirely new communities for the migrants in the occupied territories.


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Settlers, locals, strangers: Bethany Lacina, Strangers and Settlers: Migration Politics in a Local’s World, Oxford Academic, 2026

23Jun26

Description: Do people have special rights in a place if they are one of the locals? The belief that they do is common worldwide. Yet, entitlement to place has little role in most accounts of migration politics. Instead, accounts of migration politics are a showdown between culture and economics, in-group identities and material incentives. Strangers and Settlers moves past that stand-off by considering domestic and international migration simultaneously. Being local is normative even within national and ethnic groups and when the material stakes of migration are low. Both domestic and international migration politics takes place within that pro-local status quo. Using information from censuses, public opinion, mobility laws, and political parties, Strangers and Settlers describes a world of nested hierarchies of locals, offering new insights about migration politics. How mobile has the world become since the 1950s? How do migrants and minorities think about migration policy? What is the political economy of mobility control and why is immigration more regulated domestic migration? What do anti-migration activists ask for if they cannot have a sealed national border? The answers to these questions start with the fact that it’s a local’s world.


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