Formal policy vs. settlement? John Ferejohn, ‘Early democratic land policy’, Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2026

11Oct26

Abstract: This paper examines American public land policy from the colonial period through the antebellum era, emphasizing the gap between formal policy and settlement on the ground. Early national policymakers faced competing objectives: generating revenue from western lands, promoting orderly territorial expansion and facilitating landownership among independent farmers. Federalists, and later Whigs, generally favored revenue-oriented policies and sales to large purchasers, while Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats increasingly favored policies benefiting small settlers. Yet neither approach adequately accounted for the limited administrative and coercive capacity of the early American state. Settlers routinely occupied desirable land before surveys and legal sales, establishing claims through possession and improvement. Because the federal government lacked the resources to prevent or reverse this process, Congress repeatedly accommodated squatters through preemption measures that transformed unauthorized settlement into recognized property rights. These practices drew on colonial precedents and were reinforced by a republican and Jacksonian ideology associating independent landownership with citizenship, equality and opposition to monopoly. By the 1841 Preemption Act, episodic concessions to squatters had effectively become permanent policy. Early American land policy thus demonstrates how limited state capacity and settlers’ actions shaped the public domain more powerfully than formal policies enacted in Washington.


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Even the Apocalypse is not the end of the story: Julia Siepak, ‘Resurgent Ecologies: Indigenous Eco-Apocalypse in Waubgeshig Rice’s “Moon of the Turning Leaves”‘, Textus, 2, 2026, pp. 203-222

11Oct26

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Waubgeshig Rice’s speculative novel Moon of the Turning Leaves (2023) that explores its commitment to representing resurgent Indigenous futures and ecologies in the face of environmental catastrophe. Written within the convention of Indigenous futurism, the novel depicts Anishinaabe futurity amid anthropogenic environmental change, inherently linked to colonialism. Drawing from theorisations of colonisation as an Indigenous peoples’ apocalypse, the reflection centres on the ways of homing post-Apocalypse through reliance on traditional Indigenous ways of knowing and the Anishinaabe concept of return, biskaabiiyang. Indigenous mobility in the Anthropocene is approached as a strategy grounded in Indigenous intellectual traditions of adaptation and futurity.


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Settler newspapers, Indigenous histories: Gyorgy Toth, Brian Hosmer (eds), Special Issue: Native American History through Newspapers, European Journal of American Studies, 21, 3, 2026

11Oct26

Excerpt from the introduction: For decades, scholarship in Indigenous Studies has grappled with using and interpreting newspapers, journals, and other forms of printed media. Questions of voice, authority, and purpose interweave with the instruments and articulations of colonialism. They also speak to misplaced and misleading binaries that situate Indigenous peoples at odds with modernity, in this sense through modes of communication. To be sure, media distorts voice, often representing the colonial gaze. Still, even the most mediated sources can prove useful as historical documents, sometimes revealing Native constructions of the world, engagements with modernity, and including the deployment of colonialist systems of communication and memory to serve Indigenous ends. While there is a continuing need for the mapping of colonialism through print culture, it is also crucial that Native American History and Indigenous Studies be informed by rigorous studies of Native American world-making through print.


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Inclusive, yes, but into violent relations (on violence against Indigenous women): Debbie Bargallie, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Performing inclusion: How settler institutions regulate Indigenous women through epistemic violence’, in Asher Flynn, Freya McLachlan Kyllie Cripps, Jacqui True (eds), Eliminating Violence Against Women: A Handbook for the Indo-Pacific Region, De Gruyter, 2026, pp. 277-290

11Oct26

Abstract: This chapter argues that violence against Indigenous women extends beyond interpersonal or physical harm to encompass institutional and epistemic forms of violence embedded within settler-colonial systems. Through empirical insights from the Stay in Your Lane and Make Us Count projects, we reveal how universities, funding bodies, and workplaces reproduce colonial hierarchies under the guise of inclusion. Drawing on Spivak’s concept of epistemic violence and Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, we examine how Indigenous women’s knowledge, leadership, and authority are systematically devalued, appropriated, or erased. We show that diversity initiatives often operate through interest convergence, granting inclusion only when it benefits white institutions and that citation, authorship, and research funding structures serve as regulatory mechanisms of epistemic control. Racial literacy is advanced as a critical intervention: a praxis for diagnosing and disrupting institutional racism and for centring Indigenous sovereignty, knowledge, and leadership. We conclude that eliminating violence against Indigenous women in professional contexts demands structural transformation not symbolic inclusion—requiring a redistribution of power, recognition of Indigenous epistemic authority.


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Generational formations: Silvia Pasquetti, Jemima Repo, Hala Shoman, ‘Permutations of settler colonial rule in Gaza: A generational approach’, Political Geography, 2026, #103682

11Oct26

Abstract: This article mobilises generation as a lens for theorising and examining the contingent and permuting character of settler colonial formations, with a specific focus on Gaza. Generation, we argue, calls attention to settler colonial rule as situated and embodied, and temporalities of survival and resistance as layered and heterogenous. We draw on 20 interviews collected just after the 2021 bombings to foreground the reflections of young Palestinians who have grown up in, and never left, a Gaza blockaded and repeatedly bombed by the Israeli settler state. Specifically, we examine how young Palestinians, through reflections on how their generation faces a changed form of settler colonial rule, appraise and “stitch together” the temporalities of past dispossession, their present-day experiences of oppression and resistance, and futures of anti-colonial struggle and liberation. As a whole, we illuminate the importance of studying generational reappraisals and renegotiations of survival and resistance among Palestinians in and beyond Gaza as they struggle against a highly unstable and fragmented settler colonial formation.


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The abyss, surveyed: Barry Corr, Surveying the Wild Abyss: Unravelling settler memory, NewSouth, 2026

09Oct26

Description: A unique record of the Hawkesbury’s Frontier War and a powerful contemplation on memory and atonement. In this groundbreaking history of colonisation and frontier conflict in the Hawkesbury region, historian Barry Corr navigates the gaps and silences in the primary records to reveal settler amnesia, the cataclysmic nature of colonisation and the way history is remembered, or not remembered. Driven by primary source analysis of colonial records, the book is deeply informed by Corr’s perspectives and community connections as an Aboriginal person who has lived most of his life in the Blue Mountains and north-western Sydney. Surveying the Wild Abyss reinvents the way Australian history is written and asks non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians to reflect on their history and consider what the future might look like.


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Settler colonialism is involved: Jeffrey S. Bachman, John Cox (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Genocide Studies, Routledge, 2026

09Oct26

Description: The field of genocide studies has experienced extraordinary growth during the past two decades. It stands today as one of the most diverse and interdisciplinary in the social sciences and humanities. Likewise, the field’s anchoring case studies have proliferated, from an initial focus on the Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, to a genuinely global framework that incorporates cases of genocide and other mass atrocities on every populated continent. This handbook provides a cutting-edge overview of the discipline, blending theoretically grounded analysis with empirically rich illustrations to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the contemporary debates in genocide studies. Split into seven sections, the book covers: Roots and Causation; Disciplinary Perspectives; Genocide Through History; The 20th Century: Genocide Before the Convention; Genocide Since 1948; Interventions and Aftermaths; Cultural Legacies. Bringing together a diverse set of both established and up-and-coming scholars, this volume will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students who are new to the field, to educators, and to scholars, researchers, and professionals in numerous fields who seek an encompassing understanding of genocide studies.


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Settler colonialism is involved: Pietro Stefanini (ed.), Palestine in a Time of Genocide: The Global Responsibility for Gaza, Routledge, 2026

09Oct26

Description: This volume offers examinations that help better understand how Israel’s genocide in Gaza was perpetrated, the role of global and regional orders in enabling the destruction, and ways to challenge erasure. Drawing on a range of perspectives—such as international law, anthropology, politics and international relations, media studies, feminist approaches, Indigenous and settler colonial studies—the chapters reflect a collective affirmation of the continued utility and importance of the concept of genocide for making sense of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. They provide a pedagogical tool for preventing revisionist and denial narratives seeking to justify Israel’s genocide. One chapter examines how a central way in which Israel has justified genocidal attacks has been through the international legal figure of the ‘human shield’. Another chapter draws on ethnographic methods with Palestinian survivors to map some of the direct and indirect mental health implications of the ongoing genocide in Gaza on children. A further chapter elucidates the characteristics of transnational constitution and complicity by examining the ways in which the global arms trade and patterns of military collaboration have enabled the commission of genocide in Gaza. The diversity of perspectives across social science disciplines will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars of genocide studies, international law, international relations, Middle East studies, conflict studies, as well as for those seeking to critically engage with the profound, global transformations that the Gaza genocide has precipitated.


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Infrastructure is (settler colonial) theft: ,Allison Madia, Caitlin Blanchfield, ‘Colonial misappropriation and infrastructural accumulation: how US federal agencies worked to expropriate O’odham land and water for science’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

09Oct26

Abstract: Colonial misappropriation refers to the ways that settler colonial government agencies and institutions misappropriate Indigenous land, water, knowledge and bodies to defy national and tribal laws, extending settlement and solidifying ideologies that sustain difference. This paper examines one specific project – the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) – to show how O’odham relationships and resources were misappropriated to build infrastructure for scientific and technological development on the Tohono O’odham Nation during the mid-twentieth century. By expanding their jurisdiction into O’odham lands through infrastructure projects and coercive lease arrangements, the United States government was able to further the development of KPNO. The accumulation of infrastructure and misappropriation of land, water, labor and material culture benefited the observatory and astronomy industry at the expense of O’odham sovereignty and livelihoods. Government officials and workers then re-narrated this history in exhibits and promotional literature to celebrate the observatory’s continued presence on O’odham lands. This paper contributes to scholarship on infrastructure within settler colonial studies by discussing land speculation, settler expansion and resource colonialism across tribal boundaries. Additionally, it attends to the promises of economic benefit and the misappropriation of Indigenous labor for infrastructure projects to reveal architectures of dependency.


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Settler colonialism and its logic: Alison Bedford, ‘Settler Colonial Logics: A framework for tracing the ideological currents of European colonisation of the Pacific’, SocArXiv, 2026

09Oct26

Abstract: This paper expands upon Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’ to propose a broader conceptual framework to understand the logics which underpinned European settler colonialism at large. Using the three Pacific voyages of British navigator James Cook between 1768 and 1779 as a case study, the geographic and ideological expansion of empire is positioned as a maritime endeavour which works to draw a singular geographic and political border for Empire. This view of a singular oceanic empire, rather than a collection of diverse and individual nations and peoples is further supported by the integration of the principles of the Doctrine of Discovery. This integration highlights the ways in which settler colonial logics continue to support structures founded on early modern beliefs about race, civilization and faith which, while now condemned by the institutions and cultures which established them, nonetheless continue to shape the lives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial societies around the Pacific and beyond.


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