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.


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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.


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Settler colonialism as psycho-cosmocide? Yamin Kogoya, ‘Remaking the Settler World from Inside the Papuan World: Colonial Consciousness and the Struggle for Reality in West Papua’, Kurumbi Wone Working Paper Series, 13, 2026

02Jun26

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of Indonesia’s settler colonial project in West Papua, examining its systematic dismantling of Papuan cosmobian societies across eight ontological domains: the physicalmaterial, the biological-organismic, the cultural-mythological, the metaphysical-transcendental, the techno-scientific, the space-time-conscious, the domain of ultimate mystery, and the domain of memory. Grounding its analysis in the Psycho-Cosmocide theoretical framework developed by the author, and drawing on the Lani concept of Inaorak (verified cosmological belonging, from root word Inawi [home, land, space] and Worak [exist, verified, ontologically valid]) as its primary indigenous epistemological foundation, the paper argues that Indonesia’s administrative proliferation of provinces, regencies, districts, and village units across West Papua constitutes not a bureaucratic rationalisation but a systematic ontological dissection of Papuan identity, memory, and cosmological jurisdiction. The paper traces the history of naming violence from the Netherlands New Guinea era through to the 2022 creation of four new provinces and the now sixty-plus administrative units, documents the function of the transmigration programme as demographic warfare, analyses the militarisation of space as ontological enclosure, and examines the instrumentalisation of religious institutions as vectors of cognitive-semiotic erasure. The paper concludes that Papuan resistance lacks not vision, language, or alternative institutions but the one thing the settler programme will never willingly grant: the power to execute an alternative reality. Only a Wonesis—a cosmological return to the self-verified ground of Papuan being—can constitute the beginning of genuine reconstruction.


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The ‘problem of the Indio’ is a settler predicament: Sophia Martínez Abbud, ‘”Playing Latinx” as Settler-Colonial Reenactment’, MELUS, 2026

02Jun26

Abstract: At its core, this is an article about the “problem of the indio” in a transamerican context of migration, and about accounting for the political role of Indigeneity in contemporary Latinx and Latin American literature. The figure of “the Indian” has been a central concept for national literatures in the so-called Americas since the nineteenth century, and its role becomes further complicated when considering converging Indigeneities across the United States and Mexico and their unique nationalist literary traditions. In Latin America, varying traditions of indigenismo have attempted to integrate Indigeneity into national identities through paternalistic programs designed to “modernize” Indigenous communities. Similarly, as Phillip Deloria, Jr. argues, American literature becomes recognizable through the act of “playing Indian”: an appropriation of cultural traits and narratives to create settler myths that justify claims to colonized territory. Recent attempts to (dis)entangle these colonial histories and their interactions have given rise to the framework of Critical Latinx Indigeneities, which I heed throughout the article. Given the rising popularity of migration narratives in an age of global displacement, the stakes of engaging with the framework of Critical Latinx Indigeneities become more pressing as border surveillance and transnational migration intersect on Indigenous land.


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Burying settler colonialism: Kate Falconer, ‘Indigenous insiders and Anglo outsiders: A critical reading of Australian burial disputes’, Social & Legal Studies, 2026

31May26

Abstract: This article explores a cascade of deathly entanglements between nations, legal systems, communities, and individuals. Its focus is the vitally important, yet under-theorised corner of Australia’s private law known as burial disputes: disputes relating to the disposal of the body of a deceased person. As many as three-quarters of burial disputes in Australia involve at least one Indigenous party. The impetus for this paper is twofold: first, the need to situate these burial disputes in their nomocidal colonial context; and second, the radical reshaping of the legal doctrine employed by courts when resolving these disputes. In particular, and grounded in the capacity of the corpse to act as a site of creative necroresistance, it draws on work done by Australian Indigenous and decolonial scholars to offer a critical, yet affirmative, reading of this doctrinal development, which, it argues, has occurred primarily in response to the Indigenous insider presence in the burial dispute case law.


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The burning fire of settler colonialism: Jack A Kredell, Apparatuses of Fire: Smokey Bear, Exception, and Wildfire Emotion, PhD dissertation, University of Idaho, 2026

31May26

Abstract: This dissertation examines the political, rhetorical, and affective dimensions of wildfire governance in the western United States through three interrelated studies that together constitute a critical account of what I call “apparatuses of fire”: the discursive, institutional, and logistical structures immanent to the material existence of landscape fire which have shaped relationships to landscape fire in the U.S. over the past century. Chapter One analyzes the visual rhetoric of the Smokey Bear fire prevention campaign, the longest-running public service advertising campaign in U.S. history, as a site where human-animal difference is systematically constructed and naturalized. Drawing on Heidegger’s distinction between human “world-forming” and animal “captivation,” the chapter argues that Smokey Bear posters position fire prevention not merely as a civic duty but as an ontological imperative grounded in the exclusive agential capacity of humans over captivated nonhuman animals. Through close visual analysis of nonhuman animals in Smokey Bear posters, the chapter traces how representations of animality evolve in response to shifting environmental policy while consistently maintaining the foundational structure of human exceptionalism that underwrites the campaign’s central message: “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” because non-human animals cannot. Chapter Two offers a political-theoretical account of modern state fire governance as a biophysical state of exception constituted through the inclusive-exclusion of what I call “proscribed fire.” Adapting Giorgio Agamben’s theory of exception (1998) to the domain of environmental governance, and combining it with Paul Virilio’s (2006) dromological analysis of speed and logistics, the chapter argues that the U.S. Forest Service has governed fire-prone landscapes since the Great Fires of 1910 by simultaneously including fire as an exogenous limit-figure and deploying ever-greater logistical speeds to maintain territorial control. This framework illuminates both the fire exclusion era (1910–1970) and the subsequent turn toward ecosystem-based management as continuous expressions of settler continuance (Whyte, 2018) rather than genuine paradigm shifts. The chapter concludes by examining the emergence of AI-driven fire surveillance and autonomous management technologies as the latest iteration of a dromocratic logic that threatens to further marginalize Indigenous and community-based approaches to fire stewardship. Chapter Three turns from state institutions to ordinary people as decision-makers, drawing on twenty-three long-form narrative interviews with rural Inland Northwest residents personally affected by wildfire. Drawing on Lazarus’s principle (2016) of “people think,” the chapter argues that the emotions rural residents feel in response to wildfire — frustration, compassion, and gratitude — are not merely affective reactions to adverse circumstances but autonomous forms of pyropolitical thought capable of exposing, and operating beyond, the structural limits of normative governance and its forms of knowledge. Taken together, the three chapters advance a critical pyropolitics attentive to the ontological assumptions, logistical imperatives, and affective dimensions of U.S. wildfire governance, and call for alternative relationships to fire grounded in ecological reciprocity, Indigenous sovereignty, and genuine community autonomy.


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Maimable indigeneity: Amanie Issa, Christo El Morr, ‘Disablement by Algorithm: AI as a Modern Tool of Settler-Colonial Violence in Palestine’, in Christo El Morr, Rachel da Silveira Gorman, Elham Dolatabadi, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari (eds), AI for a Just World: Power, Liberation, and the People Left Behind, Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2026

30May26

Abstract: In this chapter, we examine how the Israeli military’s deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems—most notably the Lavender targeting program—operates as a contemporary extension of settler-colonial power that intentionally produces and conceals mass disablement. Situating these technologies within frameworks of racial capitalism, militarism, and ableism, we argue that algorithmic “precision-targeting” not only effectuates widespread impairment but also naturalizes this violence through the rhetoric of objectivity. Drawing on critical disability studies, crip theory, and settler-colonial critique, our analysis unfolds in three parts. First, we historicize the continuum from rubber-bullet maiming during the Great March of Return to AI-driven decision-support systems, showing how algorithmic thresholds of “tolerable error” encode political choices about whose bodies may be maimed rather than killed. Second, we unpack the epistemic logics of AI models; datasets, predictive heuristics, and minimal human oversight, to reveal how Palestinian lives are rendered killable and maimable data points. Third, we extend our critique globally, linking Palestine’s experience to analogous AI-enabled surveillance and debilitation in other regions. By foregrounding Palestinian disabled experience as a generative site for theorizing the co-constitution of disability, colonialism, and technology, this chapter contributes to peripheral crip critique and disability justice scholarship. We conclude by calling for a radical crip politics and transnational solidarity that rejects techno-colonial violence and reclaims AI futures centered on care, interdependence, and collective liberation.


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Competition, not solidarity: Austin Tseng, ‘First Nations in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese-Australian writings: the lack of settler colonial empathy’, History Australia, 2026

30May26

Abstract: late nineteenth and early twentieth century chinese-australian discourses on First Nations peoples and issues were strongly influenced by prevalent writings on race and political concerns of that time. this article explores chinese-australian print media pertaining to First Nations affairs, demonstrating that this media conceived of relations with First Nations people under a paradigm of competition rather than solidarity. these findings highlight how First Nations issues were used by chinese-language media in australia to construct narratives both to express and shape the beliefs of their readership and to articulate their relationship to their ancestral and host countries. Furthermore, my findings moderate a tendency within scholarship to overemphasise the role of anti-colonial sentiment in chinese discourses, showing that this is subject to many caveats and nuances.


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Meanwhile in Kashmir: Goldie Osuri, Settler colonialism in Kashmir, Manchester University Press, 2026

30May26

Abstract: Settler/colonialism in Kashmir examines Indian rule in occupied Jammu and Kashmir through historical and present settler/colonial geopolitics. Engaging with settler colonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies, the book explores how European sovereignty was shaped by settler/colonialism. Settler/colonialism was catastrophic for Indigenous worlds and generated the climate crisis. The book explores how India draws on settler/colonialism’s catastrophic mechanisms to rule Kashmir, thus fuelling the climate crisis and participating in the geopolitical settler/colonial world order. Sites of analysis include the India China rivalry, Kashmir’s political economy, and India’s indigenisation of its Hindu sacred geography in Kashmir. Through this exploration, the author argues for asserting Kashmiri resistance as an Indigenous anti-colonial struggle. The intersections between sovereignty, catastrophe, Indigeneity, and ecology illuminate Kashmir’s place in the geopolitical settler/colonial world order. The book contributes to timely debates in Critical Kashmir, settler colonial, decolonial, Indigenous, and South Asian studies regarding settler/colonialism and planetary crises.


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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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