« The end of the Indigenous struggle is not an institution: Cheng Xu, ‘Autonomy, interrupted: constitutional weakening of indigenous activism from civil war to civil society’, World Development, 196, 2025, #107157
The end of the struggle is not an electoral system: Margaret Yun-Pu Tu (Nikal Kabala’an), ‘A System Not of Our Making: Electoral and Institutional Constraints on Indigenous Self-Determination in Taiwan’, Taiwan Politics, 2025 »

Criminalising is a settler colonial strategy: Marya Al-Hindi, ‘Border Creation and the Hangover of Empire: The Genocide of Palestine and the Historical Construction of the Palestinian Threat’, in Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, David S Fonseca, Valeria Vegh Weis, Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South, Palgrave, 2025

13Aug25

Abstract: This chapter addresses the way in which impunity granted to Israel to enforce its illegal expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been made possible due to permissiveness around the dehumanisation of Arabs. International acquiescence about the genocide of Palestine has been intimately tied to border making and imperial interests in the region. The first section will explore the continuities in British criminalisation of Arabs in the twentieth century and how this shifted to conceptions of Palestinian terrorism in Israeli security discourse. The normalisation of punitive measures towards Arabs under colonialism demonstrates that the genocide in Gaza is a calculated, long-term strategy to erase the Indigenous people of Palestine. The second section moves on to demonstrate how the segregation of Gazans behind a fortified border coincides with this racialisation of Palestinians as terrorists. It shows how settler colonialism, which is founded on the elimination of the Indigenous population, has endured through Israeli actions in Gaza and is reinforced by narratives of Palestinian criminality. The acquiescence to Israel’s actions has demonstrated the inequality of life under international law and the permissiveness about genocide, in the service of “security narratives” in Israeli expansionist policy. Ignoring the continuities in settler colonialism and its violent border-making processes normalises violence against Indigenous populations as seen in the ongoing genocide in Palestine today.


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