Potential settlement: Hatib A Kadir, ‘Multispecies colonialism: The politics of potential in the making of settler ecologies’, History and Anthropology, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Potential settlement: Hatib A Kadir, ‘Multispecies colonialism: The politics of potential in the making of settler ecologies’, History and Anthropology, 2026

19Apr26

Abstract: ‘Finding potentialities’ has become a central obsession in colonial and state-driven efforts to identify latent value in land and life forms. It functions as a primary mechanism through which multispecies colonialism operates in Papua’s wetlands. Drawing on Dutch colonial reports and the early work of Indonesian agrarian reform scholar Gunawan Wiradi, this analysis traces how an ideology rooted in technocratic and racialized logics has reshaped Papuan landscapes over time. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, ‘finding potentiality’ has a clear historical genealogy in the Dutch colonial project of converting wetlands into sites of large-scale agricultural production. Wetlands were framed as idle, invisible, and unproductive – a view later adopted by the Indonesian state after 1963, enabling interventions such as transmigration. Second, this logic operates as a form of multispecies colonialism. Settler colonialism projects under the Indonesian government in Papua extend beyond the control of human populations to include the deliberate introduction and management of non-native plants and animals. Third, a fundamental tension emerges between the future-oriented, extractive vision of potentiality and the present-oriented realities of Indigenous Papuans. For colonial and state actors, potential is tied to projected economic value and is used to justify the transformation of existing ecologies in the name of future gains. This perspective reduces the biodiverse regions to a measurable and exploitable resource, often framed as a ‘pool of genes’, while not only disregarding subsistence practices but also produce land dispossession and disrupt Papuan relationships to their ecological time and place.

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