Ecological settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Settler Legal Ecologies: The Colonial Governance of Nature’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Ecological settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Settler Legal Ecologies: The Colonial Governance of Nature’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: Settler ecologies are the processes by which settler administrations imagine, construct, govern, discipline, and police nature, nonhuman animals, and Indigenous or otherwise marginalized communities. This article focuses on the role of law in constituting and advancing settler ecologies. It examines how legal regimes animate the colonial administration of nature across multiple geopolitical settings, including Palestine-Israel, the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Kenya. Drawing on these diverse observations, the article identifies three central legal technologies of settler ecologies: juxtaposition, which refers to law’s capacity to generate and stabilize oppositional categories; frontier ecologies, which detail how doctrines such as terra nullius and legal instruments like protected areas expand and cement law’s reach into new materialities; and hyperlegality and criminalization, which transform the violence of conquest into a routinized apparatus of environmental governance. Together, these three legal technologies of settler ecologies trace a continuum—from law’s work of ordering and differentiation, through its territorial projection, and finally to the bureaucratic governance of life. The article concludes with just legal ecologies, exploring how Indigenous, local, plural, and more-than-human legalities might unsettle the premises and start to heal the traumas of settler ecologies, while affirmatively offering other ways of living with the earth. Throughout, the article illustrates that settler ecologies are not peripheral to law but foundational to law’s material conditions and conceptual underpinnings.

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