« Beware of inclusion: Theresa Rocha Beardall, Laurel R. Davis-Delano, ‘Inclusive Elimination: How White Americans Oppose Native Nation Sovereignty Using “Our Land” and “Our Laws” Narratives’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2026

Seeing like a settler state: Ting Hui Lau, ‘Seeing like a surveillance state Settler colonialism on the China-Myanmar border’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 16, 2, 2026

03Aug26

Excerpt: Tracing how states see Indigenous peoples—and to what ends—I argue that state vision is not merely about managing populations but is structured by settler-colonial logics of dispossession and the erasure of Indigenous life (Jacobs 2018). I use the term settler surveillance to highlight these settler logics that undergird contemporary surveillance regimes. By settler colonial, I refer to a system premised on the elimination of the native and the reorganization of land and life to sustain global capitalism (Coulthard 2014; Wolfe 2006). This logic is not confined to Indigenous or borderland contexts but is structural to the modern state itself, and increasingly intensified by advancing surveillance technologies (Kauanui 2016; la paperson 2017; Speed 2019). My ethnographic encounters read Scott through this settler-colonial lens to clarify not only how the state sees but why it sees—to seize, settle, and secure its own reproduction.


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