Abstract: This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. […]

Abstract: In 1967 the Golan Heights saw a dramatic change: a hundred villages were destroyed and replaced by new Israeli settlements. We study the beginning of this settlement through the lens of settler-colonialism, using documents of the time. The settlers claim to be ‘original natives’, ‘returning’ to the land and, like other colonial settlers elsewhere, […]

Abstract: This thesis critically compares technologies of settler colonialism and genocidal elimination in Canada and Israel. Keeping with the argument that recognizes settler colonialism as an entity that destroys to replace, genocide is taken up as a theoretical framing device that addresses comparable methods of both the material and discursive elimination of Indigenous peoples in […]

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the rhetoric and discharge of state mental health care provisions in the wake of the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker reflect the logic of elimination that underpins settler-colonial societies. Firstly, the use of emotional politics and the diplomacy of sympathy transform the police shooting of an Aboriginal man […]

Abstract: This article argues that post-9/11 global disaster films exemplify a social imaginary preparing white, Western subjects to envision settler (re)colonization of the Global South as the only option in the face of increasing ecological devastation. Using the films The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, I demonstrate how this catastrophe colonialism pairs the racialization of migration with the coloniality […]

Abstract: This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help […]

Abstract: California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water […]

Abstract: Eighteenth and nineteenth century British and European colonial extension into the New World and the South Seas resulted in the growth of new colonial cities. With this development came the establishment of Western institutions, namely, the museum. These new museums needed content, and where better to look than the models beloved at ‘home’ in […]

Abstract: On 1 April 2022, Pope Francis made a historic apology to indigenous peoples in Canada for what he described as “deplorable” abuses occurring in church run residential schools.1 This statement is one of multiple apologies recently offered by world leaders for colonial injustices and abuses of indigenous people. For many, these apologies represent landmark events. However, […]

Abstract: Settler colonial projects are not only focused on the economy of a population and the formation of a settler state, they are also cultural undertakings whereby the settlers form their own settler culture. In this article, we explore the dynamics of Zionist settler culture from the point of view of its most radical critics, […]