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Decolonising space: Bhargavi PBA, ‘Not “Manifest” but an “Inclusive” Destiny: A Case for Decolonizing Space Exploration’, E-International Relations, 12/05/25

23May25

Excerpt: While interplanetary travel is presented as a valuable endeavor, in which space explorers will visit other planets and colonize them, it has also been termed by some scholars as a ‘renewed form of settler colonialism’—the legacy of colonization on Earth that had led to disastrous consequences such as genocide, displacement of Indigenous communities and cultures, economic inequalities and the degradation of the environment (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Saini, 2019; Painter, 2010; Bhandar, 2018). It is, therefore, imperative for space explorers to understand the history and legacy of colonialism on Earth to help discern how seemingly innocent curiosity to explore space is entrenched in colonial behaviors.


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Urban settler colonialism in West Papua: Hatib A. Kadir, Bustamin Wahid, ‘Frontier sands: settler colonialism, resource extraction, and indigenous dispossession in Sorong, West Papua’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

23May25

Abstract: This article asserts that the development of a West Papuan city’s infrastructure has occurred through an ongoing series of dispossession affecting Indigenous Papuans. These acts of dispossession manifest through various subtle, intimate, and familial channels. Consequently, those engaged in the construction of infrastructure encompass both low-wage settler workers seeking to salvage from a beleaguered capitalist system, and Indigenous Papuans who have suffered land losses. Through ongoing research in Sorong since 2021, we examine the pivotal role of sand quarries by focusing on four aspects. First, land ownership dispossession, specifically the Moi clan in Sorong city, experienced land dispossession. Second, Investigate the material aspects of sand and stone that become the basis for infrastructure establishment. Third, examining how settlers utilize kinship ties among Moi Indigenous Papuans to access land and sand resources. And Fourth depicting the Indigenous Papuans’ efforts to assert claims and control over sand quarries, forming a crucial part of strategies against the encroachment of Indonesian settler communities.


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Sheep devour men (again): Ahlam Soboh, ‘Settler Grazing: A Tool for Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank’, Policy Commons, 13/03/25

20May25

Abstract: This document outlines how the Israeli occupation army and authorities are using “settler grazing” as a means of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. By allocating land for grazing to settlers, they aim to displace Palestinian communities, restrict their access to essential resources, and ultimately annex Palestinian land into Israeli settlements. These actions violate international humanitarian law and resolutions affirming the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC) asserts that this policy escalation aims to increase land for the Israeli colonial project while restricting Palestinian livelihoods, leading to direct and indirect displacement.


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Trumpean settler colonialism: Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, ‘Settler colonialism in Donald Trump’s America’, The Geographical Journal, 2025

20May25

Abstract: This commentary contends with the broader settler colonial structures through which the second Donald Trump presidency may proceed. Through a historical and contemporaneous engagement with broader concepts such as settler colonialism and the ‘frontier’, this piece grapples with how Indigenous nations can ensure their continued vitality through this political moment.


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The Indigenous forest for the settler tree: Ryan C. Hellenbrand, Into the Woods and Back Again: An Environmental Kin Study of German Settler Ecologies in the Upper Midwest, PhD dissertation, The University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2025

20May25

Abstract: Forests in the United States have long been and continue to be contested places of cultural
identity. Lumbering and European settlement in the forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin and
Michigan radically and violently disrupted Indigenous ecological relationships to their
homelands. Yet the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin has a developed a world-renowned forestry
program that supports their self-determination across multiple domains. This dissertation
examines the genealogy of natural resource conservation in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest,
specifically the connections between national identity, Indigenous self-determination and the
implementation of forestry. This is a comparative landscape ethnography of German modes of
monumentality: the Endres Chapel at Indian Lake County Park, Wisconsin; the Hermann
Monument in New Ulm, Minnesota; and the implementation of forestry in the cutover region of
the Northwoods. I analyze how histories of place and belonging intersect with forestry in
practice today. The Endres chapel outside of Madison, Wisconsin instantiates familial narratives
of settler belonging to these Indigenous homelands; the Hermann the German statue in New
Ulm, Minnesota as an embodiment of German nationalism in the U.S.; and lastly the
implementation of German Scientific Forestry responds to the ecological devastation of the
Cutover to maintain settlers’ symbolic and material claims to Indigenous homelands.


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On Gaza and settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Genocide in Gaza and the End of Settler Colonialism’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

19May25

Abstract: Written in April 2025, this position piece is prompted by a number of recent interventions suggesting that the ongoing Gaza genocide is a consequence of Israeli settler colonialism. That the Israeli onslaught in the besieged Palestinian territory is genocidal is undeniable – a mountain of accumulating evidence supports this conclusion. This paper, however, discusses whether ‘settler colonialism’ remains a suitable interpretative tool. It suggests that the unfolding genocide is not a culmination of Zionist settler colonialism but its end.


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Threatening Indigenous peoples: Julisa J. Lopez, Tyler Jimenez, Stephanie A. Fryberg, ‘The cyclical nature of Indigenous identity threat’, European Review of Social Psychology, 2025

19May25

Abstract: Indigenous identity threats are fostered and reified through a cyclical process wherein sources of threat for Indigenous people are simultaneously strategies non-Indigenous people employ to manage threat. One contemporary threat for Indigenous people is the omission of their existence and experiences from the public consciousness. Omission threatens Indigenous identity by undermining well-being and fostering intergroup biases. Indigenous people respond by engaging in collective action to address such pernicious representations. As historical and contemporary wrongdoings impacting Indigenous people become visible, non-Indigenous people are confronted with the reality that their group is responsible for and/or benefits from Indigenous oppression. An unintended consequence of Indigenous collective action is that it may further threaten non-Indigenous people’s identity. To mitigate this threat, non-Indigenous people omit Indigenous people’s existence, which recreates threats for Indigenous people. Interrupting this cycle requires that we actively change the processes embedded in our social institutions and practices that reify Indigenous omission.


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Beware of settlers planting trees: Lucía Gutiérrez Vázquez, Atxu Amann Alcocer, Flavio Martella, ‘Greening the occupation: colonial landscape regulation in Palestine-Israel’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

17May25

Abstract: Historically, the modification of the landscape through afforestation has been instrumentalized in the service of the colonization of the territory. In this context, the construction of green areas in Palestine-Israel in the twentieth century can be interpreted as an exercise of strategic territorial control linked to the Zionist project. The planting of forests under the Forest Ordinance of 1926 in the territory acquired by Israel, the cultivation of olives associated with Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 in the West Bank, and the designation of Parks and Nature Reserves thanks to the National Parks Law of 1998 alongside Order 373 in the West Bank are three interventions that demonstrate the synergy between plantations and prevailing regulations. Through its analysis, this article reveals the landscape as a material result of surveillance technologies and argues that green areas in Palestine-Israel are covertly instrumentalized against rootedness, autonomous reproduction, mobility, self-determination, and the memory of the Palestinian people, masking a colonization strategy according to a model of territorial ethnic cleansing.


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More settler colonial necropolitics: Robert L. Nelson, Frontiers of Empire: Max Sering, Inner Colonization, and the German East, 1871-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2025

17May25

Description: How did the homesteads and reservations of the Prairies of Western North America influence German colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Europe? Max Sering, a world-famous agrarian settlement expert, stood on the Great Plains in 1883 and saw Germany’s future in Eastern Europe: a grand scheme of frontier settlement. Sering was a key figure in the evolution of Germany’s relationship with its eastern frontier, as well as in the overall transformation of the German Right from the Bismarckian 1880s to the Hitlerian 1930s. ‘Inner colonization’ was the settlement of farmers in threatened borderland areas within the nation’s boundaries. Focusing on this phenomenon, Frontiers of Empire complicates the standard thesis of separation between the colonizing country and the colonized space, and blurs the typical boundaries between colonizer and colonized subjects. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.


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Settler colonial necropolitics: Ian Klinke, Life, Earth, Colony: Friedrich Ratzel’s Necropolitical Geography, University of Michigan Press, 2025

17May25

Description: Life, Earth, Colony explores the ideas, life, and historical significance of German zoologist turned geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), famous for developing the foundations of geopolitical thought. Ratzel produced a remarkable body of work that revolutionized the study of space, movement, colonization, and war. He also served as a source of intellectual inspiration for national socialism, particularly through his Lebensraum (living space) concept, which understood all life as being caught in an eternal struggle for space. This book closely analyzes this radical conservative intellectual, focusing on his often-overlooked ethnography, biogeography, travel, and creative writing, and colonial activism as well as his more widely-known political geography. Life, Earth, Colony finds that there is an as yet unexplored necropolitical impulse at the heart of Ratzel’s entire oeuvre, a preoccupation with death and dying, which had a profound impact on twentieth-century history.


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