settler colonial studies blog

Leveraging the settler ecostory: Caitlin Morton, Settler Colonialism and the Australian Environment: A Sociolegal Discourse Analysis of Decolonising Narratives Mobilised by First Nations Peoples in Modern Australian Environmental Conflicts, PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: This thesis uses a historical discourse analysis of sociolegal narratives mobilised by First Nations peoples in environmental conflicts in modern Australia to develop three case studies on (1) the Wild Rivers Act 2005, (2) the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (3) the McArthur River mine. Each case triggered social, legal, and political action by affected Traditional Owners who mobilised narratives that contributed to decolonisation by critiquing and replacing colonial assumptions about the environment and environmental governance. The sources evidencing these decolonising narratives are diverse, reflecting the diverse forms of legal, social, and political participation within First Nations peoples’ resistance to ongoing settler colonialism and its effects on their lands and waters. It is this fact that necessitates the analysis of a broad scope of sources such as petitions; open letters; protest narratives; and legal documents such as court transcripts, submissions, and reports, with O’Brien (2018) providing important precedents for decolonising projects based on the extensive historical study of petitions and related documents. By exploring the sociolegal achievements and narrations of First Nations peoples (individually and collectively) asserting rights to their lands and waters, this research adopts a decolonising approach adept at critiquing and replacing colonial normativity (Mignolo, 2009, 2021). This approach allows the research to answer questions on how decolonisation is framed by First Nations peoples within public debates about the environment, and the implications for understanding environmental politics and policy in Australia and other settler colonial contexts. The results, which are particularised to each case, support the overall argument that the mobilisations and narrations of First Nations peoples defending their lands and waters are decolonising because they critique and replace colonial environmental norms in public fora.

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The death of settler colonialism: Rye Purvis, ‘A conceptual review of a land-informed Native American Death Pedagogy: Overcoming settler colonialism and the Western Death System’, Death Studies, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: Land is central to and holds agency in death and dying belief and knowledge systems within Native American communities in North America. these land-informed belief and knowledge systems serve as the foundation for a Native American Death pedagogy. possibilities and futurities of Native American Death pedagogy has been negatively impacted by historical and ongoing effects of settler colonialism. As settler colonialism functions to eliminate Native American lifeways, it simultaneously makes space to replace with Western socio-political systems and frameworks. for death and dying practices, these Western socio-political systems and frameworks can be referred to as a Western Death System—an expansion of Robert Kastenbaum’s theory of the Death System. through experiential knowledge and a conceptual review, this article will address the significance of land in Native American Death pedagogy and the challenges from the Western Death System.

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Once they were migrants (then they were settlers): Fotios Papadopoulos, From migrants to settlers: the history of Greek communities in colonial Zimbabwe and Tanganyika, 1890s-1960, PhD dissertation, EUI, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: This doctoral thesis examines the position of Greek migrants in the colonial societies of sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on their transformation from migrants to settlers. Through the cases of colonial Zimbabwe and Tanzania from the 1890s to the 1950s, it explores how Greeks, as marginal Europeans without a colonial background, were positioned both materially and culturally within these societies. Although generally classified as Europeans in the 20th century, Greeks lacked direct colonial rule background, having themselves been subjects of British and Italian rule in the Ionian Islands, Cyprus, and the Dodecanese. The study argues that Greek migrants’ racial and settler status was fluid, shaped by their economic activities, class, and interactions with European settlers, indigenous communities, and other immigrant groups, such as Indians. In the early period (1890s– 1920s), most Greeks worked as laborers, small shopkeepers, or traders with indigenous populations, often occupying peripheral roles in colonial society. However, from the late 1920s to the 1960s, their status shifted: in Southern Rhodesia, Greeks entered politics and even held mayoral positions in major cities, while in Tanganyika, they acquired extensive agricultural estates—land ownership on a scale rarely seen in their homeland. This dissertation examines the conditions that allowed only certain social classes to access the privileges of settler colonialism and how individuals from a non-imperial background—lacking capital, foreign language skills, and religious or ethnic alignment with ruling elites—were able to integrate into, and sometimes thrive within, colonial structures. Ultimately, it challenges approaches to settler colonialism as an exclusive domain of imperial powers, demonstrating how ‘smaller’ European migrant communities strategically navigated, participated and even influenced colonial systems.

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Not necessarily vulnerable: Jade Jenkinson, ‘Contemporary Crises, Historical Antecedents: Refusing Vulnerability in Indigenous Speculative Fictions’, Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) Empire of Wild (2019) and Jessica Johns’s (Cree) Bad Cree (2023) refuse to frame the violent events at their centre as isolated or incidental. Instead, authors situate crises within the long historical continuum of settler-colonialism and its impact on Indigenous communities in Canada. Catriona Mackenzie et al.’s expansive intersectional taxonomy of vulnerability defines its pathogenic variant as emerging from entrenched ‘sociopolitical oppression or injustice.’ Pathogenic vulnerability demonstrates how specific groups can experience conditions that render them more vulnerable to violence. In this article, I argue Dimaline and Johns utilise speculative tropes to interrogate widespread decontextualised state narratives of individual vulnerability. Violent events are alternatively narrated as products of their specific context – the conditions of pathogenic vulnerability conferred upon Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations. A central protagonist’s individual search for truth foregrounds narrative engagement with contemporary issues facing communities – Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2s) statistics, land grabs, state sponsored industrialism and environmental and psychological devastation within post- extraction communities. Yet authors resist reasserting victim paradigms or employing a reconciliatory politics. Speculative tropes instead encourage what Jo-Ann Archibald (Stó:lō) calls storywork. Such tropes, which denaturalise violent encounters, encourage lateral thinking via nested narratives/metanarratives and embed both traditional monsters and alternative worlds, instigate storywork through inciting deeper reader engagement while foregrounding Indigenous agency, knowledge and resistance.

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Growing settlers thinking about settler colonialism: Robert Petrone, ‘”I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help”: An examination of how Firekeeper’s Daughter educates about settler colonialism’, Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, 54, 2025, pp. 73-85

21Nov25

Abstract: This essay offers an examination of various ways Angeline Boulley’s best-selling, award-winning Indigenous Young Adult novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter attends to and educates about settler colonialism. At the core of this analysis is the guiding question: In what ways does Firekeeper’s Daughter illuminate the ongoing social structure of settler colonialism within the context of what is currently known as “The United States”? Specifically, this analysis focuses on the topics of Native identity, including colonial mechanism of blood quantum; and the ways institutions such as the FBI operate from values and epistemologies of compartmentalization and deficit notions of Native Peoples. Across this analysis, the overarching goal is to demonstrate how Firekeeper’s Daughter educates about how settler colonialism as structural, contemporary, and ongoing—baked into current social systems.

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Settlers out of time and out of place: Linda Andersson Burnett, ‘The “Savage” Within: The Sámi People and the Archaeology of Whiteness’, Isis, 116, 4, 2025, pp. 766-777

21Nov25

Abstract: In this article, I will examine how the Swedish zoologist and archaeologist Sven Nilsson (1787–1883) constructed what I refer to here as the archaeology of whiteness. Whiteness denotes here a racialized and colonial epistemic venture that positioned Europeans at an “evolutionary advantage” over Indigenous and colonized peoples. Specifically, I will analyze how Nilsson’s writing denied the Sámi people, Indigenous to Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula of Russia, any sense of temporal “coevalness” with Europeans and how they were marked as racially and temporally different from other European inhabitants. I will conclude by addressing the colonial and political implications of this denial of Sámi historical motion, particularly in the context of how narratives of Sámi “savagery” and their supposed extinction were entangled with the increased extraction of natural resources from Sámi territories in Sweden and settler colonialism.

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Settler dishumanitarianism: Ron J. Smith, ‘A failure of humanitarianism: the West, Settler Colonialism, and the Manufactured crisis in Gaza’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

21Nov25

Abstract: Gaza has been subject to numerous manufactured humanitarian crises since 2006, a year after the Israeli withdrawal of civilian settlers across the strip. Many of these crises are supported by the refusal of the West to recognise the sovereignty of the Palestinian people and their basic human rights. The starvation and total collapse of the health of Gazan people is not simply a matter of neglect, but rather an active process of dispossession that began with the numerous proposals for the splitting of historical Palestine, and the advent of the Palestinian refugee problem with the establishment of the state of Israel. This paper considers the history of the West’s contentious relationship with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from its conception to the present day. This history includes long-term shortfalls in promised financial support to UNRWA across the Middle East and existential crises for the agency due to funding withheld based on flimsy accusations. The paper will examine demands to end the agency in favour of others even further removed from the goal of refugee return and resettlement.

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The roots of settler colonial architecture: Andrew Herscher, ‘Anishinaabe Forests, American Lumber, Settler Balloon Frames’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 84, 4, 2025, pp. 512-526

21Nov25

Abstract: The balloon frame is commonly viewed as a nineteenth-century construction innovation that enabled rapid house building across the United States. This article recontextualizes the balloon frame in relation to U.S. settler colonialism. This recontextualization proceeds through an examination of the harvesting of white pine timber on Anishinaabe homelands in Michigan, which provided much of the lumber from which balloon frames were constructed in the nineteenth century, and the use of the balloon frame by squatters and settlers on Anishinaabe and other Native homelands at the same time. The article also addresses the ways in which Anishinaabe communities engaged the lumber industry and the balloon-frame construction that this industry made possible, in both cases to support continuing inhabitation of their homelands. In the context of this historicization, the balloon frame appears as both a colonial technology for the seizure and plunder of Anishinaabe land and an Anishinaabe technology of survivance and sovereignty.

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Settler colonial planning: Alberto Toscano, ‘Planning Against Palestine’,Protean Magazine, 13/10/25

20Nov25

Excerpt: The GREAT plan (subtitled “From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally”), like its kin proposals, is also a recapitulation, recombination and acceleration of multiple forms and devices of domination emerging from the history of colonial racial capitalism. As a node in what it calls “the Abrahamic fabric” of this imperial region, the political form to be taken by Gaza is that of a “U.S.-led multilateral custodianship.” The Trust, we are told, will govern Gaza “for a transition period until a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity is ready to step in its shoes.” To implement this structure of antipolitical governance—an echo of the UN Mandate system which regarded certain populations as unready (or in the case of Palestinians, unfit) for self-governance without European tutelage—this machine to void Palestinian sovereignty, premised on the subaltern’s willingness to mature into a willing and pacific client, GREAT includes its own productions of neocolonial space, namely what it terms “Hamas-free humanitarian transition zones.” Presented with operational maps, these “humanitarian transitions areas,” to be managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and then a “hybrid security framework,” are the not-very-distant descendants of the British practice of resettlement into “new villages” in Kenya and Malaya, the French policy of regroupement in Algeria, and United States’s own strategy of “hamletization” in Vietnam. Demonstrating the sheer continuity in the ruling imaginary of counterinsurgency, the very design of the “New Gaza,” with its golf courses and green areas, draws on the history of social war in the imperial metropolis itself. As we can read in one of the slides: “Like Haussman’s strategy in 19th century Paris, this plan aims to address one of Gaza’s ongoing insurgency’s root causes: its urban design.” Felicitously, spatial discipline can now be complemented by cybernetic control, once “all services and economy in these cities will be done through ID-based AI-powered digital system.” But GREAT has a much wider horizon than the mere management of pacification in the wake of genocide. In the breathlessly vapid language of venture-capitalist visionaries, it sings of raising billions in public private investment, employing an “innovative funding model” that would combine some kind of “tokenized” “land trust” whose returns would be invested in a “Wealth Fund for Gaza.” Gaza’s value, now estimated at 0 dollars, would rise in ten years to over $300 billion (accompanied by “1 million jobs”). Critical to GREAT’s vision is the idea of Gaza as a “hub” in a vast logistical-extractive-productive regional complex to compete with China. The establishment of the “New Gaza” would serve to accelerate the profitable integration of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and transform the Strip into the “center of pro-American regional architecture,” securing economic, political, and military power over the circulation of energy, capital, and commodities (special attention is given to “rare-earth minerals”). As Ziadah argues, what “is being imagined is not recovery for [Gaza’s] residents, but the conversion of Gaza into a logistics centre serving IMEC,” “a corporatized trusteeship for global capital”. In GREAT, she concludes, “Gaza is described less as a society than as a distressed asset to be flipped. This is disaster capitalism at its sharpest. It is devastation reframed as the precondition for speculative profit.”

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German settlers in the Far East: Vladimir N. Shaidurov, ‘The German Population of Siberia amid Social Transformations, 1900s–1920s’, Journal of Frontier Studies, 4, 2025

18Nov25

Abstract: At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Siberia once again became a “melting pot” that brought together representatives of diverse ethnic groups. The reasons for migration beyond the Urals were predominantly economic. This article examines how various social events in the first third of the 20th century affected the lives of Siberian Germans. Amid the agrarian crisis, Russian Germans engaged in agriculture were compelled to seek ways to survive within Russia. The modernization of the state resettlement policy in the early 20th century and the expansion of rail transport created favorable conditions for labor migration, as a result of which, by the mid-1910s, Siberia had become one of the most rapidly developing agrarian regions. German settlers played no small part in this process by establishing capitalist family-farm enterprises that served as models for Russian oldsettlers and other migrants. The events of 1914–1922 disrupted the established rhythms of German rural life. The economic policies of the Bolsheviks who came to power precipitated famine in the first half of the 1920s. The German population suffered as well, which fueled growing emigration sentiment. Even so, the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the revival of cooperatives enabled a rapid recovery of small scale commodity production. The All-Russian Mennonite Agricultural Union played an important role in this process. The gradual rollback of the NEP and the shift to a command-administrative economic model brought increasing pressure to bear on the German population, among which conservative clerical sentiments predominated. By the late 1920s, this would trigger a new round of confrontation between Russian Germans and the Soviet state. This article will interest readers concerned with the history of ethnic minorities (Russian Germans) and nationalities policy in the 20th century.

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