settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism as necropolitics: Mehak Bakshi, Sandeep Kumar Sharma, ‘The Necropolitical Order: Indigenous Marginality and Sovereign Power in Settler Colonialism’, Library Progress International, 44, 3, 2024, pp. 5131-5240

10Oct24

Abstract: This paper examines the concept of the necropolitical order as it manifests within the context of settler colonialism, focusing on the relationship between Indigenous marginality and sovereign power. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Achille Mbembe, Patrick Wolfe, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, we argue that settler colonialism operates as a distinct form of necropower, one that seeks to eliminate Indigenous peoples not only physically but also culturally and politically. The paper analyses how land dispossession, genocide, legal frameworks, and ongoing systemic inequalities function as mechanisms of necropolitical control, producing and maintaining Indigenous marginality. We explore how settler states assert sovereignty through the control of life and death, shaping the life chances of Indigenous populations and limiting their ability to exercise self-determination. Furthermore, the paper examines Indigenous resistance movements and decolonial struggles as forms of counter-necropower, challenging the settler colonial order and asserting Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. This paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the ongoing struggles for Indigenous rights and justice by analysing the necropolitical dimensions of settler colonialism.

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Inappropriate settlers: Jamie Marie Lukow, Inappropriate Settlers And East End Heathens: The Philanthropic Abduction Of The British Home Children, MA dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: This project captures the intricacies of the BHC movement’s eugenic philosophy from the British perspective starting in 1868, charting its origins within Poor Law policy and Galtonian theory, as well as establishing its pervasive presence within in the works of Thomas Barnardo and William Booth. For this research, I utilize dozens of primary and secondary sources including, but not limited to, the entire collection of Dr. Thomas John Barnardo’s self-funded publications and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. I also demonstrate how the eugenic philosophy undergirding the British Home Children Movement originated in Britain. Inappropriate Settlers and East End Heathens: The Philanthropic Abduction of the British Home Children. This project establishes the survivors of the British Home Children Movement as settler colonial anomalies whose complicated identities as well as resistance to settler colonial constructs contributed to their mistreatment in the settler Dominion of Canada. Undergirding this research are primary and secondary sources in the form of periodicals, philanthropic publications, and personal testimonies which illuminate how the Home Children’s experiences share drastic similarities with the First Nations Children forced into residential homes across Canada. My research also incorporates the works of immigration and British Poor Law scholars like Sally Brooke Cameron and Lydia Murdoch to establish the transatlantic tensions which rendered the subjects of the British Home Children Movement as settler colonial outcasts with no home or heritage. This parallels the First Nations Children of Canada who were abducted from their families, dispossessed of their heritage and homelands, and shunned by the invading settler community. In its paying attention to the Home Children’s abductions, institutionalizations, and burials within mass unmarked graves across Canadian provinces, this project challenges the settler colonial binary and reestablishes the Home Children as what historian Patricia Rooke calls “inappropriate settlers.”

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Landed settler republic: Mary Shi, Settlers’ Republic: Land, Infrastructure, and the Emergence of New Technologies of Government in the United States, 1789-1862, PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: This dissertation puts land at the center of the American state formation to analyze the emergence of the American administrative and developmental state. As the first nation to emerge from revolt against colonial rule, in the United States empire and republicanism collided to produce a settlers’ republic. Therein, it was through the work of acquiring, surveying, and selling land; promoting infrastructure projects such as canals and railways; and managing western territories that a people wary of centralized authority paradoxically found themselves building an expansive, bureaucratized, and increasingly developmental American state. Significantly, with so much of the activity of the early American state directed towards the acquisition, settlement, and incorporation of land, territory emerged as the orienting object of government. Territory was reimagined a space to be governed—to be improved, economized, and developed in the nation’s interest. It was in pursuing settlers’ visions of an empire for liberty that early Americans found themselves building the administrative institutions and ways of relating government to territory, economy, and society now pervasive in today’s nation-states. I make this argument in a series of studies. In the first, I construct a novel dataset characterizing antebellum Congressional debate activity from 1789 to 1861 (N=12,658), to demonstrate that the majority of early Congressional activity was concerned with acquiring, defending, and transforming land. Theorizing this centrality of land requires considering how modern state formation involved not only the expansion and bureaucratization of state administrative capacities, but also a transition from expansive empires of difference to territorially, economically, and socially contiguous nation-states. In the United States, this transition occurred via settler colonial practices of territorial incorporation such as, in the antebellum period, the integration of new states on equal political footing, and the construction of transportation and communication infrastructures. In the second study, I examine the period in the United States before it was taken-for-granted that government should promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways to stimulate what is now called economic development. I demonstrate how the public lands—the broad swathes of land in the national domain for which title had not been transferred to private owners—were repeatedly called upon as a fiscal resource, thereby allowing early American state builders the flexibility to experiment with various institutional arrangements and new governmental rationalities to justify government support of infrastructures. Crucially, to mobilize the public lands in this way, early American state builders relied on assumptions of Native dispossession and erasure. These assumptions lowered the perceived costs of mobilizing the public lands as a fiscal resource, and institutionalized processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure in American political and economic development. In a third study, I analyze the legislative debates leading up to the authorization of the first transcontinental railroad as a window into how federalism complicated territorial expansion and development. I theorize federalism as the outgrowth of empire to demonstrate how federalism territorialized understandings of sovereignty, thereby rendering decisions over territorial expansion and development politically destabilizing in ways that they would not be under empire. I analyze the debates leading up to the passage of the 1862 Pacific Railway Act to examine how federalism complicated territorial development in practice. The fact that the railroad could not be approved until after the outbreak of the Civil War, which removed Southern sectional interests from Congress, illustrates the limitations of federalist systems to make decisions over land. Because federalism allows legislators to sidestep conflict by excluding dissenting positions via the re-drawing or strategic selection of political boundaries, federalism does not incentivize meaningful compromise over questions of territorial development. I conclude by sketching the evolution of the United States’ settler political economy. I discuss how the various efforts to manage land examined in detail above were situated in the United States’ evolving land policy, administrative capacities, and governmental rationalities. From the General Land Office to the Department of Interior, it was to meet the demands of managing vast territories that some of the United States’ earliest and most technocratic administrative agencies were established. And it was from the bird’s eye view of those agencies that early American state builders experimented with ways of promoting and optimizing public welfare using land policy that echo the economizing reasoning of today. Analyzing the United States as a settlers’ republic makes visible the trade-offs and exclusions constitutive of American state formation and establishes the central role that land played in American political and economic development. By doing so, this dissertation points to the horizon needing to be transformed therein to perfect democratic government and reimagine relationships between land, government, and people more generally.

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Unhealthy settler colonialism: Mary Wicks, Christine Hampshire, Jeannie Campbell, Sian Graham, Louise Maple-Brown, Renae Kirkham, ‘Us and them: colonialism and racism in remote Aboriginal healthcare discourse’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: Background: The origins of modern Australia are settler colonialist, the logic of which initiated theft of land and attempted erasure of First Nations peoples. This study explores the role of non-Aboriginal Health Care Workers (HCWs) in the ongoing settler colonial project and the formation of mental models that lead to dualistic discourse embodying structural and interpersonal racism. Methods: Using van Dijk’s sociocognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis, colonial ideology, HCW mental models and discourse about Aboriginal people were explored. Results: The dualistic categorisation of Us and Them underlies racist discourse around responsibility, dependence, health, illness and the role of culture in health. HCWs had poorly conceived ideas about cultural safety and demonstrated hierarchical thinking, exclusion and collusion in racism. Conclusions: Remote HCWs will continue to propagate the ideology of settler colonialism unless cultural safety, critical reflexivity and anti-racism training are prioritised in cultural training.

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Writing the history of historyless places: Anna Clark, ‘What is history in a settler colonial society? Mapping the limits and possibilities of ethical historiography using an Australian case study’, History and Theory, 2024

09Oct24

Abstract: In recent decades, the role of the history discipline as part of the architecture of colonization has become more visible and better understood. Such acknowledgement reflects foundational shifts in historical practice and theory prompted by transdisciplinary and transnational scholarship in fields such as postcolonial and settler-colonial studies, First Nations knowledges, and historical perspectives and practices contextualized by transatlantic slavery. Their intervention in turn prompted a vital question: How do we map settler-colonial historiography if the discipline has been complicit in the settler-colonial project? Using Australian historiography as a case study, this article explores how History has been part of the architecture of colonization, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. Drawing on the work of Indigenous history-makers and knowledge-holders, it also points to ways that researchers might reach outside the traditional scope of historiography to map and contemplate the range of history-making that comprises history in the settler colony.

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The labour of settler colonialism: Maria Almeida Reis, “Práticos na terra”: Arguing for Indigenous Labor and Colonial Development in Portuguese America, 1532-1757, PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2024

05Oct24

Abstract: This dissertation traces the debates over the regulation of Indigenous labor in PortugueseAmerica. I follow these debates as they first unraveled in the northeastern sugar-planting regions of sixteenth-century Brazil, and then as they traveled to the State of Maranhão and Grão-Pará, a Portuguese colony in the eastern Amazon that was administered separately from the State of Brazil. I draw from extensive research in multiple imperial archives, with manuscript sources in Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, to analyze the development of a school of thought among sectors of the settler population that argued for Indigenous slave-trading and/or increased settler access to Indigenous workers in mission villages. I show how settlers and their opponents manipulated a portfolio of arguments to demand different labor regimes and policies. In their arguments for increased access to Indigenous laborers, settlers claimed that they were poor, that they were dependent on Indigenous skilled labor, that relying on Indigenous workers was more practical than relying on enslaved Africans, and that Indigenous peoples were “práticos na terra,” or experienced in the land, and thus the best-equipped workers in the region. I thus draw attention to the ubiquity of “pragmatic” arguments to labor debates, focusing on how settlers wielded ideas of utility, feasibility, poverty, and the common good, to make their demands. Countering the historiographical assumption that Europeans had a long-standing preference for African enslaved labor, my dissertation argues that Maranhão was a colony where a great variety of ideologies about Indigenous and African peoples were tested, questioned, and reconceptualized across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, Portuguese ideas about Indigenous peoples’ proclivity to work were much more nuanced than the historiography has posited. With time, these arguments became increasingly racialized, as settlers activated ideas about the Indigenous versus the African body and correlated skin color to one’s ability to work. Furthermore, settler arguments demanding greater access to Indigenous laborers often implicitly and explicitly contested the framework of “disease, flight, and capacity to work,” a framework long embraced by the historiography as an explanation for the rise of African slavery in the Americas. In their arguments, settlers in Maranhão wielded their on-the-ground experiences to contend that Indigenous labor was more practical than relying on the trans- Atlantic slave trade, that disease outbreaks justified more slave-trading, and that Indigenous peoples were more apt to the kinds of work required for Amazonian production. Thus, I argue that this framework was as much a constructed argument subject to debate as it was an explanation of a material reality.

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The military as settler: Juliet Nebolon, Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai’i and the Making of US Empire, Duke University Press, 2024

05Oct24

Description: Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of home front and war front. In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi, even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers. Nebolon identifies settler militarism’s inherent contradiction: It depends on life, labor, and land to reproduce itself, yet it avariciously consumes, via violent and extractive projects, those same lives and natural resources that it needs to subsist. From vaccination and blood bank programs to the administration of internment and prisoner-of-war camps, Nebolon reveals how settler militarism and racial liberal biopolitics operated together in the service of capitalism. Collectively, the social reproduction of these regimes created the conditions for the late-twentieth-century expansion of US military empire.

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Plausibly genocidal settler colonialism: Fabiola Celenza, Colonial legacies, dehumanization, and international law: analysis of the Gaza genocide ; historical foundations, theoretical perspective, and legal implications, MA dissertation, University College Dublin, 2024

04Oct24

Abstract: The roots of the plausible genocide in Palestine lie in more than a century of colonial history that has profoundly shaped the region. Indeed, the war between Israel and Hamas since Oct. 7 is not an isolated phenomenon, but the result of colonial legacies and power dynamics. This research will analyze the influence of colonial legacies in international response and implementation of law in the alleged genocide in Gaza. In addition, theoretical perspectives on dehumanization and international law are analyzed to assess how these frameworks address human rights violations against Palestinians. The hypothesis posits that historical and colonial power dynamics shape international reactions and legal measures. Using critical analysis of historical texts, official statements, and media reports, the study assesses the role of colonial history and dehumanization in the war. It finds that these factors significantly affect international responses, exposing systemic biases and shortcomings in legal frameworks. Despite existing human rights instruments, legal responses are often hindered by political and historical influences. To improve justice and accountability in Gaza genocide, the international community must address these colonial legacies and strive to decolonize legal and diplomatic frameworks. Keywords: Israeli-Palestinian question, Gaza, genocide, colonialism, human rights violations, international law, dehumanization.

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Recognising settler colonialism: Jennifer Adese, Aboriginal TM: The Cultural and Economic Politics of Recognition, University of Manitoba Press, 2022

04Oct24

Description: In Aboriginal™, Jennifer Adese explores the origins, meaning, and usage of the term “Aboriginal” and its displacement by the word “Indigenous.” In the Constitution Act, 1982, the term’s express purpose was to speak to specific “aboriginal rights”. Yet in the wake of the Constitution’s passage, Aboriginal, in its capitalized form, became increasingly used to describe and categorize people. More than simple legal and political vernacular, the term Aboriginal (capitalized or not) has had real-world consequences for the people it defined. Aboriginal™ argues the term was a tool used to advance Canada’s cultural and economic assimilatory agenda throughout the 1980s until the mid-2010s. Moreover, Adese illuminates how the word engenders a kind of “Aboriginalized multicultural” brand easily reduced to and exported as a nation brand, economic brand, and place brand—at odds with the diversity and complexity of Indigenous peoples and communities. In her multi-disciplinary research, Adese examines the discursive spaces and concrete sites where Aboriginality features prominently: the Constitution Act, 1982; the 2010 Vancouver Olympics; the “Aboriginal tourism industry”; and the Vancouver International Airport. Reflecting on the term’s abrupt exit from public discourse and the recent turn toward Indigenous, Indigeneity, and Indigenization, Aboriginal™ offers insight into Indigenous-Canada relations, reconciliation efforts, and current discussions of Indigenous identity, authenticity, and agency.

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Paternalist settler colonialism: Ashraf Othman Bader, Asem Khalil, ‘Colonial Paternalism under Israeli Military Rule (1967-1977): “Social Welfare” as a Tool of Control’, Al-Muntaqa, 7, 2, 2024, pp. 90-109

04Oct24

Abstract: This study examines the system of colonial paternalism that Israel imposed during the first decade of its post-1967 military rule over the Occupied Palestinian Territories . It interrogates the system’s legal and financial frameworks and forms of Palestinian resistance to it. Drawing on newly released archival material from the minutes of Directors-General Committee of Israeli ministries, records of Israeli military orders, and interviews with Palestinians, the study illustrates how the Israeli “social welfare” system cemented policies of control, regulation, and exploitation of the Palestinian population. It forced Palestinians into accepting financial arrangements and purchasing “subsidized” goods from the Israeli market, while simultaneously framing Israel as a caring guardian of their interests. The study enriches the theoretical debate on settler colonialism and the logic of policies governing the Palestinian population.

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