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Heavenly terra nullius: Emily Ray, Sean Parson, ‘Caelum Nullius: Outer Space and the Colonial Logic of Property Rights’, Theory & Event, 28, 1, 2025, pp. 67-96

03Jan25

Abstract: Reimagining outer space as enclosed and privatized reinforces liberal property rights as universal and necessary to space programs. New space policies mark a return to terra nullius and a narrow conception of land-use that determines property rights. The liberal and colonial logic of property rights affirms hegemonic narratives of space as a limitless environment with no prior property claims. We analyze outer-space policies and the relationships between state and capital. We draw from Anker on Lockean freedom and Nichols on constructing property through theft. We argue that corporate colonization of space reinscribes the logic of settler-colonialism in space exploration.


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Neuro-settler decolonsation: Rochelle Star, ‘Reclaiming Wellness: The Land, Neurodecolonization, and Indigenous Resilience’, Convergence/ia/e, 45, 2, 2024, pp. 164-178

02Jan25

Excerpt: Indigenous knowledge systems provide a comprehensive, interconnected framework for understanding health, wellness, and resilience, particularly through the relationship with land. Colonization severed many of these relationships, leading to cultural, psychological, and physical trauma among Indigenous peoples. The process of neurodecolonization offers a way to heal these historical and ongoing traumas by re-integrating traditional practices—grounded in the land—with modern therapeutic techniques such as mindfulness, somatic experiencing, and intentional land-based healing.


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Formalising title, formalising settler colonial land regimes: Oren Shlomom, Michal Braier, ‘Threats and ambivalence in land formalization: The case of settler-colonial land regime in East Jerusalem/al-Quds’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024

02Jan25

Abstract: Urban land formalization, i.e., land titling and registration, is commonly viewed as a primary policy tool for addressing urban poverty and fostering socioeconomic and spatial development, especially in the urban informalities of the Global Southeast. While critical perspectives on urban land formalization highlight the threats and risks associated with the market-driven logic of land formalization, in this paper, we examine the perils of displacement and property rights erosion in the context of settler colonial land regime. Through the analysis of Israel’s initiative to formalize Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, we contend that risks and benefits of land formalization programs are contingent upon the land regime whithin which they are implemented. We demonstrate how potential benefits of land formalization, alongside its potential threats, produce ambivalence among target communities. This ambiguity becomes ingrained in settler colonial land practices of land formalisation and translates into noncooperation by Palestinians with the Israeli land formalization initiative. Thus, we emphasize the significance of analyzing local land regimes and politics to better understand the specific threats and opportunities and their impact on target communities.


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Visualising settler colonial erasure: Azza El Hassan, The Afterlife of Palestinian Images Visual Remains and the Archive of Disappearance, Palgrave, 2024

01Jan25

Description: The Afterlife of Palestinian Images is a groundbreaking study of how colonial violence alters and changes visual objects – which in turn affects how a society and culture relates to its own images. Based on the practice-based creative methodology of Palestinian filmmaker and researcher Azza El Hassan, this book explores the re-use and re-appropriation of photos, film and media equipment that have survived looting and destruction, objects which become a constant reminder of what was and what has been lost. El Hassan goes beyond using these visual remains as simple evidence, demonstrating how artistic engagement can reconfigure them into new narratives and establish a renewed sense of cultural identity. While previous research has explored why colonial structures practice native archive plundering, as well as into how a culture reckons with the absence of archival records, this book uniquely addresses how plundered cultures relate to the actual remains of their archives. As a scholar and an artist, El Hassan reconciles a problematic past and present in the search for a new visual experience emerging out of the ruins, finding ways to move forward after destruction.


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Settlers seen from Korea: Nak-chung Paik, ‘Settler Colonialism and the “Open Road”: Apropos of Studies in Classic American Literature’, In/outside: English studies in Korea, 47, 2024, pp. 5-25

31Dec24

Abstract: This paper begins by citing Lawrence’s prediction in Studies in Classic American Literature that in the near future the influence of dead Native Americans on U.S. society will begin to work in earnest and that some “real changes” will occur. I then go on to examine whether or not we in the twenty-first century actually witness Lawrence’s ‘real changes’, and to what extent they may be attributed to “the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians”, as asserted by Lawrence. This examination rests on two assumptions regarding Lawrence’s Studies: 1) that its historical narrative represents a highly iconoclastic yet essentially coherent rendering of the history of white settlers in North America and their settler colonialism; 2) that his readings of classic American authors too, for all the idiosyncrasy of expression, manage to capture the deep meaning behind the ‘duplicity’ that characterizes creative American works. In this narrative the sinking of the whaling ship Moby-Dick marks the final destruction of the white man’s ‘blood being’. Lawrence’s greatness lies, however, in his going beyond mere diagnosis and in finding in Whitman’s ‘Open Road’ a new vision of true democracy, “the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself”.


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Threatened! Danielle Endres, Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting, Ohio State University Press, 2023

29Dec24

Description: While research demonstrates how Indigenous populations have been disproportionately affected by the global nuclear production complex, less attention has been given to tactics that have successfully resisted such projects. Danielle Endres’s Nuclear Decolonization shifts the conversation around nuclear colonialism in important ways, offering an account of how the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Skull Valley Goshute peoples and nations prevented two high-level nuclear waste sites from being built on their lands. Using a decolonial approach, Endres highlights two sets of rhetorical tactics—Indigenous Lands rhetorics and national interest rhetorics—used to fight nuclear colonialism. The book reframes nuclear decolonization as fundamentally a struggle for the return of Indigenous lands while also revealing how Native activists selectively move between Indigenous nationhood and US citizenship in order to resist settler decision-making. Working at the intersection of Indigenous antinuclear advocacy, Indigenized environmental justice, and decolonization, Nuclear Decolonization centers Native activism and voices while amplifying the power and resilience of Indigenous peoples and nations.


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Threatened? Elian Weizman, ‘Thresholds of Threat: Processes of Criminalisation and Repression in the Israeli Settler State’, in Anna Di Ronco, Rossella Selmini (eds), Criminalization of Dissent in Times of Crisis, Palgrave, 2024, pp 333-355

29Dec24

Abstract: This chapter investigates processes of criminalisation and repression of dissident political activism of Israel’s citizens, both Palestinians and Jews, given the state’s particular political formation as a ‘liberal’ settler state. I argue that the operational logic of the settler state that guarantees the rights and privileges of the Jewish citizenry dictates the strategies used to tolerate, contain, limit or crush dissent altogether. This depends on the idea of threat that—for the settler state—is anyways always grounded in racial hierarchies. By unravelling the shifting threshold of threats, state vulnerabilities and fragility are exposed, in this way allowing us to gain a window into the precarity of such system of power as well as into the ways it can be challenged and transformed.


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Indigenous cultural health and wellbeing? Undesr settler colonialism? Brett J. Biles, Nina Serova, Gavin Stanbrook, Brooke Brady, Jonathan Kingsley, Stephanie M. Topp, Aryati Yashadhanab, ‘What is Indigenous cultural health and wellbeing? A narrative review, Lancet, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: Indigenous cultural health is an emerging field of research and reflects the unique connections Indigenous peoples have with their Country, culture, and knowledge systems. This narrative review explores the concept of cultural health focusing on the interplay between culture, health, and wellbeing within settler colonial contexts. The review is mostly focused on Australian research, despite its international scope. A narrative review methodology was employed, search terms were compiled, and a title and abstract search was executed across two databases (Scopus, PubMed), confined to English language papers, with a focus on Australia. Three key themes were identified: Country; culture, and Indigenous knowledges. Country is vital to health. Culture practices offer frameworks for healing nurturing the relationship between people, Country and culture. Privileging Indigenous knowledges is a means to achieving health and wellbeing. Indigenous cultural health encompasses the interconnectedness of Country, people and culture, demanding a holistic approach that integrates Indigenous knowledges and practices. In Australia, these core components of cultural health must be situated in a contemporary context of ongoing colonisation. This narrative review underscores the importance of culturally centred approaches in addressing health inequities and enhancing the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples.


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Settler Islamophobia is anti-Indigenous: Ryan Al-Natour, ‘“Not Yours to Reclaim”: White possessive logics and the Reclaim Australia movement of 2015-6’, Australian Journal of Social issues, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: Within settler colonial societies around the world, the racialisation of settlers of colour as “invaders” exemplifies how invasion paradoxes operate on Indigenous lands that remain both stolen and unceded. The Reclaim Australia movement was active in 2015–2016 and frequently denied its racism as it protested the presence of Muslims within Australian society. Whilst Islamophobia is a key defining feature of this movement, this article focusses on Reclaim Australia’s persistent expressions of anti-Indigenous racisms. In analysing this racist movement, I point out that it is not enough to observe that racist invasion narratives among settlers on stolen, unceded Indigenous lands are paradoxical. Rather, that a series of white possessive logics shape these racisms, as the movement produced two dichotomous narrations of Indigenous peoples that involved a commodified “Aboriginal friend” trope, or framed First Nations peoples as ungrateful “beneficiaries” of the colonial project that is Australia.


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The fence as a settler episteme: Lisa L. Stenmark, ‘Fences on the Epistemological Prairie: A Settler Colonial Approach to “Religion and Science”’, Religions, 15, 1, 2025, #3

27Dec24

Abstract: Building on the idea of religion and science as conceptual maps of intellectual territory, I use a settler colonial analysis as a framework for thinking about decolonizing religion and science in a way that moves away from abstraction and towards action; addressing not just the ideas, but the tools of control—the fences—that impose ideas on the territory itself. Comparing the Wyoming prairie with the epistemological prairie, I describe the maps, fences and other tools and technologies of settler colonialism used to appropriate Indigenous Land and knowledge, eventually turning it into private property. It is in this last step—the creation of private property—that fences are most important, because they are tools of ownership that do not merely restrict access to parts of the prairie (land and knowledge), but restrict movement on the prairie itself. I describe patents and intellectual property as examples of fences on the epistemological prairie. Because they are legally and historically connected to technologies of settler colonial appropriation of land—including terra nullius and land patents—they are an excellent example of the connection between land and epistemological territory, and show what epistemological decolonization can look like in practice.


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