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Settler colonialism in contemporary Nigeria: Anthony Imeh Umoh, Barinaadaa Nwinkol, ‘Trends and Dynamics of Indigene/Settler Conflicts in Plateau State, 1994-2010’, Gnosi, 7, 2, 2024

15Jul24

Abstract: Plateau State is a vibrant mosaic of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and cultural communities. It boasts one of Nigeria’s highest concentrations of ethnic minorities, with over fifty-eight distinct groups residing within its borders. Since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999, the state has faced significant challenges in managing the complexities of indigene/settler dynamics and ethno-religious conflicts. While ethnic groups from various parts of Nigeria also live in Plateau State, the recurrent violent conflicts predominantly involve Hausa/Fulani settlers and the indigenous tribes. This paper delves into the patterns and intricacies of indigene/settler conflicts in Plateau State, analyzing their zero-sum nature where one group’s gain is perceived as another’s loss. It argues that the complexity of these conflicts is exacerbated by multiple interwoven factors, including ethnicity, religion, competition for scarce resources, and struggles for political and economic dominance. These factors collectively create a volatile environment, making conflict resolution particularly challenging. The study concludes that these persistent negative trends and dynamics have severely undermined the dividends of democracy in Plateau State. The ongoing conflicts have resulted in significant loss of life and property, leaving many homeless and exacerbating the socio-economic challenges faced by the state. This paper aims to shed light on the urgent need for comprehensive conflict management strategies to foster lasting peace and development in Plateau State.


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Settler colonial wars everywhere: Stefan Aune, Indian Wars EverywhereColonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire, University of California Press, 2023

15Jul24

Description: References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation “Geronimo” used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States’ formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the “savage wars” of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.


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The gender of contract under the settler contract (allow me a Patemanism): Elizabeth Bowyer, Women Contracting in Law c.1840-1920: Gender and settler colonialism in the courts of Aotearoa New Zealand, PhD dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2024

12Jul24

Abstract: This is a study of Māori and Pākehā women’s contracting and civil litigation in the first eighty years of the English common law in Aotearoa/New Zealand c.1840-1920. It provides the first detailed survey of how colonial women were acting as legal subjects under the civil law. Contracts included marriage, land purchases and sales, consumer contracts, labour, employment, and the buying and selling of goods and chattels and services. During this period the common law operated within highly imperialist values of liberal economic exchange and individual, male, property ownership in a land driven economy. Women’s ability to contract with another party, own property, their appearances in the courts of law and their legal subjecthood, was understood and determined by their marital status under the common law doctrine of coverture. Upon marriage, a woman’s legal status changed from feme sole to feme covert bringing her under the ‘cover’ of her husband. Coverture subsumed a woman’s legal existence under that of her husband meaning a woman’s ability to act under the common law was severely curtailed. Despite coverture, women appeared in contract cases in the colony’s courts in significant numbers and under diverse circumstances, forcing the courts to consider women as legal subjects. Māori women’s legal status under marriage law was distinct. Māori women were British legal subjects under article three of the Treaty of Waitangi and customary laws were recognised by the common law to facilitate Crown and settler land purchases. Marriage and property laws were changing over the period under review. The mobile and masculine colonial frontier meant geographical separations between married couples, desertion, legal separations and de facto relationships were common. The Married Women’s Property Protection Act 1860 and the Married Women’s Property Protection Act 1870 were utilised by women and increased their legal agency. Couples made use of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1867 and Divorce Act 1898. A husband’s death restored women’s property rights and many widows took on the task of managing family property. The Married Women’s Property Act 1884 redefined women as autonomous legal subjects who could own property under the common law and contract as autonomous legal persons. This study finds that common law doctrines were often unsuited to the realities of colonial life where families were economically dependent on wives’ labour and trading ability. Women operated as legal subjects who entered into legal agreements regularly, challenging orthodox legal applications and common law presumptions surrounding women’s relationship to property. Meanwhile, colonial conditions, married women’s property laws, divorce, widowhood and Māori customary law altered women’s standing before the law. Women, families, and the courts negotiated women’s complex legal position to facilitate law, order and the buying and selling of property within a system of colonisation that was concerned with organising property along gendered and racial lines.


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The inverse of settler motherhood: Cori Balsdon, ‘From “Mothers of the ‘Nation” to “Enemies of the State”: How the “Unfit” Indigenous Mother Holds the Power to Cultural Revolution’, Crossings, 4, 1, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: This paper explores how the colonial construction of Indigenous women as ‘unfit’ mothers of ‘inferior’ status justifies state interference in their lives, perpetuates other harmful stereotypes within the public consciousness and blames Indigenous mothers for their life conditions. Sterilization is but one weapon used by the Canadian state to violate Indigenous women’s right to reproductive autonomy, both historically and at present. Recent Canadian reports investigate Indigenous women’s claims to forced tubal ligation procedures and how coercion within colonial institutions stripped them of their power and identity through the removal of choice. Multiple class-action lawsuits are currently underway in Canada, where the voices of Indigenous women who have suffered the intergenerational impacts of colonialism in their daily lives and at the hands of western medical institutions are demanding justice and recognition of their basic human rights. Despite at least five generations of state-directed violence against them, Indigenous mothers continue to resist colonization of their bodies, land, and communities. Through reconnecting to their past, present, and future, Indigenous mothers are remembering their inherent roles and responsibilities as mothers of the nation. They have never forgotten their power nor their role as protectors of their people. They have always resisted. I aim to amplify the voices of Indigenous women in a country that has silenced them for too long and acknowledge that I by no means am interpreting their work through my point of view – I am giving them the space they deserve. 


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Mining settles on Indigenous lands: Paul J. White, ‘Mining Life Cycles and Indigenous Land Dispossession in North America: A View from the American West’, in  Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Filippo M. Zerilli, The Global Life of Mines,  Berghahn Books, 2024, pp. 113-139

11Jul24

Excerpt: A notable consistency in the history of Western mining is how often mineral extraction has been conducted with limited regard to the rights and well-being of indigenous peoples. In North America, the westward expansion of Euro-American enterprise during the nine-teenth century was intimately associated with the forced displacement of Native American and First Nation peoples from their land base. The general pattern remains evident today on the North American continent, as well as in interactions between Western mining enter-prises and indigenous peoples globally. Land loss has nevertheless taken many forms. Dispossession resulted from violent encounters as well as from the provisions of resource laws and global initiatives, and all of which have differed in their effects over time and space. This is to say that dispossession is perhaps best framed as an unfolding process rather than as an event with inevitable, evenly distributed impacts.Despite a robust and growing literature on the topic, historical treatments of interactions between miners and Native Americans occurring between the initial discovery rushes and the present day remain rare. An unintended consequence of this bifurcation in inter-est is that the discussion of mining heritage becomes similarly segre-gated into rush-era and post-rush era periods.


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The academic freedom of settlers: Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, ‘The Coloniality of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Exception’, Middle East Critique, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: This article reflects on my experience of being suspended and reinstated. It demonstrates how administrators, including those at my institution, knowingly violate academic freedom and free speech. Throughout, I discuss the institutional and political machinations seeking to silence dissident voices, particularly those who critique Israel and Zionist settler colonialism. The aim is to make more visible the linkages between external pressure and the capitulation of administrators influenced by donors. I highlight the university’s role in producing technologies of colonial violence used on Palestinian bodies and the significance of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In the subsequent sections, I critique the weaponization of antisemitism and the Palestine exception to academic freedom. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of speaking and writing truth to power during a genocide.


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Acknowledging Indigenous land in one place / disavowing it in another: Brenna Bhandar, ‘A Land Acknowledgment in a Different Key: Palestine, Solidarity and the Disruption of the Liberal Script’, Middle east Critique, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: Rather than the exception to an otherwise progressive intellectual environment in North American, and specifically Canadian universities, the suppression of speech related to Palestine reveals the racial limits of a settler-colonial liberal politics of acknowledgment and reconciliation. The mainstream or institutional conceptualisation of academic freedom does not address the structural racism and settler-colonial realities within which Canadian universities are embedded, rendering them as ‘natural’ allies for Israeli institutions and state practices. A complicated, if revealing, moment of exposure of the limits of the liberal script of reconciliation is the land acknowledgment, which has become, since October 2023, an opportunity grasped by some critical scholars to acknowledge the links between the ongoing genocide in Palestine and settler colonialism across Turtle Island. Tracing the oppositional functions of the land acknowledgment, this article exposes the political limits of a liberal racial order, which is explicitly challenged by expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation.


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The tent of settler colonial studies – a tent in a field? Antoinette Burton, ‘Beyond the big tent: recontextualizing settler colonial studies’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: This reflection on the field of Settler Colonial Studies uses the “big tent” metaphor to ask what is seen to be encompassed in the field; who is left out and how attached its practitioners are not just to teleology but to the dialectic logics of colonialism itself. Drawing on Burton’s 30 years of work in the field of colonial and imperial history, it queries some of the premises of settler colonial studies’ remit asks how attention to gender and sexuality impacts the direction of the field and posits the dialectic alongside telos as a site of critical tension for thinking about approaches to subject and method.


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Defining settler colonial studies: Sidney X. Lu, ‘Defining settler colonialism: thinking with categories and concepts’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: This essay critically analyzes a few key concepts central to the field of Settler Colonial Studies by responding to Cyrus Schayegh’s article, ‘Settler Colonial Studies: A Historical Analysis.’ It aims to challenge a series of West-centered conventional assumptions and start the dialogue that would re-define the field and its significance in the years to come.


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The story of settler colonial studies: Cyrus Schayegh, ‘Settler colonial studies: a historical analysis’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: This text is a historical analysis of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). Partly because most SCS scholars in principle only see those polities as settler colonies whose settlers eventually became a majority and gained independence—i.e. principally the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand—some historians have critiqued it. At the same time, historians have used it to revisit their research. Throughout, though, they have engaged SCS in area- and period-specific journals, without bundling their insights. This historical analysis of SCS addresses that issue. It has two parts. As shorter first part unpacks the historical-political background for SCS’s Anglo-bias: the similar and linked domestic political trajectories of Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia’s indigenous peoples from the 1950s and their centrality in the internationalization of indigenous politics from the late 1960s to the 1990s. A longer second part analyzes three issues both central to SCS and relevant to historians: structuralism, colonialism versus settler colonialism, and the settler-native binary.


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