settler colonial studies blog

The colony goes bananas: Nicole Khayat, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat,, ‘Bananas and the imaginary of progress: Eco-nationalism and agro-capitalism in Mandate-era Palestine’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 9, 1, 2025, pp. 53-74

10Mar26

Abstract: This article examines the role of banana plantations in the settler-colonial, capitalist transformation of Mandate-era Palestine. A microcosm of Zionist settlement and Indigenous Palestinian resistance, the cultivation of bananas reveals competing visions of development and national legitimacy, rooted in the cultural politics of ecological and economic nationalism. Framing banana cultivation in Palestine as a site of eco-nationalist struggle, the article details the convergence of capitalism, agriculture and ecology at the heart of the Zionist-Arab conflict. While bananas were not new to Palestine, efforts to significantly expand production under the British Mandate were constrained by the region’s poorly suited soil and climate, giving rise to competing discourses of scientific knowledge and cultural rootedness. Neither native to Palestine nor grounded in biblical tradition, bananas evoked in the settlers an ersatz ‘secular’ imagination of their inherent capability and expertise, which clashed with the lived reality of the Indigenous people’s deep familiarity with the local ecology and comparative agricultural success. Drawing on extensive primary sources, the article traces scientific discourses and cultural representations of banana cultivation in the districts of Beisan and Jericho, shedding new light on the ways in which agriculture shaped the Zionist-Arab conflict, including the role of the Palestinian capitalist class in resisting settler-colonial dispossession. The article thus explicates the role of bananas in uneven regional development and the struggle for control over land, demonstrating the usefulness of eco nationalism as a lens to better understand economy and ecology as tools of capital accumulation and control.

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The colony is on fire: Marijn Nieuwenhuis, Mikko Joronen, ‘Colonial pyrotechniques in Palestine: Arboricide and fiery dispossessions’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 9, 1, 2025, pp. 334-356

10Mar26

Abstract: In this article, we examine how fire—a triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen—functions as a settler colonial tool of destruction closely linked to techniques of elimination and replacement. In Palestine, we conceptualise fire as part of a broader set of pyrotechniques—elemental practices that devastate more than bodies and infrastructures by targeting and eroding the environmental conditions that sustain Palestinian lifeworlds. Drawing on ideas from elemental politics and world-making, we show how settler fire attacks materially and physically transform landscapes into desolate spaces, rendering them legible and available for colonisation. Fire is deployed not only by civilian settlers shielded by the Israeli state but also by the state itself through practices of ‘pyroterror’. Palestinians—’People of the Olive Tree’—are simultaneously dispossessed by fire and framed as ‘pyroterrorists’, revealing the racialised asymmetries embedded in colonial logics of security and dispossession. Finally, we examine the contradictions of afforestation and other landscape-engineering techniques through which settler colonialism grounds its presence and expands by overwriting Indigenous ecologies and ways of living. We argue that fire—both in its destructive and transformative capacities—is central to the ongoing expansion and maintenance of settler colonial frontiers in Palestine.

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The root cause of settler colonialism: Moss M. R. Berke, ‘The Cruel Optimism of Mass Tree-Planting Initiatives: Settler-Colonial Environmentalism and the Affective Allure of Tree Planting’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2026

07Mar26

Abstract: Placing Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” in conversation with Tuck and Yang’s work, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” this paper examines affective attachments to mass tree-planting efforts, which encourage unquestioned faith in these initiatives, serving to enable their persistence despite their consistent failures. This paper questions how affective attachments to mass tree-plantings teach publics to remain invested in the ability of settler-colonial institutions to solve climate crises, thereby ensuring that climate crises remain meaningfully unaddressed. Drawing together decolonial scholarship, affect theory, Indigenous thought and scholarship on environmental education, I demonstrate that mainstream tree-planting initiatives do not challenge the logics that permit forest and land degradation, but in fact, reproduce these logics. Rejecting a model which considers the act of planting trees as a success in and of itself, I instead ask what is missed when the planting of a tree is more important than the life of the forest.

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Global networks of anticolonial resistance: Bronwyn Carlson, Tristan Kennedy, Madi Day (eds), Global networks of Indigeneity: Peoples, sovereignty and futures, Manchester University Press, 2026

07Mar26

Description: There are approximately 370 million Indigenous people in the world, belonging to 5,000 different groups, in 90 countries worldwide. Indigenous people live in every region of the world. As ‘being Indigenous’ is increasingly acquiring a more globalised focus, terms such as ‘Indigeneity’ are useful to refer to our membership of the global community. As Meran argues, ‘Indigeneity’ has come to presuppose a sphere of commonality among those who form a world collectivity of ‘indigenous peoples’ (2009, 303). Similarly, Maaka and Fleras (2005, 20) argue that, while Indigeneity has traditionally implied a relationship or tension between Indigenous peoples and politics, and colonial governments, the term also now encompasses connections between Indigenous peoples through shared experiences of colonialism. This volume comprises 13 chapters that seek to answer what it means to be Indigenous in an increasingly globalized and connected world. It challenges the notion that Indigeneity can only be defined in relation to colonialism and speaks to the way in which Indigenous people draw on relationality to strengthen our connections and support each other as we imagine a future in which we are thriving.

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Polish settler colonialism: Ben Van Zee, ‘A Kulturkampf comes to Curitiba: the political cultures of partitioned Poland and Polish emigrant colonialism in Brazil’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

07Mar26

Abstract: Starting in the 1890s, expansion-minded Polish nationalists advocated the settlement of the Brazilian state of Paraná, hoping to create a bridgehead for a ‘New Poland’ in South America. This article examines why, around 1900, colonialists began framing the Polishspeaking settlements of Paraná as another front in the ‘culture wars’ that pitted German and Polish nationalists against each other in the eastern regions of Prussia. Presenting the colonial cause as an extension of the nationalist ‘cultural struggle’ in Europe, Polish colonial activists sought to capitalize on popular support for resisting Germanization. The article enriches Polish colonial history by highlighting a parallel transformation in colonial thought. As colonial boosters borrowed from the playbook of European mass politics, they overhauled their political vision for Polish communities in Brazil. They abandoned their earlier aim to forge an independent state and recast their political designs as a democratic, federative effort to establish Polish cultural autonomy within the Brazilian state. The rising prominence of federalist policies, practices, and political ideas in relation to demands for national autonomy in the Habsburg and Romanov Empires shaped this federalist turn of the Polish colonial idea, revealing the lasting impact of partitioned Poland’s political cultures on Polish settler colonialism overseas.

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Classic settler colonialism (for everyone, except for Indigenous peoples): Beth Marsden, ‘School strikes for segregation: settler protests and First Nations access to education in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales’, History Australia, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: Australia led the world in passing legislation to establish free, secular and compulsory school systems. While school systems were not designed for the education of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, Aboriginal families participated in state school systems, nonetheless. In the early 1900s, as new land acts drove closer settlement, the dynamics in some rural areas, and state schools, shifted. Settler communities protested Aboriginal attendance, staging school strikes to pressure state education departments to exclude Aboriginal children. These departments, anxious to maintain the attendance of white children, responded by adapting school systems to allow the exclusion of Aboriginal students. This article examines how school strikes, carried out by white settler communities, were used to justify the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal children from government schools. It argues that examining how state education systems adapted to Aboriginal students and school strikes produces new understandings of the role of schooling in settler colonialism.

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Recovering from settler colonialism: Molly C. Reid et al, ‘Research PaperExperiences with recovery from substance use in a Northern Midwest Indigenous Reservation setting’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 151, 2026, #105207

06Mar26

Abstract: Background: People in recovery from substance use face unique challenges that can threaten the sustainability of their progress. These issues are often compounded in rural areas, where economic and geographic barriers limit access to recovery services. Indigenous Peoples face ongoing structural inequities that further challenge sustained recovery. More information about experiences in recovery in rural Indigenous settings is needed in order to design effective programs. Methods: We conducted a qualitative Community-Based Participatory Research study with semi-structured interviews from n=24 adults in recovery from illicit substance use who self-identified as Indigenous in a rural reservation setting in the Northern Midwest United States. We asked about factors that supported their recovery, challenges faced, and what support they would like to see in their community. The interviews were thematically analyzed informed by the Indigenous Connectedness Framework (ICF). Results: People in recovery in this rural reservation setting drew strength from each of the ICF domains of connectedness: peer support networks, family, elders, and friends, facilitated by connection and reconnection with spiritual practices. Many described feeling isolated, especially if they experienced transportation barriers or their social networks used drugs. Participants identified the need for improved access to substance use-free cultural events and assistance with transportation. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the importance of social connectedness to recovery in this reservation setting, tying in with Indigenous conceptualizations of individual wellbeing as interrelated with intergenerational, family, community, spiritual, and environmental connectedness. These findings support the potential for peer-recovery support programs and expanded access to cultural practices and events.

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Settler relational envy: Rob Efird, ‘All Our Relationships: Settler Translations of Indigenous Relations with Plants’, in Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Jessie Fredlund, Helen Kopnina (eds), Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, Routledge, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: How should non-Indigenous teachers represent Indigenous culture and experience to their students? As a growing number of schools in North America require this content, non-Indigenous educators often struggle with how to present it accurately and respectfully, in ways that honor Indigenous sovereignty and cultural revitalization. In order to support their efforts, this chapter offers the suggestions and perspectives of Dr. Nancy Turner and Elise Krohn, two veteran non-Indigenous educators whose work focuses on the relationship between Indigenous people and plants in the Pacific Northwest region of North America.

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Settler ecosystems: Irus Braverman, ‘Settler Ecologies and Their Decolonization: Three En-Visions of Ecological Futures’, in Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Jessie Fredlund, Helen Kopnina (eds), Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, Routledge, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: This chapter urges scholars who work at the intersection of environmental, multispecies, and racial justice to reflect more closely on the entanglements of human and other-than-human lives and the legal regimes that shape those entanglements in various settler colonial contexts. The chapter draws on and further develops the term “settler ecologies,” defining it as the processes by which settler administrations imagine, construct, govern, discipline, and police nature, nonhuman animals, and Indigenous or otherwise marginalized populations. Contemplating the intersection of nature and settler colonialism and the manifestation of their coproductions in myriad sites, this chapter inquires how various settler ecologies correspond with one another, illuminate each other, and are similar to or diverge from each other as well as how they relate to the accelerated impacts of climate change. While it exposes the continued legacies and violence of settler colonialism, this chapter, at the same time, considers how we can bring about decolonial futures. It offers three vignettes, each documenting Indigenous ruination through nature conservation schemes while also moving beyond critical documentation to envision ways of decolonizing conservation. It refers to such offerings as “en-visions”.

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Settler self-discovery: Yang-Hsun Hou, ‘Affective Dimensions of Han Settler Colonialism: Autoethnographic Reflections from a Transnational Taiwan Studies Scholar’, in Po-Han Lee, Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe, Yu-chin Tseng (eds), Feeling Taiwan: Emotions in Everyday Politics, Social Movements, and Research Practices, Routledge, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: This chapter presents a critical autoethnographic inquiry into the author’s felt experiences as Hokkien/Hohlo, Han, and a Taiwanese international graduate student in the United States. In the ongoing realities of global racialization, racism, colonialism, and imperialism, studies have emphasized how self-examination and disclosure can contribute to anti-oppression and resist harmful narratives in academia. I present in this chapter the emotional contours of my epistemic routes and tensions wrestling with what I have learned as a transnational graduate student, and how they have rearranged my relations with my identities, the lands and waters that we now know as Taiwan, and the Indigenous sovereignties and communities in Taiwan. This chapter takes seriously emotions and affects as openings toward settler accountabilities and decolonial solidarities. I highlight the nuances that nudged me toward reconfiguring my relationship with Taiwan, whether in my graduate coursework in the United States or during spontaneous moments during my dissertation research fieldwork. This study surfaces how my perceptions of Taiwan and what it means to be Taiwanese have become more dynamic over the years, moving toward a closer alignment with how lands and waters have never been still and toward a critical reflection of settler colonial nationhood.

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