settler colonial studies blog

Settlers, locals, strangers: Bethany Lacina, Strangers and Settlers: Migration Politics in a Local’s World, Oxford Academic, 2026

23Jun26

Description: Do people have special rights in a place if they are one of the locals? The belief that they do is common worldwide. Yet, entitlement to place has little role in most accounts of migration politics. Instead, accounts of migration politics are a showdown between culture and economics, in-group identities and material incentives. Strangers and Settlers moves past that stand-off by considering domestic and international migration simultaneously. Being local is normative even within national and ethnic groups and when the material stakes of migration are low. Both domestic and international migration politics takes place within that pro-local status quo. Using information from censuses, public opinion, mobility laws, and political parties, Strangers and Settlers describes a world of nested hierarchies of locals, offering new insights about migration politics. How mobile has the world become since the 1950s? How do migrants and minorities think about migration policy? What is the political economy of mobility control and why is immigration more regulated domestic migration? What do anti-migration activists ask for if they cannot have a sealed national border? The answers to these questions start with the fact that it’s a local’s world.

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Catty settlers: Zoei Sutton, Kate Hall, ‘”Feral Catastrophe”: Analysing the Narrative Construction of Australian Cats’, in Georgina Endfield, Poul Holm (eds), Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, Oxford, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: Feral, pest, savage, invaders: cats have long been painted as the villains in Australian histories, continuing to wreak havoc on biodiversity and the welfare of prized ‘native’ species. But where do these ideas come from? Could it be that selective ecological narratives have presented a simplistic account of feline pasts and presents, obfuscating the complex human–animal–environment entanglements that actually exist? This chapter critically explores human–cat relations in Australia, drawing a multidisciplinary approach to explore themes of anthroparchy, dis/utility, settler colonialism, and extinction. Existing narratives from scientific, popular cultural, and governance discourses will be analysed using a social constructivist lens, with key themes brought to life in feline-centric vignettes to demonstrate alternative constructions of cats as minded, emotional, oppressed, and capable of coexistence with humans and other animals. This unique methodological approach effectively foregrounds non-human animals in the narratives that often cause them to become invisible them, offering a rich and multifaceted contribution to the representation of non-human animals. This multidisciplinary method allows us to imagine a future where cats have been freed from the narratives which trap and cast them as villains, and present socio-scientifically supported possibilities through which this might be achieved.

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Partnership or containment? Hemopereki Simon, ‘Possessing the Awa: Te Awa Tupua, legal personhood and the continuities of settler/invader colonialism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: This article offers a critical Indigenous analysis of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, celebrated as an innovative fusion of Māori cosmology and Western law through the legal personhood of the river. While positioned as a hallmark of bicultural partnership, the Act exemplifies bicultural containment – a state strategy that symbolically includes Māori worldviews while preserving the juridical supremacy of the settler state. Drawing on Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theory of the white possessive, Unger and Henderson’s contextuality, and critiques of biculturalism as a ‘zombie’ concept, the paper shows how Te Awa Tupua functions as a ‘settler move to innocence’, reframing whakapapa, mana and kaitiakitanga within government regimes. Rather than advancing mana motuhake, the settlement embeds Māori relational ontologies into governance structures accountable to ″the Crown″. Legal personhood, while symbolically powerful, is constrained by co-governance mechanisms, racial capitalism and biopolitical control, ensuring sovereignty over ‘resources’ remains with the state. Situating Te Awa Tupua within the trajectory of Crown–Māori relations, the article argues that biculturalism has shifted from responding to Māori demands for justice to regulating them within narrow confines. Genuine decolonisation requires the return of land, water and decision-making authority grounded in tikanga and Indigenous governance, not symbolic recognition.

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The face(book) of settler colonialism: Lora Chapman, ‘Settler-Australian anxieties and the savagery of Facebook: notes from Alice Springs’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: In an age when social media is fully embedded within the human experience and identity, it also offers up opportunities for the re-enactment of dispossession and the development of stigma. In this article, I examine data from the remote Central Australian town of Alice Springs’ social media forums, describing a novel medium via which ongoing moral violence is levelled at young Aboriginal people. Settler constructions of Aboriginality are examined in some detail, along with their implications for the town’s settler and Aboriginal communities. I argue that posts from these pages are not only symptomatic of historical violence and dispossession, but that they are also manifestations of violence in themselves. In addition, I consider the ways that these processes might contribute to lived experiences of disadvantage for young people, by extending the reach of surveillance and equating to a novel form of moral violence, as defined by Didier Fassin.

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Despite settler colonialism or because of it? Sydney Beckmann, ‘”Yours for a United Race”: the Society of American Indians and the Meaning of Unity’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: As part of the promotional literature for the Society of American Indians (SAI), Secretary Arthur C. Parker ended a recruitment letter with the salutation, “Yours for a united race.” On a draft of this letter, he crossed out the last three words and hand-wrote “progress.” This change calls into question the meaning of unity and race and how they were utilized by Parker and the Society. The SAI has been described as a pan-Indian organization with an urban, assimilationist agenda that homogenized Indigenous identity. Utilizing Parker’s letter, this paper argues that pan-Indianism as a label invokes a specific colonial notion of unity that erases the complex decisions made by SAI members to negotiate relationships between their communities, religious traditions, and settler society. Drawing on the work of critical Indigenous scholarship, the paper proposes using the concept of relationality as the interpretive framework for discourse on the SAI and unity.

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Veterinary settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Veterinizing the Settler State: Biopolitics, Care, and Killing in Palestine-Israel’, Medical Anthropology, 2026

21Jun26

Abstract: Drawing on three multispecies cases in Palestine-Israel – the fallow deer, the griffon vulture, and the free-roaming dog – this article depicts veterinary governance as constitutive of the settler state. Specifically, the article identifies three interrelated but distinct technologies of veterinary power: biopolitics, enacted through population management and selective reproduction; pastoral power, exercised through intimate care and detailed surveillance; and necropolitics, manifested in practices of extermination. The article argues that veterinization advances and naturalizes the state’s settler ecologies. In Palestine-Israel, this dynamic is especially visible in the state’s peripheral regions, in territories it has occupied since 1967, and along the Gaza border.

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Toxic settler colonialism: Jianni Tien, Katherine Kenny, ‘A hydrological breakdown of containment logics: Toxic exposures, pollution, and waste in the waterways of settler-colonial Australia’, E: nature and Space, 2026

21Jun26

Abstract: Social science scholarship has long explored the spatial, political and embodied dimensions of contamination, attending to the ways pollutants are unevenly distributed and unreliably contained. In this framing, waste is relegated elsewhere, to people and places deemed expendable. However, while exposures to waste and other forms of contamination remain deeply uneven, we are also witnessing a shift into a new era in which toxic exposures are increasingly inescapable for everybody on this planet. In this paper we ask: If waste is a relation that relies on othering, what happens when it begins to overflow its neat containment, seeping into spaces previously protected by wealth and privilege? We situate this enquiry in the context of recent pollutant events in settler-colonial Australia, examining three case studies that emerged across 2024 and 2025: 1) “Tar balls” comprised of faeces, drugs, and oil; 2) cases of melioidosis caused by a bacteria referred to as the “mud bug”, and 3) PFAS, so called “forever chemicals”. Though differing in form and scale, each of these contamination events emerges in or through water, and travels across bodies, ecologies, and infrastructures. Drawing from approaches in critical discourse analysis (CDA), environmental humanities, toxic geographies, and feminist science and technology studies (STS), we analyse media reporting on these particular pollutant events as representative of our shifting relationship to toxicity in a chemically saturated world. We argue for a hydrological approach, informed by hydrosocial scholarship, that thinks with water’s relational qualities to challenge the settler-colonial logics of purity and containment that underpin contemporary understandings of toxicity, pollution, and waste. The emergence of contaminants in the privileged spaces of Australia’s waterways may signal the breakdown of containment logics but also an opening: a chance to reconfigure our relationship to toxicity and toxic living.

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Indigenous settlers? Arama Rata, ‘Indigenizing Zionism: Narrative Claims Deployed by the Indigenous Coalition for Israel to Evade Settler-Colonial Characterization’, Middle East Critique, 2026

21Jun26

Abstract: From inception, the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine has been explicitly colonial. However, recent attempts have been made to frame global Jewry as indigenous to Palestine, including by groups who foreground their own indigeneity. This article focuses on the Indigenous Coalition for Israel, the New Zealand-based group whose founders opened the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem in February 2024. Background details of the group’s members and networks are described, exposing a Christian nationalist agenda that is antithetical to indigenous liberation. Thematic analysis of claims made by the group via their website reveal narrative subthemes and rhetorical techniques used to serve two specific discursive functions: to invert the colonizer–colonized relationship, and to reject settler-colonial theory. Both enable Zionism to evade characterization as settler-colonial. Settler-colonial theory is shown to illuminate historical and contemporary power dynamics in Palestine. However, the abstraction of the theory leaves open conceptual gaps enabling the recuperation of its terms. This article concludes that indigenous liberation requires theory grounded in the historical trajectories and material realities of resistance and situated within the global systems sustaining colonial domination.

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The bugBear of settler colonialism: Yung-Ying Chang, John Chung-En Liu, ‘The Formosan Black Bear and Taiwanese Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: Building on scholarship that situates nations and nationalism within colonial relations, this article examines nationalism in settler-colonial Taiwan amid China’s colonial claim to sovereignty. Drawing on interviews, conservation documents and popular representations, we show how the Formosan black bear became a national symbol of resistance to Chinese irredentism across three cumulative stages: early-2000s symbolic competition with China’s giant pandas; mid-2010s diffusion through branding, commodification and political advocacy; and post-2017 politicisation amid intensifying cross-strait tensions. However, Han Taiwanese often attribute bear deaths to Indigenous communities and prioritise bear conservation, whose public popularity is partly associated with the bear’s national symbolism, over Indigenous communities’ everyday experiences of living with bears. We show that Taiwanese nationalism has anticolonial origins and continues as antihegemonic resistance, while suggesting that this bear symbolism may subordinate Indigenous perspectives in public discussions of human–bear conflicts. The paper offers a relational account of nationalism’s resistant and oppressive possibilities.

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The settler equation: P. L. Krapivsky, ‘Riviera model with egoistical settlers’, arXiv, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: The Riviera model mimics a densifying settlement along the coastline. In the lattice version, houses are built sequentially in empty sites with the constraint that every newly built house has at least one empty neighboring site. The distribution of clusters of adjacent houses does not obey a closed set of evolutionary equations, but the void-cluster-void distribution does. We compute the latter and extract the cluster distribution from it. In the jammed state, when all voids have length one and the evolution ceases, the cluster distribution has a neat form and exhibits a factorial decay with the length of the cluster. To investigate finite systems, we employ a static approach directly treating jammed states. If the coastline is a finite segment, we determine the statistics of the number of empty sites in the jammed state (the average, variance, and higher cumulants). We also study a continuum version in which houses are built along the line so that each newly built house is sufficiently separated from at least one neighboring house.

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