settler colonial studies blog

Encountering settler colonialism: Mark Griffiths, Mikko Joronen (eds), Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

04Nov23

Description: Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better understand the cultural making and unmaking of colonial and anti-colonial space in Palestine. Encountering Palestine asks us to rethink how colonialism and power operate in Palestine, the ways Palestinians struggle, and the lifeways that constantly encounter, un/make, and counter the spaces of colonial violence.

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Settler colonialism is a constraint on Indigenous reproduction II: Moana Rarere, Yara Jarallah, Tahu Kukutai, ‘Indigenous fertility in Aotearoa New Zealand: How does ethnic identity affect birth spacing and timing?’ Journal of Population Research, 2023

03Nov23

Abstract: The survival of Indigenous peoples in the CANZUS states of Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States is nothing short of remarkable. Not only have Indigenous peoples thwarted colonial tropes of the vanishing native but, for decades, Indigenous population growth rates have significantly outpaced those of the dominant settler populations. The future survival of Indigenous peoples fundamentally rests on continued natural increase, and understanding the causes and consequences of fertility behaviour is critical. While total fertility rates for Indigenous women in CANZUS countries are relatively low, childbearing tends to be concentrated at younger ages in contrast to the dominant white populations. The fertility transitions of both settler and Indigenous populations in the CANZUS states are well documented, however, a significant gap remains: how cultural factors shape contemporary Indigenous fertility behaviours. Using Aotearoa as a case study, we explore the relationship between Māori cultural identity, birth timing, and the duration of birth intervals. We use the 1995 New Zealand Women: Family, Employment and Education survey data to further test the impact of cultural identity on birth transition rates using the piecewise exponential model and Kaplan-Meier estimates. We find that women who identify Mainly Māori (exclusively or primarily) are at greater risk of bearing much earlier to first birth but not necessarily subsequent births. However, because of the earlier start, Māori have a longer reproductive window to bear more children, and at higher birth orders still bear earlier than non-Māori. The empirical evidence strengthens our case to suggest that cultural orientation has some influence on Indigenous fertility and contributes to the development of Indigenous-centred theories of fertility and demography more broadly.

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Settler colonialism is a constraint on Indigenous reproduction: Ñusta Carranza Ko, ‘Unacknowledged genocide: Coercive sterilization of indigenous women in Peru’, Violence, 2023

03Nov23

Abstract: From 1996 until 2000, under the pretense of upholding women’s rights and expanding access to family planning resources, the Peruvian government launched an aggressive sterilization campaign that disproportionately targeted Indigenous peoples. In total, 272,028 persons were sterilized, the majority of whom were of Indigenous descent and resided in rural and poor areas. Recent studies conclude this to be a case of genocide, with the state systematically subjecting an ethnic minority population—the Indigenous peoples—to a coercive sterilization campaign that sought to eliminate in whole or in part Andean and Amazonian Indigenous communities. Despite the alarming evidence about the genocide committed against Indigenous peoples, victims are yet to be recognized by the state. The denial of victims’ sufferings leaves the work of building and creating humanity after atrocity incomplete. This study focuses on the unacknowledged memories of genocide, engaging in an analysis of the norms of reparations. The denial of the state to grant integral reparations, despite the existence of a modified law on reparations, points to a purposeful silencing of these victims. Furthermore, these practices represent a new layer of genocide against Indigenous peoples that neglects their victimhood and raises questions as to the absence of humanity after atrocity.

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Settler colonialism is acclimatisation II: Dmitry V. Arzyutov, ‘The making of the Homo Polaris: human acclimatization to the Arctic environment and Soviet ideologies in Northern Medical Institutions’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

03Nov23

Abstract: This paper examines the history of the Soviet human acclimatization project in the North and Siberia, which spanned from medical experiments in Stalin’s forced labor camps to the subsequent wave of industrialization in the region. The author argues that human acclimatization in the North was a settler colonial science project aimed at facilitating Russian administrators and engineers in asserting control over the territory and its resources, while creating a new homogeneous ‘indigenous population’ in Siberia and the North. This envisioned population, referred to as Homo Polaris by the author, was intended to emerge through a two-way transformation: the adaptation of Indigenous peoples into Soviet ideologies and practices, and the acclimatization of settlers coming from the European part of the country to the Arctic environment. Although the administrators and medical doctors were unable to achieve this biopolitical objective, the complexities and dialogues surrounding these transformations shed light on the late Soviet settler-colonial ideologies and their impact on social life in Siberia from the 1950s to the 1980s. The research is based on a comprehensive analysis of both published and archival works by scholars involved in the project.

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Settler colonialism is acclimatisation: Netta Cohen, New under the Sun: Early Zionist Encounters with the Climate in Palestine, University of California Press, 2023

03Nov23

Description: New under the Sun explores Zionist perceptions of—and responses to—Palestine’s climate. Covering the rise of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Cohen traces the production of climactic knowledge through a rich archive across medicine and botany, technology and economics, architecture and planning. As Cohen convincingly argues, this knowledge was not only shaped by Jewish settlers’ Eurocentric views but was also indebted to colonial practices and institutions. Zionists’ claims to the land were often based on the construction of Jewish settlers as natives, even while this was complicated by their alienated responses to Palestine’s climate. New under the Sun offers a highly original environmental lens on the ways in which Zionism’s spatial ambitions and racial fantasies transformed the lives of humans and nonhumans in Palestine.

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The theology of settler colonialism: Dana Lloyd, Jan Pranger, ‘Decolonization at the Intersection of Political Theology and Settler Colonial Studies’, Political Theology, 2023

01Nov23

Excerpt: In March 2023, the Vatican issued a statement repudiating the doctrine of discovery. The repudiation is a result of dialogue with Indigenous Catholics: ‘In our own day, a renewed dialogue with indigenous peoples, especially with those who profess the Catholic Faith, has helped the Church to understand better their values and cultures. With their help, the Church has acquired a greater awareness of their sufferings, past and present, due to the expropriation of their lands, which they consider a sacred gift from God and their ancestors, as well as the policies of forced assimilation, promoted by the governmental authorities of the time, intended to eliminate their indigenous cultures’. There is a lot to unpack in this statement: for example, the acknowledgement of present suffering, not only past suffering (historian Patrick Wolfe would say that settler colonialism is a structure rather than a discrete event), that lands that were stolen from Indigenous peoples were – are – sacred to them, and the Catholic Church’s active (even if only tacitly admitted) role in executing policies of forced assimilation. There is a throughline that runs from the papal bulls that applied the doctrine of discovery in the Americas in the fifteenth century to the mass graves of Indigenous children unearthed at sites of Native American and First Nations residential schools in the United States and Canada. Investigating this throughline is one of our goals in gathering scholars to think at the intersection of political theology and settler colonialism.

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The settler colonialist university: Abigail Boggs, ‘Educational Pasts, Enduring Colonial Presents: Indigenous Student Conscripts and the Foundation of the US University’, History of the Present, 13, 2, 2023, pp. 141-165

01Nov23

Abstract: Taking Indigenous sovereignty as at once axiomatic and constitutively strategic, this article argues that it is necessary to expand the chronology and disrupt the geographic certitude through which the history and present of US higher education and its internationalization are conventionally understood. Colleges and universities in the British colonies and what became the United States, including Harvard, William & Mary, and Dartmouth, were founded and funded with the intention that they would function as a vital technology through which the nation-state and white Christian culture would reproduce and secure themselves, their possessions, and their futures. This project was to be accomplished through the assimilation and at times incorporation of people, often youth, from polities understood as fundamentally other from that of their instructors and benefactors. Assessments of the extent to which such projects were effectuated vary, but it is well established that contemporary universities and colleges are conceptually and financially rooted in colonial educational projects that targeted Indigenous students for incorporation and assimilation. In an era when many of these same institutions are making substantial, if inadequate, efforts to contend with their historical origins, it is necessary to move beyond acknowledgment of these histories and contend, instead, with how such projects materially and epistemologically underwrite the basic functions of the most well-resourced and prestigious higher education institutions of the present.

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The slow violence of settler colonialism: Dorota Golańska, ‘Slowness as warfare: Towards a relational approach to political violence in the West Bank’, Geography Compass, 2023

01Nov23

Abstract: Engaging with recent applications of the concept of slow violence to the ongoing political developments in the West Bank, this review article argues that the relational approach offered by feminist geopolitics facilitates the conception of slow violence and warfare as part of a single complex of violence. The article traces feminist geopolitics’ contribution to research on geographies of slow violence on the one hand, and to the analyses produced within the fields of critical geopolitics and critical war studies on the other, exposing that scholarly work exploiting the relational approach generated within and across these areas of research enables a broader understanding of political violence’s tangled operations. Based on the analysis of the recent scholarly engagement with slow violence in the West Bank, the article proposes that thinking of slowness as a form of warfare captures the complex entanglement of different modalities of violence as they materialize in specific spatio-temporal circumstances. Moreover, such an approach contributes to the further reinvigoration of feminist geopolitics with insights generated within (settler) colonial studies.

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The anticolonial sovereignty of food health: Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, Cassandra J. Nguyen, Susanna V. Lopez, ‘Food Sovereignty and Health: A Conceptual Framework to Advance Research and Practice’, Health Promotion Practice, 24, 6, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: Settler colonialism disrupted traditional Indigenous foodways and practices and created high rates of diet-related disease among Indigenous peoples. Food sovereignty, the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own food systems, is a culturally centered movement rooted in traditional Indigenous knowledge. This approach directly intervenes upon systems-level barriers to health, making it an important strategy for health equity. While food sovereignty initiatives can be found within many Indigenous communities, the conceptual linkages between food sovereignty and health have not been well documented within the public health literature. We present a practice-informed conceptual framework developed as part of the Center for Indigenous Innovation and Health Equity (CIIHE) initiative, a community–academic partnership with the goal of strengthening Indigenous food systems and practices to promote health and well-being. The framework emphasizes connectedness, including the transmission of knowledge across generations and the restoration of relational responsibilities, as central to Indigenous concepts of health and wellness.

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Chinese settler colonialism: Uradyn E. Bulag, ‘The wheel of history and minorities’ ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese nation’, Comparative Education, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: This article offers a theoretical intervention in new and emergent approaches to analysing China’s coercive nation-building policies under Xi Jinping. The author contends that the recent Western framing of CCP policies as genocidal or necropolitical, predicated on notions of settler colonialism and indigeneity, not only strips minority nationalities of their political agency but also prevents them from pursuing anti-colonial self-determination. By delving into the extensive scholarly work within Chinese anthropology, history, and philosophy that contributes to the reconstruction of a retrotopian Chinese nation with non-Han minority groups at its core, this article argues that the ongoing effort to build a revitalised Chinese national community requires more than merely overcoming obstacles related to minority cultures and identities. It entails actively reimagining the role and participation of minorities in ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese national community, implying their voluntary relinquishment of identities and rights in order to align with the Chinese nation.

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