settler colonial studies blog

When settler colonialism has no air: Mikko M. Puumala, Oskari Sivula, Kirsi Lehto, ‘Moving to Mars: The Feasibility and Desirability of Mars Settlements’, Space Policy, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: The on-going space settlement debate has raised questions whether it is possible to settle other planets, and if it was, is it something humans should do. The problem with this space ethical discussion is that it can easily become too vague. To avoid this problem, we suggest a framework for identifying relevant variables that affect the feasibility constraints and desirability factors of establishing space settlements. The variables we focus on include the settlement stage, scale and time frame. Based on the relevant literature, we take mission cost, survival, habitation, water, in situ resources for food, oxygen and fuel energy and dependence on Earth as feasibility constraints that are relevant for the framework. None of them are hard constraints, but rather soft feasibility constraints that make it difficult to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars in the near- to medium-term future. However, in the past, humanity has achieved goals that first seemed infeasible. To justify the costs and effort, the goal must be highly morally desirable. We discuss five different desirability factors that could help justify the effort but as each framework has unique feasibility constraints, not all of these factors are sufficient or necessary to justify this effort. We argue that some of the desirability factors prominent in space ethical literature are not sufficient or necessary in our framework, and thus, we conclude that the normative grounds for establishing a permanent Mars settlement in the foreseeable future are weak.

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When settler colonialism is in the air: Alyssa J. Kreikemeier, Aerial Empire: contested sovereignties and the American West, PhD dissertation, Boston University, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: Aerial Empire combines environmental and political history to argue that air shaped the United States’ colonization of the intermountain west. By focusing on environmental management and federal-Indian policy, it shows how claiming and regulating air as a natural resource both supported and subverted the nation’s control over the region in the twentieth century. A combination of white encroachment, warfare, diplomacy, and violence had transferred the region from Native to non-Native populations by the late nineteenth century. This process involved claiming western air, but appropriating the lower atmosphere required technology and policies devised during the twentieth century. Efforts to access and regulate air shaped twentieth-century U.S. expansion in New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, and Arizona, and turned a boundless atmosphere into a finite resource. Climate cures began the process of defining air as a natural resource, accelerated by aviation which compelled courts to legally distinguish navigable airspace from air rights in the 1920s. Nuclear science expanded atmospheric knowledge and smog undermined an approach to pollution based on dilution by 1950. As air pollution control shifted from a local to national issue, commercial and military jets increasingly crowded the skies. Environmental policy extended federal authority over air as a natural resource with the 1970 Clean Air Act, which tribes used to press federal recognition of their environmental sovereignty. Fluid and elusive, atmospheric motion subverted efforts to fix the sky in place and undermined territorial jurisdiction. Although modern legislation made air a material resource, the atmosphere remained interconnected with land in ways that complicated its regulation. Claiming air required seeing it as a material rather than an immaterial resource, and as a finite rather than infinite one. Tribes influenced and deployed environmental law to bolster Indigenous power and challenge the settler state’s authority over air, land, and Native peoples. Yet Indigenous and rural communities suffered disproportionate impacts of atmospheric transformations, such as nuclear testing, extractive industry, and military airspace. Efforts to claim, measure, map, and manage the atmosphere contributed to crucial changes in modern American society, including the transfer of Indigenous land, resources, and labor to settlers; the degradation and pollution of air with dangerous compounds and waste; the expansion of military control over new spaces; and the extension of federal authority through modern environmental policy.

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Settler colonial abortion: Cassidy Ellis, Saved Babies, Dead Doctors: Settler Colonial Anxiety and Strategic Rhetorics of/in the Anti-Abortion Cultural Narrative, PhD dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: In this dissertation I identify and analyze the rhetoric that creates the anti-abortion cultural narrative and locate its toxic secrets by exposing the logics and ideologies the secrets obscure and sustain, and finally, ascertaining the strategic rhetorics that enable the narrative’s power and centrality. There are two primary arguments proposed in this dissertation. First, I argue that settler colonialism is the primary toxic secret nestled just beneath the surface of the anti-abortion cultural narrative. It is the secret that animates and sustains the narrative in service of maintaining settler colonial social order via control and maintenance of the population. Second, I argue that the anti-abortion campaign that burgeoned in the United States in the years following Roe v. Wade (1973) crafted this particular anti-abortion cultural narrative through three strategic rhetorics: 1) a (re)constituted concept of fetal personhood; 2) ideographic use of fetal imagery grounded in a Christian ethos; and 3) ideographic violence made possible through a reconceptualization of what “counts” as a violent act in the context of abortion. This dissertation also argues that the anti-abortion narrative operates in service of a larger settler colonial agenda, ultimately contributing to a settler colonial worldmaking project. I began this introduction discussing Alito’s opinion text because it is a prime example of how history, medical “facts,” socio-cultural discourses, and state power converge in narratives of reproduction. These narratives are not new, rather the Dobbs decision reminds that the heteropatriarchal White supremacist settler colonial state is working exactly as it’s meant to, privileging exactly those it was created to privilege. Alito’s ability to write the significance of pregnancy determination out of U.S. history and to construct pregnancy prevention as nonessential for “liberty” situates the anti-abortion cultural narrative within a colonial master narrative (or, ideology) that is concerned with maintaining and controlling the settler colonial population.

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The non-coloniality of settler colonialism: Doerthe Rosenow, ‘The Violence of Settler Imperialism – and Why the Concept of Coloniality Cannot Grasp It’, Millennium, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: Against a background of ongoing public and academic debate about how to best address the legacies of colonialism and slavery, there is now an ever-expanding body of International Relations (IR) literature that makes use of the concept of ‘coloniality’. Indeed, coloniality, which attempts to make sense of past and ongoing colonial oppression in global terms, seems a particularly apt concept for IR, which, after all, is interested in understanding the nature of global power. This article is critical of the way that coloniality is increasingly used in a unitary ‘catch-all’ manner to describe global colonial domination in often unspecific ways. It argues, based on an in-depth exegesis of key Latin American decolonial texts, that the way the concept has been developed makes certain colonial violence, and the resistance against it, invisible; with the violence of (global) settler colonialism being a prominent example. Using and further developing Jodi Byrd’s concepts of transit and settler imperialism, in dialogue with Latin American settler colonial literature and radical Black thought, this article aims to bring this violence to the forefront of IR debate. I will conclude by elaborating on the concrete consequences that understanding ongoing colonial violence with the help of these concepts has for thinking about decolonisation in IR.

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Gentrification is settler colonialism: Gabriel Schwake, Haim Yacobi, ‘Decolonisation, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel’, EPC: Politics and Space, 2023

27Oct23

Abstrat: Focusing on the immigration of upper-middle-class Palestinian families to the Israeli town of
Upper-Nazareth, originally built by the state to enhance Jewish presence in the area, this paper
frames the concept of decolonising gentrification. Accordingly, it studies a unique inconsistency
between economic class and ethnonational hegemony, which enables upwardly Arab minority
families to overcome ethnic barriers and to exercise social and spatial mobility. Therefore, this
paper explains how these socio-political dynamics challenge the local settler-colonial aspects of
urban development and enable the reappropriation of colonised urban space. Focusing on the
case of Upper-Nazareth and its former ‘Officers’ Neighbourhood’, we examine a distinctive
contradiction between political power and economic abilities that triggers a unique case of
gentrification, where the colonised minority gentrifies the colonising hegemony. At the same
time, this decolonising gentrification, as we argue, takes place in restricted urban enclaves, and
relies on an ethno-class price gap as it is only the minority upper-class who is willing to pay the
increasing prices, due to their limited options. Therefore, as this paper shows, decolonising
gentrification simultaneously challenges and recreates urban settler-colonialism, enabling
limited market-oriented reappropriation while triggering ethnic-based accumulation and new
forms of neoliberal exclusion.

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Indigenous sovereignty is taxing (and rightly so): Maximilien Zahnd, ‘An Alaska tax story: Tribal sovereignty, settler colonialism, and the Indigenous tax space’, EPD, Society and Space, 2023

25Oct23

Abstract: This article interrogates the extent to which tax laws are capable of empowering Indigenous
peoples. It employs the concept of an Indigenous tax space, which places spatiality at the center of
the settler colonial project. The socio-legal history of the Native Village of Kluti Kaah, an Ahtna
tribe from southcentral Alaska, constitutes the main case study. In 1987, the tribe attempted to
tax the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that passed through its traditional lands, creating an Indigenous tax
space wherein tax law and discourse congregated to express and enact Indigenous agency. The
article argues that the Indigenous tax space (1) provides a rare opportunity to reappraise the
geographies of tax laws and policies and, more broadly, (2) allows us to explore settler colonialism’s previous and ongoing effects upon Indigenous territories.

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An airport is a settler colonial node: Jason Tuấn Vũ, ‘Bound Passages: Aviation, Deportation, and the Settler Carceral Transpacific’, Radical History Review, 147, 2023, pp. 137-157

25Oct23

Abstract: This article traces the settler-colonial histories of Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) in Hawai‘i and Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport (GUM) in Guåhan (Guam) to chart the role of Indigenous dispossession in facilitating ongoing carceral transits across the Pacific. Focusing on the March 2021 deportation of thirty-three Vietnamese refugees from the United States, it situates the deportation flight’s layovers at HNL and GUM within larger processes of racial-colonial violence that constitute the development and operation of both airports. In this sense, HNL and GUM reveal the palimpsestic nature of Hawai‘i and Guåhan as sites of colonial occupation that, in turn, are used to bolster the further transit of global US empire. This essay thus attempts to chart a critical transpacific geography that links the settler-colonial and carceral dimensions of US empire through the issue of Southeast Asian deportation.

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Infrastructure is settler colonialism: Carrie Mott, ‘”The Last Victims of the Indian War”: Celilo Falls, the Dalles Dam, and Infrastructural Colonization’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023

25Oct23

Abstract: In 1957, the Dalles Dam was constructed on the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon. When the dam was completed, it inundated Celilo Falls, a Native American fishery and cultural gathering point that had been in use for at least 12,000 years. Prior to dam construction, the federal government and local agencies issued a number of reports stating the necessity of the dam for economic development through hydroelectric power generation, improved shipping navigation, flood control, and expanded irrigation capacity. These reports often sought to determine the financial payout that would be made to the groups with treaty rights to fish at their “usual and accustomed” places, such as Celilo Falls. However, the reports rarely engage with the cultural significance of Celilo Falls or the depth of opposition that people had to the dam. The research discussed here is based on archival government reports alongside the voices of affected tribal members preserved through The Confluence Project and other sources. This article develops the idea that reclamation infrastructure in the U.S. West plays a key role in colonizing efforts from federal to local scales, reflecting the aims of the settler state. Through an analysis of government documents alongside the recollections of Indigenous elders from the mid-Columbia region, this article offers insights into how reclamation infrastructure functions as an aspect of settler colonialism and relies on theorizations of this process from the people most affected by the loss of Celilo Falls.

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Responsibility against settler colonial institutions: Adam Joseph Barker, Jenny Pickerill, ‘Geographies of collective responsibility: decolonising universities through place-based praxis, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2023

25Oct23

Abstract: This paper asks how can we as geographers, occupying positions of relative privilege but also beholden to institutions entangled with legacies of colonialism and ongoing colonization, find and embody our responsibilities to Indigenous people and nations and contribute to decolonization within and beyond the academy? We begin by reflecting on Doreen Massey’s (2004) theorization of geographies of responsibility and critiques of it in the intervening years. We then engage with important considerations including the politics of recognition, relational grammars of settler colonialism and Indigenous notions of relationality. To avoid the traps of recognition politics, which often foreclose the more transformative possibilities of responsibility, we propose ways of taking of decolonial responsibility in our teaching, research and professional service. While we cannot provide simple solutions to the difficult challenge of pursuing decolonization in the academy, we believe that centralizing and prioritizing relationships of responsibility to and through place in support of resurgent Indigenous nationhood is required to avoid the denuding, individualizing process of colonial recognition and superficial performative decolonisation.

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Settlement and population: Rachel O’Sullivan, Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective, Bloomsbury, 2023

25Oct23

Description: This book examines Nazi Germany’s expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our understanding of the Nazi regime. However, as opposed to solely concentrating on violence to investigate whether the Holocaust can be located within wider colonial frameworks, Rachel O’Sullivan utilizes a broader approach by investigating other aspects, such as discourses and fantasies related to expansion, settlement, ‘civilising missions’ and Germanisation, which were also intrinsic to Nazi Germany’s rule in Poland. The resettlement of the ethnic Germans-individuals of German descent who lived in Eastern Europe until the outbreak of the Second World War-forms a main focal point for this study’s analysis and investigation of colonial comparisons. The ethnic German resettlement in the Reichsgaue laid the foundations for the establishment and enforcement of German society and culture, while simultaneously intensifying the efforts to control Poles and remove Jews. Through this case study, O’Sullivan explores Nazi Germany’s dual usage of inclusionary policies, which attempted to culturally and linguistically integrate ethnic Germans and certain Poles into German society, and the contrasting exclusionary policies, which sought to rid annexed Poland of ‘undesirable’ population groups through segregation, deportation and murder. The book compares these policies – and the tactics used to implement them – to colonial and settler colonial methods of assimilation, subjugation and violence.

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