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Migrants in settler colonialism (and on Indigenous lands): Andonis Piperoglou, Francesco Ricatti (eds), Researching Migration on Indigenous Lands: Challenges, Reflections, Pathways, Springer, 2026

16Dec25

Description: This open access edited collection provides an interdisciplinary assessment of research about migration on Indigenous lands. Via an assortment of critical reflections from settler colonial Australia, it identifies tensions between colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty as an increasingly salient topic of analysis within migration research. It poses challenges to migration research that takes place on Indigenous lands, reflects on the methodological and theoretical issues at play when studying migration in settler colonial Australia, and outlines potential pathways for ethical migration research agendas that genuinely engage with Indigenous knowledges and scholarship.  The book also compares and synthesizes where studies of settler colonialism and migration have intersected and contributing authors profile how migration, colonialism and Indigenous sovereignties intersect in multicultural Australia’s pasts and presents. At its core, the volume challenges migration studies, from Australian shores, to reimagine itself. In doing so, questions related to migration are altered and the basis of discussion around colonial legacies, multiculturalism, integration and diversity is recast. By providing nuanced theoretical, historical, and reflective case studies from a rage of disciplinary approaches, the volume will be a great resource to students, academics in migration and refugee studies, Indigenous scholars, activists, as well as policymakers in settler colonial societies.


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Settlers to the German colony: Kaisa Langer, ‘New Farmers for Germany’s Oldest Colony: German farm workers in Estonian and Baltic German Media’, Copernico, 2024

15Dec25

ABstract: In the early 20th century, Baltic German landowners recruited German farmers from Russia. The immigration of these farmers – at that time called “German colonists” – inspired a variety of colonial discourses.


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Terra nullius dreaming: Jack Quirk, ‘Gerald Murnane’s Terra Nullius’, Modern Fiction Studies, 71, 4, 2025, pp. 813-839

15Dec25

Abstract: This essay considers the legal and literary construction of terra nullius through the early fiction of Australian author Gerald Murnane. Focusing on The Plains and “Land Deal,” I explore how Murnane puts to work settlercolonial myths of empty land, property, and possession. By staging rival ontologies of land between Indigenous custodianship and settler commodification, I suggest that this work dramatizes the imaginative and juridical mechanisms by which terra nullius was rendered present and real. Murnane’s fiction can be thought of as an implicit challenge to the colonial impulse to impose meaning, revealing the enduring tension between narrative, law, and landscape.


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Vulnerable settler colonialism: Oliver Baker, ‘Embattled Settler Colonialism in John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta’, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 71, 4, 2025, pp. 443-481

15Dec25

Excerpt: Settler colonialism was never inevitable in North America. It was always vulnerable to defeat at the hands of the colonized who waged anticolonial wars in defense of their territories and governance. Anticolonial war was the reminder of settler colonialism’s limits and weaknesses that its narratives of conquest disavowed. When US settlers invaded Indigenous lands of the western seaboard following the United States’ imperial war that seized Mexico’s northern territories in 1848, they confronted erupting anticolonial wars with the potential to upend US rule. One of the most formidable anticolonial war campaigns during this period was the Garra Uprising of 1851. Antonio Garra, a leader of the Cupeño nation, united and led the Cupeños, Cahuillas, Cocopahs, Kumeyaay, Luiseño, and Quechan in armed rebellion to rout US settlers from southern California. Garra’s forces seized settlers’ livestock, destroyed enemy infrastructure, and killed in battle those who tried to repress the uprising. Garra specifically targeted settlers known for anti-Indigenous abuse and violence. US military forces and state militias scrambled to contain the uprising. It only came to an end due to internal disunity. Garra was betrayed by a fellow leader, Juan Antonio of the Chuillas, who used a coalition meeting with Garra as a trap to capture and deliver him to US authorities. Joshua Bean, the Major General of California’s state militia, formally arrested Garra and charged him with treason against the United States. Despite arguing that he had never pledged loyalty to the United States as the leader of a sovereign Indigenous nation fighting to end unjust US rule over Cupeño lands, Garra was found guilty and executed by firing squad.


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Facing Russian colonisation: Egor Antonov , Aleksandr Korobeinikov, ‘Under the Name “Yakut”: Pseudonymous Authorship, Settler Colonialism, and the Political Agency of Sakha Intellectuals in the Late Russian Empire’, Ab Imperio, 3, 2025, pp. 79-111

15Dec25

Abstract: The article explores the strategic use of the pseudonym “Yakut” by a group of Sakha (Yakut) intellectuals in the late Russian Empire to assert their political voice against imperial authority and settler colonialism. Operating from the margins of the empire, this collective voice engaged in sophisticated public discourse that did not merely respond to imperial misrepresentation but actively constructed a political language of Indigenous self-assertion. The article systematically examines three key thematic areas in which the pseudonym was deployed: rewriting Sakha history to legitimize traditional governance, rigorously critiquing land policy and settler colonialism with environmental realism, and advocating for Indigenous self-government by repurposing imperial legal frameworks. Ultimately, the article argues that “Yakut” was a discursive position crafted by an educated elite to assert intellectual sovereignty and redefine the terms of Sakha participation within a contradictory imperial system.


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Russian colonisation: Willard Sunderland, ‘The Russian Guide to Colonization Management: By Titular Councilor Andrei Ivanovich Korotich’, Ab Imperio, 3, 2025, pp. 162-178

15Dec25

Abstract: This essay is framed by the author’s decision to invent a historical document – a fictitious guide to colonization management written by the imagined bureaucrat Andrei Ivanovich Korotich – to visualize the real but unsystematized Russian colonization ideology of the 1840s. Focused on peasant resettlement ( pereselenie) as a bureaucratic tool for rationalizing the relationship between land and people, this invented “Guide to Russian Colonization Management,” highlights the chaos, corruption, and “unauthorized” movement of state peasants. This thought experiment synthesizes a nonexistent bureaucratic manual based on the general governmentality of the era, as represented by Nicholas I’s legislation and numerous instructions. Published alongside a real analytical memo on colonization penned in 1907 by the longtime colonization expert Fyodor Umnov, this essay exposes the limitations of applying settler colonialism models based on clear binaries and homogenizing the “colonial mind” as suggested by settler colonial theorists. The complex and historically evolving semantics of settler colonization in the imperial context renders those binaries uninformative – whether these are empire versus subject or resettlement versus the state.


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Indigenous vs animal rights? Esther Tordjmann, Nicole T. Cook, ‘Decolonising animal activism: engaging with Indigenous activist perspectives’, Political Geography, 125, 2026, #103472

15Dec25

Abstract: Animal rights activism has been criticised in settler-colonial states for overlooking human rights abuses and shielding colonial powers. However, the efforts of animal rights activists to expand their political alliances with subaltern and colonised others are laden with tensions, stemming from the oppression and violence of settler-colonial projects. The steps that progressive non-Indigenous activists can take to support alliances with colonised others are therefore unclear. In this article, we contend that Indigenous activists’ perspectives offer critical insights into the development of alliances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists towards linked human and animal rights in settler-colonial states. Drawing on an ethnography with Indigenous activists in Occupied Palestine (pre-October 7), we show that the conditions for alliance-building exceed the rejection of racialised settler colonialism. They also require commitments by non-Indigenous activists towards Indigenous grassroots movements encompassing the diverse political agendas and heterogeneity of Indigenous societies. Beyond the hegemony of Israeli occupation, Palestinian activists seek alliances that centre community and youth development, and self-determination as key dimensions of linked animal and human rights. These priorities unsettle the Western strictures of animal rights anchored in veganism as the sole political concern of Palestinian activists. Questioning the efficacy of inflexible moral and ethical frameworks as platforms for alliance-building, we instead locate alliances for linked animal and human rights within a politics of listening anchored in settler-colonial discomfort, the labour of yielding to Indigenous priorities and remaining open to contingent, ‘on the ground’ politics. In so doing, we show that activist ethnography can reveal complex postcolonial engagements with the political, and the plural and hybrid human and animal activisms that these geographies give rise to.


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Cement! Lies Defever, ‘Cementing Settler Colonialism: An Ethnography of Israeli West Bank Construction’, in Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Madlen Kobi, Ying Zhou (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches to a Cross-Disciplinary Field, Routledge, 2025

14Dec25

Abstract: This chapter proposes cement – the world’s most widely used building material, as a lens through which to theorize the processes of Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. It draws on an ethnographic case study of Israeli settlement construction of private villas in Nokdim and follows cement’s material and immaterial flows. By attending to cement’s material properties, ideological connotations, geopolitical and legal deployment, and unpredictable connections and trajectories, this chapter goes beyond the categorical separation between “the material-lived” (the built environment) and “the representational” (discourse on settlements). The open-ended assemblage that emerges from this case shows that “the material-lived” and “the representational” are co-constitutive and cannot be studied separately and that centring the building material can reconceptualize theory on settler colonialism, its practices, and processes. This chapter invites the political and material anthropologist to think with and through building materials and urges the architect to think of materials beyond their physical, sustainable, and aesthetic properties.


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Not settler colonialism? Shahla Hussain, ‘The Land Question in Kashmir: Limitations of the Settler-Colonial Framework’, in Sugata Bose, Ayesha Jalal (eds), South Asia’s Freedom in Global Perspective: Nation, Partition, Federation, Routledge, 2025

14Dec25

Abstract: In August 2019, the Hindu nationalist government led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) unilaterally abolished Kashmir’s autonomous status, the basis of its provisional accession to India. Since then, the Indian government has revoked Kashmir’s special land protections that prevented outsiders from buying land in Kashmir. Some scholars have responded to this political moment by situating Jammu and Kashmir within a theoretical settler-colonial model, interpreting India’s past integration policies, surveillance, assimilation agenda, land dispossession, and more through this lens. However, this chapter demonstrates the limitations of the settler-colonial framework to explain the rich and complex post-1947 history of Kashmir. Instead, it places the land question in Kashmir within its unique regional context and examines the complex dynamics at play. Drawing on laws and legislation, court cases, and legal narratives, this chapter historicizes India’s territorialization efforts across different temporal frames against the backdrop of state-subject laws, agrarian reforms, urban spatial changes, and the recent transformation of Kashmir into a site of neoliberal economic extraction. It also highlights the emotional significance of land for Kashmiris and its role in shaping their politics of collaboration and resistance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that India’s forcible integration of Kashmir reflects a postcolonial nation-building strategy focused on producing territorial sovereignty, shaped by the entanglements of imperial capitalism, neoliberalism, and corporate interests.


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Settler colonialism separates: Lesley Green, ‘Terranology: Integrating science and social sciences in the critical zone’, in Jennifer Eadie, Stephen Muecke (eds), Living in Critical Zones: Environmental Humanities in South Asia, Routledge, 2025

14Dec25

Abstract: Settler colonialism instantiated not only new regimes of property relations that privilege mastery and ownership but also a suite of concepts that define humans apart from land and Earth processes. Addressing the legacy of settler colonialism warrants addressing not only the historical legacy of political and economic arrangements but also the conceptual legacies that continue to insert, into scholarship, the fiction of human independence of the conditions of local habitability. Building on the call of Danowski and De Castro (2016) to refigure the concept of the human which universalises the illusion of people’s separation from nature, their concept of the “Terran” invites an integrative science of local habitability based on material flows, exchanges, and relations. Critical zone sciences, I suggest, frame the terms of such a science that avoids reducing the world to calculative reason sans context.


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