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Comparing settler colonial environments: Tom Lynch, Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary, University of Nebraska Press, 2022

18Sep22

Description: Outback and Out West examines the ecological consequences of a settler-colonial imaginary by comparing expressions of settler colonialism in the literature of the American West and Australian Outback. Tom Lynch traces exogenous domination in both regions, which resulted in many similar means of settlement, including pastoralism, homestead acts, afforestation efforts, and bioregional efforts at “belonging.” Lynch pairs the two nations’ texts to show how an analysis at the intersection of ecocriticism and settler colonialism requires a new canon that is responsive to the social, cultural, and ecological difficulties created by settlement in the West and Outback. Outback and Out West draws out the regional Anthropocene dimensions of settler colonialism, considering such pressing environmental problems as habitat loss, groundwater depletion, and mass extinctions. Lynch studies the implications of our settlement heritage on history, art, and the environment through the cross-national comparison of spaces. He asserts that bringing an ecocritical awareness to settler-colonial theory is essential for reconciliation with dispossessed Indigenous populations as well as reparations for ecological damages as we work to decolonize engagement with and literature about these places.


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Comparing settler colonialisms: Jacob Tropp, ‘U.S. Indian Affairs, British Imperial Africa, and Transcolonial Dialogues over Conservation and “Native Development” in the 1930s’, Journal of World History, 33, 3, 2022, p. 459-489

18Sep22

Abstract: Throughout the 1930s, as technical officers from multiple territories in British imperial Africa toured the United States to study federal soil conservation efforts in the wake of the Dust Bowl, they made particular observations of programs among southwestern Native American populations and conferred with colleagues in the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). These previously unexplored exchanges extended far beyond purely technical matters: they became significant opportunities for both British imperial and OIA officials to reflect comparatively on America’s enduring settler colonialism, colonial situations in eastern and southern Africa, and parallel state agendas of “native development.” This article focuses on three case studies—involving visitors from colonial South Africa and Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Kenya to various reservations and Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona—to reveal how officials used these transcolonial dialogues to articulate their particular interests in and promote their preferred approaches to managing colonized peoples and their landscapes.


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Agrarian reform against settler colonialism in Latin America: Joanna Crow, ‘Indigeneity, Land and Property’, in Joanna Crow, Itinerant Ideas, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 69-100

15Sep22

Abstract: This Chapter focuses on the question of land ownership. After exploring Chilean-Peruvian intellectual and artistic exchanges (via Mexico) about the urgency of agrarian reform in defence of indigenous communities in the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter shows how successive governments in both countries proceeded to reduce indigenous land tenure over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. It then explores the transnational aspects of the violent cyclical history of dispossession, indigenous rebellion (against dispossession), and state repression (of rebellion) from the 1910s through 1930s. Finally, it shows how indigenous intellectuals in both countries made it clear that their problems with landowners and the state were not just about the economic worth of land.


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The reconciliation of one Asian settler society: Scott E. Simon, Jolan Hsieh, Peter Kang (eds), Indigenous Reconciliation in Contemporary Taiwan: From Stigma to Hope, Routledge, 2023

15Sep22

Description: This book draws attention to the issues of Indigenous justice and reconciliation in Taiwan, exploring how Indigenous actors affirm their rights through explicitly political and legal strategies, but also through subtle forms of justice work in films, language instruction, museums, and handicraft production. Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples have been colonized by successive external regimes, mobilized into war for Imperial Japan, stigmatized as primitive “mountain compatriots” in need of modernization, and instrumentalized as proof of Taiwan’s unique identity vis-à-vis China. Taiwan’s government now encapsulates them in democratic institutions of indigeneity. This volume emphasizes that there is new hope for real justice in an era in which states and Indigenous peoples seek meaningful forms of reconciliation at all levels and arenas of social life. The chapters, written by leading Indigenous, Taiwanese, and international scholars in their respective fields, examine concrete situations in which Indigenous peoples seek justice and decolonization from the perspectives of territory and sovereignty, social work and justice. Illustrating that there is new hope for real justice in an era in which states and Indigenous peoples seek meaningful forms of reconciliation, this book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Taiwan Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Social Justice Studies.


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The expansion of two Asian settler societies: Tinakrit Sireerat, Looking North: Hokkaido’s Farms, Lanna’s Forests, and the Colonial Nature of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Japan and Thailand, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2022

15Sep22

Abstract: This dissertation presents a comparative enviro-colonial history of the northward expansion by Japan and Siam between the late-nineteenth century and the early-twentieth century. The term “enviro-colonial history” connotes the entanglements between environmental history and colonial history that are enabled by the practices of knowledge production and mobilization. In the case of Japan’s colonization of Hokkaido, the promotion of “scientific agriculture” became a means to transform the unfamiliar environment of the northern island into a thriving settler colony for Japanese migrants. Meanwhile, in Siam, the institutionalization of “scientific forestry” was aimed at reconfiguring the relationships around the flourishing timber trade in the northern frontier, to facilitate both the annexation of the Lanna states and the centralization of forest regulation. As I will elaborate in the chapters that follow, the production and mobilization of agricultural science in Hokkaido and forestry in Lanna enabled the imagination of “envirocolonial rule” – a form of governance that entangled environmental management with colonial
administration as if they were part of the same process.


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The reproductive politics of a settler colonial project: Bayan Abusneineh, Chosen and Imagined: Racial and Gendered Politics of Reproduction in Palestine and Israel, PhD dissertation, UC San Diego, 2022

13Sep22

Abstract: Chosen and Imagined: Racial and Gendered Politics of Reproduction in Palestine and Israel, traces how Israel manages, subjugates, and seeks to erase populations deemed threatening to the modern nation-state and its pursuit of homogeneity through racial and reproductive violence. This project aims to unravel Israel’s pronatalist fertility regime as co-produced simultaneously by ongoing histories of Zionist settler colonialism, Islamophobia/ Orientalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-blackness. Employing an interdisciplinary and transnational methodology, Chosen and Imagined combines archival research, oral history, testimonials, film and media analysis, to reveal the state’s efforts to deploy reproduction as a path to become part of the civilized, modern, and “superior” West. Through an analysis of a state sponsored child kidnapping and adoption campaign, forced sterilization, family separation and anti-miscegenation laws, and deployment of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs), I examine how discourses around reproduction are couched within eugenics. By critically engaging with critical race and settler colonial studies, Palestine studies, and reproductive histories, my project complicates traditional discourses of Israeli settler colonialism, which typically configure a relationship between the Native (Palestinian) versus the Settler (Israeli), by highlighting nuances within the figure of the settler/Israeli. For instance, I trace how Israel’s reproductive management of Black and Arab populations aids in the formation of a new European/Ashkenazi Israeli identity, the idealized subject who must be protected against abject, racialized populations.


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Truth and settler colonialism: Vanessa Barolsky, ‘Truth-telling about a settler-colonial legacy: decolonizing possibilities?’ Postcolonial Studies, 2022

13Sep22

Abstract: In 2017, the Uluru Statement calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth was released by Australia’s Referendum Council. The Uluru Statement calls for a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of
‘agreement-making’ and ‘truth-telling’. I argue that it was in the regional dialogues held by the Referendum Council prior to the release of the Uluru Statement that this demand for truth-telling
was substantively articulated by dialogue participants. This article explores this grassroots invocation of truth-telling within the context of the desire for political transformation, most recently expressed in the Uluru Statement. I argue that truth-telling is conceptualized by regional dialogue participants as an opportunity for First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians to participate as equals in a process of place-based dialogic engagement about the ‘truths’ of colonial history that may or may not lead to local reconciliation. This type of ‘agonistic’ political encounter, therefore, does not assume an outcome of national or even local reconciliation. I contend that these types of encounters may have the potential to create local decolonizing spaces in which more equal terms of association are negotiated. However, they could also be appropriated to pursue ideological forms of consensus that undermine this possibility, as occurred in previous periods of Australian history.


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Settler and indirect rule: Youssef Mnali, Settling Palestine : logics of Israeli (in)direct governance of the occupied west bank since 1967, PhD dissertation, European University Institute, 2022

13Sep22

Abstract: Settling Palestine: The logics of Israeli (In)direct governance of the West Bank since 1967 In June 1967, after Israel’s dramatic victory in the Six-Day War, the Israeli army occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the Syrian Golan Heights. With the exception of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the other territories were not annexed. Instead, they remained under military occupation and were slowly settled by diverse and heterogeneous groups of Jewish Israeli citizens. The dissertation argues that there is a profound difference between capturing territory in war and occupying it in peacetime. By necessity and design, Israel’s military occupation is built on indirect governance, with Jewish settlers serving as intermediary agents of the Israeli state. The longstanding Israeli occupation has reinforced the image of Israel as a strong state capable of enforcing its authority over the territory under its control. The dissertation reveals how many Israeli governments have been plagued by operational, reputational, and institutional capacity deficits that have hindered their attempts to govern the new territories effectively and to reign in Palestinian resistance directly with the Israeli army and other state agencies. To overcome these deficits, Israeli governments have mobilized different types of settlers who had the partial or complete capacity required by the state of Israel. In return, the state has become increasingly dependent on the administrative, logistic and security services provided by settlers on the ground and on the recruits they provide for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) at a time when Israel was experiencing a decline in the numbers of non-settler Israeli citizens joining the military and when the increasing integration of the Palestinian population and territories into Israel’s de facto and judicial sovereignty was expanding its responsibility in the eyes of the world and hindered the use of lethal violence by the army. State dependence increased the bargaining position of the settlers and gave them increasing influence in Israeli politics. These changes destabilized the initial indirect governance arrangement. Settlers constantly adapted these arrangements in order to twist them in their favour. The central question posed by the dissertation is: Why and how does the Israeli state mobilise settlers? And how have the reactions of settlers shaped state and society in Israel? The answer is provided by seven chapters which reconstruct state-settler interactions through selected episodes of Israeli occupation in the period 1967–2020. 6 The thesis is structured into seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the research question and sketches the main argument. Chapter two explains case selection and fieldwork methodology. Chapter three provides a broad ranging review of the theoretical and empirical literature. Chapter four presents a historical overview of the early decades of the occupation. It analyses the politics of the settlements, the indirect governance arrangements that emerged between the government and the religious Zionist sector, the implicit contract underlying these arrangements in terms of deficits in government capacity and settler competences, as well as the convergence and divergence of interests. Chapter five analyses the establishment of ‘illegal’ outposts in the 1990s and their subsequent transformation into permanent settlements. After the Oslo Accords’ Memorandum on new settlements, the Israeli authorities have rebalanced their emphasis away from establishing new settlements through ‘delegation’ towards establishing ‘illegal outposts’ with their subsequent silent ‘conversion’ into ‘legal’ settlements. The last empirical chapter 6 examines the indirect governance of violence. It analyses the arrangements to deal with indirect violence adopted by the Israeli government and the national-religious sector and the changes these arrangements underwent over time. Issues include soldiers’ refusal to follow orders in evacuating settlers on the grounds of their religious convictions and settler violence targeting the Israeli army, especially in the aftermath of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Chapter seven concludes with a short summary of the argument and possible extensions. The thesis builds on a theory-guided process-tracing approach (TGPT). It is based on over fifty in-depth interviews with current and former IDF officers, state officials in the Civil Military Administration, soldiers, politicians, diplomats and settlement residents and their representatives. The thesis engages with theories of settler colonialism, indirect governance, religious radicalism, and military sociology. It constitutes an innovative study of the Israeli settler movement and its historical evolution from the perspective of indirect governance and is one of a few studies focusing on radical right social movements in a non-Western political context.


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Setter women organizing: Eleanor Glenne Thompson, Class, Gender, Race, and Resistance The United Farm Women of Manitoba, 1916–1936, MA Dissertation, University of Manitoba/University of Winnipeg, 2022

13Sep22

Abstract: In the second decade of the twentieth century, the resistance of Canadian prairie farm women to the inequities of the Dominion government’s national policies, coupled with their growing awareness of women’s unequal rights, gave rise to the formation of semi-autonomous farm women’s organizations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. These women were part of the agrarian protest movement that has left its mark on the political, economic and social structures of Canada. Considerable research has shed light on the organized farm women of Saskatchewan and Alberta, but little has been written about the United Farm Women of Manitoba (UFWM). Drawing on the extensive files of the UFWM preserved in the Archives of Manitoba as well as relevant secondary sources, this thesis situates members of the UFWM in the context of settler colonialism and utilizes the intersectional analyses of gender, class, race, religion, ethnicity and region to examine these women’s lives and work, both on the farm and in the public sphere, between 1916 and 1936. The UFWM resisted the economic and political structures of monopoly capitalism that served the interests of the wealthy and privileged while oppressing those who laboured to produce that wealth and the Indigenous nations whose land was stolen. They worked tirelessly to build an alternative society based on principles of cooperation and a more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources, and they fought for women’s right to vote, to hold public office, to have an equal share in the assets they worked to produce, as well as equality in divorce, separation and child custody. Their strong agrarian class identity prevented them from affiliating closely with urban middle-class women’s groups and they felt a closer affinity with the working class. They stood in solidarity with First Nations when the Dominion government tried to take additional reserve land for returning soldiers after World War I. However, as determined as UFWM members were in their resistance to the constructed hierarchies of gender and class, their strong identity with their British Anglo-Saxon race and Protestant religion eventually led them to support assimilation and eugenics practices. While the UFWM has much to teach us about the liberating possibilities of collective action in the building of a more equitable society, their strong adherence to constructed racial and religious hierarchies reminds us of the ways racism impedes the fight for truth, reconciliation and social justice.


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Settler colonial agroecologies: Kase W. Wheatley, Beyond Land Grab Settler Agriculture: Toward a Transformative University Agroecology, MA dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2022

11Sep22

Abstract: As a practice, agroecology can trace its roots to Indigenous and peasant farmer knowledge developed over centuries, yet as a term, agroecology has existed for over ninety years. The term has become institutionalized through universities like the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Land Grant University where a number of staff and faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds practice agroecology, often in collaborative efforts. At the same time, through efforts like the High Country News exposé Land Grab U, more attention is being brought to the settler colonial origins of Land Grant universities like UW-Madison and the ongoing implications of these origins on research. Through twenty-one interviews with UW-Madison practitioners affiliated with the Agroecology program and others from the university who work with Indigenous communities, I sought to understand 1) perceptions of agroecology, 2) how settler colonialism and Indigeneity are considered in this work, and 3) what a “transformative university agroecology” could look like. Since its inception as an academic program at UW in the early 2000s, agroecology has steadily embraced a more explicit political orientation challenging individual disciplinary boundaries and the broader “productivist” paradigm of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. However, what actually constitutes the broader social context of agroecology was contested among interviewees, especially across disciplinary boundaries. Interviewees from the social sciences and humanities acknowledged settler colonialism more frequently than interviewees However, among all Agroecology program-affiliated interviewees, the depth to which settler colonialism was integrated into their work was generally limited. Interviewees from outside the agroecology program called upon their colleagues to do more and begin these efforts by building relationships based in collaboration.


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