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Laughable matter: Bernard C. Perley, ‘Perplexities of Settler Colonial Folklore: Stripping for the Holidays, ‘Journal of American Folklore, 138, 550, 2025, pp. 468-479

05Oct25

Abstract: Folklore studies has a distinguished history that also includes unintended harms due to past practices. Folklorists have learned lessons from past practices and are actively engaged in meaningful and purposive methodologies of understanding and shared knowledge. A Native American perspective offers insights into past harms but does so in the service of respectful and responsive folklore studies. This essay introduces “Indian humor” via comic strips as a means for highlighting cross-cultural perplexities to promote mutual respect and understanding between settler colonial society and Native American communities.


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Settlers monopolise international relations: Tomohiro Harada, ‘Seeing like a people: Indigenous diplomacies and struggles for self-determination under the United Nations system’, European Journal of International Relations, 2025

05Oct25

Abstract: Since the beginning of the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN), Indigenous Peoples have been frequently denied participation in the formal meetings of the UN as representatives of their Peoples, constituted by their respective governments. Instead, they have been participating formally under the UN System under the auspices of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or through Member States as substate actors. Accordingly, International Relations (IR) literature has broadly studied Indigenous Peoples under the UN System under the guises of transnational actors, lobby groups, civil society, experts, and most notably, NGOs, or simply assumed to be represented under the mantle of States in which they live. Accordingly, it pays little attention to how Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination is constituted in their practices directly under the UN System. This paper will illustrate Indigenous Peoples’ diplomacies and argue that their diplomacies constitute distinct agencies and practices of self-determination in the UN System which are aimed to challenge the dominance of sovereign States under the UN System and international order, but not without practical constraints. Nevertheless, I argue that Indigenous Peoples should be studied as distinct diplomatic actors under the UN System and in IR.


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India’s settler colonialism: Jeremy A. Rinker, ‘The settler colonial imagination: Hindutva, neoliberal development, and coming to grips with the collective trauma of Kashmir’s protracted colonization’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

05Oct25

Abstract: Despite growing literatures on the intersection between narrative testimony, persistent marginalization, and public storytelling as democratic, legal, and therapeutic resource for survivors of mass political violence (see Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses, ‘Rethinking Historical Trauma’, among others), there is little empirical understanding of the importance of creating socio-legal mechanisms for testimony and storytelling in overcoming the historical legacies of colonialism, settler exceptionalism, and collective trauma in protracted social conflicts. Indian administered Kashmir is a case in point. Stuck in the post-colonial imagination of a country now ruled by nationalistic Hindutva forces, the 2021 Russell Tribunal on Kashmir took as one of its four key goals to interrogate the Kashmir conflict through the lens of settler colonialism. In the context of neoliberal and hegemonic Hindutva forces, is such a reframing of this protracted social conflict accurate, or even possible? When powerful forces embrace a belligerent and oppositional narrative of the Kashmir conflict, like that found in the 2022 Bollywood film Kashmir Files, one must question how a settler colonial frame informs the protracted nature of the conflict. This article argues that what Harold Saunders called, a public peace process is not only welcome but required for peace with justice in Kashmir.


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Willa Cather as a settler bard: Emily J. Rau, Resettling Willa Cather’s West, Special Issue, Western American Literature, 60, 2, 2025

05Oct25

Access the special issue here.


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Dancing with settlers: Gabriel Baker, ‘Bittersweet Belonging: A Humble Story About Blooms and Bones Available to Purchase’, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 14, 3, 2025, pp. 30-54

05Oct25

Abstract: In what follows, I share a story. Emerging from engagement with critical autoethnography and danced movement as methodology during my doctoral research, my story explores the complex terrain of my sense of belonging as a Pākehā, or White woman of settler-colonial descent, in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Inspired by scholars who have drawn attention to the power and possibilities of humble approaches to being an academic and doing academic research, I tell my story not to support a grand theory or critique but to answer calls for reflexivity and response-ability among those of White settler-colonial background.


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Academia on the settler’s side: Walaa Alqaisiya, Nicola Perugini (eds), Palestine and the Western Academe: Fighting the Exception, Defending Epistemic Justice, Routledge, 2026

05Oct25

Description: The ongoing devastation in Gaza and other parts of Palestine, alongside the systematic destruction of Palestinian universities, has coincided with intensified censorship and repression within Western academic institutions. These developments reveal the distinctive position that Zionism and its defense has held for decades within Western imperial structures, creating patterns of epistemic injustice. Palestine and the Western Academe emerges from a collective sense of political and intellectual urgency in response to mounting repression against scholars and students working on and studying Palestine. While attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech in Western academia have intensified, they have been met with new forms of resistance and disobedience, bolstered by coalitional anti- racist and anti- capitalist solidarities extending from Palestine globally. This edited volume brings together significant contributions from scholars and students offering fresh approaches to the epistemic and political struggles surrounding Palestine. It demonstrates the timely and enduring relevance of the Palestinian question to international academic spaces and is essential reading for academics, researchers, and students interested in Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, International Relations, Critical Theory, Decolonial Studies, and Academic Freedom discourse. Most of the chapters in this book were originally published in Middle East Critique. This edition comes with several new chapters and an updated introduction, offering fresh perspectives and expanded analysis on these urgent and evolving issues.


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Is time on the settler’s side? Nasser Abourahme, The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony, Duke University Press, 2025

05Oct25

Description: In The Time beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Taking as his primary object  Palestinian refugee camps, created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding, Abourahme shows how these camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. That struggle, Abourahme demonstrates, is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.


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Coming of age and settler colonialism: Laura Soderberg, ‘Coming-of-age Outside the Settler State: Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe and Native Sovereignty’, in Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (ed.), The Post-Bildungsroman: Coming of Age at the Margins, Bloomsbury, 2025

05Oct25

Access the chapter here.


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The (attempted) elimination of the native intellect: Avi Shlaim, ‘Scholasticide in Gaza’, Journal of the British Academy, 13, 1, 2025, #a16

02Oct25

Excerpt: Scholasticide is the deliberate destruction of an educational system and its institutions. The term was first coined by Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an expert on the laws of war. The immediate context was Operation Cast Lead of December 2008, the first major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip after the unilateral disengagement of August 2005. The broader context was Zionist settler-colonialism and its attacks on Palestinian scholars, students, and educational institutions since the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. The term combines the Latin prefix schola, meaning school, and the Latin suffix ‘cide’, meaning killing. Nabulsi used it to describe the ‘systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel’ and the tradition of Palestinian learning. That tradition, Nabulsi observed, revolves round the pivotal ‘role and power of education in an occupied society’ in which freedom of thought ‘posits possibilities, opens horizons’, in sharp contrast with ‘the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, and the choking prisons’. Recognising ‘how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution’, Nabulsi noted that Israeli colonial policymakers ‘cannot abide it and have to destroy it’. 


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Indigenous land rights in Chile: Alexandra Tomaselli, ‘Indigenous Land Rights in Chile: Dispossession, Misrecognition, and Litigation’, in William Nikolakis (ed.), Land Rights Now: Global Voices on Indigenous Peoples and Land Justice, Cambridge University Press, 2025

01Oct25

Abstract: Despite Chile’s recent failed attempts at constitutional reform, Indigenous land rights are (still) governed by the much-contested Indigenous Law of 1993 (Law No. 19,253). The land restitution program foreseen in this law is extremely slow and controversial, and the establishment of Indigenous territories (by ordinary law) appears far from reality. At the same time, there are a few recognized Indigenous territories in Chile, and they are constantly faced with a high density of hydro-electric plants, extractivist activities, disproportionate forest and logging exploitation, salmon farming and a growing tourism industry. Over the years, Indigenous Peoples have reacted in different ways to dispossession and encroachment. Driven by frustration, some have assertively occupied their ancestral lands. Others have filed lawsuits and found a more equitable venue to claim their rights in the national courts. Against this background, this chapter analyzes the processes of dispossession faced by Indigenous Peoples in relation to their traditional lands in the north and south of Chile over recent decades, how they contested the titles to ownership and possession of such territories, and the outcomes of their litigation strategies. After the public rejections of constitutional reforms in 2022 and 2023, it remains uncertain how Indigenous land rights will be governed in the coming years or how they will be treated in any potential reforms to Pinochet’s Constitution of 1980. Despite the unfavorable legislative framework, this chapter argues that Indigenous strategic litigation can best advance and support land rights in Chile.


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