settler colonial studies blog

Forced (nope: still forced): Ghassan Elkahlout, ‘Settler colonialism and the rhetoric of voluntary migration in Gaza’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

09Nov25

Abstract: This article examines the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza as a core mechanism within Israel’s settler-colonial strategy. Drawing on historical analysis, international legal instruments and original qualitative research, the study analyses how Israeli policies employ military force, structural deprivation, and legal manipulation to facilitate Palestinian expulsion, presented under the rhetoric of voluntary migration. By tracing the evolution of displacement from the early Zionist movement to the current genocide (This paper uses ‘genocide’ for the current Israeli assault on Gaza and ‘Naksa’ (Arabic for catastrophe/setback) for the six-day war in 1967, reflecting their systemic nature.) in Gaza, the article highlights the enduring logic of elimination embedded within settler-colonial practices aimed at erasing Palestinian presence while deflecting legal accountability. The study also engages comparative insights from other cases where displacement and demographic restructuring have been used to consolidate political control, including the experiences of Indigenous communities in North America, South Africa’s apartheid regime, and territorial fragmentation in Northern Ireland. In addition to archival and legal sources, the analysis incorporates first-hand testimonies drawn from 82 interviews with Palestinian families evacuated to Qatar since October 2023. These findings contest prevailing narratives of voluntary migration and underscore the urgency of addressing displacement as part of a broader system of structural violence and settler-colonial domination.

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Digital settlers: Nikolaos Iason Koufodontis, Eleni Gaki, ‘Digital nomads or digital settlers? Rethinking regional development in the information age’, Geoforum, 167, 2025, #104466

09Nov25

Abstract: Digital labor mobility is reshaping regional economies and challenging established models of migration and spatial development. This study examines how digital nomads transition into long-term digital settlers and what regional conditions support or inhibit that process. Drawing on Network Migration Theory and Lifestyle Migration Theory, a four-stage model of digital migration is developed based on duration of stay and regional embeddedness. The model is tested through an empirical case study of Greece using survey data, spatial analysis, and three-dimensional modeling. Findings indicate that while affordability and digital infrastructure are prioritized by short-term visitors, longer-term settlers consistently rank healthcare, municipal services, local safety, and geopolitical stability as critical conditions. Preferences shift systematically across the settlement continuum, with demographic factors such as gender and income further moderating settlement tolerances. The analysis, supported by 3D modeling reveals non-linear thresholds in perceived acceptability, especially for essential services. Importantly, digital settlement does not necessarily imply full-time relocation. Many digital settlers maintain a stable regional base while continuing to travel periodically and may eventually retire to these embedded locations. By linking digital migration to human capital dynamics, regional resilience, and spatial policy design, the study contributes to ongoing debates in economic geography and migration studies. Implications are discussed in relation to evolving EU and OECD frameworks for attracting mobile knowledge workers.

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Settling/researching: Vicki Chartrand, ‘Settler Research in Indigenous Country’, Qualitative Inquiry, 2025

09Nov25

Abstract: Settler research in Indigenous country continues to emerge as problematic scholarship, often complicit in an invasive and extractive knowledge production. Drawing on the Unearthing Justices project—a collaborative research initiative that shares and showcases Indigenous-led initiatives for the MMIWG2S communities—this article examines the ontological and methodological possibilities for settler research. Foregrounding a practice of witnessing that is relational, embodied, and land-based, the article proposes this approach as a generative intervention into conventional settler research. While acknowledging the inherent tensions and incommensurability of settler presence, this article argues that settler research cannot stand outside colonial systems; instead, it must be reshaped through accountable collaborations that advance Indigenous intellectual sovereignty and community-defined justice. Rather than offer a prescriptive methodology, it invites researchers to stay with the complexities, contradictions, and responsibilities of research in Indigenous country.

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Service as survivance: Marie-Lys Jane Chambraud Thwaites, Warriors and Healers of the Eastern Band of Cherokee: Peoplehood, Survivance, and Military Service in World War I (1917-1924)’, PhD dissertation, Virginia Polytechnic, 2025

09Nov25

Abstract: My research examines the contributions of the Eastern Band of Cherokee warriors during World War I, emphasizing Indigenous agency, cultural survival, and community within a settlercolonial framework. It explores how these warriors navigated military service as both an assertion of sovereignty and a means of survival, using their enlistment to resist colonial erasure while maintaining their cultural identity. Through the application of the Peoplehood model and the concept of survivance, this study analyzes the interconnected roles of land, language, sacred history, and ceremonial practices in sustaining Cherokee identity. Furthermore, this study incorporates an Indigenous feminist perspective to emphasize the role of Eastern Cherokee women in maintaining the resilience of Cherokee communities and supporting the healing of warriors. The women served during the war as nurses, officers and occupied a generally white and male centered environment. After the war, some former warriors and women participated in political actions to improve the lives of indigenous peoples. They also had to learn to reintegrate themselves in their community and society after such deep traumas; and for that they used their traditional healing practices and traditional stories. By combining archival research, oral histories, and an analysis of military service, my work contributes to ongoing discussions of Native sovereignty, military service, and the legacies of Indigenous resilience before, during, and after World War I. It underscores the enduring importance of Indigenous storytelling, archives, and collective memory in documenting the survival and revitalization of Cherokee culture in the face of historical violence and cultural suppression.

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High altitude settler colonialism? Ting Hui Lau, Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking against Chinese Settler Colonialism, Stanford University Press, 2026

08Nov25

Description: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance explores these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and Tibet. Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands, this mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state power. Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has been compelling the Lisu to give up their subsistence lifeways, move into urban settlements, and send their children to government boarding schools. In exchange for the so-called gifts of development—healthcare, income, and education—they suffer environmental and social catastrophes such as mass landslides, strange new illnesses, and toxic food. Drawing on over a decade of engagement with the Lisu, Ting Hui Lau takes readers into the world of ex-shamans, heart-pained mothers, restless spirits, and demon-mad migrants as they grapple with the fallout from state development, which Lau argues is the latest phase in a centuries-long project of settler colonialism along China’s Southwest frontier. At once a portrayal of loss and an ethnography of hope, Lau chronicles Lisu worldmaking amid this destruction, centering their quiet resistance through everyday acts of communal caretaking. In a time of escalating geopolitical and ecological crisis, this book calls for a new decolonial politics rooted in the transformative power of endurance.

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Settler colonialism for sport: Derek Silva, Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Chen Chen, Kristi Allain, Jason Laurendeau, Janelle Joseph, Daniel Sailofsky, Shrehan Lynch, Anthony Weems, Leyla Hamed, Priyansh, Adam Ali , Roc Rochon, Zuleikha Chikh, Charlotte Phillips, Jules Boykoff, R. Taha, Jess Nachman, Zeana Hamdonah, Thomas Ross Griffin, Anima Adjepong, Jeffrey Montez de Oca, ‘Settler Colonialism–Genocide–Athleticide: The Destruction of Sport in Occupied Palestine’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 2025

08Nov25

Abstract: In this paper, our scholarly collective traces how athleticide—defined here as the obliteration of sport, sporting cultures, and athletics through the killing, arrest, detention, or disabling of athletes, coaches, staff, officials, and administrators and the destruction of athletic infrastructure and history—has been part of the US–NATO-funded Israeli state’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. Although much of the literature focuses on the philosophical, ethical, and political foundations of events that are conventionally described as “genocide,” little scholarly attention has been paid to genocide in the disparate fields that make up sports studies. Even less attention has been paid to the role that sport, sporting cultures, and athletics may, or may not, play in genocide and genocidal campaigns. To address this gap, we advocate for the development of a sociology of athleticide as one possible point of departure for advancing sports studies’ understanding of the role that sport can, and often does, play in times of genocide and the impact of state violence on sport.

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The air of the city does not make you free: Peter Kent-Stoll, ‘Struggles for the land and the city: Settler colonialism, anticolonialism, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation Program in Chicago’, Critical Sociology, 2025

07Nov25

Abstract: The Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation program relocated thousands of Native Americans to Chicago and other cities from the early 1950s through the early 1970s. Despite BIA claims of social and economic progress, Native people faced exploitative social, political, and material conditions in the city. This article examines how the BIA envisioned and managed relocation in Chicago and how Native people challenged the BIA’s expectations and desires. Urban sociological and urban historical literature on the postwar U.S. is not well positioned to answer these questions, given its minimal engagement with histories of U.S. settler colonialism and urban Indigenous experiences. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives on settler colonial urbanisms and urban indigeneity, I uncover how the BIA imagined Chicago as a modern city disconnected from indigeneity, and how relocated Native people formed the Chicago Indian Village movement to fight for land back while building space and community in resistance to dispossession.

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Indigenous sites are sacred: Michalyn Steele, ‘The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act as a Model of Cultural Sovereignty for Protecting Indigenous Sacred Sites’, Fordham Law Review, 94, 2, 2025, #8

07Nov25

Excerpt: For Native Hawaiians, the soaring summit of Hawaiʻi’s Mauna Kea is among the most sacred sites for their cultural and spiritual practices and beliefs. Indeed, the summit of the extinct volcano Mauna Kea is a literal dwelling place of deity, with access to the holy site, highly restricted to those authorized to perform sacred rituals. The mountain is central to the creation story and spiritual life of the Native Hawaiians and their islands; it is inextricably linked to their identity past, present, and future. In their tradition, only “spiritual leaders and royal elites” should be allowed access to the mountain to avoid disturbing the deity’s home.

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Settler wars now: Nick Estes, ‘US Imperialism Is an Indian War’, Middle East Critique, 2025

05Nov25

Abstract: The US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites during the so-called 12-Day War is part of a long history of preemptive military interventions that use the Indian Wars as a legal precedent. This essay explores how an anti-imperialist framing within American Indian studies sheds light on the legal underpinnings of US ‘forever wars’ in West Asia and beyond. More than two centuries of imperialist warmaking relies on the United States’ longest series of military campaigns, the Indian Wars, as a legal justification of presidential war powers to wage undeclared aggressions against any nation or group deemed an enemy of the United States.

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Gossiping settlers: Gianluca Bo, ‘Italian Colonists and Rumour as Anti-Regime Negotiation in Italian Occupied Ethiopia, 1936-41’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2025

05Nov25

Abstract: The article analyses 42 rumours and gossip pertaining to Fascist authorities, specifically high-ranked individuals and members of colonial police, documented in Italian occupied Ethiopia (1936–41). The primary goal of this study is to introduce methodological and historiographical reflections for the study of these narratives in the context of Fascist colonialism. This will be achieved in consideration of the context’s distinctive characteristics, including the scarcity of reliable information and the regime’s pervasive surveillance of the colonizers’ lives. Moreover, the analysis will use these narratives to illustrate the expectations of Italian colonizers regarding the occupation of Ethiopia. The article contends that rumours and gossip served as a means for Italian colonists to voice their discontent towards the Fascist authorities, and that they are now a crucial archive for historians striving to grasp their anxieties and life-experiences.

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