settler colonial studies blog

The face(book) of settler colonialism: Lora Chapman, ‘Settler-Australian anxieties and the savagery of Facebook: notes from Alice Springs’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: In an age when social media is fully embedded within the human experience and identity, it also offers up opportunities for the re-enactment of dispossession and the development of stigma. In this article, I examine data from the remote Central Australian town of Alice Springs’ social media forums, describing a novel medium via which ongoing moral violence is levelled at young Aboriginal people. Settler constructions of Aboriginality are examined in some detail, along with their implications for the town’s settler and Aboriginal communities. I argue that posts from these pages are not only symptomatic of historical violence and dispossession, but that they are also manifestations of violence in themselves. In addition, I consider the ways that these processes might contribute to lived experiences of disadvantage for young people, by extending the reach of surveillance and equating to a novel form of moral violence, as defined by Didier Fassin.

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Despite settler colonialism or because of it? Sydney Beckmann, ‘”Yours for a United Race”: the Society of American Indians and the Meaning of Unity’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: As part of the promotional literature for the Society of American Indians (SAI), Secretary Arthur C. Parker ended a recruitment letter with the salutation, “Yours for a united race.” On a draft of this letter, he crossed out the last three words and hand-wrote “progress.” This change calls into question the meaning of unity and race and how they were utilized by Parker and the Society. The SAI has been described as a pan-Indian organization with an urban, assimilationist agenda that homogenized Indigenous identity. Utilizing Parker’s letter, this paper argues that pan-Indianism as a label invokes a specific colonial notion of unity that erases the complex decisions made by SAI members to negotiate relationships between their communities, religious traditions, and settler society. Drawing on the work of critical Indigenous scholarship, the paper proposes using the concept of relationality as the interpretive framework for discourse on the SAI and unity.

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Veterinary settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Veterinizing the Settler State: Biopolitics, Care, and Killing in Palestine-Israel’, Medical Anthropology, 2026

21Jun26

Abstract: Drawing on three multispecies cases in Palestine-Israel – the fallow deer, the griffon vulture, and the free-roaming dog – this article depicts veterinary governance as constitutive of the settler state. Specifically, the article identifies three interrelated but distinct technologies of veterinary power: biopolitics, enacted through population management and selective reproduction; pastoral power, exercised through intimate care and detailed surveillance; and necropolitics, manifested in practices of extermination. The article argues that veterinization advances and naturalizes the state’s settler ecologies. In Palestine-Israel, this dynamic is especially visible in the state’s peripheral regions, in territories it has occupied since 1967, and along the Gaza border.

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Toxic settler colonialism: Jianni Tien, Katherine Kenny, ‘A hydrological breakdown of containment logics: Toxic exposures, pollution, and waste in the waterways of settler-colonial Australia’, E: nature and Space, 2026

21Jun26

Abstract: Social science scholarship has long explored the spatial, political and embodied dimensions of contamination, attending to the ways pollutants are unevenly distributed and unreliably contained. In this framing, waste is relegated elsewhere, to people and places deemed expendable. However, while exposures to waste and other forms of contamination remain deeply uneven, we are also witnessing a shift into a new era in which toxic exposures are increasingly inescapable for everybody on this planet. In this paper we ask: If waste is a relation that relies on othering, what happens when it begins to overflow its neat containment, seeping into spaces previously protected by wealth and privilege? We situate this enquiry in the context of recent pollutant events in settler-colonial Australia, examining three case studies that emerged across 2024 and 2025: 1) “Tar balls” comprised of faeces, drugs, and oil; 2) cases of melioidosis caused by a bacteria referred to as the “mud bug”, and 3) PFAS, so called “forever chemicals”. Though differing in form and scale, each of these contamination events emerges in or through water, and travels across bodies, ecologies, and infrastructures. Drawing from approaches in critical discourse analysis (CDA), environmental humanities, toxic geographies, and feminist science and technology studies (STS), we analyse media reporting on these particular pollutant events as representative of our shifting relationship to toxicity in a chemically saturated world. We argue for a hydrological approach, informed by hydrosocial scholarship, that thinks with water’s relational qualities to challenge the settler-colonial logics of purity and containment that underpin contemporary understandings of toxicity, pollution, and waste. The emergence of contaminants in the privileged spaces of Australia’s waterways may signal the breakdown of containment logics but also an opening: a chance to reconfigure our relationship to toxicity and toxic living.

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Indigenous settlers? Arama Rata, ‘Indigenizing Zionism: Narrative Claims Deployed by the Indigenous Coalition for Israel to Evade Settler-Colonial Characterization’, Middle East Critique, 2026

21Jun26

Abstract: From inception, the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine has been explicitly colonial. However, recent attempts have been made to frame global Jewry as indigenous to Palestine, including by groups who foreground their own indigeneity. This article focuses on the Indigenous Coalition for Israel, the New Zealand-based group whose founders opened the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem in February 2024. Background details of the group’s members and networks are described, exposing a Christian nationalist agenda that is antithetical to indigenous liberation. Thematic analysis of claims made by the group via their website reveal narrative subthemes and rhetorical techniques used to serve two specific discursive functions: to invert the colonizer–colonized relationship, and to reject settler-colonial theory. Both enable Zionism to evade characterization as settler-colonial. Settler-colonial theory is shown to illuminate historical and contemporary power dynamics in Palestine. However, the abstraction of the theory leaves open conceptual gaps enabling the recuperation of its terms. This article concludes that indigenous liberation requires theory grounded in the historical trajectories and material realities of resistance and situated within the global systems sustaining colonial domination.

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The bugBear of settler colonialism: Yung-Ying Chang, John Chung-En Liu, ‘The Formosan Black Bear and Taiwanese Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: Building on scholarship that situates nations and nationalism within colonial relations, this article examines nationalism in settler-colonial Taiwan amid China’s colonial claim to sovereignty. Drawing on interviews, conservation documents and popular representations, we show how the Formosan black bear became a national symbol of resistance to Chinese irredentism across three cumulative stages: early-2000s symbolic competition with China’s giant pandas; mid-2010s diffusion through branding, commodification and political advocacy; and post-2017 politicisation amid intensifying cross-strait tensions. However, Han Taiwanese often attribute bear deaths to Indigenous communities and prioritise bear conservation, whose public popularity is partly associated with the bear’s national symbolism, over Indigenous communities’ everyday experiences of living with bears. We show that Taiwanese nationalism has anticolonial origins and continues as antihegemonic resistance, while suggesting that this bear symbolism may subordinate Indigenous perspectives in public discussions of human–bear conflicts. The paper offers a relational account of nationalism’s resistant and oppressive possibilities.

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The settler equation: P. L. Krapivsky, ‘Riviera model with egoistical settlers’, arXiv, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: The Riviera model mimics a densifying settlement along the coastline. In the lattice version, houses are built sequentially in empty sites with the constraint that every newly built house has at least one empty neighboring site. The distribution of clusters of adjacent houses does not obey a closed set of evolutionary equations, but the void-cluster-void distribution does. We compute the latter and extract the cluster distribution from it. In the jammed state, when all voids have length one and the evolution ceases, the cluster distribution has a neat form and exhibits a factorial decay with the length of the cluster. To investigate finite systems, we employ a static approach directly treating jammed states. If the coastline is a finite segment, we determine the statistics of the number of empty sites in the jammed state (the average, variance, and higher cumulants). We also study a continuum version in which houses are built along the line so that each newly built house is sufficiently separated from at least one neighboring house.

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It’s settler colonialism, actually: Marije van Lankveld, Laura M. De Vos, ‘We Are Not Protecting “the Environment”: Unist’ot’en Pipeline Resistance as Resistance against Settler Colonialism’, in Frank Mehring (ed.), The Environment in Sustainable American Studies, Routledge, 2026

19Jun26

Abstract: This chapter examines Wet’suwet’en resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline at Unist’ot’en Camp as a struggle against ongoing settler colonialism rather than a narrowly “environmental” conflict. Using Patrick Wolfe’s conception of settler colonialism as a structure and Gerald Vizenor’s “survivance,” we analyze how dual governance frameworks enable the Canadian state and industry to bypass Indigenous sovereignty, producing a settler colonial loophole. We show how denial of Indigenous jurisdiction, environmental racism, and gender-based violence are causally intertwined in extractive projects. Framing Unist’ot’en as a site of Indigenous resurgence, healing, and land-based governance, the chapter argues for sustainability grounded in justice, decolonization, and relational worldviews.

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Settler colonial Carthago delenda est! Dominic Machado, Michael J. Taylor, ‘The Carthaginian Masters: Settler Colonialism and Racecraft in Ancient North Africa’, Arethusa, 59, 2, 2026

15Jun26

Abstract: Settler colonial praxis and the racecraft it engendered profoundly shaped the Carthaginian state, its society, and imperial trajectory. Perched against the geographic span of the Maghreb and the demographic heft of native Libyan and Numidian populations, Carthage exerted a tenuous dominance over its African hinterland. Peculiar aspects of Carthage’s mythic self-definition and constitutional system owed less to the city’s supposed commercial orientation than to its settler colonial legacy. Pathologies inherent to the settler colonial project manifested themselves in moments of crisis, contributing to Carthage’s defeat and the creation of an indigenous Numidian state.

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The painful making of territory is a settler colonial conjuncture: Benedikt Korf, Michael Watts, ‘At the edge of the sword: Toward a spatial theory of the frontier’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2026

15Jun26

Abstract: Scholarly research on frontiers has exploded over the last two or three decades. ‘Frontier’ is a word with a long history, and shifting meanings with complex relations to settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. As a geographical keyword, the frontier has been put to work to understand a variety of colonial and postcolonial settings in which new commodity frontiers – land-based, oceanic, outer-space – have arisen. But the explosion of frontier talk is marked by conceptual elasticity, contradictory meanings, and a lack of precision. We ask: what makes a frontier a frontier? A frontier, we argue, marks a conjuncture, a particular moment in state time where the social and spatial outside is transformed into the inside of state and capital. The frontier is a form of social space where ‘the edge of the sword’, understood as a threshold at the limits of state capacity, articulates a liminal condition of authority, state, and capital that brings about the painful birth (and rebirth) of territory at the margins or edges of states.

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