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The settlement of Kurdistan: Özlem Göner, ‘Colonization of Kurdistan: A Basic Geographical, Historical, and Theoretical Framework’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2025

05Nov25

Excerpt: Colonialism is most commonly typologized as either settler or extractive. Settler colonialism involves large-scale settlement, as seen in British North America, Australia, French Algeria, and Palestine, while extractive colonialism centers on resource exploitation without significant settlement, as in British India, the American Philippines, or the Dutch East Indies. Drawing on this framework, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan (2024) characterizes Ottoman Kurdistan as an instance of extractive colonialism. While this categorization is useful, it is also necessary to interrogate potential settlement ambitions of colonizing states and examine the relationships between these ambitions and realities and layered forms of extraction. Demographic engineering in Kurdistan dates back to the Ottoman dismantling of Kurdish autonomy. Yadirgi (2017) highlights the use of systematic exile, alongside massacres, in the destruction of Kurdish emirates in the early 19th century. These policies intensified after the Armenian Genocide, when between 700,000 and over a million Kurds were deported to Anatolia and Thrace, with many dying en route (Jwaideh 2009; Üngör 2011; Yadirgi 2017). Although large-scale settlement of other Muslim populations in Kurdistan remained limited in the following decades, such aspirations have persisted and continue today. From the 1934 Settlement Act, which incentivized the settlement of Muslims from other regions in Kurdish areas to “Turkify” the region, to the forced relocation of Dersim Genocide survivors (1938–39) and the displacement of one to two million Kurds in the 1990s, Turkey has used settlement laws to uproot Kurds and dismantle the social and political fabric of Northern Kurdistan (Jongerden 2017). Similarly, Syrian and Iraqi Arabization policies established Arab “belts” in Western and Southern Kurdistan. Between the late 1950s and 1963, Syria settled primarily landless Arab peasants, including migrants from Egypt, in the Derik and Hasakah regions of Western Kurdistan (Rojava) (Roberts 2014, Tejel 2011, Altuğ 2013). The Iraqi state also employed demographic engineering, culminating in the Anfal Campaign of 1986–88 (McDowall 2013). Successive Iranian states—from the Safavid era to the Islamic Republic—employed demographic engineering strategies, such as “dilution” and “fragmentation,” to disrupt Kurdish geographic continuity and undermine autonomy claims (Hassaniyan 2019; Mohammadpour and Soleimani 2021). Settlement ambitions persist to this day, as seen in Afrin, Western Kurdistan, where Turkey ethnically cleansed the Kurdish majority and resettled populations and militias aligned with its interests, effectively acting as a surrogate settler colonial power since 2018.[2] Targeted settlement against key groups and families critical to Kurdistan’s social and political fabric has had lasting effects. While Kurdistan’s colonization cannot be classified as settler colonialism—since it remains predominantly Kurdish—continued attention to demographic engineering and socio-political erasure is essential to understanding the links between genocidal violence and economic exploitation.


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Manifest limits (in more ways than one): Andrew C. Isenberg, The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850, The University of North Carolina Press, 2025

03Nov25

Description: In The Age of the Borderlands, acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence. Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government’s power: the land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state—ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.


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With a chapter on boxing and Indigenous heritage by Kyle T. Mays: in Rudy Mondragón, Gaye Theresa Johnson, David J. Leonard (eds), Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion, University of Illinois Press, 2025

03Nov25

Access the book here.


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Resistance: Noura Erakat, John Reynolds, ‘Settler colonialism’, in Antony Anghie, B. S. Chimni, Michael Fakhri, Karin Mickelson, Vasuki Nesiah (eds), Research Handbook on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Elgar, 2025, pp. 46-54

01Nov25

Abstract: This interview with Noura Erakat was done by John Reynolds in September 2022. We discuss the defining features of settler colonialism, how it is distinguished from other forms of colonialism, and the nature of its relationship with international law. The interview also addresses questions of knowledge production: how the field of settler colonial studies is defined, who the main theorists of settler colonialism are and what their key interventions have been. The interview highlights in particular the contributions of Third World and Indigenous thinkers, from Palestine to Australia to Hawai’i, to our understandings of settler colonialism. It reflects in this light on whether and how settler colonial studies relates to Indigenous scholarship and Indigenous studies. The interview also touches directly on the question of Palestine: what does settler colonialism look like in Palestine today? What does international law have to say about it?


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Indebted settlers: Hengameh Ziai, ‘Debt as a political technology: rubber, Firestone and the temporalities of settler colonialism in Liberia’, Journal: Review of African Political Economy, 2025

01Nov25

Abstract: This article examines the constitution of a settler colony in Liberia, along with its consolidation of modern governmental power, through a techno-political account of debt, rubber and the corporation. Although settlers, paradoxically, received very little of the money loaned to them by international finance capital, their indebtedness was crucially productive. Disassembling the workings of ‘debt’ during this period reveals it as not merely an ‘economic’ transaction but a modern political technology – an apparatus that enforces, as ‘security’, forms of financial, administrative and military control. In the nineteenth century, this debt apparatus was essential to the spatial expansion of settler power, enabling the progressive domination, taxation and extraction of labour from the indigenous peoples of the ‘hinterland’. From the 1920s, the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company was concerned to indebt Liberia to ensure temporal control. Producing plantation rubber necessitated the control not only of space (territory, bodies) but also of time (limiting future political possibilities).


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Settler colonial pyrotechnics: Marijn Nieuwenhuis, Mikko Joronen, ‘Colonial pyrotechniques in Palestine: Arboricide and fiery dispossessions’, EPE: Nature and Space, 2025

31Oct25

Abstract: In this article, we examine how fire—a triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen—functions as a settler colonial tool of destruction closely linked to techniques of elimination and replacement. In Palestine, we conceptualise fire as part of a broader set of pyrotechniques—elemental practices that devastate more than bodies and infrastructures by targeting and eroding the environmental conditions that sustain Palestinian lifeworlds. Drawing on ideas from elemental politics and world-making, we show how settler fire attacks materially and physically transform landscapes into desolate spaces, rendering them legible and available for colonisation. Fire is deployed not only by civilian settlers shielded by the Israeli state but also by the state itself through practices of ‘pyroterror’. Palestinians—’People of the Olive Tree’—are simultaneously dispossessed by f ire and framed as ‘pyroterrorists’, revealing the racialised asymmetries embedded in colonial logics of security and dispossession. Finally, we examine the contradictions of afforestation and other landscape-engineering techniques through which settler colonialism grounds its presence and expands by overwriting Indigenous ecologies and ways of living. We argue that fire—both in its destructive and transformative capacities—is central to the ongoing expansion and maintenance of settler colonial frontiers in Palestine.


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Beauty in destruction (it’s a settler thing): Sadie Couture, ‘Melodies of the toppling trees: the tree farm pastoral, extractivism, and attachment in British Columbia, Canada’, Cultural Studies, 2025

31Oct25

Abstract: This paper develops a concept, ‘the tree farm pastoral,’ that describes the ability to perceive beauty in the midst of destruction and dispossession through a particular framing of the extraction of wood and the cultivation of crops. The tree farm pastoral is an affective orientation marked by a series of profound transformations in the management of forests – the development of ‘sustained yield forestry’ – which occurred around the middle of the twentieth century and that fundamentally shifted the relationship between settlers and trees in British Columbia, Canada. Emerging from an analysis of forest management documents as well as the life and work of Robert Swanson – a poet, logger, engineer, railway inspector and whistle inventor – this paper argues that this transformation was also discursive and perceptual, occurring on the level of language and sound. Bringing insights from cultural studies, sound studies, settler-colonial, and Indigenous studies into conversation with primary sources about forestry from the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that the tree farm pastoral – as constructed materially, discursively, and perceptually – serves to help settlers affectively navigate the tension between loving and caring for, while disrespecting and destroying, the forests of British Columbia. The tree farm pastoral names a particular entanglement between the material and discursive forms of extraction and dispossession – the concrete and physical versus the ideological and affective – that can be hard to parse when theorized in general or out of context. This paper offers the tree farm pastoral as a tool we can use to describe a way of being oriented towards the world that fuels and enables settler-colonialism, to complicate our understanding of the affective dimensions of extractivism, and to add to discussions about metaphor, language, and sound as they relate to techno-utopian discourses in media studies and beyond.


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Understanding India as a Brahminical settler colony: Shaista Patel, Sunder John Boopalan, ‘”Rooted in the soil”: defining Dalitness as an ethic and worldview’, Cultural Studies, 2025

31Oct25

Abstract: This article, written by two Dalit scholars from different religions and nationalities, reflects on the contours of Dalitness as an ethic and worldview. Drawing on Dalit and Black writers, they put forward the praxis of Dalitness as ‘rooted in the soil’ to present Dalitness as negotiated, as lived, and dreamt rather than as always understood on dominant-caste society’s dehumanizing terms as broken, crushed, and damaged. Thinking through the praxis of rooted in the soil, they argue, offers methodological and ethical challenges that should concern readers and writers interested in questions and alternatives of awareness, intention, worldview, method, and material life/s rooted in communal imaginations of beauty and remedy amidst violence of Brahminism. In order to not essentialize such Dalitness as guaranteed by those born outside the caste system, they turn to Dalit novelist Vauhini Vara’s much-celebrated novel, The Immortal King Rao, to reflect on the function of Dalitness of the main protagonist of the novel, King Rao. They argue that beyond a label, Dalitness is a dynamic lived reality – a reality that emerges alongside an itinerary of contradictions that Dalit people deal with throughout their lives and a reclamation of their humanity in and through critiques of structures of domination in a caste-hierarchized world.


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The settler backlash (in Argentina, for example): Claudia N. Briones, ‘Argentina’s indigenous policy under a libertarian regime: An oxymoron with worrying nuances’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 15, 3, 2025, pp. 627-634

28Oct25

Abstract: Although Javier Milei’s administration has only just begun, some of its statements and initiatives already indicate policies that threaten the lives and rights of indigenous peoples. Deeply embedded libertarian principles are in clear conflict with key constitutional mandates regarding indigenous policy. Moreover, libertarian modes of governance amplify entrenched narratives of Argentina’s formation of alterity, which hinder the full implementation of indigenous rights. Consequently, a qualitative shift towards heightened conflict appears to be underway, as the current presidency not only fails to suppress but actively amplifies the racist rhetoric of the country’s most anti-indigenous sectors and interests.


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High settler modernism? C. Oliver O’Donnell, ‘The Armory Show, Walt Kuhn, and Settler Modernism’, Archives of American Art Journal, 64, 2, 2025

28Oct25

Abstract: The artistic production of Walt Kuhn, as well as the watershed exhibition he helped organize—the Armory Show of 1913—were shaped by the legacies of United States colonialism. This essay substantiates this claim by positioning the Armory Show’s pine tree emblem as well as Kuhn’s own work in relation to deeper iconographic histories and interpreting them as forms of settler modernism. This interpretative framework recasts the controversial reception of the Armory Show, especially when placed in dialogue with the politics of Theodore Roosevelt—who prominently reviewed the exhibition—as well as with the particularities of Euro-American nationalism. The resulting interpretation clarifies the key role race played in displacing the academic tradition from its position of authority within the US and in excluding nonwhite artists and cultures from histories of American modernism.


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