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Settler colonial AI (introducing a special issue): Jessica Russ-Smith, Holly Randell-Moon, ‘AI and Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Knowing, Engaging, and Learning in New Data Contexts’, Somatechnics, 15, 3, 2025

23Dec25

Excerpt: The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated debate and discussion about knowledge practices in social, political, and institutional spaces. Although the development of new data systems raises important ethical and professional practice issues, these developments also take place in a digital context informed by older colonial knowledges and systems. Technologies such as AI prompt renewed considerations and examinations of the sustainability and importance of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, as data governance remains an ongoing priority for First Nations communities (Tapu and Fa’agau 2022; Whaanga and Mato 2021). Whilst a substantial body of research, policy and law development has focussed on developing ethical standards for AI use (Kakar 2021), this work has largely excluded First Nations communities. To achieve ethical AI use, if even possible, First Nations communities, knowledges and Data Sovereignty are essential to resist producing and reproducing colonial data norms. This special issue focuses on AI, Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the impact of technology on data decision-making in knowledge, engagement, and learning contexts. Furthermore, this issue explores and examines these intersections from the perspectives of diverse sovereign First Nations peoples, cosmologies and ways of Knowing, Being and Doing.


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Settler colonial AI: Ihab Maharmeh, ‘AI as a tool for settler-colonial projects: how Israel employs AI to intensify colonial dominance under the pretext of counterterrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper offers a critical examination of how Israel employs artificial intelligence (AI) technologies under the pretext of counterterrorism to intensify the Zionist settler-colonial project and capitalist accumulation in Palestine. It focuses particularly on how AI has become integral to Israel’s settler-colonial regime, serving ideological, geopolitical, and commercial objectives while presenting these aims as neutral, technical procedures embedded within its counterterrorism strategy. This paper builds on scholarship that shows how settler colonies have historically used stigmatisation, classification, and the delegitimisation of Indigenous resistance as terrorism to eliminate Indigenous peoples before raising questions about how, more recently, AI has intensified this colonial logic. By focusing on Israel’s use of AI, this paper offers an analysis of how AI is intensifying genocide, displacement, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ voices. It also demonstrates how Israel’s use of AI supports capitalist accumulation, as security technologies tested on Palestinians under the pretext of counterterrorism are commercialised and exported to global markets.


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Unmissable settler patriarchy: Lindsay Martel Montgomery, Heather Pezzarossi, Jennifer P. Byram, ‘Archiving Futurity Within the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Crisis’, American Anthropologist, 2025

20Dec25

Abstract: In this article, we examine how settler colonization and gendered violence against Indigenous women are remembered and recorded in two archival registers: 18th-century records from the Massachusetts Archives Collection (MAC) and a 21st-century corpus of posts using the hashtag MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) on X (formerly Twitter). These archives are shaped by distinct temporal logics and contain multiple projections of settler and Indigenous futurity. The MAC is dominated by the colonial logic of recursive dispossession; a temporal perspective of declension that acknowledges Indigenous lands only after they are taken, and Indigenous people only after they are “disappeared.” A close reading of these documentary sources also reveals how Indigenous peoples worked within this system to maintain social relationships and connections to place. We contrast settler visions of futurity with contemporary social media articulations of vibrant and emancipatory Indigenous futures grounded in hope and presence. Through this comparative discussion, we demonstrate how different documentary modalities encode time, define events, and shape informational flows in ways that enable and constrain Indigenous futurity.


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Settler Oktoberfest! Audrey Ricke, Oktoberfest in Brazil: Domestic Tourism, Sensescapes, and German Brazilian Identity, University of Alabama Press, 2023

20Dec25

Description: Oktoberfest in Brazil: Domestic Tourism, Sensescapes, and German Brazilian Identity is one of the first ethnographies to analyze the tourism industry based on German cultural heritage in southern Brazil. Southern Brazil’s booming domestic tourism industry draws more than 500,000 people to events such as the Oktoberfest in Blumenau. Ricke investigates domestic tourism as sensescapes, focusing on the multiple and layered meanings associated with tourism’s sensory experiences and interactions. The author also introduces the “economy of aesthetics” as a new framework to capture how the sensescapes associated with domestic tourism are intertwined in the negotiation of ethnic, national, and transnational identities. These sensescapes also intersect with discourses on class and race, which are examined as well. Oktoberfest in Brazil leads readers on a tour through German Brazilian home gardens, folk dance performances, and the largest Oktoberfest in Brazil. These sensory-rich spaces of interaction provide access to different perspectives and types of identity negotiation at multiple levels from the local to the transnational. Ricke illustrates how the emotions and sensory experiences of these sensescapes associated with German cultural heritage function as a means for German Brazilians to negotiate senses of belonging as Brazilians as well as their ethnic and transnational identities. This book also provides historical and contemporary insights into the politics of citizenship associated with cultural heritage. As politics become more polarized, the need to analyze different ways of communicating through sensory experiences increases. The unique contribution of the economy of aesthetics framework is its ability to capture the influential power of sensory experience in the negotiation of identity and senses of belonging and citizenship more broadly. It provides new insights into how and why some sensory experiences within domestic tourism foster belonging and identity while other experiences reinforce social distinctions and national divisions.


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Settler patriarchy: Jordan Lea Johnson, ‘Angelina in the Archives: Tracing Heteropatriarchy and Settler Colonialism in Local Histories of the Pineywoods’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 46, 3, 2025, pp. 121-151

20Dec25

Abstract: This article draws on Native feminist theories and critical settler colonial studies to analyze the role of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism in local histories of the East Texas Pineywoods, occupied Caddo lands. Taking up accounts from the early modern colonial period alongside more contemporary examples, I conduct a feminist genealogical analysis of a Caddo woman known to the settler archive as Angelina. Characterized as the “Pineywoods Pocahontas” within local history and lore of East Texas, Angelina is situated within a legacy of Native women imagined to be aligned with colonial interests through their romanticized attachments to white settler men. As with other famous Native women, settler stories comprehend Angelina according to heteropatriarchal norms of gender and sexuality, imagining her as submissive and accommodating while framing colonization within a teleological narrative of US history. In colonial journals and memoirs, as well as contemporary paintings, murals, and local histories, settler stories frame Angelina through the lens of heteropatriarchy and colonial modernity, confining Caddo peoples and societies to a prehistoric past while eliding Caddo sovereignty in the present and denying Caddo futures. I apply Native feminist theorizations of gender, sexuality, and colonialism to representations of Angelina to denaturalize the heteropatriarchal replacement narratives that continue to authorize settlers as the rightful inhabitants of Caddo homelands, framing local history narratives and settler storytelling practices as one way that settler colonialism is romanticized in the past, enacted in the present, and normalized in the future.


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Represented, but within settler colonialism: Loredana Giarrusso, ‘Contemporary Colonialism, Governmentality and the Pursuit of a Commonwealth Indigenous Body, 1973–2005’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2025

20Dec25

Abstract: This article examines Indigenous representative bodies in Australian politics from 1973 to 2005 with a particular focus on the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the National Aboriginal Conference, the Council for Aboriginal Development and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The examples of these Indigenous representative bodies illustrate the pervasive settler colonialism that has underpinned the government’s approach in Indigenous affairs and highlights the problematic nature of relations between the national government and Indigenous peoples. This entrenched settler colonialism reinforces ongoing colonial structures, maintaining the legitimacy of national government at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ political autonomy. The article reflects on the 2023 constitutional referendum proposal of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament as an outcome of the continued underlying settler colonial dynamics underpinning government interactions with Indigenous peoples conducted at the political level.


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German settlers without settler colonies (with illustrations): Rachel O’Sullivan, ‘Entangled Narratives of Colonialism: Promoting Overseas and Continental Expansion in Nazi Germany’, Copernico, 2025

19Dec25

Excerpt: Nazi Germany’s eastern expansion has meant the Nazi goal of Lebensraum (living space) is often solely associated with Eastern Europe. However, the justifications for claiming overseas colonies by colonial enthusiasts during the Third Reich were often strikingly similar to the narratives of those who supported eastern expansion. Although Nazi Germany is heavily associated with its eastern expansion during the Second World War, many groups did not abandon the fantasy of reestablishing a German empire in Africa, even after the National Socialists came to power with their clearly eastwardorientated ideology in 1933. In fact, from as early as 1934, Nazi state institutions, such as the “Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP” (NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy, KPA) under the leadership of war veteran Franz Ritter von Epp, officially planned for an eventual German return to Africa after the war. Meanwhile, colonial enthusiasts throughout Germany were eagerly producing material such as books and leaflets, attended specialized schools and organized events which promoted German overseas expansion. Such colonial enthusiasts were often members of the “Reichskolonialbund” (Reich Colonial League, RKB), also under the leadership of Epp, which was formed in 1933 when the “Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft” (German Colonial Society, founded in 1887) merged with other smaller organizations. While the KPA undertook all official planning for the future reclamation of the German colonies in Africa, the RKB raised awareness and educated the public on colonial matters.


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German settlers since 1880 (with illustrations): Tim Buchen, ‘The portrayal of the (Russian) German colonists as settlement pioneers 1880–1945’, Copernico, 2025

19Dec25

Excerpt: This article shows how German colonists from the Tsarist Empire were, by means of a colonialist discourse, made into instruments of the Germanization of Eastern Europe. Their supposed lack of sophistication was practically prerequisite for coping with the ostensibly primitive inhabitants and the untamed wilderness. During the 18th and up to the end of the 19th century, Germany saw extensive emigration. Many Germans who did not inherit a farm moved to places where land was cheaply available. While most emigrants went to America, many Germans also moved to Eastern Europe.


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German settlers during WWI (with illustrations): Ron Hellfritzsch, ‘On the Road to the ‘New Eastern Lands’: Plans for the German Colonization of the Baltic States during the First World War’, Copernico, 2025

19Dec25

Excerpt: During the First World War, the German Empire had far-reaching plans for expansion in Eastern Europe. The Baltic states in particular were destined to become a German settlement colony known as the “Neues Ostland” (new eastern lands). With hindsight, some of these plans appear as forerunners of National Socialist conquest policy. Calculations “for a new farm to be established in Courland” The Latvian National Library (Latvijas Nacionālā bibliotēka) in Riga has in its collection a small brochure featuring drawings and statistics with the cumbersome title “Capital requirements, economic equipment and yield estimate for a new farm to be established in Courland with a total area of 20 hectares”. Behind this seemingly dry title lies the hitherto barely researched history of a gigantic imperial project developed during the First World War, in which the entire Baltic region was to be transformed into a German settlement colony under the name “Neuland” (new lands), “Ostland” (eastern lands) or “neues Ostland” (new eastern lands). But why did so many Germans at that time regard the Baltic states in particular as a utopian space that seemed to offer far-reaching prospects for a future land grab by German settlers?


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Early Palestinian reflections on settler colonialism: John Harfouch, ‘”The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine”: Understanding Zionism through the Work of Fayez Sayegh’, Liberated Texts, 10/11/25

19Dec25

Excerpt: November 10th, 2025, marks the fiftieth anniversary of UN Resolution 3379, when the United Nations General Assembly voted to declare Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. This statement effectively condemned Zionism as a racist political ideology and Israel as a racist state, to be relegated alongside other colonial, apartheid, and imperial state projects. Passing with a vote of 72 in favor and 32 against with 35 nations abstaining, it was overwhelmingly supported by the newly liberated Third World countries who saw the statement as a challenge to American and European hegemony. Resolution 3379 was not the work of a single individual. Nonetheless, several Palestinian intellectuals deserve special recognition for their efforts in passing the resolution. Foremost amongst them is Fayez Sayegh, who spearheaded the effort and argued the Palestinian case on the Assembly floor. This review will work through Sayegh’s writings to come to a better understanding as to just what he and his counterparts within the Palestine Liberation Organization meant when they argued that Zionism is racism. How did they understand ‘racism’ and where does Zionist racism fit within what Sayegh called ‘the Palestine Problem’ more generally? Given that context what then is ‘anti-racism’? Is racism the appropriate lens through which to approach the problem? Readers may know Fayez Sayegh from his 1965 essay, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. That was the first publication from the PLO Research Center, which Sayegh founded and directed for a short period. While interpreting Sayegh’s statements on Resolution 3379, I draw from both his own and his colleagues’ writings for the PLO Research Center, so it is useful to have some idea as to what that Center was. In its 18 years of operation in Beirut the Center published a total of 340 books. At its peak, the Center employed roughly 80 full-time researchers in a 6-storey building in downtown Beirut.


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