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The political economy of a settler colony: Alaa Tartir, Tariq Dana, Timothy Seidel (eds), Political Economy of Palestine: Critical, Interdisciplinary, and Decolonial Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

22May21

Description: This book explores the political economy of Palestine through critical, interdisciplinary, and decolonial perspectives, underscoring that an approach to economics that does not consider the political—a de-politicized economics—is inadequate to understanding the situation in occupied Palestine. A critical interdisciplinary approach to political economy challenges prevailing neoliberal logics and structures that reproduce racial capitalism, and explores how the political economy of occupied Palestine is shaped by processes of accumulation by exploitation and dispossession from both Israel and global business, as well as from Palestinian elites. A decolonial approach to Palestinian political economy foregrounds struggles against neoliberal and settler colonial policies and institutions, and aids in the de-fragmentation of Palestinian life, land, and political economy that the Oslo Accords perpetuated, but whose histories of de-development over all of Palestine can be traced back for over a century. The chapters in this book offer an in-depth contextualization of the
Palestinian political economy, analyze the political economy of integration, fragmentation, and inequality, and explore and problematize multiple sectors and themes of political economy in the absence of sovereignty.


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Settlers on Mars! Annette Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Springer, 2021

19May21

Description: This book is dedicated to the nascent discussion of the legal aspects of human exploration and possible settlement of Mars, and provides fresh insights and new ideas in two key areas. The first one revolves around the broader aspects of current space law, such as intellectual property rights in outer space, the legal implications of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence, legal considerations around the freedom of exploration and use, and the International Space Station agreement as a precedent for Mars. The second one focuses on the creation and management of a new society on Mars, and includes topics such as human reproduction and childbirth, the protection of human rights in privately-funded settlements, legal aspects of a Martian power grid, and criminal justice on the red planet. With multiple national space agencies and commercial enterprises focusing on Mars, it is more than likely that a human presence will be established on the red planet in the coming decades. While the foundation of international space law, laid primarily by the Outer Space Treaty, remains the framework within which humans will engage with Mars, new and unforeseen challenges have arisen, driven particularly by the rapid pace of technological advancement in recent years. To ensure that space law can keep up with these developments, a new scholarly work such as the present one is critical. By bringing together a number of fresh international perspectives on the topic, the book is of interest to all scholars and professionals working in the space field.


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Climate change settles: Carla M. Dhillon, ‘Indigenous-Settler Climate Change Boundary Organizations Contending With U.S. Colonialism’, American Behavioral Scientist, 2021

19May21

Abstract: Indigenous peoples who are taking actions on climate change issues have formed networks that are at the intersect between Indigenous knowledges and various environmental science fields. These climate organizations work across many boundaries in science, politics, and culture. This article asks how large-scale U.S. climate boundary organizations that convene Indigenous and non-Indigenous climate practitioners contend with ongoing colonialism. Analysis indicates that Indigenous-settler networks offer avenues for Indigenous values to be practiced in collaborative climate science. Such organizations also provide limited opportunities to utilize climate science in tribal climate adaptation. While these boundary organizations aim to build meaningful cross-cultural and mentoring relationships, uneven power dynamics and resources also permeate the partnerships. These structural inequalities cause tensions to arise. Tensions further arise from uses of new terminology to navigate longstanding struggles over places, political sovereignties, and human relationships to natural worlds. I argue that a decolonial environmental framework discerns roles for Indigenous governance in attending to anthropogenic climate change. The approach broadens sociological understandings of climate change by examining the attempts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors to build climate networks


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Trafficking settlers: Colectivo Darién, ‘Trafficking as settler colonialism in eastern Panama: Linking the Americas via illicit commerce, clientelism, and land cover change’, World Development, 145, 2021

19May21

Abstract: Rural spaces are garnering new attention in illicit economies. At the confluence of the American continents, illicit commodities are being moved through rural Panama’s communities and iconic Darién forests. Over the last decade, the international media have focused on the uptick in human “migration” while the Panamanian press has chronicled dramatic illegal logging. Less acknowledged is the surge in drug smuggling and arms trafficking. Using media reports and mapping over the last twenty years, we ask how multi-commodity trafficking and human exploitation are remaking rural space. We provide the first synthetic and spatial overview of eastern Panama’s multiple trafficking, showing how it is altering social and environmental relationships. Media reports, many based on government seizures, indicate trafficking routes throughout the region, implying the involvement of much of the local population and resulting in new clientelistic social relationships between traffickers, residents, and the state. Increasingly, trafficking is driving land cover change, diminishing forest cover in private lands, protected areas, and indigenous lands and connecting them via a growing road network. Indigenous peoples’ conservation of forests hampers surveillance and makes their lands ideal for trafficking. This also means that they are the only ethnicity frequently named in the media, threatening indigenous sovereignty and land legalization efforts. We conclude that trafficking is a form of settler colonialism, continuing processes of taking that began in this area of the American mainland centuries ago. Rather than incidentally holding indigenous residents culpable, maligning them in trafficking’s transit area is fundamental to capitalist expansion, integrating it with the country’s dollarized economy, highly developed banking sector, and the canal’s global commerce. The continued transit of people and illegal commodities in eastern Panama is quickly transforming conservation, indigenous sovereignty, and sustainable development.


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Reclamation as settler colonialism: Tara L. Joly, ‘Growing (with) Muskeg: Oil Sands Reclamation and Healing in Northern Alberta’, Anthropologica, 63, 1, 2021

16May21

Abstract: Scientists working for oil companies in the Athabasca region are developing methods by which to reclaim muskeg (boreal peatlands) on land disturbed by oil sands extraction. The Alberta government requires companies to reclaim disturbed land by achieving equivalent capability of the landscape to support an end land use. Indigenous community members instead define reclamation as establishing not only quantifiable ecological functions, but also relationships to their traditional territories. Tensions emerge as Indigenous concerns are often subsumed within bureaucratic discourses that favour scientific classification and quantification of land uses in reclaimed areas. Divergent responses to muskeg in reclamation activities are informed in part by these competing emphases on quantifiable landscapes as opposed to those that are relational and growing. This article traces this multiplicity through the examination of government and scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous communities in northern Alberta. Muskeg is used as an analytical tool to explore competing conceptions of land reclamation. Mistranslation of polysemantic terms like muskeg occur on an ontological level, and settler colonial relations and power imbalances between competing languages and knowledge systems proliferate in reclamation activities.


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Aboriginal mobility and settler seriality: Sarah Galletly, ‘Aboriginal Mobilities and Colonial Serial Fiction’, Australian Literary Studies, 36, 1, 2021

16May21

Abstract: This article combines Indigenous mobility studies with recent work on seriality and periodical form to examine how the structural necessities of serialised periodical fiction reinforced representations of settler and Aboriginal mobilities for Australian readers across the nineteenth century. It considers the limits or gaps in the project of Australian settlement that these serial texts highlight through an exploration of how settler authors formulated ideologically acceptable and more ‘suspect’ manifestations of Aboriginal mobilities and persistence. Building upon Katherine Bode’s work in World of Fiction (2018) on Aboriginal presence in nineteenth-century Australian periodical fiction, this article considers how the structure of the serial itself worked to reinforce – and occasionally disrupt – perceptions of Aboriginal-settler frontier violence and white supremacy. It also explores moments of settler discomfort and unsettlement in these serial texts that operate as counterpoints to the larger imperatives of this periodical fiction to support and reinforce the colonial project. By aligning the disruptive potential of these serial narratives and their representations of Aboriginal and settler mobilities, I argue we can uncover moments when these texts appear to resist the rhetoric of forward momentum and advancement traditionally associated with narratives of colonial modernity.


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Urban growth as settler colonialism: José Prada-Trigo, Natalia Aravena, Pablo Barra, ‘Urban growth and indigenous land. Real estate strategies and urban dynamics in Temuco (Chile)’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2021

13May21

Abstract: This manuscript reviews the urban growth process in the Temuco-Padre las Casas conurbation (Chile) on indigenous land, highlighting three topics of great interest. First, the ability of legislation to regulate the protection of indigenous land. Second, the role played by the real estate sector as the main protagonist of urban expansion on indigenous land. Finally, the subsidiary role of those who should be the main actors: indigenous communities. The consequence is a process of material and symbolic dispossession of the Mapuche population, which reinforces the dynamics of settler colonialism existing in the region and presents parallels and divergences with other international cases. For this, the methodology used combined quantitative data with qualitative information, spatializing the former and giving greater weight to the latter as an interpretive key. The results reflect a disagreement between a legislation incapable of regulating urban growth and responding to indigenous demands, and a reality marked by increasing pressure on the Mapuche population and lands. This shows a situation that is present in Chile but can be extrapolated to other countries in the region.


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Indo-American revolutionary doctrine (Indigenism against imperialism): Jack Englehardt, ‘A Lenin for the Americas: Raúl Haya de la Torre and the Forgotten Story of Indigenous Revolutionary Socialism’, The St Andrews Economist, 2021

13May21

Excerpt: The true innovation of aprimso ideology, then, lies not in its relation to Western doctrinaire philosophy, but the telling precedent that a positive Latin American identity could only rise from indigenous thought and popular action. With its Quechua songs and cheers, and cells named after Inca emperors, APRA vindicated a shunned pre-colonial past and became the first popular movement to call for the wholesale liberation of Indians, who for over four centuries had been political non-participants. 


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Unlearning settler/Westphalian sovereignty: Harald Bauder, Rebecca Mueller, ‘Westphalian Vs. Indigenous Sovereignty: Challenging Colonial Territorial Governance’, Geopolitics, 2021

12May21

Abstract: The Westphalian concept of sovereignty frames international relations and law. Since the 2007 UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the notion of Indigenous sovereignty has also entered international political debate. In this article, we examine the underlying premise of Westphalian and Indigenous sovereignties. A scoping review of the literature reveals that Westphalian sovereignty is a Eurocentric concept implicated in the colonialisation of Indigenous peoples in settler societies. Conversely, Indigenous sovereignty is a broader idea that involves social and cultural aspects, recognises the interdependencies between political actors and relationships to the land, and acknowledges the contextualised nature of sovereignty. We suggest that the two conceptions of sovereignty cannot be reconciled with each other. However, in a shifting political terrain, Indigenous sovereignty poses a critical challenge to the Eurocentric definition of sovereignty.


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Cinema is settler colonial: Agata Frymus, ‘Pocahontas and Settler Colonialism in Early Film, 1907– 1910’, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 60, 3, 2021, pp. 83-103

12May21

Abstract: This article examines promotional material linked to Pocahontas, Child of the Forest (Edwin S. Porter, 1907) and Pocahontas (director unknown, 1910), placing them in the wider debates about colonialism, film exhibition, authenticity, and the role of film as an educational medium in the early 1900s. Since its emergence, cinema played a pivotal role in promulgating the ideas of assimilation into dominant, white Protestant values. As American society was becoming increasingly heterogeneous, Pocahontas, an Indigenous woman central to the national mythologies of the United States, offered a problematic model of cultural integration.


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