settler colonial studies blog

It’s the political economy of settler colonialism, s: Phil Henderson, Shiri Pasternak, ‘The Political Economies of Ongoing Settler Colonialism’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 266-272

04May26

Excerpt: Andrew Curley’s Carbon Sovereignty (2023), Rebecca Hall’s Refracted Economies (2022), and Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay’s Plundering the North (2023), all offer distinct and compelling investigations of political economy. Each considers in some detail how Indigenous Peoples respond to, engage with, or plan around the ways in which the market—be it in the form of coal power plants, diamond mines, or big retailers—conditions the scope of possibility for exercising autonomous political authority. In the case of Carbon Sovereignty and Refracted Economies, both books share an approach that foregrounds careful yet unsparing ethnography of the profound social and political complexities driving Indigenous decision-making regarding resource extraction. Plundering the North, by contrast, delves into the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and it’s successor, the North West Company (NWC), in order to show the deliberate role played by both firms in perpetuating food crises in the North in order to secure new rounds of state-backed profitability models that made the hunger of Indigenous northerners a bankable commodity for southern capital.

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The women of settler colonialism: Carla Joubert, Barberton Daisies: Women and Settler Colonialism in the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek and Alberta in the Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Western University, 2026

04May26

Abstract: This dissertation explores the role of white women in the settler colonial processes of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) and the Northwest Territories in the nineteenth century. It introduces to the historiography of the Transvaal evidence that the ZAR mimicked the patterns of settler colonization globally. Through an analysis of the Boer trek period, statute law, private diaries and correspondence, and government records, this dissertation shows that white women played a fundamental role in the creation of a settler colonial republic, and its predecessor settlements, in the Transvaal region from 1834 to 1881. It is also placed in conversation with the established settler colonial history of Canada. The thesis includes a comparative case study, Wetaskiwin, Alberta, against which to affirm the internationally consistent nature of settler colonialism broadly, and in the ZAR, specifically. The dissertation studies the role of women through three thematic paradigms: settler colonialism, race, and gender. In each, the history of women as laborers, wives, reproducers of the state, and social figureheads and caregivers, comes to the fore to show that women served vital roles during settler colonization, and in state policies of Indigenous removal and displacement. The dissertation concludes that white women were core participants in settler colonization in the ZAR, and that the ZAR fit into a global pattern of imperial settlement.

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Introducing Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst, ‘Omtroduction’, in Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026, pp. 1-21

04May26

Abstract: In this critical introduction, co-editors Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, and Julia Hurst set out the provocation and framing for Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? The collection emerges in the aftermath of the defeat of the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and the constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples as Australia’s First Peoples, situating this defeat in the broader context of persistent patterns of settler refusal to hear and act upon truths long articulated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Rather than a deficit of knowledge, let alone information, the editors identify a pervasive infrastructure of refusal—denial, ignorance, and antipathy—that sustains settler legitimacy while constraining the possibilities of justice. Situating Australian experience within comparative and transnational contexts, the volume interrogates how refusal operates institutionally and affectively, and how it is reproduced through pedagogy, culture, and politics. At the same time, contributors foreground Indigenous-led truth-telling and sovereignty, affirming their independent power as practices of healing, resurgence, and mobilisation. Rejecting reconciliationist closures, the introduction advances a historiographical agonism that retains tension and contestation as necessary to resisting settler moves to innocence. In mapping both impediments and points of vulnerability, this collection reframes the burden of response: truth-telling is not a project First Nations must render more palatable to a settler polity structured by refusal, but rather a challenge settlers and their institutions must confront if just relations are to be realised.

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Spying settlers: Merve Gönlühoş Elmas, ‘Espionage as a Settler-Colonial Practice: The Case of the Palestine–Syrian Front During World War I’, Middle East Critique, 2026

04May26

Abstract: This article explores espionage as a foundational yet understudied strategy within the broader framework of settler colonialism. While existing literature has extensively analyzed the structural and discursive dimensions of settler-colonial projects, little attention has been paid to the practices that enable their success. Indeed, focusing on the role of espionage operations, this study argues that civilian-based espionage was critical for the Zionist settler-colonial project. Through a historical case study of the Nili organization, an early Zionist espionage network that collaborated with British forces against the Ottoman state during World War I, the article demonstrates how espionage became an operational practice in the Palestine–Syrian front. By situating Nili within the logic of the Zionist settler-colonial project, it contributes to a deeper understanding of how espionage operations even foster the development of settlements to a state power, as in the Israeli case. Within this context, the study calls for a rethinking of espionage as a central practice of settler-colonial transformation starting with civilian-based spying networks ending up as settler-colonial states.

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Mennonite settler colonialism in Ukraine: John R. Staples, Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine, University of Toronto Press, 2024

04May26

Description: In the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire opened the grasslands of southern Ukraine to agricultural settlement by new colonists, among them Prussian Mennonites. Mennonite colonization was one aspect of the empire’s consolidation and modernization of its multi-ethnic territory. In the colony of Molochnaia, the dominant personality of the early nineteenth century was Johann Cornies (1789–1848), a hard-driving modernizer and intimate of senior Russian officials whose papers provide unique access into events in Ukraine in this era. Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine uses the life story of Johann Cornies to explore how colonial subjects interacted with Russian imperial policy. The book reveals how tsarist imperial policy shifted toward Russification in the 1830s and 1840s and became increasingly intolerant of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious minorities. It shows that Russia employed the Mennonite settlement as a colonial laboratory of modernity, and that the Mennonites were among Russia’s most economically productive subjects. This microhistory illuminates the role of Johann Cornies as a mediator between the empire and the Mennonite colonists, and it ultimately aims to bring light to the history of nineteenth-century Russia and Ukraine.

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The key words: Clare Corbould, Hilary Emmett, ‘Settler Colonial Keywords for New Area Studies: Land, Labour, and Language in Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897)’, in Clare Corbould, Hilary Emmett, Sarah Garland, Malcolm McLaughlin, Thomas Ruys Smith, John Wills (eds), American Studies in the Age of New Area Studies: Infinite Space, Routledge, 2026

01May26

Abstract: This chapter examines the role/place of cross-cultural translation in New Area Studies by reading Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897) as a mode of area studies avant la lettre. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976) and later developments of this concept, we examine Twain’s use of three terms: recruit, squatter, and native. Our close reading of Twain’s comparative account of settler colonies reveals: first, his scorn for euphemisms that mask coercive Pacific labour regimes; second, his unsettling of Australian celebrations of squatters by recalling American associations with land theft and slavery; and third, Twain’s reproduction of settler-colonists’ claims in Australia to nativeness and of myths about Aboriginal people’s “extinction.” As a methodology for New Area Studies, keywording thus enables a nuanced interrogation of cross-cultural translation. In de-exceptionalising US histories of land, labour, and racialisation by situating them within shared settler colonial formations, the method is useful across multiple disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, history, and New Area Studies.

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Indigenous and at home: Jacek Anderst , Keziah Bennett-Brooka, Tamara Mackean, ‘Flipping the script on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and housing: a call for strengths based discourse in Australian housing research’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2026

01May26

Abstract: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are deeply connected to the lands, seas and skies across the settler-colonial state of Australia. They take strength from ongoing connection to culture, spirituality and community. Colonisation impacts these life-giving connections through the dispossession of peoples from Country and disconnection from community and culture. These ongoing colonial processes negatively impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s access to quality housing and are the source of housing precarity. Housing research often portrays Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s housing experiences within deficit discourse. Deficit discourse causes harm in its problematisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are reduced to characterisations such as ‘the Indigenous housing problem’. Strengths-based discourse, now regularly applied in health, can address this harm by centring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s cultures, knowledges and priorities, and appropriately contextualising experiences within settler colonialism. Aboriginal health researchers have for two decades pushed for strengths-based discourse, leading to shifts in health policy, such as the call to eradicate systemic racism. There is an opportunity to similarly flip the script in housing research to centre Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s existing strengths, capabilities and community-led housing solutions and positively influence housing policy.

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Settlers and their pests: Jodie Evans, Abbi Virens, ‘Nuisance Over Nuance: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Common Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Online Media’, New Zealand Geographer, 2026

01May26

Abstract: In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Australian brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) is widely reviled as an icon of environmental destruction. This paper employs critical discourse analysis to examine how the possum is constructed as a pest within online media. Depicted as non-native, overconsuming, and proliferative, the possum emerges as a villain in antithesis to the natural world. This paper argues that such discourse reflects not only the possum’s threat to biosecurity but also deeper tensions within capitalist and settler-colonial ways of relating to nature.

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Dance! Miguel Martínez, ‘Danza Azteca as a form of resistance to White Settler colonialism’, International Journal of Human Rights Education, 10, 2026, pp. 1-17

28Apr26

Abstract: White settler colonialism is a systematic process by which Europeans and their descendants migrate to and settle in a new land with the explicit expectation of taking over the land, regardless of any Indigenous peoples that may live on the land (Speed, 2017; Wolfe, 2006). The Indigenous people who reside there can be exploited for labor, removed, exterminated or some combination of the three. In the process of settling the land, the settlers rename places, transform land use, create a new sense of cultural identity, and work to eliminate any remnants of what had existed prior to their arrival. Indigenous ways of living, epistemologies and religious practices and beliefs are replaced by White political, religious, social, cultural and economic systems and structures. While the impact of White settler colonialism is felt across essentially all Indigenous people in the United States, there has been a significant amount of resistance against it. In this paper, I aim to describe the impact of White settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples of the United States, with an emphasis on the ways that Indigenous people lost access to their cultural practices, and how traditional Danza Azteca, as practiced in California, is a way of resisting against White settler colonialism. As someone who has practiced Danza since 1987, I will discuss some of the history of Danza in the U.S. and how it is a search for Indigeneity and a form of resistance against White settler colonialism.

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The seeds of future settler colonialism (i.e., for those who are too distracted to look at apocalyptic thinking, if the apocalypse comes, what comes after will be settler colonial): Annukka Paajanen, ‘Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: Major actors within the United Nations and academia have suggested that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a ‘backup’ facility for the world’s crop diversity, could facilitate reconciliation between Indigenous and ex situ conservation approaches. This paper examines the collaboration between the SGSV and their Indigenous depositor, Parque de la Papa (Parque), to assess this proposition. Although the SGSV promises to ‘secure’ crop diversity ‘for the benefit of everyone’, work in decolonial and Indigenous studies has shown that neoliberal capitalist and colonial structures underpin and hinder reconciliation and conservation efforts. By critically analyzing literature from various fields and content from institutional websites, I demonstrate how the SGSV’s methods, while intended to safeguard crop diversity, may inadvertently perpetuate colonial dynamics by integrating Indigenous seeds into a system that prioritizes Western/settler colonial, neoliberal capitalist values. Reading the two conservation approaches vis-à-vis, I highlight the asymmetrical exchange that the Parque must navigate to preserve Indigenous knowledge and resources amid climate change challenges in the Andean highlands. Based on the analysis, I assert that despite the collaboration’s benefits, it risks transforming Indigenous communities along Western lines, potentially undermining biodiversity. Understanding these challenges is crucial for improving biodiversity protection and supporting the communities involved.

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