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Settler colonial mathematics! Naomi W. Nishi, ‘White Hoarders: A Portrait of Whiteness and Resource Allocation in College Algebra’, The Journal of Higher Education, 2021

25May21

Abstract: This study uses Critical Race Theory, Settler Colonialism, and Critical Whiteness Studies to frame how property is recognized only under the auspices of whiteness. In the college algebra classroom, this is born out through white entitlement, racialized senses of sharing, and resource allocation. This study uses portraiture to depict how white hoarding, as the co-option of resources by white students, marginalizes and disenfranchises Students of Color.


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Democratic theory meets colonialism: Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf, Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Condition of Democracy: Volume 3: Postcolonial and Settler Colonial Contexts, Routledge, 2021

25May21

Description: Classical liberal democratic theory has provided crucial ideas for a still dominant and hegemonic discourse that rests on ideological conceptions of freedom, equality, peacefulness, inclusive democratic participation, and tolerance. While this may have held some truth for citizens in Western liberal-capitalist societies, such liberal ideals have never been realized in colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. Liberal democracies are not simply forms of rule in domestic national contexts but also geo-political actors. As such, they have been the drivers of processes of global oppression, colonizing and occupying countries and people, appropriating indigenous land, annihilating people with eliminatory politics right up to genocides. There can be no doubt that the West – with its civilizational Judeo-Christian idea and divine mission ‘to subdue the world’ – has destroyed other civilizations, countries, trading systems, and traditional ways of life and is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of human beings in the course of colonizing the world from its Empires of trade through colonialism to settler colonialism and today’s politics of regime change. The book discusses the settler colonial regime that Israel has established in Palestine while still claiming to be a democracy. It discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.


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The indigeneity of empire: Richard Price, Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies, Routledge, 2021

25May21

Description: Indigeneity is inseparable from empire, and the way empire responds to the Indigenous presence is a key historical factor in shaping the flow of imperial history. This book is about the consequences of the encounter in the early nineteenth century between the British imperial presence and the First Peoples of what were to become Australia and New Zealand. However, the shape of social relations between Indigenous peoples and the forces of empire does not remain constant over time. The book tracks how the creation of empire in this part of the world possessed long-lasting legacies both for the settler colonies that emerged and for the wider history of British imperial culture.


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Settler women got the vote: Sarah Carter, Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces, University of British Columbia Press, 2021

25May21

Description: Many of Canada’s most famous suffragists – from Nellie McClung and Cora Hind to Emily Murphy and Henrietta Muir Edwards – lived and campaigned in the Prairie provinces, the region that led the way in granting women the right to vote and hold office. Manitoba enfranchised women in January 1916, and Saskatchewan and Alberta quickly followed in March and April. In Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice, award-winning author Sarah Carter challenges the myth that grateful male legislators simply handed western settler women the vote in recognition that they were equal partners in the pioneering process. Suffragists worked long and hard to overcome obstacles, persuade doubters, and build allies. But their work also had a dark side. Carter situates the suffragists’ struggle in the colonial history of the region, a period when Indigenous people were being cleared from the Plains and marginalized on reserves to make way for permanent settlers. Even as they pressured legislatures to grant their sisters the vote, settler suffragists often accepted and approved of that same right being denied to “foreigners” and to Indigenous men and women. This powerful and passionate account of prominent suffragists and their lesser-known allies shows that the right to vote meant different things to different people – political rights and emancipation for some, domination and democracy denied for others. This book is important reading for anyone with an interest in Canadian women’s history or the history of colonialism in Prairie Canada and on the Great Plains. It will particularly appeal to students of Canadian or political history.


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Covid and settler colonialism: Renisa Mawani, ‘A Historical Account of the Pandemic: Health, Colonialism and Racism in Canada’, in Impacts of COVID-19 in Racialized Communities, Royal Society of Canada, 2021, pp. 56-61

25May21

Abstract: In this paper, I situate the Covid-19 pandemic within a longer historical context in Canada. I argue that settler colonial state has produced the conditions in which certain (white) lives are valued, protected, and nourished while other lives (Indigenous/ Chinese) are left to die. I make this argument by focusing on two examples: the role of the Indian Act and the enactment of Canadian Immigration legislation. While the former has produced unliveable conditions for Indigenous peoples on and off reserves, the latter has suggested that certain migrants – particularly the Chinese – were “foreign” and diseased. The racial inequalities that have surfaced in the current pandemic, I suggest, requires us to consider the long histories of racial violence in Canada, the ways in which certain bodies have been made vulnerable to disease, while others have been blamed for its proliferation, all in the interests of white (re)settlement.


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Sharing? Katherine A.H. Graham, David Newhouse (eds), Sharing the Land, Sharing a Future: The Legacy of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, University of Manitoba Press, 2021

22May21

Description: Sharing the Land, Sharing a Future looks to both the past and the future as it examines the foundational work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and the legacy of its 1996 report. It assesses the Commission’s influence on subsequent milestones in Indigenous-Canada relations and considers our prospects for a constructive future. RCAP’s five-year examination of the relationships of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples to Canada and to non-Indigenous Canadians resulted in a new vision for Canada and provided 440 specific recommendations, many of which informed the subsequent work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Considered too radical and difficult to implement, RCAP’s recommendations were largely ignored, but the TRC reiterates that longstanding inequalities and imbalances in Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples remain and quite literally calls us to action. With reflections on RCAP’s legacy by its co-chairs, leaders of national Indigenous organizations and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, and leading academics and activists, this collection refocuses our attention on the groundbreaking work already performed by RCAP. Organized thematically, it explores avenues by which we may establish a new relationship, build healthy and powerful communities, engage citizens, and move to action.


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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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