settler colonial studies blog

Immobile: Anne Irfan, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Displacement/ Immobility Nexus: Israeli Policy in Gaza Since 1948’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2025

30Aug25

Excerpt: In July 2025, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced a new plan to forcibly displace, contain, immobilize, and ultimately expel Gaza’s Palestinians. The plan, which followed numerous ethnic cleansing schemes for Gaza from both Israel and the US, proposed that the Israeli army would establish a so-called “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, a city largely obliterated by 21 months of genocidal warfare (ongoing at the time of writing). According to Katz, the army would then “move” 600,000 Palestinians into the encampment, with the eventual aim of enclosing the Strip’s entire population therein. Once inside, the Palestinians would not be allowed to leave the camp, which would be surrounded and guarded by the military, except to emigrate from Palestine permanently.

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Settler colonialism is about unchilding: Mazhar Ahmad Al Zo’by, Imed Ben Labidi, ‘”Unchilding’ Palestine: media representation and the limits of civilizational discourse’, Cultural Studies, 2025

30Aug25

Abstract: Within the global neo-orientalist colonial imagination, contemporary Arab and Muslim societies provide crucial ideological representations for the constitutive otherness of western civilizational politics. So profoundly imbued are negative views of the oriental Arab societies that even their children are inadequate to meet basic standards for innate civilizational virtues to warrant human rights consideration. This article explores how besieged Palestinian children living under settler-colonialism have been portrayed and excluded from the Western Enlightenment discourse on children’s rights. Using discourse analysis to examine a variety of visual and textual media configurations and to identify their ideological sources, the article explains how Palestinian children have been constituted as an extension of their forefathers presumed pre-modern, backward oriental savage societies. Hence, to ‘unchild’ Palestinians by subjecting them to incarceration, starvation or death, even though undesirable, the article further argues, becomes necessary measures to contain the child’s contamination by the same cultural irrationality of his/her oriental parents.

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Parallel Indigenous thinking: Habib Badawi, ‘Parallel Experiences of Displacement and Resistance: Native Americans and Palestinians’, Contemporary Arab Affairs, 2025

30Aug25

Abstract: This research undertakes a comparative analysis of the historical experiences of displacement and resistance encountered by Native American communities in the USA and Palestinian populations in Israel and the occupied territories. Utilizing a qualitative approach, the study explores parallels in displacement, cultural stereotyping, diversity, resistance efforts, historical rhetoric, and the impact on identity. By employing settler colonialism theory and engaging critical Indigenous and Palestinian perspectives, the analysis elucidates shared patterns of oppression and resilience. The study aims to highlight the complexities of cultural survival against colonial forces, contribute to discourses in American Indian Studies and Palestinian Studies, and foster broader understandings of decoloniality, social justice, and human rights.

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Parallel settler thinking: Justin Holmes, Brian F. O’Neill, ‘Constructing Comparability: Climate Change Adaptation and the Transnational Settler Modularity of Desalination’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2025

30Aug25

Abstract: Regarding technology, “modularity” typically refers to an apparatus’ interchangeability, reproducibility, or transposability, i.e., “plug and play” applications. However, critical scholars contend that modularity is laborious and aspirational, not to be taken for granted. Where promoters of modularity often focus on material dimensions of technology, this article intervenes in these debates by revealing the necessary practical and discursive work required. We problematize desalination’s transnational modularity through an analysis of archival and ethnographic research of comparative connections between California and Israel. We argue desalination emerged from Israel’s project to restructure environmental, political, and economic risks with(in) Palestine. Through naturalizing colonization and extraction, desalination’s applicability to places such as California is made to appear self-evident. We demonstrate this process by interrogating three common arguments used to craft comparability between California and Israel: (1) desalination overcomes “natural” scarcity; (2) desalination produces geopolitical cooperation through “abundance”; and (3) desalination displays superior techno-managerial expertise. In so doing, we contribute to science and technology studies and critical environmental justice studies by illustrating how “adaptations” can emerge from settler-colonial projects. Founded on socionatural exploitation and domination, settler-colonial projects prove productive of modular capitalist endeavors and ongoing practices of constructing comparisons.

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Whingeing settlers: Darren Reid, Invoking Empire: Imperial citizenship and Indigenous rights across the British World, 1860–1900, Manchester University Press, 2025

30Aug25

Description: Invoking Empire examines the histories of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand during the transitional decades between 1860 and 1900, when each of these colonies gained some degree of self-government, yet still remained within the sovereignty of the British Empire. The book applies the conceptual framework of imperial citizenship to nine case studies of settlers, Indigenous peoples, and metropolitan Britons who lived through these decades, to make two main arguments. First, Invoking Empire argues that colonial subjects articulated their imperial citizenship through a humanitarian lens to both support and challenge the rise of settler colonialism, revealing the complex entanglement of imperial and settler governmental authority as well as the multifarious uses and meanings of humanitarian discourses in the late nineteenth century. Second, the book argues that such humanitarian articulations of imperial citizenship were often rendered inoperable by a combination of imperial and settler governmental structures, emphasizing the multifaceted and overlapping barriers that prevented the realization of political rights guaranteed by imperial citizenship. By attending to continuities of imperial political subjectivities within self-governing colonies, as well as by showing that the rise of settler sovereignty was often contingent upon the many and repeated failures of imperial citizenship, Invoking Empire challenges teleological assumptions that the rise of the settler nation states was an inevitable or immediate result of winning responsible government.

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Indigenous film-making is about resisting settler colonialism: Amar Ramesh Wayal, A. P. Anupama (eds), Global Perspectives on Indigenous Film and Literature, Springer, 2025

30Aug25

Description: This edited volume comprehensively explores narrative survival in Indigenous film and literature, forging a literary and transitional approach to native writing. It navigates the evolution of Indigenous voices, spanning the oral tradition and literary forms from colonial times to the present. It covers a range of issues related to indigenous inequalities and diversities in film and literature. With chapters from global perspectives, including North America, Canada, New Zealand, and South Asia, it ensures an inclusive exploration of indigenous narratives. The diverse chapters address topics such as the aboriginal experience, residential school legacy, the invisible nation of Algonquins, tribal songs, decolonial futures, caste, survival narrative, trauma, and other marginalized groups such as low castes, linguistic minorities, and Adivasis (tribals). The book focuses on innovative concepts to understand the study of a particular indigenous group in isolation from others and more than the conventional comparative study of different indigenous groups. It deals with the challenges of achieving local indigenous rights and identities. It is a valuable resource for social science and humanities scholars, particularly for indigenous scholars, development professionals and administrators interested in the issues related to social diversity and indigeneity in a global setting.

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What unites settlers? Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, W. W. Norton, 2008

30Aug25

Description: Relying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled in Europe, and the divisions between them only grew—until, with the arrival of the Seven Years’ War, thousands of country people were forced to flee from Indian attack. Silver reveals in vivid and often chilling detail how easily a rhetoric of fear can incite entire populations to violence. He shows how it was only through the shared experience of fearing and hating Indians that these Europeans, once irreconcilable, were finally united under the ideal of religious and ethnic tolerance that has since defined the best in American life.

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Reconciliation for sport: Britta Peterson, Meredith Wing, Audrey R. Giles, Rochelle Stewart-Withers, Valentina Ly, ‘Rendering the invisible visible: reflexivity and flexibility in a scoping review on sport for reconciliation’, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 2025

28Aug25

Abstract: Numerous scholars have argued that sport is a vessel through which to enforce settler-colonial domination; however, sport can also represent a domain in which to support Indigenous-settler reconciliation. Nevertheless, differing understandings of reconciliation, particularly within diverse global contexts, can lead to ambiguity in its definition and application. Therefore, as part of a broader project on sport for reconciliation (SFR), we conducted a scoping review to examine the ways in which the term SFR is used in the academic literature. Through the scoping review process, we screened 2201 articles by title and abstract and conducted a full-text screening of 181 articles. Only four articles met our inclusion criteria. While scoping reviews typically focus on findings, we seek to centre the process itself, emphasising reflexivity and flexibility, two aspects often promoted yet rarely presented and made visible in practice. In response to this gap, we examine the tensions we experienced regarding the implications of exclusion, which were amplified by our understanding of colonialism. We argue that engaging in reflexivity can (re)conceptualise exclusion criteria, shifting from the binary of inclusion and exclusion to a critical investigation of what something is not. Subsequently, we propose a sixth step to Arksey and O’Malley (2005) scoping review methodology, ‘implications of excluded articles and reflexive insights’. We recommend this step be completed before the optional consultation stage. By centring reflexivity and flexibility, we offer a nuanced (re)conceptualisation of both SFR scholarship and the use of scoping reviews, particularly in research shaped by and grounded in colonial logics.

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The Soviet settler colony: Nicole Eaton, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad, Cornell University Press, 2023

26Aug25

Description: German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe’s two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler’s Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis’ genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

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The settler colonial origins of modern social thought, actually: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, Princeton, 2023

26Aug25

Description: In this provocative and original retelling of the history of French social thought, George Steinmetz places the history and development of modern French sociology in the context of the French empire after World War II. Connecting the rise of all the social sciences with efforts by France and other imperial powers to consolidate control over their crisis-ridden colonies, Steinmetz argues that colonial research represented a crucial core of the renascent academic discipline of sociology, especially between the late 1930s and the 1960s. Sociologists, who became favored partners of colonial governments, were asked to apply their expertise to such “social problems” as detribalization, urbanization, poverty, and labor migration. This colonial orientation permeated all the major subfields of sociological research, Steinmetz contends, and is at the center of the work of four influential scholars: Raymond Aron, Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier, and Pierre Bourdieu. In retelling this history, Steinmetz develops and deploys a new methodological approach that combines attention to broadly contextual factors, dynamics within the intellectual development of the social sciences and sociology in particular, and close readings of sociological texts. He moves gradually toward the postwar sociologists of colonialism and their writings, beginning with the most macroscopic contexts, which included the postwar “reoccupation” of the French empire and the turn to developmentalist policies and the resulting demand for new forms of social scientific expertise. After exploring the colonial engagement of researchers in sociology and neighboring fields before and after 1945, he turns to detailed examinations of the work of Aron, who created a sociology of empires; Berque, the leading historical sociologist of North Africa; Balandier, the founder of French Africanist sociology; and Bourdieu, whose renowned theoretical concepts were forged in war-torn, late-colonial Algeria.

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