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The settler colonial police: Paul Bleakley, ‘Capital, Settler Colonialism and Police Violence in Imperial Queensland’, in Emma D. Watkins, Eleanor Bland (eds), Imperial Crime and Punishment, Emerald, 2025

26Aug25

Abstract: In the wake of its separation from New South Wales in December 1859, Queensland’s growth was predicated largely by its value as a ‘new frontier’ for European colonists seeking to expand their pastoral and agricultural wealth. The process of settler colonialism was facilitated by the Queensland colonial (later, state) government, who routinely used the Queensland Native Mounted Police (QNMP) for more than 50 years to protect the interests of white landowners, at the typically fatal expense of the region’s Indigenous peoples. The exercise of state violence by the paramilitary-oriented QNMP was reflected in punitive expeditions that resulted in massacre; however, the use of colonial or state police agencies to defend capital with violence was not limited to conflict on the frontier. Drawing on archival material, such as the transcripts of judicial inquiries and internal government correspondence, this chapter reaffirms the existence of a nexus between capitalist expansion and state violence in the imperial period and makes connections between violence committed on behalf of Queensland’s landed pastoralists in the mid- to late-1800s and similar (albeit, less fatal) interactions with labour into the early 1900s. Through this, it is possible to critically interrogate the historical role of police as agents of state in Queensland, with implications for how politically motivated law enforcement was carried out to varying extents throughout the pre-Fitzgerald era, prior to sweeping reforms of the Queensland Police Force (QPF) at the dawn of the 1990s.


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The base of the triangle: Leila K. Blackbird, Embodied Violence: Slavery and Settler Colonialism on America’s Third Coast, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025

25Aug25

Abstract: This dissertation examines the intertwined histories of slavery and settler colonialism in Louisiana and the greater Gulf South from the Mississippian era through the early American republic, centering the violences that structured imperial expansion, racial capitalism, and territorial conquest. Rather than treating African enslavement and Indigenous elimination as parallel but distinct processes, this dissertation employs a synthetic framework that reveals their deep structural entanglements across French, Spanish, and Anglo-American regimes, foregrounding the centrality of Indigenous enslavement alongside African chattel slavery and their disproportional impacts on women and children. It demonstrates how settler colonial logics have been enacted through various legal and spatial regimes, but also through forms of ongoing structural violence, which have been embodied and are still experienced today. It further argues that the rise of the U.S. South and the consolidation of American empire were built on these interlocking systems of violence against Black and Indigenous peoples; slavery transformed the Gulf South and Lower Mississippi Valley from a richly networked Indigenous world to a racialized geography of elimination, enslavement, and extraction, practices which are foundational—not peripheral—to American settler colonialism. Using a place-based multi-sited historical methodology, this dissertation illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous people have experienced and resisted such embodied violence, including reproductive control, forced displacement and diaspora, legal erasure, and intergenerational trauma. The epilogue brings this history into the present, examining how former Native American villages and cultural sites were turned into plantations and then petrochemical-industrial sites, perpetuating cycles of disease, disaster, and death against descendant communities and tribal nations for profit. By combining archival and decolonial methods, this dissertation reorients U.S. history from the margins, insisting on the Gulf South—the Third Coast—as central to the making, and unmaking, of American empire.


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Anthropocene or settlerocene? Tracy A. Stephens, ‘The Anthropocene and Settler Moves to Innocence in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport’, Studies in the Novel, 57, 3, 2025, pp. 325-342

25Aug25

Abstract: Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport, which presents the internal monologue of an anxious mother of four, is a snapshot of American life in the Anthropocene, as the protagonist worries about her complicity in environmental degradation. The novel illustrates that the Anthropocene is a settler move to innocence that disguises both the role of settler colonialism in causing the climate crisis and the responsibility of settlers to work toward decolonization. It makes this critique through its attention to Indigenous history, the protagonist’s attitudes toward her family’s resource use, and her daughter Stacy’s Indigenous identity. Throughout the novel, interspersed with the protagonist’s monologue, is the story of another mother: a cougar who loses, searches for, and is eventually reunited with her kittens. The paralleling of these stories and Stacy’s identification with the cougar suggest that hope for the future lies in decolonization and the restoration of kinship ties with non-humans.


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Abigail Bratcher, The Transformation of the Steppe: Ecological Imperialism and Livestock-Agriculture in Kazakhstan, 1891-1964, PhD dissertation, University fo Chicago, 2025

25Aug25

Excerpt: In 1929, 7,442,000 head of cattle were spread across the vast territory of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. By 1931, the number had dropped to 2,800,000 animals.1 By 1935, only 1,830,000 animals remained, nearly an 80% reduction.2 Over the course of the First Five-Year Plan, Kazakh livestock herds—once the wealth of nomadic pastoralists and the lifeblood of Russian imperial food systems—were on the brink of collapse. Yet decades later, First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party, Dinmukhamed Kunaev would celebrate the restoration of these livestock herds in the republic as the conquering of a “second Virgin Lands [vtoraia tselina].” In the process of this tremendous destruction and resuscitation of animal life, nomadic pastoralism as a traditional mode of Kazakh animal husbandry faded away. In its place stood gigantic fields of grain monocultures, barns with the capacity to shelter hundreds of animals, and Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Caucasian cattlemen that measured their work in feed units per hectare rather than seasonal migrations across ancestral pastures. This dissertation began from a basic, awestruck question: How did this transformation occur—all in less than a century?


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Localist settler colonialism: Hannah Shepherd, ‘Japan’s local imperialists: Expansive ideas of hometown and empire within the Asia-Pacific world’, Modern Asian Studies, 2025

22Aug25

Abstract: This article focuses on a case study of one Japanese prefectural association and its monthly magazine to reassess the importance of prefectural associations (kenjinkai) beyond the diaspora communities in North America on which Anglophone scholarly focus has remained until now. It also returns an overlooked imperial dimension to Japanese language histories of domestic prefectural associations and discourse over the ‘hometown’. Arguing that the expansive ideas of the hometown, created through the networks of prefectural associations and the pages of their publications, gave rise to ideas of borderless empire and frictionless mobility, this article demonstrates how histories of prefectural associations and magazines like Fukuoka kenjin present a new, regional perspective on both empire and the idea of the hometown in pre-war Japan. Associationalism in and beyond Japan’s empire was not unique, and this article puts the history of kenjinkai in conversation with other such regional settler networks around the globe that were happening at the same time. The article then looks at the transwar continuities and ruptures felt by overseas associations in both North America and among former Japanese colonists, before contextualizing the rise of a ‘third wave’ of domestic migration and hometown discourse in the 1960s.


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The social work of settler colonialism: Paul Michael Garrett, ‘Hegemony and settler colonial subjectivities: The censure of the Israeli Union of Social Workers (IUSW) by the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW)’, Critical Social Policy, 2025

22Aug25

Abstract: In March 2018, and again in January 2025, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) censured the Israeli Union of Social Workers (IUSW) for its failure to adhere to the profession’s ethical principles. IUSW members have been combat active during the ongoing Gaza genocide and the Israeli union has been stridently unwilling to ‘make any statement calling for peace’. This article seeks to comprehend the IUSW’s stance in light of the twinned ideological imperatives of neoliberalism and settler colonialism. Furthermore, it explores how social workers’ subjectivities are shaped within the Zionist hegemonic project.


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Settler federalism: Aaron John Spitzer, ‘Contested Frontiers: Indigenous Power, Settler Rights and the Re-Constitution of Federal Territories’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2025

22Aug25

Abstract: Australia, Canada and the United States are settler-colonial federations comprising two types of federal units. The first are states/provinces: full, permanent federal partners, securely settler controlled. The second are territories. Historically, territories were “partners in waiting,” slated for federal incorporation once settlers achieved control of the jurisdiction, outnumbering and disempowering Indigenous peoples. The “rights revolution” made achieving control by force less acceptable. Meanwhile, in Australia, Canada and the US, there remain several territories where Indigenous peoples hold significant power. I find today’s remaining territories experience a new way settlers target Indigenous power, not through force but through rights-challenges. Further, I show these rights-challenges provoke “constitutive contests,” the outcome of which are consequential, potentially “re-constituting” territories in amanner fostering settler control. Finally, I explore why territories might be especially vulnerable to re-constitution through settler rights challenges.


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More food for settler colonial thought: Mehroosh Tak, Sardar Babur Hussain, Haris Zargar, Lauren Jessica Blake, ‘Settler colonialism de-develops food systems in protracted crises’, Nature Food, 6, 2025, pp. 751-756

22Aug25

Abstract: Prevalent policy responses to food systems in protracted crises adopt a dichotomous lens of either humanitarian aid or economic underdevelopment, while ignoring the key role of colonialism and/or settler colonialism. Here we propose a framework to enable us to better comprehend food systems in protracted crises by paying attention to the role of colonial and settler colonial regimes and their use of slow violence and land dispossession in de-developing food systems. Investigation and acknowledgement of these structural drivers of food systems change is critical for policy success due to the role of the state in the perpetration of violence against Indigenous or native peoples’ food systems in protracted crises.


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Urban resistance against settler colonialism: Giorgia Ciccocioppo, ‘Permanent Battlespaces: Military Landscapes as a Lens of Israeli Settler Colonialism in Hebron, West Bank’, Crime, Law and AI, 06/08/25

19Aug25

Excerpt: Architecture in Hebron, West Bank, presents such a complex array of colonial strategies that the following analysis covers only partially. Since the establishment of Israeli settlements, military presence has gradually intensified to protect the latter from the alleged threat that Palestinian communities represent. Palestinian individuals are therefore subjected to a violent military regime that impacts their bodies, through physical persecution by the IDF and algorithmic profiling; their communal spaces, destroyed through targeted demolition or fragmented by checkpoints and settler-exclusive infrastructure; and their homes, through intensive surveillance and military raids. Life as a Palestinian resident in Hebron is deprived of collectivity, civic participation, and social life. The attempt to neglect Palestinians is materialized in the establishment of two differential temporal regimes. However, despite the clear-cut separation into enclaves and archipelagos, Israelis and Palestinians still inhabit the same spaces. The lives of both communities are still inevitably and violently intertwined. Despite the State of Israel’s justifications of such conditions based on a felt security threat posed by Islamist terrorism, a deeper look into how daily life unfolds in Palestinian communities in Hebron reveals a further settler colonial agenda. Building on the theoretical framework of security and military landscapes (Minghi, 1986; Pearson, 2012), and urban warfare (Coward, 2009), this paper aims to examine the goals and impact of military penetration into urbanity through the qualitative method of case study. Subsequent to the presentation of the literature’s framework applied to the case of Hebron, the following sections will disentangle the question of the blurred lines between military and civilian, war and peace, security and oppression: specifically, the differential mobility questions established by military checkpoints are highlighted, to further move into a reflection over the use of high-tech biometric surveillance systems as a disciplinary tool.  The work concludes with a critical reflection on the role of architecture in perpetrating violence and in finalizing a settler colonial project.


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Municipal resistance against settler colonialism: Margaret Ellis-Young, ‘Urban transformation and Indigenous-settler reconciliation: Discursive (dis)connections between municipal reconciliation strategies and area redevelopment plans in five Canadian cities’,Cities, 167, 2025, #106350

19Aug25

Abstract: Municipalities in settler colonial states are currently engaged in seemingly conflicting projects of urban redevelopment and Indigenous-settler reconciliation, given the role the former plays in reproducing colonial dispossession. However, state-led reconciliation itself can also reinforce the settler colonial relationship through its selective recognition of colonial violence, Indigenous presence, and new pathways forward. In response to these tensions, this article examines how emerging municipal reconciliation discourses are reproduced, transformed, or ignored within new area redevelopment plans, and the extent to which this “dialogue” indicates discursive shifts to settler planning norms and ideals. A textual analysis of reconciliation documents and redevelopment plans in five Canadian cities – Vancouver, Edmonton, Regina, Hamilton, and Montréal – reveals that reconciliation discourses of relationship-building, Indigenous presence, and unity and inclusion are consistently translated in ways that maintain the settler planning status quo. Crucially, these concepts are transformed in interaction with planning discourses of urban authority, redevelopment as capital accumulation, and the inclusive city, underlining the need to challenge both capitalist planning norms and unnuanced ‘inclusion’ as a response to inequitable development outcomes.


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