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High altitude settler colonialism? Ting Hui Lau, Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking against Chinese Settler Colonialism, Stanford University Press, 2026

08Nov25

Description: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance explores these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and Tibet. Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands, this mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state power. Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has been compelling the Lisu to give up their subsistence lifeways, move into urban settlements, and send their children to government boarding schools. In exchange for the so-called gifts of development—healthcare, income, and education—they suffer environmental and social catastrophes such as mass landslides, strange new illnesses, and toxic food. Drawing on over a decade of engagement with the Lisu, Ting Hui Lau takes readers into the world of ex-shamans, heart-pained mothers, restless spirits, and demon-mad migrants as they grapple with the fallout from state development, which Lau argues is the latest phase in a centuries-long project of settler colonialism along China’s Southwest frontier. At once a portrayal of loss and an ethnography of hope, Lau chronicles Lisu worldmaking amid this destruction, centering their quiet resistance through everyday acts of communal caretaking. In a time of escalating geopolitical and ecological crisis, this book calls for a new decolonial politics rooted in the transformative power of endurance.


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Settler colonialism for sport: Derek Silva, Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Chen Chen, Kristi Allain, Jason Laurendeau, Janelle Joseph, Daniel Sailofsky, Shrehan Lynch, Anthony Weems, Leyla Hamed, Priyansh, Adam Ali , Roc Rochon, Zuleikha Chikh, Charlotte Phillips, Jules Boykoff, R. Taha, Jess Nachman, Zeana Hamdonah, Thomas Ross Griffin, Anima Adjepong, Jeffrey Montez de Oca, ‘Settler Colonialism–Genocide–Athleticide: The Destruction of Sport in Occupied Palestine’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 2025

08Nov25

Abstract: In this paper, our scholarly collective traces how athleticide—defined here as the obliteration of sport, sporting cultures, and athletics through the killing, arrest, detention, or disabling of athletes, coaches, staff, officials, and administrators and the destruction of athletic infrastructure and history—has been part of the US–NATO-funded Israeli state’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. Although much of the literature focuses on the philosophical, ethical, and political foundations of events that are conventionally described as “genocide,” little scholarly attention has been paid to genocide in the disparate fields that make up sports studies. Even less attention has been paid to the role that sport, sporting cultures, and athletics may, or may not, play in genocide and genocidal campaigns. To address this gap, we advocate for the development of a sociology of athleticide as one possible point of departure for advancing sports studies’ understanding of the role that sport can, and often does, play in times of genocide and the impact of state violence on sport.


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The air of the city does not make you free: Peter Kent-Stoll, ‘Struggles for the land and the city: Settler colonialism, anticolonialism, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation Program in Chicago’, Critical Sociology, 2025

07Nov25

Abstract: The Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation program relocated thousands of Native Americans to Chicago and other cities from the early 1950s through the early 1970s. Despite BIA claims of social and economic progress, Native people faced exploitative social, political, and material conditions in the city. This article examines how the BIA envisioned and managed relocation in Chicago and how Native people challenged the BIA’s expectations and desires. Urban sociological and urban historical literature on the postwar U.S. is not well positioned to answer these questions, given its minimal engagement with histories of U.S. settler colonialism and urban Indigenous experiences. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives on settler colonial urbanisms and urban indigeneity, I uncover how the BIA imagined Chicago as a modern city disconnected from indigeneity, and how relocated Native people formed the Chicago Indian Village movement to fight for land back while building space and community in resistance to dispossession.


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Indigenous sites are sacred: Michalyn Steele, ‘The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act as a Model of Cultural Sovereignty for Protecting Indigenous Sacred Sites’, Fordham Law Review, 94, 2, 2025, #8

07Nov25

Excerpt: For Native Hawaiians, the soaring summit of Hawaiʻi’s Mauna Kea is among the most sacred sites for their cultural and spiritual practices and beliefs. Indeed, the summit of the extinct volcano Mauna Kea is a literal dwelling place of deity, with access to the holy site, highly restricted to those authorized to perform sacred rituals. The mountain is central to the creation story and spiritual life of the Native Hawaiians and their islands; it is inextricably linked to their identity past, present, and future. In their tradition, only “spiritual leaders and royal elites” should be allowed access to the mountain to avoid disturbing the deity’s home.


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Settler wars now: Nick Estes, ‘US Imperialism Is an Indian War’, Middle East Critique, 2025

05Nov25

Abstract: The US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites during the so-called 12-Day War is part of a long history of preemptive military interventions that use the Indian Wars as a legal precedent. This essay explores how an anti-imperialist framing within American Indian studies sheds light on the legal underpinnings of US ‘forever wars’ in West Asia and beyond. More than two centuries of imperialist warmaking relies on the United States’ longest series of military campaigns, the Indian Wars, as a legal justification of presidential war powers to wage undeclared aggressions against any nation or group deemed an enemy of the United States.


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Gossiping settlers: Gianluca Bo, ‘Italian Colonists and Rumour as Anti-Regime Negotiation in Italian Occupied Ethiopia, 1936-41’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2025

05Nov25

Abstract: The article analyses 42 rumours and gossip pertaining to Fascist authorities, specifically high-ranked individuals and members of colonial police, documented in Italian occupied Ethiopia (1936–41). The primary goal of this study is to introduce methodological and historiographical reflections for the study of these narratives in the context of Fascist colonialism. This will be achieved in consideration of the context’s distinctive characteristics, including the scarcity of reliable information and the regime’s pervasive surveillance of the colonizers’ lives. Moreover, the analysis will use these narratives to illustrate the expectations of Italian colonizers regarding the occupation of Ethiopia. The article contends that rumours and gossip served as a means for Italian colonists to voice their discontent towards the Fascist authorities, and that they are now a crucial archive for historians striving to grasp their anxieties and life-experiences.


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The settlement of Kurdistan: Özlem Göner, ‘Colonization of Kurdistan: A Basic Geographical, Historical, and Theoretical Framework’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2025

05Nov25

Excerpt: Colonialism is most commonly typologized as either settler or extractive. Settler colonialism involves large-scale settlement, as seen in British North America, Australia, French Algeria, and Palestine, while extractive colonialism centers on resource exploitation without significant settlement, as in British India, the American Philippines, or the Dutch East Indies. Drawing on this framework, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan (2024) characterizes Ottoman Kurdistan as an instance of extractive colonialism. While this categorization is useful, it is also necessary to interrogate potential settlement ambitions of colonizing states and examine the relationships between these ambitions and realities and layered forms of extraction. Demographic engineering in Kurdistan dates back to the Ottoman dismantling of Kurdish autonomy. Yadirgi (2017) highlights the use of systematic exile, alongside massacres, in the destruction of Kurdish emirates in the early 19th century. These policies intensified after the Armenian Genocide, when between 700,000 and over a million Kurds were deported to Anatolia and Thrace, with many dying en route (Jwaideh 2009; Üngör 2011; Yadirgi 2017). Although large-scale settlement of other Muslim populations in Kurdistan remained limited in the following decades, such aspirations have persisted and continue today. From the 1934 Settlement Act, which incentivized the settlement of Muslims from other regions in Kurdish areas to “Turkify” the region, to the forced relocation of Dersim Genocide survivors (1938–39) and the displacement of one to two million Kurds in the 1990s, Turkey has used settlement laws to uproot Kurds and dismantle the social and political fabric of Northern Kurdistan (Jongerden 2017). Similarly, Syrian and Iraqi Arabization policies established Arab “belts” in Western and Southern Kurdistan. Between the late 1950s and 1963, Syria settled primarily landless Arab peasants, including migrants from Egypt, in the Derik and Hasakah regions of Western Kurdistan (Rojava) (Roberts 2014, Tejel 2011, Altuğ 2013). The Iraqi state also employed demographic engineering, culminating in the Anfal Campaign of 1986–88 (McDowall 2013). Successive Iranian states—from the Safavid era to the Islamic Republic—employed demographic engineering strategies, such as “dilution” and “fragmentation,” to disrupt Kurdish geographic continuity and undermine autonomy claims (Hassaniyan 2019; Mohammadpour and Soleimani 2021). Settlement ambitions persist to this day, as seen in Afrin, Western Kurdistan, where Turkey ethnically cleansed the Kurdish majority and resettled populations and militias aligned with its interests, effectively acting as a surrogate settler colonial power since 2018.[2] Targeted settlement against key groups and families critical to Kurdistan’s social and political fabric has had lasting effects. While Kurdistan’s colonization cannot be classified as settler colonialism—since it remains predominantly Kurdish—continued attention to demographic engineering and socio-political erasure is essential to understanding the links between genocidal violence and economic exploitation.


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Manifest limits (in more ways than one): Andrew C. Isenberg, The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850, The University of North Carolina Press, 2025

03Nov25

Description: In The Age of the Borderlands, acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence. Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government’s power: the land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state—ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.


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With a chapter on boxing and Indigenous heritage by Kyle T. Mays: in Rudy Mondragón, Gaye Theresa Johnson, David J. Leonard (eds), Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion, University of Illinois Press, 2025

03Nov25

Access the book here.


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Resistance: Noura Erakat, John Reynolds, ‘Settler colonialism’, in Antony Anghie, B. S. Chimni, Michael Fakhri, Karin Mickelson, Vasuki Nesiah (eds), Research Handbook on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Elgar, 2025, pp. 46-54

01Nov25

Abstract: This interview with Noura Erakat was done by John Reynolds in September 2022. We discuss the defining features of settler colonialism, how it is distinguished from other forms of colonialism, and the nature of its relationship with international law. The interview also addresses questions of knowledge production: how the field of settler colonial studies is defined, who the main theorists of settler colonialism are and what their key interventions have been. The interview highlights in particular the contributions of Third World and Indigenous thinkers, from Palestine to Australia to Hawai’i, to our understandings of settler colonialism. It reflects in this light on whether and how settler colonial studies relates to Indigenous scholarship and Indigenous studies. The interview also touches directly on the question of Palestine: what does settler colonialism look like in Palestine today? What does international law have to say about it?


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