settler colonial studies blog

Mars, settler colonised: Jonathan Caleb Imdad, ‘Terraforming the Red Planet: Imperial Domination, Neocolonial Control, and Resistance in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars’, NUML: Journal of Critical Inquiry, 23, 1, 2025, pp. 36-53

13Jul25

Abstract: This paper uses Edward Said’s concept of colonial discourse to examine how Mars is colonized by the governments of Earth and dominated by transnational capitalism, as it is depicted in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. The novel portrays Mars as a battlefield for the imperial powers of Earth, where the wars for Martian land proceed from well-known predilections for imperialist and neo-colonial capitalism. Mars appears as a “frontier,” neither settled nor exploited, that can be colonized, where both the colonizers and colonized struggle for dominance. But Martian colonists reject corporate and institutional control and fight their own battles reminiscent of anti-colonial struggles on Earth. This qualitative study investigates how Mars can be viewed as an extension of neocolonialism by arguing that Robinson has depicted Mars as a colonial/neocolonial space. The novel serves as a warning to the institutions of Earth as it demonstrates that conquest, corporate dominance, and economic exploitation are challenges that must be continually opposed. The research underlines the need to create a system based on justice, freedom, and the wellbeing of all settlers. It raises both political and ethical questions and illustrates how speculative fiction like Red Mars plays a role in policymaking conversations.

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It’s a structure: Kaitie Jourdeuil, ‘Territorial justice as structural justice: settler colonialism and territorial rights theory’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2025

08Jul25

Abstract: This paper challenges the dominant paradigm that territorial justice in settler-colonial states like Canada is a matter of distributive justice. Instead, it argues that theorists should embrace the dominant paradigm in Indigenous political thought and the critical theory that territorial justice is a matter of structural justice. This is because the structural paradigm focuses on how Indigenous and settler jurisdictions are constructed in relation to each other, and the conditions required to change this relationship. To make this argument, I highlight three worries for the distributive paradigm in settler-colonial states and show how a structural paradigm can address them. The first concerns the feasibility of implementing just distributions in contexts of structural injustice. The second concerns the distributive paradigm’s ability to describe how Indigenous and settler jurisdictions relate to each other. The third concerns how it justifies jurisdictional rights. I conclude by considering the new directions for territorial rights theory that the structural paradigm proposes.

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Imperial Russia’s settler colonialism: Zhasurbek Nurullaev, ‘Colonial Policy of Russia: Land Reforms and Demographic Transformation (1906–1917)’, Lingvospectr, 6, 1, 2025, pp. 403-408

08Jul25

Abstract: This article provides a critical analysis of the mechanisms and consequences of Russian colonial policy in the last decades of the imperial era, with a particular focus on the land reforms initiated after Stolypin’s agrarian transformation of 1906 and their impact on the demographic landscape of the colonized territories, especially in Central Asia. The study shows how these measures, officially aimed at regulating internal peasant unrest and increasing agricultural productivity, actually served as an instrument of imperialist expansion, demographic engineering and social control. Through a detailed study of archival materials, statistical data and the work of scholars, the author demonstrates how the Russian authorities facilitated the resettlement of Slavic settlers in non-Russian peripheries – primarily in Turkestan – with the aim of strengthening political power, exploiting agricultural resources and changing the ethnic composition of the region. The analysis also covers the socio-political consequences of such demographic interventions: the dispossession of indigenous peoples of their land rights, the aggravation of inter-ethnic relations, environmental degradation due to intensive farming and the administrative marginalization of indigenous peoples.

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Trust in reconciliation: Dimitrios Panagos, Reconciliation and trust in settler states’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2025

08Jul25

Abstract: This article examines the phenomenon of reconciliation in the context of settler states (e.g. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, etc.). It takes the position that reconciliation is necessary in these states because they are the products of a particular form of historic injustice (i.e. settler state colonialism), which continues to poison the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens. The aim of the article is to outline three key features that would be necessary for the construction of a satisfactory, detailed account of Indigenous-non-Indigenous reconciliation in settler states. The first feature is that such an account must be sensitive to the background context of settler state colonialism, which sometimes requires Indigenous people to turn away from non-Indigenous peoples, and sometimes supports Indigenous-non-Indigenous engagement and cooperation. The second feature is that the account of reconciliation must include the promotion of trust and trustworthiness, and illustrate how settler states can bring this about. The third feature is that the account should employ a duty-centric discourse instead of rights-talk when the concern is Indigenous-non-Indigenous reconciliation. While this article does not offer a comprehensive theory of reconciliation in settler states, it puts forward that these three features are first, but necessary steps for constructing such a theory.

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The technologies of erasure: Danielle Samantha Poindexter, Technologizing Erasure: Indigeneity, Gender, and the Co-Production of Settler Colonialism in the Industrialized Agriculture of the California Borderlands, PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2025

08Jul25

Abstract: This dissertation examines how industrialized agriculture in the California Borderlands enacts and sustains settler colonialism through the entanglements of technology, race, and gender. Focusing on Ejido Eréndira in Baja California Norte, I analyze how agricultural technologies are not neutral tools but are coproduced with settler colonial structures that erase Indigenous presence and reshape the meanings of land, labor, and belonging. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and place-based fieldwork, I argue that settler colonialism in this region operates through both narrative and infrastructure. Bridging feminist science and technology studies with settler colonial, postcolonial, and critical development theories, I foreground how power is embedded in the everyday practices of agricultural life. This work reveals how agrarian development and narratives of modernity have been shaped by racialized and gendered ways of knowing and organizing the world, and insists that future agricultural and environmental analyses must attend to these structures of power. Ultimately, Technologizing Erasure contributes to interdisciplinary conversations about land, science, and development by offering a transnational feminist critique of how the tools of progress reproduce dispossession.

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Spanning the boundary: Mitchell C. Gibbs, Pauline M. Ross, ‘Boundary spanners: An Australian First Nations perspective’, People and Nature, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: A boundary spanner is a person who breaks down the barriers or ‘boundaries’ between specific groups of society. To do this, they use their innate qualities and skills developed through experience to conceptualise a method which facilitates meaningful relationships between the two groups. The aim of this perspective piece was to help Western academy to identify and understand the value of boundary spanners and develop a language to move forward in a meaningful dialogue about Indigenous knowledges and peoples at a time when the need for boundary spanners is substantial in Australia and globally if we are to sustain Land, Sea and Sky Country As Indigenous knowledges in Australia and the world are increasingly elevated as meaningful and valid by the Western academy, and our planet faces global environmental challenges, it has never been more important to understand the role and characteristics of people who are boundary spanners—those that bridge the gap between Indigenous peoples and the Western academy. There are many characteristics exhibited by effective boundary spanners. Many, if not all, of these characteristics are innate, strengthened through their experiences with Indigenous peoples and grounded in ethics and respect for culture and customs, and very importantly, integrity and honesty. Being an effective boundary spanner, however, comes with challenges. These challenges include issues of trust, perception, respect, identity, burn out, time management, competing timeframes and the capacity to create pathways and repair relationships. The boundary spanner must find solutions for these challenges to build positive relationships between themselves, the academy and the Indigenous community. This is needed to collectively find solutions to environmental challenges. This perspective piece sets out to highlight the importance of boundary spanners, the characteristics they have and the challenges they face in the ‘in between’ place they occupy between the Western academy and Indigenous communities.

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Dairy settler colonialism: Lynley Tulloch, ‘The Price of Milk: Dairy Farming as Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Animal Studies Journal, 14, 1, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: This paper critically analyses the history and culture of dairy production in Aotearoa New Zealand through a historical-materialist approach. It is argued that the violence of settler colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand is pervasive and multifaceted. In historicizing the production and ideological maintenance of pastoralism and dairy farming in Aotearoa New Zealand, I argue that this has resulted in ongoing interspecies violence. A decolonial perspective is adopted, focusing on how pastoralism was the bedrock for animal agriculture and the alienation of Māori from their land and ways of being. The first part of this paper explores the development and growth of dairying in Aotearoa New Zealand, arguing that this was enabled in large part due to the confiscation of Māori land by the British colonial government. Following this, insights from postcolonial theory and critical animal studies are applied to examine the ongoing effects of capitalist colonisation and dairy expansion on the environment, the cows themselves, and Māori. Critical discourse analysis is then employed to explore dominant colonial ideologies of dairy farming that have persisted into the present day.

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The missions of settler colonialism: Joseph Vincent Payne, The Chumash War of 1824: Revolution and Counterrevolution in the California Missions Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and La Purísima, MA dissertation, California Polytechnic State University, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: In 1824, the Indigenous Chumash of Missions Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and La Purísima de Concepción went to war against the settler-colonial system that bonded them to the mission lands and forced labor regime demanded by the Spanish Franciscan missionaries and compelled by Mexican military force in Alta California. The conflict lasted months and included violent battles and skirmishes at all three missions, the militant occupation and reclamation of La Purísima, a mass exodus to the interior of the territory, and the subsequent counterrevolutionary collaboration of the Spanish missionaries and Mexican military to return many (but not all) of the Chumash to the missions. In this thesis, I argue that the actions of the Chumash throughout the conflict, available through multiple archival and oral history accounts, show a people engaged in a revolutionary war for autonomy against the settler-colonial mission system. The collective action of the Chumash in 1824 created a deep fissure in the California Mission system at a time of political tumult and radical redefinition during Alta California’s early Mexican period and helped feed the intertribal coalition of Indigenous resistance in the interior of the territory. The revolutionary Chumash contributed to the instability of the settler-colonial system and partly compelled the new Mexican government’s pragmatic decision to formally end the mission system through secularization less than ten years later. This thesis attempts to place the Chumash War of 1824 in this broader context of the Age of Revolutions, New Mission History, and the legacy of genocide of Indigenous Californians in the hopes of reexamining the California Missions in pedagogy and popular historical memory by illustrating the destructive role they played in the lives of Indigenous peoples, and the agency and autonomy that the Chumash asserted to remove themselves from the yolk of the settlercolonial California Mission system.

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Settler markers: Laura Pulido, Sophia Ford, Mason Leavitt, ‘Paving Over the Past: Oregon Historical Markers, White Innocence, and Manifest Destiny’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: In this article we examine how Oregon’s highway markers represent settler colonization and White supremacy. The data consist of 141 historical highway markers developed by the Oregon Travel Information Council (OTIC), a state-led tourism and transportation agency. We coded the data set based on the extent to which markers acknowledge White supremacy or settler colonization or represent multiculturalism. Although the markers employ multiple narratives, we found that the vast majority deny histories of White supremacy and colonization. We argue that one reason for this is because hegemonic cultural memory is invested in preserving White innocence, which is central to the legitimacy of the White nation. There are numerous ways that White innocence is produced, including centering Whiteness; obscuring Black, Indigenous, Mexican, and Asian American history; erasing settler violence; and celebrating and normalizing settler colonization. Within the data set, Manifest Destiny is the most fully articulated discourse of White innocence. Our findings illuminate how White supremacy and Manifest Destiny are foundational to Oregon and are expressed through state-sponsored White innocence to absolve racial violence and dispossession.

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Who is a settler? Samantha Lourdes Meza-Tejada, Social Work in the Settlement Sector and the Pursuit for Reconciliation: Reflections from Newcomer Latinos/as on Settler Colonialism and Reconciliation in Canada’, MA dissertation, University of Calgary, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: Formed on the practice of colonization, the creation of Canada is based on the immigration of French and English settler colonizers on stolen land. As time went on, immigration expanded to individuals of racialized backgrounds in search of starting a new life or seeking refuge in Canada. When we consider colonial legacies in immigration, and as we see modern-day immigration open to more non-European and racialized newcomers, how do we understand who is a settler or settler colonizer in the present time? This settler/non-settler debate carries particular importance when considering the Truth & Reconciliation (T&R) Calls to Action from the perspective of racialized newcomers to Canada, the settlement sector, and the social work profession’s interaction with racialized newcomers and immigrants. Using critical ethnography and exploring this topic through coloniality of power, postcolonial, and decolonial theories, this thesis shares details from a study completed with newcomer Latinos/as in Calgary, Alberta that explored their understanding and own positionality to settler colonialism, reconciliation, and being a racialized newcomer in Canada. Initial findings of this study present observations from Latin American cultural events, media, and reflections from individual interviews completed with Latino/a study participants as they explore their identity as newcomers in Canada and as individuals originating from a country and culture deeply rooted in colonization. This thesis concludes by offering recommendations on how these findings can be considered to promote a more relatable and intentional practice and engagement of reconciliation and achieving the T&R Calls to Action specifically for racialized newcomers, the settlement sector, and social work professionals who work with such populations.

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