settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism in Kashmir: Waleed Rasool, ‘Settler Colonialism in Kashmir and the North East: India’s Inter- and Intra-State Strategies andImplications for SAARC’, Policy Perspectives, 23, 1, 2026

20Apr26

Abstract: This qualitative study relies on a theory-driven analysis of legal and institutional sources to evaluate the application of post-colonial theory to the Kashmir issue by India, comparing the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir with India’s North-Eastern states at the intra-state level and India’s brinkmanship with South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations at the inter-state level. The paper identifies a recurring pattern of territorial hegemony in which limited political accommodation is initially granted, followed by legal and institutional restructuring that converts occupation into annexation and brings settler-colonization into play. The Indian unilateral moves of 2019 in Jammu and Kashmir is shown as set pattern and replication of strategies previously employed in India’s North-Eastern and peripheral regions. The paper makes three key contributions. First, it advances post-colonial theory by demonstrating how India, once a colonized state, itself functions as a colonizing power. Second, it provides a fact-based legal assessment of potential actions by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General under Article 99, highlighting gaps between international norms and United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Third, through a comparative approach, it evaluates Indian brinkmanship and draws strategic lessons for smaller SAARC states in future where India eyes to expand. The paper establishes that Kashmir has entered a most crucial phase of settler colonialism, placing the Kashmiri people at demographic extinction.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The Fair Play (settler) Republic: Christopher R. Pearl, Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution, University of Virginia Press, 2024

20Apr26

Description: How Indigenous Americans and colonial settlers negotiated the meaning of independence in the Revolutionary era. On July 4, 1776, two hundred miles northwest of Philadelphia, on Indigenous land along the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, a group of colonial squatters declared their independence. They were not alone in their efforts. This bold symbolic gesture was just a small part of a much broader and longer struggle in the Northern Susquehanna River Valley, where diverse peoples, especially Indigenous nations, fought tenaciously to safeguard their lands, sovereignty, and survival. This book immerses readers in that intense, decades-long struggle. By intertwining the experiences of Indigenous Americans, rebellious colonial squatters, opportunistic land speculators, and imperial government agents, Christopher Pearl reveals how conflicts within and between them all set the terms and ultimately shaped the meaning of the American Revolution. In the crucible of this conflict, memories, histories, and animosities collided and converged with tremendous consequences. Declarations of Independence delves into the racial violence over land and sovereignty that suffused the Revolutionary Age and helps restore Indigenous peoples to their central position at the founding of the United States.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonialism in space will be expensive: Steven Griggs, ‘How to Pay for Settling Space’, Space Enabling Paper Series, 2025

19Apr26

Abstract: Human space-faring societies have been the subject of science fiction and the imagination of countless people desiring a different way of life. Various concepts of what life would be like in space, whether on a spacecraft, space station, or other planets or moons, vary with the imagination of those seeking various idealistic or altruistic reasons. Lifestyles, environmental, and survival technologies have been the subject of engineers, scientists, and human behavior specialists for decades. Payload and volume constraints have limited the practical capability of humans in a space-faring society. Advances in private/public space launch by SpaceX and Blue Origin have advanced space flight with affordability as the key driver. SpaceX is pushing heavy-lift reusable rockets to impressive rocket payloads in mass and available volume. Although cost has been reduced over previous rocketbased solutions, the total cost of creating a space settlement is in the trillions of dollars. How will Earth-based human space settlers pay for the opportunity to settle in space? This paper will explore an integrated space economy concept that will provide how thousands of humans can compensate for Earth-based investment in developing a human space settlement society. Trillions of dollars will be required, but trillions are available to return to Earth-based investors or repay government entities.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler indifference: Emily Grafton, ‘The Reproduction of Settler Colonial Logics as Reinforcement of Settler Indifference in Canada’, International Journal of Conflict & Reconciliation, 6, 1, 2026, pp. 23-40

19Apr26

Abstract: This article presents a meta-narrative examining the Canadian settler public’s indifference toward Indian Residential Schools and associated genocide denial. To produce this meta-narrative, its research methodology of re-framing draws on critical anti-colonial and decolonial scholarship. The findings demonstrate a clear connection between the logic of settler colonialism and Canadians’ indifference to the nation’s history with Indian Residential Schools. This indifference is reinforced by long-standing settler colonial narratives. This article contributes original insights to the field of settler colonial scholarship by integrating existing research on settler colonial narratives and critiques of reconciliation to develop a new framework—a meta-narrative—for understanding settler indifference and its impact on Canadian society. The social implications of this framework include a deeper understanding of the insidious and destructive nature of settler colonial logic within reconciliation practices, which often perpetuate settler indifference. The evidence suggests that reconciliation efforts can reproduce settler colonial logics through dominant narratives, resulting in superficial or inauthentic understandings of reconciliation. In conclusion, reconciliation processes ought to be built through new and transformational relationships instead of relying on and reifying past settler colonial logics.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Post-settler agriculture? Peter Andrée, John Reid, ‘Transitioning to agricultural sustainability in the context of settler-colonialism: insights from the intersection of indigenous and Western knowledge systems’, Agriculture and Human Values, 2026

19Apr26

Abstract: In settler-colonial states that seek to recognize Indigenous rights, such as Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ), the transition to agricultural sustainability must draw upon the insights of both Indigenous knowledge, in this case mātauranga Māori, and Western knowledge systems. This was the premise behind the ‘Sustainability Transition Challenge Wānanga’ that took place in 2023 under the leadership of the Indigenous people of Ōtautahi (Christchurch), Ngāi Tūāhuriri. Grounded in wānanga as an Indigenous knowledge sharing methodology, this discussion paper explores five themes pertinent to the emerging sustainable agriculture transition in ANZ: 1) the importance of embracing te ao Māori (Māori worldview) in knowledge production related to sustainability; 2) the role of Indigenous leadership in sustainable agriculture; 3) the place of traditional/customary food practices and environmental management approaches within sustainable agri-food transitions; 4) the centrality of renewing mana whakahaere (governance); and 5) the importance of celebrating and sharing successes. Our discussion of these themes suggests future research on agri-food transitions in settler-colonial contexts pay greater attention to the key role of Indigenous property rights, co-governance models that acknowledge these rights, and the potential for catchment-level initiatives for operationalizing these approaches. We call on sustainability transition researchers to bring to the fore more stories of successful Indigenous-led transition experiments in settler-colonial contexts to mitigate political tensions that arise at the community level, allow lessons to be learned from, and inspire further change informed by both Indigenous and Western knowledge systems.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

A settler colony is a settler colony: Eiichiro Azuma, Settling the California Delta: Rural Japanese America Under Racial Segregation, Stanford University Press, 2027

19Apr26

Description: Before wartime removal and incarceration, most West Coast Japanese Americans, including immigrant Issei and US-born Nisei generations, resided in rural agricultural areas. Existing histories of Japanese America have often overlooked this farming aspect of their experience, focusing instead on urban narratives. Centered on the town of Walnut Grove, the “downriver” (kawashimo) settlement was home to Issei farmers, merchants, and laborers who lived alongside their Nisei children in a society characterized by strict racial segregation and landlessness. In the delta basin, a small group of white landowning settlers and corporate interests held power and wealth, shaping social relations and economic opportunities for mostly Asian immigrant settlers and fieldhands. Combining theories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and immigrant transnationalism with the techniques of microhistory, Eiichiro Azuma reveals the intricate dynamics of paternalistic interdependency between white landlords and Japanese tenants, as well as the complex interethnic relations among marginalized immigrant groups in the local segregated society and agricultural economy. Through his careful analysis of heretofore overlooked immigrant vernacular sources and oral histories, Azuma sheds important light on a lesser-known aspect of rural Asian American history through the lens of multiracial entanglements on the ground.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Potential settlement: Hatib A Kadir, ‘Multispecies colonialism: The politics of potential in the making of settler ecologies’, History and Anthropology, 2026

19Apr26

Abstract: ‘Finding potentialities’ has become a central obsession in colonial and state-driven efforts to identify latent value in land and life forms. It functions as a primary mechanism through which multispecies colonialism operates in Papua’s wetlands. Drawing on Dutch colonial reports and the early work of Indonesian agrarian reform scholar Gunawan Wiradi, this analysis traces how an ideology rooted in technocratic and racialized logics has reshaped Papuan landscapes over time. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, ‘finding potentiality’ has a clear historical genealogy in the Dutch colonial project of converting wetlands into sites of large-scale agricultural production. Wetlands were framed as idle, invisible, and unproductive – a view later adopted by the Indonesian state after 1963, enabling interventions such as transmigration. Second, this logic operates as a form of multispecies colonialism. Settler colonialism projects under the Indonesian government in Papua extend beyond the control of human populations to include the deliberate introduction and management of non-native plants and animals. Third, a fundamental tension emerges between the future-oriented, extractive vision of potentiality and the present-oriented realities of Indigenous Papuans. For colonial and state actors, potential is tied to projected economic value and is used to justify the transformation of existing ecologies in the name of future gains. This perspective reduces the biodiverse regions to a measurable and exploitable resource, often framed as a ‘pool of genes’, while not only disregarding subsistence practices but also produce land dispossession and disrupt Papuan relationships to their ecological time and place.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler imaginaries today: Rafael Verbuyst, Lorenzo Veracini, ‘South Africa, Gaza, Greenland: Trump 2.0 and the global settler colonial imaginary’, Globalizations, 2026

17Apr26

Abstract: We analyse statements by US President Trump issued since returning to the White House in early 2025 and focus on pronouncements concerning three particular sites: South Africa, Gaza and Greenland. A coordinated array of specifically settler colonial imaginings emerges: South Africa is a site of past settler struggle–a spectre, it must be punished and turned into a warning; Gaza is a site of contemporary settler struggle–it must be erased and emptied of its inhabitants; Greenland is imagined as a site of future settler colonial endeavour–it must be subdued and pre-emptively owned. We observe the articulation of a fully-fledged global settler colonial imaginary with populist characteristics, and a general move away from apologetic settler colonialism and towards a form of aggressive or unapologetic settler colonialism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Ontological sovereignty against settler violences: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Abeer Otman, ‘Enacting Lived Sovereignty Amid Epistemic and Ontological Violence in the Settler-Colonial Academy’, Sociological Forum, 2026

16Apr26

Abstract: This paper examines the tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and the structural and institutional logics of the settler colonial academy. Critical scholarship suggests that higher education can regulate epistemic boundaries, discipline knowledge production, and shape the subjectivities of colonized students. In this context, the paper explores how colonized students enact individual and collective forms of sovereignty. Drawing on Fanon’s reflections on the existential dimensions of colonial domination and Biko’s contributions to Black Consciousness, the paper analyzes the formation of psycho-political, ethical, and ontological subjectivities among Palestinian-Jerusalemite students studying within Israeli academia while living amid conditions of heightened political violence. It suggests that students articulate forms of consciousness, futurity, and affective belonging as resources of resistance. Rather than treating sovereignty solely as a legal or political status, the paper conceptualizes it as an ontological orientation grounded in consciousness, relational being, lived experience, and collective memory. The analysis contributes to ongoing debates in decolonial and Indigenous studies by suggesting that sovereignty can be understood not only as a claim to recognition but as a situated, relational, and lived practice that interrupts institutional and state frameworks.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonial studies revisited: Jay Lalonde, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Colonialism’, in Maddalena Marinari (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Migration Studies, OUP, 2026

15Apr26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a theory, policy, and practice in which settlers create new political orders on lands dispossessed from Indigenous peoples. Typically, an empire seeks to remove Indigenous inhabitants and replace them with settlers from the metropole in order to generate revenues from land sales, bolster sovereignty claims through occupation of territory, and, eventually, provide staples to help feed the metropole. In order to gain the land necessary for settler colonial projects, settlers need to remove Indigenous peoples: either through genocide, by restricting or removing Indigenous sovereignty and land base, or by conceptual erasure and forcible assimilation into the settler citizenry. While colonial settlement has existed since at least the beginnings of European colonization in the 15th century—and potentially much earlier—it has defined especially the 19th and early 20th centuries. British settler colonies (especially Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) have all enforced similar policies of settler colonial dispossession. After providing a summary of the emergence of settler colonial studies as a discipline and definitions of settler colonialism, this article focuses mainly on settler colonial policy in Canada and British settler colonies generally. It shows that colonial settlement created a settler society based on the redistribution of land dispossessed from Indigenous nations to settlers perceived as desirable, and shaped immigration policy to recruit large numbers of settlers from Europe, ideally able-bodied farmers. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between colonial settlement and migration. Topics include dispossession and displacement; doctrines of discovery and occupation; imperial competition over colonies; the Homestead Act and the Dominion Lands Act; terra nullius; whiteness and desirability; and the emergence of “white settler colonies,” “neo-Europes,” and the “Angloworld” in the 19th century.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute