settler colonial studies blog

Accounting for settler colonialism: Ella Henry, Andre Poyser, Bettina Schneider, ‘Accountability frameworks for Indigenous financial institutions in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand’, The Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development, 15, 1, 2025, pp. 49-71

30Jun25

Abstract: Indigenous peoples around the world share a history of colonization and poverty, including the loss of land, language, and the cultural foundations of their societies and communities. An increasing number of Indigenous peoples are actively rebuilding and revitalizing their cultures through economic endeavour. This paper presents case studies from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, highlighting applicable models of collaborative co-governance employed by Indigenous finance entities, as well as the accountability frameworks that have emerged from this renaissance. We found evidence of commonalities based on the cultural values and traditional knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples in their respective countries. The literature informs our analyses, as it originates from our organizations and communities of interest. We discovered that, despite the social, cultural, and economic differences, the exciting and innovative strategies developed by Indigenous peoples in all three countries are not only similar and relevant to one another but also applicable to non-Indigenous financial and investment institutions and their accountability frameworks. The integration of Indigenous philosophies and values into the governance of Indigenous financial and investment entities has fostered a multi-dimensional approach that considers both Western and Indigenous practices. The necessity of meeting both Indigenous and nonIndigenous accountability requirements creates an interlocking circle of values and codes of conduct, providing Indigenous financial and investment entities with a double layer of protection.

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Anxiety must be assuaged: Bryan Smith, ‘Colonial anxiety and the virtuous work of the Humanities and Social Sciences’, Critical Studies in Education, 2025

30Jun25

Abstract: Curriculum, as a policy of the settler-state, is essential in carefully safeguarding learners and educators from encounters with the colonial project’s inherent violence. In Australia, the effort to create an acceptable engagement with the past via curriculum is particularly important given the need to reproduce liberal views and discourses of inclusion that define the politics of the contemporary settler state. At its core, curriculum thus works to placate colonial anxiety and furnish learners with ideas about the nation-state that are intrinsically geared toward colonial legitimacy and preservation. In this article, I take up this condition, highlighting how the Australian Curriculum represents the context of Australia in such a way that minimises any potentially productive anxious encounters with the violence of colonisation. Drawing on Lisa Slater’s idea of virtuous anxiety, I analyse and explore how the Australian Curriculum’s humanities and social sciences learning area represents the place and history of Australia as one that is fraught with violence all the while learners and educators are afforded space to learn about colonisation from a safe emotional and political distance.

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Extractive settler colonialism: Rebecca Jane Hall, ‘Unsettling extraction through community relations to land’, in Shireen Hassim, Anna C. Korteweg (eds), Handbook on Politics and Society, Elgar Online, 2025, pp. 68-84

29Jun25

Abstract: Resource extraction is tightly woven through past and present processes of colonial and imperial dispossession, characterized by exploitation and violence. Contemporary extraction is simultaneously shaped by community relations to land and community resistance to and reshaping of extractive regimes. This chapter traces both the continuities of extractive violence and the ways in which contemporary extraction is being reconfigured by community resistance and relations to land. The chapter begins by locating extraction in colonial processes of dispossession. I then turn to the specificities of settler colonial dispossession in Northern Canada. In this context, I consider what it means to live and work at once within and beyond extraction. I look to the multiple ways in which northern Indigenous communities have responded to, resisted, and reshaped contemporary extractive operations and the transformative possibilities that are revealed in their relations to land that transcend extractivism.

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Captive settler colonialism: Z. Baroud, The Colonial Origins of Israel’s Carceral Regime: Examining Colonial and Settler Colonial Applications of Carcerality in Palestine, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2025

29Jun25

Abstract: The establishment of the state of Israel and its subsequent occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip brought a long history of British colonial policy and practice in Palestine back to life. This resurrection, achieved through policy transfer, primarily involved carceral policy pertaining to police roles, the administration of prisons, the application of detention, traditions of torture, along with other punitive administrative measures, such as curfews and deportation. However, the (limited) scholarship frames this transfer merely as a continuation, with the result that it is predisposed to overlook the distinctions between the carceral practices of colonial and settler regimes. In addition, this neglects the role of Zionism within the Mandate framework, with the result that it is instead presented inversely, namely as the impact of colonialism on Israel and its policy in the oPt. This thesis, in examining the nuances of Mandate policies in Palestine and Israel’s adoption of colonial carceral policy and practice, analyses the eliminatory nature of carcerality within a Zionist settler programme in Palestine that spans over 140 years. It contends that, rather than existing as strictly separate categories, coloniality and settler coloniality were, in the British–Israeli case, also shaped by the Mandate’s commitments to Zionism, resulting in a more nuanced and complex mission in Palestine. While British carceral policy was indeed adopted by Israel and its occupation regime, this thesis proposes to instead focus on the intensification of these practices under a fully realised settler project which had nearly an additional five decades to develop. Further, building on Kelly Lytle Hernández’s work in the US, this thesis argues that carcerality functioned not only to suppress resistance but also as a mechanism of native elimination in Palestine, with this becoming especially evident during periods of popular uprising, such as the Great Revolt (1936–1939) and the First Intifada (1987-1993). Though distinctly situated, both uprisings were fundamentally struggles against Zionist erasure in its varying forms. A significant portion of this thesis therefore focuses on these two pivotal periods, which precipitated escalations in carceral violence and the expansion of carceral infrastructure. While this thesis acknowledges a slight shift in trajectory in British carceral policy following the rise of anti-Mandate Zionist militancy, (however still not at all comparable to the carceral subjugation inflicted upon Palestinians), it primarly focuses on the era when Mandate and Zionist coordination was intact and flourishing. This thesis advances our understanding of the expanse of carceral violence in its settler colonial application, and its utility as a tool for native elimination in Palestine, while also illuminating how carcerality has facilitated the advancement of both colonial and settler colonial programmes in Palestine. Crucially, it highlights overlooked nuances between these classifications in the Palestinian context. By engaging with the growing (yet still limited) scholarship on this subject in other colonial contexts – particularly the United States – it seeks to challenge and expand the discourse around this subject. Although this thesis centres its attention on the Mandate period (1920-–1948) and the early years of the Israeli occupation, its findings provide a framework for understanding contemporary Israeli carceral regime across occupied Palestine, particularly in light of the current, and ongoing, genocide in Gaza, much of which has taken place within settler spaces of captivity.

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Lost Finnish settlements in the north: Janne Lahti, ‘”To the Homeland”: Settler Monument, Memory and the Finnish Colony of Petsamo on the Finnish–Russian Borderlands’, Journal of Modern European History, 2025

27Jun25

Abstract: This article examines a set of entanglements between settler memory and a monument in a nation that does not acknowledge that it ever had a colonial history. It looks at the efforts of exiled Finnish settlers to keep alive the memory of Petsamo as ‘their homeland’ through a monument they set up in Ivalo, Northern Finland, in 1985. Before being forced out of Petsamo, a province on the Arctic Ocean, by the Soviet Union in 1944, Finnish settlers tried to reshape Petsamo from a multi-ethnic borderland into a Finnish homeland for over two decades. Their settler memory is inscribed on and funnelled through this Ivalo monument, via claims of belonging and connection to a lost homeland. The monument set up by the settlers is meant to speak to their specific stories, their version of the past and of themselves. It serves settler purposes, declaring settler belonging to the broader public, to the nation and even to the world. It maintains and channels settler memory to future generations and remains uncontested and largely ignored in today’s Finland.

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Lost German settlements in the forest: Piotr Kołpak, Marta Raczyńska-Kruk, Wojciech Solarz Marcin, Weronika Wnuk-Ciastek, ‘Forest Germans: a forgotten ethnic group in the contemporary landscape of the Polish Carpathians’, Miscellanea Geographica, 29, 3, 2025, pp. 140-149

27Jun25

Abstract: In the 1340s, the Kingdom of Poland expanded eastwards, prompting large-scale settlement in the Wisłoka and Wisłok river basins, formerly a borderland between Poland and Ruthenia. This initiative integrated German and Polish settlers, who became known as the “Forest Germans” (Polish: Głuchoniemcy). Led by King Casimir the Great and Lesser Poland magnates, Germans settled around Biecz, Krosno, and Łańcut, introducing advanced flax processing and contributing to the region’s development. Villages established under German law gained self-government, and village courts were formed. By the late 15th century, some German villages became Polonized, although German was still spoken in certain areas until the late 16th century. The 1624 Tartar invasion devastated the region, accelerating its Polonization. By the 20th century, the term “Forest German” had largely disappeared, and research into this community’s history and settlement patterns remains limited.

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Lost Norse settlements in America: Gordon Campbell, Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth, Oxford University Press, 2021

27Jun25

Description: The story of the Vikings in North America as both fact and fiction, from the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries to the myths and fabrications about their presence there that have developed in recent centuries. Tracking the saga of the Norse across the North Atlantic to America, Norse America sets the record straight about the idea that the Vikings ‘discovered’ America. The journey described is a continuum, with evidence-based history and archaeology at one end, and fake history and outright fraud at the other. In between there lies a huge expanse of uncertainty: sagas that may contain shards of truth, characters that may be partly historical, real archaeology that may be interpreted through the fictions of saga, and fragmentary evidence open to responsible and irresponsible interpretation. Norse America is a book that tells two stories. The first is the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries, settling in Greenland and establishing a shore station at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland (to which a chapter of the book is devoted) and ending (but not culminating) in a fleeting and ill-documented presence on the shores of the North American mainland. The second is the appropriation and enhancement of the westward narrative by Canadians and Americans who want America to have had white North European origins, who therefore want the Vikings to have ‘discovered’ America, and who in the advancement of that thesis have been willing to twist and manufacture evidence in support of claims grounded in an ideology of racial superiority.

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Lost Estonian settlements in the Caucasus: Aivar Jürgenson, ‘The National Epic as a Source of Place Names: The Toponymy of Estonian Settlements on the Black Sea Coast of the Caucasus’, Philological Researches, 2025

27Jun25

Abstract: The article examines changes in place names in areas along the Black Sea coast of the
Caucasus where Estonian settlers were relocated in the 1880s. Following the conquest of the Black Sea
coast, Tsarist authorities sought to assert their power by introducing new place names, thereby
inscribing their ideology onto the foreign territory. The names assigned by the authorities typically
reflected the names of “heroes” of the Caucasian War, high-ranking representatives of the Russian
administration, or members of the Tsar’s family. However, the authorities also allowed settlers
significant freedom in naming their new settlements. Although the settlers’ chosen names did not reflect
the colonial ideology of the Russian Empire, the names were influenced by the prevailing ideology in
the settlers’ homeland. For Estonians, this was national romanticism, which drew inspiration in part
from Estonian mythology. The article explores which mythological figures were used in the names of
Estonian settlements in the Caucasus and the purposes behind such naming. It also investigates the
motivations behind the creation of local microtoponyms.

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Parallel settlements: A. Moaswes, Interconnections Across Palestine and Kashmir: The Politics and Economy of Indian-Israeli Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2025

27Jun25

Abstract: The strengthening of political and economic ties between Israel and India in recent decades has prompted the emergence of a body of academic and activist literature that has placed Israel’s violence against Palestinians and India’s against Kashmiris in a comparative and analogical frames. Taking the relationship beyond that of analogy and comparison, this study seeks to explore the dynamics behind how the development of interconnections between Israeli and Indian settler colonialism in Palestine and Kashmir play into their mutual reinforcement. Viewing these interconnections as existing beyond the scope of Indian-Israeli diplomatic ties, but rather as parts of wider networks of relationships that weave settler colonial processes into the fabric of global political and economic flows, this project therefore prompts the question of what these interconnections reveal about world capitalism in the current century. In addition to examining the global role of interconnections between two of the longest running cases of colonialism instigated during the supposed era of global decolonisation, this study’s specific focus on Israeli settler colonialism’s relationship with that of India spotlights a key blind spot of much postcolonial literature, which fails to address the phenomenon of postcolonial states enacting forms of colonialism and its role in contemporary worldmaking. By examining the relationship between the cases of settler colonialism at the centre of this study in a way that contextualises their existence within the common terrain of global neoliberal capitalism, this study reveals how cross-colonisation entrenches settler colonial processes deeply into said terrain. To do this, I first establish how both India and Israel discretely entrench their respective settler colonisations of Palestine and Kashmir into the flows of world capitalism. I then outline the dynamics that draw the two cases into contact with one another. I use this as a base to analyse the political economy of Indian-Israeli cross colonial interconnections in Kashmir and Palestine – an economic relationship that is reinforced by the economic interests of other global and regional powers in the continued colonisation of Palestine and Kashmir. After this, I analyse the role of universalist vocabularies and narrative assemblages in embedding the economic cross-colonial linkages into global political flows, focusing on those of the nation-state system, the global War on Terror, and capitalist rationalism.

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Bombing out: David Lloyd, ‘Israel’s Settler-Colonial Bomb: For Refaat Alareer Available to Purchase’, Social Text, 43, 2, 2025, pp. 1-16

26Jun25

Abstract: Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza has entailed the massive destruction of universities and schools, religious and cultural centers, and other sites critical to the survival and reproduction of Palestinian cultural life. At the same time, the death toll of Palestinian writers and artists, teachers and doctors, journalists and researchers has been exceptionally high. Such a level of destruction and killing continues to be excused by Israel and its supporters as the unfortunate collateral damage of a war against a terrorist organization that conceals itself within civilian spaces. This essay, on the contrary, argues that in light of the longer history of colonialism with which Israel’s settler‐colonial enterprise is continuous, the assault on cultural life should be seen as a systematic element of its overall project, the elimination of the Palestinians as a people. What the Kenyan anticolonial intellectual Ngugi Wa Thiong’o once described as colonialism’s “cultural bomb” aims, alongside more material weaponry, to break the will to resistance of the colonized. It intends the psychological destruction of the population and the eradication not only of armed resistance but also of those whose intellectual, artistic, or literary work contributes to the maintenance of the sense of cultural continuity and futurity on which both armed and unarmed resistance draws. The instance of Refaat Alareer, a scholar, teacher, and poet murdered by Israel in December 2023, is emblematic of the long history of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian cultural figures but also of the persistence and dissemination of their work that defies destruction.

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