settler colonial studies blog

The settler colonial dilemma: Maya Zebdawi, ‘Zionism in Disarray: An Interrupted Continuum’, Kohl, 10 No. 1, 2024

15Jul25

Excerpt: The struggle to erase settler consciousness within a settler colonial project is also the struggle to build a nationalist imagination that is hyphenated: anchored in national identity while simultaneously dependent on transnational infrastructures of power. Both the Israeli citizen and the settler live a double existence, as national subjects loyal to the state, and as cosmopolitan actors embedded in global systems. This hyphenation is not incidental; it is essential for the survival of the settler colony against the ongoing militant resistance of the indigenous population. For Israel, this tension points toward two possible futures: either the eradication of the unifying antagonist (the Palestinian), or the dismantling of the settler condition itself through the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. This is why belonging to the state of Israel is marked by a fundamental contradiction: the demand for rooted national belonging collides with the necessity of sustaining a transnational identity. It is within this contradiction that post-Zionism emerges, grappling with the unresolved question of how to mend the split between national loyalty and global dependence. Post-Zionism does not offer a singular solution to this crisis; instead, it is fragmented into multiple strategies, each attempting to negotiate the contradiction in different ways. Some versions lean toward neoliberal globalization, seeking to dissolve national tensions into market cosmopolitanism. Others turn inward, reimagining Jewish identity through cultural critique or diasporic pluralism, loosening the settler state’s exclusive territorial claims. Yet, each of these strategies remains haunted by the same structural dilemma: how to sustain a national project whose infrastructural and material survival depends precisely on transcending its own nationalist foundations. The settler identity has to be resolved to emancipate the settler colony from its structural nature into the modern nation state. The family is where the imaginary (keeping Anderson’s imagined communities in mind) travels, and the “woman” serves to homogenize the settler society in front of the so-called “hand of terror.” To echo Jie-Hyun Lim’s “victimhood nationalism” (2014), gender is added to the matrix of epistemic consciousness. The modus operandi of victimhood nationalism in Israel shows a linguistic and historical (narrative) consumption of victimhood on a gendered basis. Once the victims are gendered, they become a call for collective union in order to reimagine militarist functionality. The woman victim is the epistemological binary of collective guilt and innocence; she is where Zionism resuscitates victimhood as a historical culture of self-confrontation. She is the family where collective guilt and innocence become a homogeneous entity for the modern post-settler to seep through. Ultimately, the complexity of victimhood nationalism is in direct confrontation with liberation movements, its colonized subject, and the “post-colonial” nation-states surrounding it.

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With a chapter on settler colonial ecopractices: Adam Barker, Jenny Pickerill, ‘Settling in colonial ways? Eco-communities’ uncomfortable settler colonial practices’, in Jenny Pickerill (ed), Eco-communities: Surviving Well Together, Bloomsbury, 2025

15Jul25

Access the chapter here.

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Settlers imprison words: Sione Lynn Pili Lister, ‘”We Don’t Want to Use the White Man’s Terminology”: Pacific Islander Identity Formation and Enduring Indigeneity within Settler Colonialism’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2025

13Jul25

Abstract: Drawing from 40 in-depth interviews with self-identified Pacific Islanders, I examine how Pacific Islanders develop their pan-ethno-racial identity alongside their Indigeneity within the U.S. racial hierarchy. I find that settler colonialism plays an active role in individuals’ identity formation—both as a historic event and as a contemporary structure—in three critical ways. First, respondents engage with colonialism as they negotiate ethnoracial labels for themselves. Second, respondents use colonial histories to assist them as they navigate potential panethnic boundaries. Third, respondents center their Indigeneity despite colonial efforts to separate them from their Indigenous homelands and culture through the imposition of a pan-ethnic-racial label, while practicing a trans-Indigenous politic. Throughout, Pacific Islanders reveal how tightly bound their ethnoracial identities are to their Indigeneity, expanding the sociological study of race and ethnicity by turning the race-settler colonialism lens to the Pacific Islander diaspora.

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Settlers imprison children: Lama Alsafi, ‘Settler colonialism and Israel: the incarceration of Palestinian children as a central feature of Israel’s settler colonial project’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

13Jul25

Abstract: This paper investigates the ways in which settler colonialism, and particularly Zionist settler colonialism, explains Israel’s hyperincarceration and hyperpolicing of Palestinian children and the structural abuse these children are subjected to while detained. It argues that it is critical to contextualise Israel’s hyperincarceration of Palestinian children, including the abuse, torture, rape, displacement, and dispossession that accompany it, within the context of settler colonialism and Israel’s settler colonial project. This is because the ultimate goal of Zionist settler colonialism, as with any settler colonial project, is the total extermination, elimination, and replacement of the Indigenous population in order to secure complete and unfettered control of the land and access to and use of its resources, with the mass incarceration of Palestinian children being a key method utilised by Israel to achieve these aims.

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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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