settler colonial studies blog

Decolonising Palestine: Riccardo Bocco, Ibrahim Saïd (eds), De/Colonising/Palestine, Graduate Institute Publications, 2025

03Jul25

Abstract: This edited volume seeks to contribute to the broader project of decolonisation by bringing
together diverse perspectives for a critical examination of the Palestine Question. It aims to challenge dominant narratives, highlight the resilience and agency of Palestinians, and explore new pathways toward justice and liberation amid ongoing occupation and colonialism. The volume is structured into five sections, each providing a distinct lens on the question of Palestine. Topics covered include the question of refugees, the diaspora, the predicament of the Palestinian Authority, hydropolitics, and the settler colonial modes of Israeli control. Additionally, the book delves into Palestinian cultural resistance and the evolution of international coalitions, highlighting a shift in solidarity – from performative to transformative – towards decolonisation and liberation and the associated challenges.

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Corporate and settler dispossession: Matthew Scobie, Andre Poyser, Georgia Hampton, ‘Tangata Whenua, People Born of the Land: From Corporate Dispossession and Repossession to Severance and Reconnection’, Journal of Business Ethics, 2025

03Jul25

Abstract: This paper explores Indigenous resistance to corporate dispossession in both a historical and contemporary context. Using two case studies of corporate dispossession of Ngāi Tahu land and resources in Aotearoa New Zealand, we advance understanding of dispossession and resistance through Indigenous critique. Although over 170 years apart, these cases are linked together by a singular Indigenous experience and demonstrate the recursive (self-referential and self-reinforcing) logic of both dispossession and Indigenous resistance. We utilise the concepts of ‘severance’ as a more locally appropriate term for dispossession, and ‘reconnection’ as a more locally appropriate term for repossession. These concepts also have broader use for exploring the relationship between capitalism and its outside. Indigenous critique offers valuable insights beyond particular Indigenous contexts, and Indigenous struggles provide an alternative power base to defend shared rights and reconnect these shared rights with shared responsibilities. Indigenous critique thus offers a glimpse of possible futures.

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The writing on the settler wall: Hadil Haroun Louz, ‘”We protest on walls”: Palestinian political agency in Berlin’s struggle against German state repression’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2025

02Jul25

Abstract: Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines Palestinian political graffiti in Berlin as a visible form of resistance against state repression. It conceptualises this repression as a transnational extension of settler-colonial mechanisms – understood as settler coloniality, following AnnaEsther Younes – and deeply entangled with Germany’s antiPalestinian racism and institutionalised memory politics. This framework legitimises surveillance, censorship, racialized policing, and the deployment of high-tech state power against Palestinian activists. Amid this repressive landscape, political graffiti functions as a counter-public, confronting dominant narratives, resisting structural silencing, and reimagining Berlin’s urban surfaces as spaces of response. These visual interventions are not merely symbolic; they provoke ideological opponents, nurture political consciousness, and resist historical erasure. Much of this graffiti is created by recently arrived Palestinian refugees, particularly those affiliated with Samidoun, the now-banned Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. The suppression of political graffiti and the framing of Palestinian activism as ‘new antisemitism’ serve to uphold a colonial hierarchy that systematically delegitimizes Palestinian resistance. While acknowledging the limitations of graffiti as a tool for political change – its vulnerability to erasure, alteration, and smudging – this paper emphasises its role in asserting agency, sustaining transnational anti-colonial solidarity, and exposing the contours of anti-Palestinian racism in Germany.

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Sámi’s predicament: Panu Puhakka, Everyone is for Sámi, yet no one agrees, MA dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2025

02Jul25

Abstract: This thesis asks what kinds of themes and ignorances arise in the Finnish Parliament, when Members of the Finnish Parliament (MPs) legislate on Sámi, and what kind of implications Parliamentary discussions have, regarding Finnish policy toward Sámi, and the relations between the Finnish state and Sámi. Sámi, the only recognized Indigenous people in the European Union live across Northern Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the Kola Peninsula, in their traditional homeland Sápmi, and have been, throughout the history, the subjects of various assimilationist and colonial policies and efforts. To examine the situation, this thesis draws from settler colonial theory as well as theories of knowledge and ignorance. Publicly available parliamentary data two Records of Parliamentary Plenary sessions, PTK 127/2022 and PTK 128/2022, and six written questions, publicly available through the website of the Finnish Parliament, are examined through thematic analysis, as this was deemed the most effective way to examine the contributions Finnish MPs have made between 2014 and 2022, considering that ignorance has not been studied in this context in Finland. The analysis finds six themes regarding ignorances and their implications for the Sámi and the Finnish society as a whole. This thesis finds that both ignorances and colonialisms in the contributions made by MPs are rooted in the view that Indigenous rights are a zero-sum game. Furthermore, the MPs in question have an implicit worry regarding the land use in Sápmi with the emergence of Sámi rights. Finally, the implications of the findings to Sámi, wider society, and further research are discussed.

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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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