settler colonial studies blog

The housing of settlers: Jessica Parish, Dawn Hoogeveen, ‘Gold is not a metaphor*: locating financialisation and housing injustice in settler colonial property regimes in Canada’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2025

14Jun25

Abstract: Settler colonial urbanisms and financialisation are two well cultivated areas of thought; however, both have been underutilised to explain the state of housing precarity in contemporary Canada. To address this gap this paper reframes financialisation and assetization through the lens of the settler colonial city and its racialised labour and property regimes. Through analysis of current literature and data on specific practices and outcomes of financialisation and assetization in major Canadian cities, we show how extractive techniques reproduce colonial, gendered, and racialised inequalities and precarities in the housing system. Our intervention demonstrates how settler colonial urbanism and processes of financialisation extend and transform longstanding colonial processes in relation to property, unhoming, and land. We draw on research into homelessness, rental, and owner-occupied housing to expose extraction and precarity as broad structural features of the settler colonial housing system. Ultimately, we argue that financialisation on its own does not explain the multifaceted nature of contemporary housing crisis in Canada. The extractive nature of housing financialisation is situated within an analysis of the specifically settler colonial nature of property and labour in Canadian urbanism.

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A faithful move against settler colonialism: Emile Badarin, ‘Decolonising faith: Palestinian Liberation Theology in the context of settler-colonialism’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

14Jun25

Abstract: This article explores the decolonial potential of the Palestinian Liberation Theology (PLT). It does so by examining the PLT’s attempt at establishing a decolonial Indigenous theology in pursuit of inclusive justice and liberation for both the colonised and the coloniser. While PLT offers a compelling spiritual resistance and contextual hermeneutics contesting Western and Zionist colonial theology, it suffers from inconsistencies. Specifically, the article argues that PLT’s reliance on the occupation paradigm and progress narrative has led to an incoherent assessment of Israeli violence within the broader settler-colonial context. These assumptions have limited PLT’s vision, aligning it with the dominant colonial discourse and solutions, such as the partition of Palestine in favour of settlers. As a result, PLT’s conclusions appear disconnected from its otherwise compelling theological framework. However, a recent shift in PLT’s discourse and literature that engages theological analysis with the paradigm of settler-colonial marks a crucial development, offering new space for a more critical decolonial theology and practice in Palestine and beyond.

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The whole story: Roger Nichols, Surviving Invasion: American Indians and Settler Colonialism, Ethics International Press, 2025

14Jun25

Description: This book focuses primarily on American Indians’ experiences with the invading Anglo-Americans from the 19th century to the present. It looks briefly at Canadian experiences for comparison. The author’s collected essays examine the impacts of treaties and policies related to native sovereignty, property, culture, and religion; and review modern protests to protect tribal sacred sites and long-held treaty rights, showing how indigenous societies have successfully resisted repeated governmental policies seeking to erase their cultures and force them into the general society. Essentially, these readings chronical Indians’ survival as they overcame the policies of settler colonialism which sought to destroy their societies. The book supports the many university and college courses in American Indian Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Ethnic Studies.

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Really, Tim? Tim Duncan, ‘An unsettling Marxist ideology’, Institute of Public Affairs Review, 77, 1 2025, pp. 54-61

13Jun25

Abstract: ‘Settler colonial theory is yet another bizarre ploy by Marxists to unfairly discredit and destabilise Western democracies‘.

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The right to the settler colonial: Thiruni Kelegama, ‘The politics of rural access and settler colonialism: Weli Oya and the tensions of a right to the rural’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2025

13Jun25

Abstract: This commentary extends Van Sant and Fairbairn’s right to the rural concept by examining how access claims operate in contested territories through the case of Weli Oya, Sri Lanka. Analysing this Sinhala settlement scheme at the edge of Tamil-claimed territories, I demonstrate how rural access claims transcend agricultural utility to serve territorial control projects and reinforce settler colonial dynamics. These tensions necessitate a more nuanced analytical approach to distinguish between emancipatory and oppressive rural access claims in contested landscapes.

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Settler colonial Japan: Roslynn Ang, ‘Unequally interdependent: Ainu social resilience within Japan settler-nation multicultural discourse’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2025

13Jun25

Abstract: Although the Japanese government gave up its discourse on racial homogeneity to actively promote multiculturalism featuring Ainu cultural heritage, the organizing committee dropped the proposed Ainu performance in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony. This paper examines how the politics of (not) recognizing the Ainu assist in the production of the Japanese settler nation and the Ainu community’s strategies to survive within this context. I argue that the state needs Ainu representations to market itself as a liberal multicultural nation that respects human rights in the global society. However, it faces a dilemma when Indigenous recognition unsettles the legitimacy of settler occupation and exposes the violent colonial heritage of the nation. The Ainu community strategically utilizes this mix of global and local discourse to retain spaces for practicing their intangible cultural heritage and cultural rights to natural resources.

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Settler colonialism is hard labour: Shiri Pasternak, ‘Labour, Settler Colonialism, and Economies of Extraction: The Wages of Settlement’, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context, 2025

12Jun25

Abstract: Indigenous resistance to colonization can intersect uncomfortably and often violently with a fight by workers to access Indigenous lands for extraction and jobs. Jobs have always been a literal frontier of settler colonial conflict because, simply put, colonization takes work. When immigrants began to settle through recruitment programmes en masse in Canada, they benefitted from a scale of colonial land seizure unknown anywhere else in the world at that time. The means by which to settle was the work— both required and provided—by corporations like the railroads, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and colonization enterprises. By the late 19th century, the market for wage labour on farms and in the central manufacturing regions was underway as industrialization took hold; the emergence of capitalism was born through its deep reliance on colonial land policy. For this reason, the political economy of colonialism can be studied through a long history of intersecting class formation and colonial land policy in Canada. We might call this dynamic the wages of settlement.

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The discovery we need against settler colonialism: Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Yale University Press, 2023

11Jun25

Description: The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. The long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a dynamic new generation of scholars insisting that any full American history must address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. In this ambitious book Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In a transformative synthesis of recent scholarship, Blackhawk shows that European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success, that Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire, that the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior, that California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War, that the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West, and that twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. A full retelling of U.S. history requires much more than a reckoning over disease, violence, and dispossession—it requires acknowledging the enduring power, agency, and survival of Native nations to create a truer account of the formation and expansion of the United States. Studying and teaching America’s Indigenous truths reveals anew the varied meanings of America.

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The Marx we need against settler colonialism: Kevin B. Anderson, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism, London, Verso, 2025

11Jun25

Description: In his late writings, Marx went beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. Kevin Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on Russia, India, Ireland, Algeria, Latin America, and ancient Rome. These texts, some of them only now being published, provide evidence for a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. As Anderson shows, the late Marx elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities.

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Destroying to replace: Rafeef Ziadah, Christian Henderson, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Sharri Plonski, Charmaine Chua, Riya Al Sanah, Elia El Khazen, ‘Disruptive Geographies and the War on Gaza: Infrastructure and Global Solidarity’, Geopolitics, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: This forum explores the geopolitics of infrastructure in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza, situating the current genocide within longer histories of settler colonialism, spatial control, and transnational complicity. As homes, hospitals, and schools are reduced to rubble, this destruction is not only military, but infrastructural – an assault on the material conditions of Palestinian life. Infrastructure emerges here not as background, but as a primary mechanism of governance, dispossession, and colonial reordering. From roads and borders to electricity grids and telecommunications, the systems that organise everyday life in Gaza and the West Bank are also those that fragment space, enforce dependency, and suppress self-determination. Rather than viewing this destruction in isolation, contributors trace how it is sustained by regional and global circuits of capital, logistics, arms, and energy. Gaza’s collapse is embedded in a broader political economy of militarism, where supply chains, defence industries, and financial infrastructures turn dispossession into profit. Yet, this forum also foregrounds counter-infrastructures and practices of resistance: from survival networks and subterranean spaces of refusal, to workers’ strikes and transport disruptions that challenge the flows sustaining Israeli militarism. Together, these essays ask what it means to ‘follow infrastructures’ in a moment of mass atrocity – what such a method reveals about power, complicity, and potential rupture. The forum moves beyond documenting destruction to consider how infrastructure is both a tool of domination and a terrain of struggle. Across scales and contexts, it highlights how Palestinians resist infrastructural warfare and how international solidarity movements can intervene in the systems that enable it. In doing so, the forum contributes to a growing body of politically accountable scholarship, mapping not only how infrastructures sustain violence, but how they might be reimagined.

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