settler colonial studies blog

Eurogames are actually settler colonial games: J. Rey Lee, Unsettling Catan: Detached Design in Eurogames, University of Michigan Press, 2025

06Jul26

Description: Most revolutions don’t start with nineteen cardboard hexagons, but Klaus Teuber’s game about settling a hexagonal island quietly revolutionized boardgaming. Catan’s commercial success selling over 40 million copies certainly catalyzed a modern boardgaming boom. More importantly, its playful experiments set a new tone for game design. By making its cutthroat gameplay feel peaceful and pastoral, Catan helped a fledgling eurogame tradition forge its distinctive style and was heralded by Wired for “changing the American idea of what a board game can be.” Although peaceful revolutions are usually the best kind, it’s worth questioning how these games cultivate peaceful feelings. Today, peaceful-feeling eurogames often settle into detached design—a mindset of making conflict feel peaceful by dampening conflicted feelings. Unsettling Catan questions how peaceful-feeling eurogames can make implicitly imperialist themes palatable by cultivating a detached mindset that imagines power as peaceful, neutral, and abstract. To ask the hard questions that eurogames often look away from, the book walks through each aspect of Catan’s gameplay (placing hexes, rolling the dice, robbing and trading, collecting resources, building and scoring) to explore how simple design decisions can play out, or play with, cultural ideas and ideals. As the first entry in the Tabletop Games book series, Unsettling Catan introduces key concepts for thinking about board games as a medium and offers accessible game analyses and personal reflections to help players, creators, and scholars reimagine what board games can be and become.

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Police as settler policy: Michael K. Bryden, ‘Police Legitimacy and Indigenous Self-Determination: Towards a Decolonised Dialogue’, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: In settler states, police are used to establish and maintain colonial order, suppress Indigenous resistance, and secure state authority. Today, Indigenous people experience disproportionate rates of police contact that emerged during colonisation. Yet, mainstream scholarship on legitimacy has largely ignored Indigenous perspectives on policing, the wider context of settler colonialism, and questions of self-determination. This article focuses on police legitimacy and Indigenous self-determination in Australia, with implications for other settler states. I argue that Indigenous selfdetermination cannot be achieved without legitimate forms of social control. Building on the theorising of Beetham (1991) and Bottoms and Tankebe (2012), this article suggests that decolonised legitimacy dialogues are necessary to understand how Indigenous peoples conceptualise legitimate policing. A decolonised dialogue acknowledges policing’s colonial origins and its ongoing role in settler societies, the Western philosophies underlying legitimacy theory, and the need to centre Indigenous self-determination. I propose that “police” legitimacy can be enhanced via two pathways: (1) through reforms within state structures and/or (2) through Indigenous-generated alternatives (e.g., night patrols). This dual strategy considers the importance of both community-informed and evidence-based practices in policing to reduce harm while striving, ultimately, for as little (state) policing as possible. Here, I argue for epistemological consilience: the integration of Indigenous and Western knowledge systems.

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Food for Indigenous thought: Colleen Hammelman, Charles Z. Levkoe, Kristin Reynolds (eds), Radical Food Geographies: Power, Knowledge and Resistance, Bristol Univesity Press, 2024

06Jul26

Description: This collection presents critical and action-oriented approaches to addressing food systems inequities across places, spaces, and scales. With case studies from around the globe, Radical Food Geographies explores interconnections between power structures and the social and ecological dynamics that bring food from the land and water to our plates. Through themes of scale, spatial imaginaries, and human and more-than-human relationships, the authors explore ongoing efforts to co-construct more equitable and sustainable food systems for all. Advancing a radical food geographies praxis, the book reveals multiple forms of resistance and resurgence, and offers examples of co-creating food systems transformation through scholarship, action, and geography.

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Sacralised resistance against settler colonialism: Dadang Ismatullah, Sri Rijati Wardiani, Titin Nurhayati Ma’mun, Sangidu, ‘Ethical Witnessing, Home, and Return in Ghassan Kanfani’s Returning to Haifa: A Decolonial and Religious Humanities Reading’, Jurnal Lektur Keagamaan, 24, 1, 2026, pp. 419-451

06Jul26

Abstract: Palestinian exile in Ghassan Kanafani’s fiction deeply reshapes the relationships connecting individuals to home, memory, and historical existence. While existing scholarship has largely emphasized political nationalism, trauma, and structural settler-colonial violence, the ethical dimensions and processes of cultural sacralization sustained within disrupted domestic spaces remain underexplored, particularly in relation to how secular resistance narratives resonate within religious readerships. This article examines how home, memory, and return are represented in Returning to Haifa through an integrated framework of settler-colonial studies and the religious humanities. Employing qualitative textual analysis and close reading of both the Arabic original and its English translation, the study focuses on narrative structure, spatial description, and intergenerational dialogue. The analysis shows that home functions not merely as a domestic setting but as a culturally sacralized space where moral attachments endure against colonial erasure. Memory emerges as a form of ethical witnessing, while the transformation of Khaldun into Dov exposes the intimate violence of intergenerational rupture. This study contributes to religious literary studies by demonstrating how Kanafani’s secular narrative undergoes religious re-signification within contemporary Muslim horizons of expectation, demonstrating how such a moral reframing is enacted by specific communities of reading through shared ethical imaginaries of dignity (al-karamah) and historical continuity.

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Electoral participation? Sabrina Bourgeois, Joanie Bouchard, Marjorie Prince, ‘Settler Ballots and Indigenous Voices: Exploring Electoral Behavior, Partisanship, and Political Attitudes among Indigenous Peoples in Canada’, The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 2026

04Jul26

Abstract: We possess a limited understanding of Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and political attitudes. Previous research has mainly focused on explaining Indigenous electoral abstention and has faced constraints, mainly because of small sample sizes. Drawing on data from both the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, which encompass an unprecedented number of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis respondents, we explore Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and attitudes toward public spending at the federal level in Canada. We show that while Indigenous respondents remain more likely to consider abstention, they can also be more supportive of third parties than their nonIndigenous counterparts and adopt views spanning the traditional left–right ideological spectrum. These findings encourage a redefinition of the expectations regarding the political behaviors and attitudes of Indigenous Peoples in order to fully engage with diverse political cultures.

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Digital indigeneity against settler colonialism? Maurice Ebileeni, ‘Digital Palestine and the National Imagination’, Critical Inquiry, 52, 4, 2026

02Jul26

Abstract: It seems that Palestine has found a convenient spot in the cloud, as a complex, yet seemingly cohesive, digital nation comes into being. The growing possibilities of online connectivity through social media, search engines, and streaming services, along with the newly designed features of online articulation (posting, sharing, commenting, reacting, and so forth), are intensifying the idea of a single people, a single heritage, and a single national destiny. This article presents the concept of digital Palestinian nationalism as a critical prism for examining how online political activism in support of Palestine reveals the multiple, somewhat conflicting, layers of present Palestinian temporality. My contention is that digital Palestinian nationalism operates in an algorithmic present that significantly intensifies the historical temporality of national imagination but is simultaneously in conflict with various ongoing temporalities of Palestinian displacement. Deeply entangled in the sociometer of user engagement, algorithmic processes amplify deep national sentiments among Palestinians everywhere in reaction to footage of Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip (since 7 October 2023) within a constant frame of “real-time” and “right-time.” However, in buttressing national sentiments, this algorithmic presentness hinders attempts to imagine differently so that the Palestinian story might branch out to comprehend the multiple ongoing political and cultural developments of Palestinian experience in the various contexts of displacement in Israel-Palestine and the world at large.

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Emergent cultural heritage against settler colonialism: Claudia Vlad, ‘Reclaiming Palestinian Cultural Heritage under Settler Colonialism: Grassroots Practices in Kafr ‘Aqab, Jerusalem’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2026

02Jul26

Abstract: Grassroots cultural heritage in Palestine functions as a pivotal arena of resistance, challenging hegemonic heritage approaches adopted by the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority, and international heritage organisations. Focusing on the NGO Riwaq’s initiatives in rural Jerusalem, this paper demonstrates how heritage becomes a site for reimagining Palestine beyond flagged symbols of nationhood. Through these counter-hegemonic frameworks, this article sheds light on how grassroots actors subvert hegemonic heritage models. The analysis traces three interconnected practices through Riwaq’s projects: the rehabilitation of Kafr ‘Aqab Historic Centre, the ‘Mapping Rural Jerusalem’ project, and the ‘Engaged Margins’ exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023). These scales are explored through theoretical frameworks, including Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, Euro-American heritage management and the human rights discourse. Drawing on Chatterjee’s critique of Western modular forms of imagined communities, Barakat’s ‘deruination’ and Muñoz’s disidentification from a victim-centred aesthetic regime, this paper argues that Riwaq broadens what counts as heritage. Ultimately, the paper posits that cultural preservation is a form of resistance, enabling grassroots organisations to challenge colonial power structures, assert the right to narrate overlooked histories, and advance ‘Alter-Native’ forms of self-determination.

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Humouring settler colonialism: Derek Hilligoss, The Rhetoric of Gallows Humor: The Settler Colonial Unconscious in Reservation Dogs, PhD dissertation, University of Kansas, 2026

02Jul26

Abstract: This dissertation examines how Native comedy operates as a rhetorical and psychoanalytic critique of settler colonialism. Focusing on the television series Reservation Dogs, I argue that gallows humor, which is defined as comedy engaging death, trauma, and suffering, functions as a distinctly Native rhetorical practice that reveals and resists ongoing colonial violence. Drawing on rhetorical studies, Native studies, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the project theorizes the “settler colonial death drive,” defined as the unconscious compulsion within settler society to reproduce eliminatory logics that render Native life precarious. Through close textual and contextual analysis, I demonstrate how Reservation Dogs uses humor to expose these conditions while fostering survivance, refusal, and community. Chapter one situates Native comedy historically as a form of gallows humor emerging from conditions of marginalization. Chapter two analyzes the Tall Man trope and representations of suicide, reframing death as a structural condition rather than individual pathology. Chapter three examines the Deer Lady to theorize the gendered dimensions of settler colonial violence and Native feminist refusal. Ultimately, this project positions Native gallows humor as a critical rhetorical practice that confronts, rather than escapes, the enduring violences of settler colonialism.

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Sovereignty is an unequal relation: Amy Swiffen, ‘Contesting sovereignty: Indigenous legal and political responses to settler colonialism in Canada’, in Marinos Diamantides, Michel Rosenfeld, Giuseppe Martinico (eds), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Sovereignty, Elgar Online, 2026, pp. 95-112

29Jun26

Abstract: This chapter deals with the complex interaction between Indigenous sovereignty and state sovereignty within the context of settler colonialism in Canada. The author examines how European concepts of sovereignty have shaped and constrained Indigenous authority, with the Canadian legal system often seeking to limit the sovereignty of Indigenous nations, despite constitutional recognition of their inherent rights.

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Thoreau as settler disaster: Andrew Wildermuth, ‘Foraging, Forging, Forgoing – or, Thoreau as Settler Disaster in the Age of Walker and Apess’, in Linda Hess, Sylvia Mayer, Katja Sarkowsky, Christoph Straub (eds), Environmental citizenship: politics, practices, representations, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2026, pp. 69-83

29Jun26

Excerpt: In Concord, Massachusetts, a few years ago, I attended a two-week summer residency on the topic of Thoreau and social reform in the American Renaissance. On the final day, we discussed “Native American Rights in Antebellum America.” At the very start of the event, one of the event’s panelists, Linda Coombs, an historian and educator of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, began with a question: “What Native American rights?” The mostly White audience stiffened. Coombs laughed. “What rights, really?” She offered this like it was the punch line everyone had long known was coming. “It just doesn’t compute,” she said. It was clear that Linda Coombs was unimpressed with and disinterested in both Henry Thoreau’s person and work. She dismissed Thoreau with turns of phrases that were startling, even sacrilegious, to many in the room – in “The Concord Colonial Inn,” which Thoreau’s family once owned, and where a young Thoreau roomed while studying at Harvard – and where, for the last weeks, many of us, myself included, had worshipped at and swum in his and Transcendentalism’s shrines. Coombs, on the other hand, referred to him as a settler and mocked his fame for spending years on Indigenous land. She also asked why it was only on our final day that we focused on Indigeneity in North America. These and other inquiries exacted a certain speechlessness – a general liberal confusion, at a conference about reform, in good liberal Massachusetts – that became utterly pervasive, palpable, indeed, in this windowless room in Thoreau’s literal basement.

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