settler colonial studies blog

Ongoing settler colonialism: Jamal Al-Nabulsi, ‘The Ongoing Zionist Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Al-Shabaka, 12/03/25

16May25

Abstract: This article examines the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Israeli regime against Palestinians in Gaza as a continuation of the Zionist settler colonial project. It argues that the massacres and displacement of Palestinians are not aberrations but intrinsic to the continuous Zionist colonization of Palestine over the past 75 years. The author identifies three key features of this colonialism: its permanent nature, its goal of displacing Palestinians, and its strategy of fragmentation of land and people to undermine Palestinian sovereignty. The piece concludes by emphasizing the need to dismantle the Zionist colonial project to achieve justice and freedom for Palestinians.

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The political economies of settler colonialism: Surbhi Kesar, Don Goldstein, ‘Introduction to the Symposium on Political Economy of Occupation, Colonialism, and Conflict in Palestine’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 2025

13May25

Excerpt: The discipline of economics and the subdiscipline of political economy have managed to, for the most part, distance themselves from studying the issue of occupation, colonialism, and conflict in Palestine. This engagement is aimed to remedy that. We consider such an engagement crucial for two reasons. On one hand, by way of this intervention, we are adding a speck to the brave and varied voices of resistance in the academic community to Israel’s violent onslaught on Palestine. The response has ranged from students occupying university spaces in asserting their right to protest and resist and calling for their universities to divest from the Israeli institutions complicit in genocide, to unions organizing and calling for action against scholasticide in Palestine, to students and academics organizing teach-outs to educate those around us about the historic forms of colonialism and the ongoing system of apartheid in Palestine. This has also led to a reckoning for many academics about how our own social positions might be implicated within global imperialism and continuing forms of colonial domination. It is not surprising that as radical political economists we consider this reckoning seriously. In the first issue of this journal, Weeks (1969) argues that economists are very much implicated within the status quo and are a part of the elite that gain from the way the system is structured, which makes it unsurprising that few utilize their tools to challenge it. In contrast, the mandate of radical political economics is to utilize and construct frameworks and tools geared toward systematically questioning and critiquing the contemporary economic structure, whose very dynamics are inherent with conditions for generating economic and social inequalities (Resnick and Wolff 1987). A failure to intervene in this current moment—which is probably the most destabilizing and politically charged one in the last few decades—would be a failure of the radical political economy project. On the other hand, this intervention is directed internally towards our academy in order to chisel space for engaging with some crucial questions about processes of racialization, colonialism, and dispossession that have underpinned capitalism’s expansion—dimensions that many political economy frameworks based on Western imaginations of capitalism have often considered peripheral. This is not a new critique levied against such frameworks. Over time, many debates have emerged to expand or reformulate the frameworks to include these “peripheral” dimensions. These include incorporating forms of structural domination, such as processes of identity, including gender and race, as mutually co-constitutive of capitalist class exploitation (see, e.g., interventions from Marxist-feminist scholars such as Matthaei 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996; Federici 2004). Another important dimension has been to incorporate colonialism as a central feature of development of global capitalism, along with the contemporary role of imperialism in shaping economies today (Luxemburg (1913) 1951; Lenin 1937; Rodney [1972] 2018; Amin 1974; Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Recent calls have pushed this forward to identify the specific dynamics of postcolonial economies, marked by dispossession without proletarianization, that cannot simply be analyzed as underdeveloped versions of advanced capitalist economies of today, but rather characterize the very dynamics of postcolonial capitalism (Sanyal 2013). These debates have challenged the Western-centric approaches to political economy and have, in response, reformulated and further developed the radical political economy frameworks. This project takes on new urgency in the wake of this moment.

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The citizenship of settler colonialism: Aaron Mills, ‘First Nations’ Citizenship and Kinship Compared: Belonging’s Stake in Legality’, The American Journal of Comparative Law, 2025, #avae032

13May25

Abstract: Many First Nation individuals appear to accept that debates about belonging to First Nations political community are properly framed as debates about citizenship. Interlocutors frequently identify the ongoing significance of kinship, but fold it into their conception of citizenship. This Article resists citizenship’s orthodoxy. Kinship is not a unique feature of First Nations citizenship, but rather is its own model of belonging to a political community: a model internal to First Nations law, understood on its own terms. There are, then, two models of belonging to First Nations political community, citizenship and kinship, within and over which debates about belonging play out. For First Nations political communities using their own systems of law, kinship is a source of fundamental legal interests, just as citizenship is a source of fundamental rights and freedoms in modern liberal democracies. However, comparativists, legal theorists, and political theorists have struggled to appreciate this reality because internal (or settler) colonialism disconnects kinship from legality conceptually and thus institutionally. Those connections must be reestablished. To that end, this Article shows that, functionally, kinship is a full answer to citizenship. The argument is made in two interwoven parts, each of which turns on the picture of kinship as a structural feature of First Nations law, understood on its own terms. First, kinship is citizenship’s political equal insofar as it offers a justificatory account of belonging to a political community; second, kinship is citizenship’s legal equal insofar as it, too, serves as a foundation for fundamental legal interests. The gravamen of this Article is, thus, twofold. First, one is not hearing what First Nations law says about belonging if one is only willing or able to listen in the language of citizenship. Second, the stakes in one’s choice of model are significant: citizenship and kinship structure legality in fundamentally different ways.

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The flower of settler colonialism: Anna Carsley-Jones, ‘The White Trillium: Naturalizing the Unnatural in Ontario’, Anti-Colonial Science: A Course Journal, 3, 2025

13May25

Excerpt: What does it mean for a native plant to be rendered representative of a settler colonial territory?

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Settler domestication: Marlena Tronicke, ‘Unsettling Domesticity: Homemaking Practices and Empire Building’, in Marlena Tronicke, Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Domestic Elsewheres, Palgrave, 2025, pp. 75–113

11May25

Excerpt: The two novels discussed in this chapter reimagine British settlement in what is now Australia. Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) revisits the convict colony of New South Wales at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By contrast, Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek (2015), which has so far eluded neo-Victorian scholarship, is set in mid-nineteenth-century South Australia. Rather than using these locations as mere backdrop, both novels examine how they are gradually colonised by British settlers. Whilst following oppositional trajectories—Grenville’s novel essentially presenting a narrative of upward mobility and Treloar’s one of failure and social decline—they each depict a form of imperial domesticity and its enactment via homemaking practices. The reader encounters extensive descriptions of how cabins are built and furnished, how land is fenced in and cultivated, and how domestic chores structure the comparatively secluded and monotonous day-to-day lives of colonial women.

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Settler climate engineering: Frank Busch, Joel Krupa, Anthony Harding, ‘An Indigenous perspective on climate engineering’, Energy Research & Social Science, 125, 2025, #104117

11May25

Abstract: Indigenous Peoples remain uniquely exposed to the threat of anthropogenic climate change, thereby requiring the research community to collaboratively explore (alongside Indigenous organizations and individuals) new approaches to climate risk mitigation. This Perspective assesses one aspect of climate risk mitigation – climate engineering, an umbrella term which we use to encompass emergent negative emissions technologies (like direct air capture) and research into the spectrum of solar radiation management techniques. In this co-produced contribution from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators, we situate the research within our community-based Indigenous histories. We then outline the nature of Indigenous climate risk as context for arguing that flawed existing attempts to simplistically assess the nexus of Indigeneity and climate risk management (which can prescriptively provide a universal “Indigenous perspective” across a structurally fragmented, highly complex landscape of Indigeneity) need to be abandoned. We propose methodological and engagement ideas for researchers in this space to consider. Of note, the applied focus of this paper concludes with “next steps” direction based on existing models observed within our fifty years of combined experience at the nexus of Indigeneity and community development.

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Settler colonial ontocides? Severin Fowles, ‘Settler Ontocide’, in Gavin Lucas, Shannon Lee Dawdy (eds), Undoing Things: How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart, Routledge, 2025

11May25

Abstract: It is increasingly claimed that the global environmental crisis known as the Anthropocene is poised to universalize the experience of land dispossession, economic breakdown, and societal unworlding, leaving history’s colonizers as vulnerable as those they have colonized. The former now awkwardly look to the latter for models of how to survive collapse and to build more sustainable worlds in the aftermath of the current political order and the capitalist system that animates it. This chapter considers the growing ecological imperative to dismantle settler colonialism and its links to fantasies of “becoming indigenous.” It argues that such fantasies have historical roots in the post-World War II era among the first generation raised in the wake of the atomic bomb. Looking to the 1960s hippie communes of the American West as on-the-ground experiments in the conscious rejection of capitalism, militarism, and settler subjectivities, this chapter explores the paradoxes therein, asking what happens when our political projects of undoing themselves come undone.

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Silicon Palestine: Antti Tarvainen, Silicon Palestine: An Inquiry into the Entanglements of Innovation and Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, Univesrity of Helsinki, 2025

11May25

Abstract: ‘New worlds’ and new beginnings populate the dreams of both innovation and settler colonialism. In this dissertation I examine how innovation economy is made in entanglement with settler colonial expansions and struggles. The thesis takes place in ‘Silicon Palestine’: the shifting frontiers of technological innovation and risk capital that bring Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and spaces like San Francisco and Dubai into interplay. ‘Innovation’ appears in this dissertation not as a universal economic form but as a site of political struggle and creativity. Innovation is a gathering of heterogenous and contradictory forces, actors and imaginaries in which the purity of settler colonialism and capitalism is lost. The conceptual framework of the thesis bridges settler colonial and relational theory. Through the perspective of ‘entanglements’ — a relation that is not determined but inherently dynamic and heterogenous — I examine the relations between settler colonialism and innovation economy through four analytical lenses: political myth, temporality, spatiality, and embodiments. The research material is collected through an explorative and ethnographic research design between 2019 and 2023, during a total of 13 months of fieldwork in the urban spaces of innovation. Most data come from the Palestinian occupied territories: Ramallah, Rawabi, and East Jerusalem – but also from places such as Tel Aviv/Jaffa and San Francisco. Key materials include 140 interviews with Israeli and Palestinian innovation elites, photographs and fieldnotes from innovation hubs, and popular innovation literature. The empirical chapters interrogate the entanglements of innovation and settler colonialism in their various constellations ranging from histories to political myths, from urbanities to practices of tech-outsourcing, and from peace- to genocidal war-making. The work contributes to discussions on the relationships between settler colonialism and global capitalism, the critical analyses of innovation, and the global approaches on Palestine/Israel. Two key arguments are central to the work. First, Silicon Palestine shows that the settler colonial state plays a defining role in the global constitution of innovation economy. The study decenters both the neoliberal and the techno-universalist notions of violence to make space for a more colonially informed reading. Second, Silicon Palestine productively destabilises both the categories of ‘innovation’ and ‘settler colonialism’ by departing from the unidirectional dramas of capitalist expansion and the contained geographies and binaries of settler colonialism. Rather than a periphery or a passive object of capitalist and settler colonial expansion, Palestine emerges as a crucial site of global theory. Silicon Palestine shows power in its violence and in its irresolvable heterogeneity and fragility.

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Replanning the settler city: Nadeem Karkabi, Eilat Maoz, ‘Decolonizing Haifa: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Return’, Palestine/Israel Review, 2025

10May25

Excerpt: Late in the summer of 2024, one of the authors of this introduction (EM) boarded a bus from the neighborhood of Bat Galim to Hadar HaCarmel in Haifa. Sitting across from her was an elderly Jewish woman who, clearly seeking conversation, began complaining about changes to the bus’s schedule, her neighborhood, and the city in general. “It’s all Arabs here now,” she said without reservation, “we always lived with them. I grew up with the Arabs who live by Saint George’s church, but now . . . now they are everywhere.” She linked Palestinian growing presence to the loss of the city’s Jewish character, pointing to loud music played on Shabbat and disregard for Yom Kippur observances. It was nighttime. The bus climbed through old Stanton Road, now called Shivat Tsion (literally: Zion’s Return). The road was built during the British Mandate to connect Palestinian downtown with the Jewish settlement up the mountain. “Look!” the woman gestured out the window, “Here was the mayor’s house, and we lived down there.” The mayor’s house belonged to Abed Al-Rahman Al Haj, Palestinian mayor of Haifa between 1920 and 1929. Today, it is one of the only remaining structures of Palestinian Wadi Salib and was recently sold to Jewish speculators. “You know, Arabs bought all the houses up here, and even in the Carmel,” the woman continued. “This is dangerous since, you know, Haifa used to be Arab”. This brief encounter, mundane as it is unsettling, highlights significant changes unfolding in Haifa over recent decades. A historically diverse city, from which almost all of the Palestinian population was expelled in 1948 (Manna 2022; Morris 2004), Haifa is slowly regaining a prominent Palestinian presence. This is evident in the growing number of Palestinian residents in many of the city’s neighborhoods, in the growing power of Palestinian capital in processes of urban development, and, perhaps most importantly, in growing Palestinian claims on urban space, history, and identity. For the Jewish woman cited earlier, these changes appear threatening, as they upend longstanding power dynamics between ethnonational collectives. What worries her, it seems, is less the mere fact of having Palestinian neighbors, and more the changing relations between rulers and ruled, “homeowners” and “guests,” or, indeed, between settlers and natives. Hence, her assessment that “Arabs bought all the houses here,” which, if not entirely false, is certainly exaggerated, and hence her concerns about the growing influence of Palestinians over the city’s public character. Yet, what is particularly troubling to her is how contemporary changes conjure up historical specters, as they recover a city that “used to be Arab” before the ethnic cleansing of 1948. She clearly identifies Palestinian life in Haifa with a kind of collective return, a prospect she views as dangerous and tangible. Perhaps this is because she, like many others raised on colonial dread, fears that the Palestinians will do to the Zionists what they did to them.

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French settler colonialism in action: Rahoui Fatna, ‘French Colonial Policy in Algeria: Integration and Naturalisation Policies as a Model’, Science, Education and Innovations in the Context of Modern Problems, 8, 3, pp. 625-642

10May25

Abstract: The policies of integration and naturalisation are among the most significant strategies that French colonialism sought to implement in the Algerian territory as part of a comprehensive colonial project. Its primary aim was to assimilate and dissolve Algerian identity within the French colonial entity politically, religiously, and culturally to extend its influence over the region and seize its wealth and resources, thereby attempting to subject the Algerian people to eternal rule. Within the framework of this integration policy, colonial France implemented various political, administrative, and judicial laws and legislation in Algeria. This paper seeks to present the most prominent laws before addressing the French naturalisation laws applied in colonial Algeria under successive governments and examining the position of Algerians, both elites and the general populace, towards these measures.

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