settler colonial studies blog

Replanning the settler city: Kaila Fely Escleto Tawera, Charting the Journey: Indigenous Kinship, Identity and Replanning the Settler-Colonial City, MA dissertation, University of Otago, 2025

10May25

Abstract: Urban environments worldwide are dynamic spaces symbolising progress and innovation. However, these sites of human significance are also commonly steeped in rich histories of genocide, displacement, and dispossession of Indigenous populations. Contemporary settler-colonial cities not only occupy Indigenous lands but effectively alienate the notion of Indigeneity that inherently exists within them. Aotearoa New Zealand cities are no exception. In Aotearoa, cities continue to reinforce colonial narratives through the fragmentation, dilution, and exclusion of Indigenous Māori geographies and identities (Puketapu-Dentice et al., 2017). Colonialism and urbanisation in Aotearoa have engendered the atrophy of everyday Māori traditions, practices, and social structures, resulting in disproportionately negative health, education, and economic impacts (Ryks et al., 2014). Urban spaces profoundly impact the identity and experiences of the people occupying them. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, our urban milieu might reasonably be expected to reflect the Treaty-based biculturalism shared between New Zealand Māori and non-Māori cultures. However, urban spaces, alongside policy and decision-making, continue to deliver a one-sided Western narrative that does not reflect the diversity in the nation (Akena, 2012). This research critiques such Western oversight within settler-colonial cities. It does so by exploring the experiences of New Zealand Māori young people, both those living within and beyond their tribal territories, in two urban locations: Ōtepoti (Dunedin) and Tūranga (Gisborne). These small cities offer unique case studies distinct from larger urban areas. Focusing on the smaller urban centres, the research articulates potential opportunities and insights to inform more inclusive and equitable approaches to urban planning in a settler-colonial context on the periphery. In addition, exploring how Māori young people perceive and encounter their respective urban environments provides insights into identity and sense of belonging for Indigenous citizens. This investigation contributes to a nuanced understanding of Indigenous experiences within place and how place attributes can be conducive to facilitating aspects of identity and contemporary placemaking. A Kaupapa Māori methodology (Smith, 2012) has been used to ensure that the research, from its inception to its dissemination, is firmly grounded in Māori philosophy, epistemology, and ontology. Upholding a Kaupapa Māori perspective provides an avenue to mainstream Indigenous knowledge and aspirations alongside Western-based research while also ensuring that the study is conducted by Māori, with Māori, and for the potential benefit of Māori.

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Social memory against settler colonialism: Viviana Huiliñir-Curio, ‘Mapping memories: tracing Mapuche mobilities beyond borders’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2025

08May25

Abstract: This work explores how Mapuche social memory expands understanding of Indigenous territoriality based on mobility in the southern Andes borderland. Social memory offers historically meaningful and rich insights into understanding Indigenous territorial demands and environmental conflicts rooted in settler colonialism. I underline the importance of examining Mapuche memories through historical routes in the Trankura Valley of Chile, located in the southern Andes Mountains, for two reasons: First, Mapuche narratives about mobility question visions of authenticity based on static and ahistorical ideas of an Indigenous community confined in land enclosures. Second, studying Mapuche routes opens possibilities for mapping Mapuche territorialities beyond nation-state narratives and settler colonial spatial formations that have historically disrupted Indigenous land relations. Therefore, this work considers the importance of historical and critical analysis of Mapuche mobility as constellations to expand debates about Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice on the Andes borderlands.

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Nuclear settlers: Joseph MacKay, Jamie Levin, ‘Firearms analogies and settler colonialism in US nuclear deterrence strategy’, Security Dialogue, 2025

08May25

Abstract: Nuclear strategy has long been formulated through analogies. We focus on one in particular: guns. Early nuclear strategists in the United States used multiple analogical comparisons to make sense of the new, apparently unprecedented technology that confronted them. They compared nuclear deterrence to gun dueling and the nuclear revolution itself to the rise of gunpowder on European battlefields. Both analogies invoked empire, in the form of American settler frontier gunfights and the impact of firearms on European expansion. This article offers a critical reading of them. We show both analogies were historically flawed, relying on outdated accounts of how firearms shaped military-political change. Our argument proceeds in three stages. First, we document the role of gun analogies in early US nuclear strategic writing. Second, we critically evaluate the analogy, showing its historical and analytical limits. Drawing on firearms literatures in history, sociology, criminology, and economics, we show that much of what we now know about firearms diverges from nuclear theory and history. Third, we develop an alternative interpretation, contrasting these analytical fictions with the actual history of nuclear colonialism.

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German ‘Indianthusiasm’ and settler colonialism: Judy L Fisher, German Indianthusiasm and Settler Colonialism: Pernicious Continuities, PhD dissertation, Purdue University, 2025

06May25

Abstract: The figure of the “Indian” upholds and perpetuates U.S. settler colonialism in ways not confined within U.S. borders. Instead, fascination with “Indians” has been a global phenomenon that can help us better understand the movement of settler colonial ideologies. Regarding the specific relationship between the “Indian” and Germany, scholars have argued that the fascination and love for all things “Indian”, or German Indianthusiasm, allows Germans to situate themselves alongside the victims of history rather than perpetrators specifically in regard to the Holocaust (Hartmut Lutz 2006). However, little attention has been given to how German Indianthusiasm connects with German settler colonialism in German South West Africa (DSWA). “German Indianthusiasm and Settler Colonialism: Pernicious Continuities” situates U.S. settler colonialism and German settler colonialism in DSWA as constitutive of a transnational settler colonial project, rather than distinct nationalist endeavors. Whereas representations of “Indians” in Wild West shows, Völkerschauen, and colonial exhibitions enabled Germany to position itself as a colonial power alongside other European nations during the German colonial period, contemporary iterations of Indianthusiasm allow German audiences to ignore their history of settler colonialism in DSWA and deflect responsibility for addressing this history. Exposing the simultaneity of “Indian” and “African” displays with the German colonial project in DSWA, and contemporary Wild West spaces juxtaposed by efforts to address Germany’s colonial legacy, this project tracks the pernicious continuities of colonial logics across geographic space and time. I suggest that Indianthusiasm allows a guilt-free realm to talk about decolonization, solidarity, and cross-cultural sharing with “Indians” without foundationally challenging the settler colonial ideologies inherent in the figure. For Germans to truly address their colonial heritage, and to make concerted efforts to address the representation of “Indians” in Germany, there must be an acknowledgement of how such ideologies are connected and persist over time.

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The settler still in the bedroom: Ayah Omran-Randall, Maryam Al-Khater, ‘Executing Sharia court decisions in the dissolution of marriages between Jerusalemites with different identity cards: implications for the Israeli settler colonial project’, Journal of Gender Studies, 2025

06May25

Abstract: While significant scholarly attention has focused on the Israeli state’s efforts to control Palestinian intimate lives, a notable gap remains regarding the legal mechanisms, particularly the fragmented legal systems impacting Palestinian women in marriages involving holders of different identity cards in East Jerusalem and the broader political and ideological objectives of Israeli settler-colonialism. Accordingly, this study bridges the gap by investigating the enforcement of Sharia court judgements in these marriages, highlighting how such legal processes expose Palestinian women to the Israeli settler colonial project. It argues that mechanisms for executing Sharia court rulings – primarily concerning alimony and custody – establish five distinct relationships: (1) between J1 Jerusalemite women and Israeli authorities; (2) between J1 Jerusalemite women and the Palestinian Authority; (3) between J2 Jerusalemite/West Bank women and the Palestinian Authority; (4) between J2 Jerusalemite/West Bank women and Israeli authorities; and (5) between J1 and J2 Jerusalemite/West Bank women. The study asserts that these relationships regulate Palestinian women’s intimate lives and gendered roles, contributing to patterns of Israelization and Judaization, undermining Palestinian statehood, and fostering apartheid-like conditions among Palestinians of similar racial and cultural backgrounds. These dynamics fragment the Palestinian social fabric, advancing the elimination of Palestinians and the dominance of Jews.

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The settler in the bedroom: Sivuyisiwe Wonci, ‘The Ontology of the “Swart Gevaar”: Decolonising Black Women’s Wombs in South Africa’, in Mtisunge Isabel Kamlongera (ed.), Decoloniality in Gender Discourse and Praxis, Routledge, 2025

06May25

Abstract: The history of South Africa is publicly commemorated as a process of dispossession of people from the land, massacres and cultural and linguistic attempted erasures. This public commemoration hardly recognises intimate geographies of settler colonialism in which Black women’s wombs were subjected to violent reproductive health technologies which had the intention of reducing Black fertility. This chapter asks how did the ontology of the ‘swart gevaar’, which is the fear of White people being swamped by Black people, institutionalised by settler colonial administrators and the apartheid government managed to wage war on Black women’s wombs. Inequalities of reproductive healthcare system in this post-apartheid moment are examined, and how they continue to send Black women to shallow graves. This chapter also reflects on ways in which Black women resisted settler colonial reproductive violence and developed their own reproductive health agencies, intimate freedoms and maintained indigenous reproductive health systems. It proposes that decolonial feminist project in South Africa should begin by exhuming Black women’s bodies from shallow of settler colonial reproductive violence and publicly commemorate them as radical sites of liberties, desires, names, songs, resistance, community and human dignity. Decolonising women’s wombs in South Africa will also require birthing new cultures of intimacy, building new homes of agency, reproductive liberties and dignified reproductive health services.

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Lasting the frontier itself: Simon Wesley Huff,, Learning to Dwell in the Last Frontier: Women Writers and the Cultural Imagination of Colonial Alaska, 1867-1959, PhD dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2025

06May25

Abstract: Learning to Dwell in the Last Frontier examines the role of female writers in shaping the literary and cultural history of Alaska’s colonial period (1867-1959), arguing that their works played a crucial but largely unacknowledged role in constructing and contesting the dominant frontier mythology. While Alaska has long been framed through hyper-masculine narratives of conquest and resource extraction, the writings of Eliza Scidmore, Elizabeth Robins, Esther Birdsall Darling, and Martha Martin complicate these tropes, engaging with themes of gender, colonialism, and environmental consciousness. By centering these writers, this study reconstructs a literary genealogy that challenges the conventional canon of Alaskan literature. Their texts trace Alaska’s transformation from a colonial outpost to a mythologized space of personal renewal and national identity. At the same time, they expose the contradictions of this transformation – particularly the marginalization of native presence and the authors’ ambivalent roles within the settler-colonial framework. This dissertation offers an alternative literary history of Alaska – one that foregrounds the complexities and contributions of women’s writing in the colonial period. In doing so, it reshapes our understanding of Alaska’s colonial past and illuminates its enduring cultural legacy.

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Democratic settler colonialism? Rauna Kuokkanen, Sarah Maddison, ‘Reclaiming democracy through Indigenous self-determination: what does a “functioning country” mean?’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

06May25

Abstract: The recognition and advancement of Indigenous rights is often posed as a threat to democracy. In this article, we counter this idea to argue that the expansion of Indigenous rights does not in fact undermine democracy; rather, it offers an opportunity to reclaim democracy by establishing a more inclusive and pluralistic governance and society. We examine what reclaiming democracy and a ‘functioning country’ mean in the context of structural injustice and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples. We propose that strengthening Indigenous rights and expanding political autonomy could serve as a pathway to reclaiming democracy. More specifically, advancing a more just and functioning society requires embracing the twin aspects of Indigenous self-determination: Indigenous participation in broader society and political autonomy over internal affairs. This dual approach challenges the traditional concept of a unitary state with centralized and uniform sovereignty. Instead, it promotes pluralism, wherein multiple sovereignties coexist. Drawing on theories of democracy and structural (in)justice, and using empirical examples from Australia and Sápmi (Scandinavia), we argue for moving from democratic cultural pluralism to democratic political pluralism.

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A settler fix: Clare M. Beer, Sara Salazar Hughes, ‘“Fixing” Settler Capitalism: Un/Sustainability in the Former Fort Ord’, Antipode, 2025

06May25

Abstract: California’s former Fort Ord Army Base is located on the unceded Indigenous territory of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation. After seven decades as a training ground for foreign wars, the decommissioning of the base triggered an economic, demographic, and cultural crisis for greater Monterey. The solution to this crisis, the Fort Ord Base Reuse Plan, promised sustainable development in the form of local environmental protection, public higher education, and economic growth. We argue that the Fort Ord Base Reuse Plan illustrates a settler sustainability fix, which the state deploys to secure settler capitalist futurity on the Monterey Peninsula at the expense of Indigenous futurity. Ultimately, this research advances current understandings of settler capitalism by foregrounding the role of un/sustainability in defining its crisis-fix relation.

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Fiscal settler colonialism: Isabelle Megosh, ‘Land to Levy: Taxation as a Tool of Settler Colonialism’, Colloquium, V, 2025

06May25

Abstract: In both the United States and Canada, the taxation of Indigenous people is often viewed as an innocent tool for financing government operations. In the settler colonial context, however, taxation is not strictly a tool for financing the government – it is a powerful instrument for racial domination and forced assimilation of Indigenous people. This paper examines how colonial legal systems have utilized taxation not purely as a method of revenue collection but as a means to both secure white settler possession and to force assimilation on Indigenous people in order to delegitimize Indigenous sovereignty and enforce the Eurocentric definition of economic productivity and citizenship. Additionally, these taxations cause disproportionate financial effects on Indigenous communities and limit their economic opportunities. Drawing on the works of scholars Brenna Bhandar and Cheryl Harris, this analysis will reveal how taxation serves not solely as a method of revenue collection, but as an apparatus for upholding settler colonialism. From historical policies that explicitly categorized Indigenous people as “civilized” or “uncivilized” based on their tax status to contemporary rhetoric that frames Indigenous communities as economic burdens, taxation’s purpose is to maintain racial and economic inequities and reinforce the legitimacy of the settler colonial project.

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