Jen Preston, ‘Neoliberal settler colonialism, Canada and the tar sands’ Race & Class 55, 2 (2013).

The Canadian government commenced the treaty-making process with the Indigenous peoples of the Athabasca region in 1870, motivated by the Geological Survey of Canada’s reports that petroleum existed in the area. This, in addition to the discovery of gold in the Klondike region, spurred an influx of unregulated settlement and resource extraction in the north. The trajectory of this history has continued to bring the Canadian settler state – and its oil industry stakeholders – into negotiation with indigenous Nations over the Athabasca tar sands. Currently contested is Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway project, which aims to move oil from the Edmonton, Alberta area by way of two massive pipelines covering 1,170km to Kitimat, British Columbia, where it would then be transported to Asia-Pacific markets by super-tankers. This paper examines the widespread criticism of the project from Indigenous and environmental groups, as well as responses to these objections by public/private partnerships between Enbridge, federal and provincial governments and their national security and counter-terrorism forces. It argues that recognising and naming contemporary forms of white settler colonialism, including these types of neoliberal partnerships, is required for new relations to become possible.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2201473X.2013.847524

John Dugard and John Reynolds, ‘Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory’, European Journal of International Law 24, 3 (2013).

Apartheid is a loaded term; saturated with history and emotion. It conjures up images and memories of discrimination, oppression, and brutality; indulgence, privilege, and pretension; racism, resistance, and, ultimately, emancipation. All of which come to us through the history of apartheid in South Africa. Although prohibited and criminalized by international law in response to the situation in southern Africa, the concept of apartheid was never given enormous attention by international lawyers. Following an awakening of interest in the international legal prohibition of apartheid as a potentially appropriate lens through which to view the situation of the Palestinians, this article examines the merits of such a claim in the context of Israeli law and practice in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Call for Papers:

Other People’s Country: Law, Water, Entitlement

Special issue of Settler Colonial Studies (late 2014)

Guest editors: Timothy Neale (University of Melbourne) and Stephen Turner (University of Auckland)

There has been a tendency in settler colonial scholarship to focus, like settlers themselves, on land as the prime form of territory. But for indigenous groups, claims to ‘country’ or territory contain far more than the earth alone. Further, indigenous territorial claims not only often include or focus upon freshwater and saltwater but also can themselves resemble water: multivalent, transformative, animate. Recently, in Australia and New Zealand, questions regarding indigenous rights and the possession of water have revealed, once again, the contradistinction and entanglement of indigenous and settler laws. Setter attempts, in turn, to resolve these questions raise other issues regarding the nature of the object recognised and the form of its recognition.

The guest editors seek submissions considering ‘other people’s country’ as the conflicted site of claims to resources, knowledges, and futures in settler-colonial nations such as Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, the United States of America and other iterations of settler-colonial ‘place’. How do legislation, policies and institutions ‘govern’ lands and waters in these places? How are bodies of water – whether rivers, lakes, seas or aquifers – made ‘lawful’ within settler-colonial nations today and can we think of them as possessing their own ‘law’?

Possible topics submissions to the Special Issue may chose to focus on:

• The ‘cosmopolitics’ of water
• The political ecology of contested sites
• The politics and ‘the political’ of waters in settler-colonial sites
• ‘Settlement today’ in resource contests
• Counter-mapping waters
• Settler and indigenous imaginaries of water
• First Law as a source of material and/or immaterial entitlement

The editors seek multidisciplinary perspectives on the study of water and law in settler-colonial sites. We welcome work from authors in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, indigenous studies, Maori studies, cultural geography, sociology, media studies, heritage studies, history, gender studies, law, critical legal studies, postcolonial studies, economics, politics, international relations, political science, literary criticism and other related fields.

Proposal abstracts of 300-500 words should be sent by 1st of December 2013 tonealet@unimelb.edu.au or sf.turner@auckland.ac.nz. Successful applicants will then be notified ahead of submission of complete papers in early 2014. All accepted submissions will then be peer-reviewed.

According to the Commonwealth’s charter, member states should communicate and co-operate “in the common interests of our peoples and in the promotion of international understanding and world peace”.

In its statement, The Gambian government said it had “withdrawn its membership of the British Commonwealth”.

It said it had “decided that The Gambia will never be a member of any neo-colonial institution and will never be a party to any institution that represents an extension of colonialism”.

[…]

The last time a nation left the Commonwealth was in 2003, when Zimbabwe withdrew.

BBC News.

Gregory S. Alexander, ‘The Complexities of Land Reparations’, Law & Social Inquiry (early view 2013).

The question whether unjust dispossessions of land perpetrated on whole peoples in the past should be corrected by restitution in kind, that is, granting reparations in the form of returning land to the dispossessed former owners or their present-day successors, is substantially more complex than the questions posed by other forms of reparations. I argue that the complexities involved in all the situations where claims for land reparations are made to correct historic injustices give us good reasons to be hesitant about granting such claims. At the same time, we should not dismiss such claims out of hand. Reparations that take a form other than restitution of dispossessed land may be both necessary and sufficient to establish a public marker of acknowledgment.

George Pavlich, ‘Criminal Justice and Cape Law’s Persons’, Social Legal Studies (2013)

Expansive criminal justice arenas have for centuries been marked by tenaciously unequal representations of the race, class, ethnicity and gender of the subjects they capture and punish. Although the phenomenon has been analysed in several ways, this article focuses on the influence of criminal justice in an eclipsed dimension of colonial settings, namely, the political logic deployed to enunciate legal persons that simultaneously defined criminal law’s jurisdiction and objects of regulation. This politics is nicely illustrated by law directed at crimes at the Cape of Good Hope during extraordinarily unsettled times circa 1795, where unequal categories of legal personhood were assigned to those involved with crime. These categories were subsequently targeted for different intensities of legal force. Versions of this basic logic have resounded over the centuries; using the Cape’s rich archive as an illustrative example, one glimpses how differentiated conceptions of the legal person help to sustain inequalities that fuel the disproportions of many criminal justice institutions nowadays.

Cory Willmott, ‘Beavers and Sheep: Visual Appearance and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Algonquian-Anglo Relations’, History and Anthropology iFirst (2013).

 Differences between Great Lakes Algonquians and their colonizers in the meanings and values of dress were not simply a matter of different symbolic meanings for the coded elements. Rather, for Algonquians, the whole realm of the visual played a lesser role in the construction, maintenance and negotiation of identities than it did for the colonizers. Whereas nineteenth-century British and Americans “read” dress to ascertain identities, including moral character, occupation and class, with a few notable exceptions, Great Lakes Algonquians relied instead upon behaviour as a primary indicator of identity. The meanings and values humans attribute to dress are linked to the economic and social structures of their production and distribution. These structures provide the basis for the modes of perception through which people conceive “selves” located in their physical and cognitive environments. For humans, as corporeal beings with subsistence needs, human–animal relations play a major role in these processes.

The Cherokee Nation, to which the girl’s birth father belongs, had insisted she would stay with the tribe.

BBC News.

Rachel Busbridge, ‘Performing colonial sovereignty and the Israeli ‘separation’ wall’, Social Identities (2013).

As a structure that does not mark an actual border and is constructed primarily on occupied territory, the Israeli ‘separation’ wall is a unique space that functions as both border and borderlands. Here, I explore the wall as a performance of sovereignty which simultaneously constructs and de-constructs imaginings of the Israeli nation-state. On the one hand, I contend that the wall is a colonial production that draws a psychic line between a ‘civilised in here’ and ‘uncivilised out there’, fulfilling the double function of forging a perceived bounded, protective national enclosure at the same time as buttressing the necessity of controlling territory beyond the bounds of that enclosure. On the other hand, I argue that the complex relationship between settler and state materialised in the wall points to a blending of theology and politics in Israel, which threatens to empower a God-sanctioned politics that undermines state. In addition to promoting anxiety of the Palestinian ‘out there’, then, the wall is understood as also fostering an anxiety increasingly turned inward to the structures of the Israeli state itself.