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Is it a structure? Jeremia Pelgrom, Clemens Six (eds), Settler Colonialism as a Structure? Rome, KNIR Dialogues Online, 2025

22Apr25

Excerpt: This collection of papers originates from a June 2024 workshop at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) as part of the Settler Colonial Paradigms research program. Scholars from the Research Centre for Historical Studies at University of Groningen, explore settler colonialism across different time periods, from the ancient Mediterranean to future visions of Mars colonization, analysing its core characteristics and lasting impact. The contributors examine overlooked perspectives and raise important questions: What defines settler colonialism across time and space? How does it differ from other colonial forms? And how can this concept enhance our understanding of contemporary global dynamics? External experts in the field have been invited to respond to foster further dialogue and advance the discourse.


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Enduring Palestine (introducing a special issue of Native American dn Indigenous Studies): Gina Starblanket , Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, ‘Editors’ Remarks: Enduring Palestine’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 12, 1, 2025, pp. 1-4

21Apr25

Access the special issue here.

Excerpt: In NAIS 1:2 (fall 2014) inaugural editors Jean M. O’Brien and Robert Warrior produced a special forum entitled “Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from Indigenous Studies.” Responding to growing discussions about the academic boycotts of Israel, and the NAISA Council Declaration of Support for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions (December 13, 2013), O’Brien and Warrior carved out dedicated space for intellectual engagement with Israel-Palestine through a special forum featuring two submissions received around the same time, each focused on indigeneity, Palestine, Israel, and the significance and implications of disciplinary and narrative engagements with Palestine. Over a decade later, we find ourselves again responding to intensifying calls to attend to Palestine from within and across Native American and Indigenous studies as we witness our membership undertaking analyses and activism on Palestine and on Indigenous relationalities in greater numbers and depth, through methods and modalities that exceed conventional means of scholarly engagement and presentation.


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Actually toxic settler colonialism: Geneva M. Smith , ‘Settling (for) glyphosate: Agrochemical worlding in Argentina’s GM soy belt’, Environment and Planning E: Environment and Space, 2025

21Apr25

Abstract: Since Argentina became the world’s largest consumer of glyphosate, Argentine producers’ lives, livelihoods, and landscapes have become intimately entwined with agrochemicals. This article follows a range of settler-farmers making “common sense” decisions about how to live and farm with agrochemicals in Argentina’s genetically modified (GM) soy belt. In a process I call agrochemical worlding, settler-farmers perspectives about agrochemical safety are informed by long-standing arrangements about who determines how to use Argentine land, thereby shaping how settler-farmers move through a landscape saturated with agrochemicals. Using a progression of ethnographic encounters, I situate and then dislodge a sense of agrochemical safety by attending to enactments of different agrochemical ontologies. Attention to worlding practices at the intersection of settler common sense and toxicity both situates GM farming in Argentina as a form of settler agriculture, and agrochemical use as a contemporary technique of settler colonialism.


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Unrecognising settlers: Emile Badarin, Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine, Bloomsbury, 2025

20Apr25

Description: Using Palestine as a case study, Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States shows how recognition politics operate to legitimize long-standing colonial power structures.
In existing scholarship, recognition has been seen as an asset coveted by indigenous communities. This book forwards a new, theoretically ground-breaking perspective. Emile Badarin shows that in colonial contexts, settlers use recognition to legitimize and normalize the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people. More than this, settler-colonial states themselves actively pursue recognition, employing it as a means to further the elimination of the indigenous societies they seek to replace. In making the case, the book critically examines the Euromodern categories of race, racism and racial hierarchies and draws new conclusions about the interplay between colonialism, racism and Zionism. Central to this analysis is how anti-Zionism has been strategically equated with anti-Semitism, and effectively used as a tool for the advancement of both settler-colonialism in Palestine and Israel’s recognition on the international stage. The book delves into indigenous normative resistance against colonial recognition politics through the lens of the Palestinian practice of ?umud (steadfastness), extracting its philosophy of liberation as a pathway towards a decolonial future for all in Palestine and beyond.


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The unplanning settlers: Keisha Maloney, ‘Planning With the Animacy of the Land’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 2025

20Apr25

Abstract: Settler planners who are committed to advancing reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in settler colonial cities are actively decolonizing their praxis. In this Viewpoint, I discuss how settler colonialism is embedded in planning Canadian cities to argue that settler planners should critically interrogate their relationship with the land to address colonialism’s ecological and social legacies. Learning from Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and the principle of reciprocity in Indigenous methodologies, I demonstrate how planning practice can advance reconciliation and sustainability when planners shift their understanding of land as property to land as relation. I then show how planners can plan with the animacy of the land across various aspects of planning practice. Planning with the animacy of the land respects the land as a living entity that holds stories and knowledge in its sedimented layers and thus can honor Indigenous land relations while advancing more just, sustainable solutions.


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Racial settler colonialism: Lana Tatour, Ronit Lentin (eds), Race and the Question of Palestine, Stanford University Press, 2025

20Apr25

Description: This book develops from the position that the colonization of Palestine—like other imperial and settler colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Race and the Question of Palestine explores how race operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory system. Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Essays build on a long-standing tradition of theorizing race in Palestine studies and speak to four interconnected themes—the politics of racialization and regimes of race, racism and antiracism, race and capital accumulation, and Black–Palestinian solidarity. These engagements challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case, and stress the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.


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Fattening settler colonialism: Szilvia Csevár , Yasmine Rugarli, ‘Greasing the Wheels of Colonialism: Palm Oil Industry in West Papua’, Global Studies Quarterly, 5, 2, 2025, #ksaf026

20Apr25

Excerpt: Settler colonialism is best conceptualized as a structure rather than a singular historical event, underscoring its permanent, ongoing and systemic nature (Wolfe 1994, 96; Wolfe 1999, 2). Unlike other colonial formations, settler colonialism’s primary goal of elimination is not race but the expropriation of land. This process is perpetuated through various mechanisms, seeking to “destroy to replace” (Wolfe 2006, 388), which differs from genocide as it encompasses not only physical elimination but also cultural erasure, assimilation, and the systematic destruction of Indigenous identities, land fragmentation and a wide array of biocultural assimilation (O’Brien 2010). Settler colonial narratives actively erase Indigenous Peoples while memorializing them as relics of the past—perpetuating the myth of the “vanishing Indian” (Kēhaulani Kauanui 2016, 3) which serves as an ideological tool to deny Indigenous presence and rights, thereby legitimizing settler claims to land (O’Brien 2010). The colonization experiences in Southeast Asia, as well as that of several African nations, are distinct from this practice in several ways. In its most renowned work, Fanon (1963) provides a powerful analysis of colonial structures, pointing to the emergence of new post-colonial forms of imperialism and political distortions entrenching racialized forms of violence and leading to the continued exploitation of former colonies. Tracing colonial techniques and strategies, Casanova (2007) explains internal colonization as the dominance and exploitation of natives by natives. Indeed, the concept of internal colonization refers to the practice of racialized classification of minority ethnic groups as subordinate to the dominant ethnicity within the borders of a single state. Such “domestic subset of a larger colonial (or imperial) paradigm” (Chávez 2011, p. 786) bears on all social relations, including political and extractive violence. Southeast Asia is particularly suitable to illustrate the various patterns and harmful impacts of internal colonization on traditional communities, closely linked to a narrow understanding, or even non-existence, of indigeneity in the region. Post-colonial state forming in most Southeast Asian countries denied the existence of specific Indigenous groups on the territory, claiming that the concept “internationalist indigeneity” (Merlan 2009, p. 303), as developed within the UN system, is inherently linked to European domination through settler colonialism and therefore inapplicable to Southeast Asian territories, which did not experience significant European settlement. What has become known as the “Asian controversy” (Kingsbury 1998), a peculiar all-or-nothing approach to indigeneity, is a common feature in qualifying indigeneity in the region (Baird 2020). While there are notable parallels with the patterns of classic European settler colonialism, the current neo-colonial administration in West Papua clearly exhibits methods of internal colonization as well.


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Introducing a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies: Karl Jacoby, Magdalena Naum,’Introduction: new voices in settler colonial studies in a time of crisis’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

20Apr25

Excerpt: In late November of 2024, just as this special issue was being edited, the then-President of the United States, Joe Biden, created a stir when he was spotted leaving a bookstore on Nantucket clutching a copy of the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi’s 2017 monograph, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. The subtitle of Khalidi’s book, A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, encapsulated the work’s central theme: the efforts of Zionists to create a homeland in Palestine needs to be understood as a settler colonial project, in which Jews sought to replace the region’s Indigenous population and claim Palestinian lands as their own. ‘[R]adical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all settler colonial movements’, writes Khalidi. ‘In Palestine, it was a necessary precondition for transforming most of an overwhelmingly Arab country into a predominantly Jewish settler state’. Biden’s apparent interest in Khalidi’s work (which came ‘4 years too late’, according to the The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’s author) speaks volumes as to the sudden and unprecedented entrance of Settler Colonial Studies into contemporary political debates. Hamas’s massacre of October 7, 2023 and Israel’s on-going response, which Amnesty International and others have labeled genocidal, has focused intense attention on whether Israel should be labeled a settler colonial state as well as on the relationship between settler colonialism and various forms of violence, up to and including genocide. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who seek to defend Israel’s behavior have adopted the tactic of issuing blanket dismissals of Settler Colonial Studies, designed to discredit the field in general and its application to Israel/Palestine in particular. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens labeled settler colonialism a ‘fatally flawed … academic theory’. Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, composed an essay entitled ‘The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism’ for The Atlantic. He subsequently expanded his article into a short book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, Justice, in which he claimed that settler colonial theory ‘offers a distorted account of history’, designed ‘to divide the world into the guilty and the innocent’. Not long afterwards, David Frum, a former speech-writer for George W. Bush–perhaps best known for coining the phrase ‘the axis of evil’ to describe Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–published his own article in The Atlantic decrying the concept of settler colonialism as ‘guilty history’ that offered little more than a sneering ‘condemnation of the new societies’ European colonialism created.


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Demography and settler colonialism in French Algeria: Nacer Boukrou, ‘Demographic Transformations and Settlement Policies in Algeria During the French Colonial Period’, The Arabic Journal of Human and Social Sciences,17, 2, 2025, pp. 265-275

20Apr25

Abstract: This research addresses the demographic transformations in Algeria during the
French colonial period (1830-1962) and the impact of settlement policies and forced
migration on the social and cultural fabric of the country. The study relies on historical
and social analysis of various references and demographic and statistical data, as well as
testimonies and historical memories. The research highlights the long-term economic,
social, and cultural impacts of these policies and the reshaping of Algerian national
identity as a result of these changes.


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The settler riviera: Khaldun Bshara, ‘Settler Colonialism Rebranded: Trump’s Gaza Plan and the Capitalist Logic of War’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2025

20Apr25

Abstract: This essay explores Donald Trump’s proposal to “own Gaza” and develop it into a  “riviera”  that would draw  “people from all over the world.”  The author argues that it aligns with Trump’s broader expansionist ideology and reflects a continuation of the US’s imperial legacy. Through a comparison between the destruction of Gaza and that of Dresden (Germany), and between the proposal to take over Gaza and the US acquisition of Hawaii, the author examines Trump’s plan for Gaza—a real-estate project intertwined with urban renewal and postwar reconstruction that recycle capital surpluses to create new spaces to attract developers and investors—as settler colonialism rebranded. He ends by coining the concept of  “the right to the full Dresdenization” of Gaza as a way to secure for Palestinians a just and comprehensive recovery process that allows them to rebuild their lives and reclaim their space in the aftermath of catastrophic devastation.


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