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German settlers since 1880 (with illustrations): Tim Buchen, ‘The portrayal of the (Russian) German colonists as settlement pioneers 1880–1945’, Copernico, 2025

19Dec25

Excerpt: This article shows how German colonists from the Tsarist Empire were, by means of a colonialist discourse, made into instruments of the Germanization of Eastern Europe. Their supposed lack of sophistication was practically prerequisite for coping with the ostensibly primitive inhabitants and the untamed wilderness. During the 18th and up to the end of the 19th century, Germany saw extensive emigration. Many Germans who did not inherit a farm moved to places where land was cheaply available. While most emigrants went to America, many Germans also moved to Eastern Europe.


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German settlers during WWI (with illustrations): Ron Hellfritzsch, ‘On the Road to the ‘New Eastern Lands’: Plans for the German Colonization of the Baltic States during the First World War’, Copernico, 2025

19Dec25

Excerpt: During the First World War, the German Empire had far-reaching plans for expansion in Eastern Europe. The Baltic states in particular were destined to become a German settlement colony known as the “Neues Ostland” (new eastern lands). With hindsight, some of these plans appear as forerunners of National Socialist conquest policy. Calculations “for a new farm to be established in Courland” The Latvian National Library (Latvijas Nacionālā bibliotēka) in Riga has in its collection a small brochure featuring drawings and statistics with the cumbersome title “Capital requirements, economic equipment and yield estimate for a new farm to be established in Courland with a total area of 20 hectares”. Behind this seemingly dry title lies the hitherto barely researched history of a gigantic imperial project developed during the First World War, in which the entire Baltic region was to be transformed into a German settlement colony under the name “Neuland” (new lands), “Ostland” (eastern lands) or “neues Ostland” (new eastern lands). But why did so many Germans at that time regard the Baltic states in particular as a utopian space that seemed to offer far-reaching prospects for a future land grab by German settlers?


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Early Palestinian reflections on settler colonialism: John Harfouch, ‘”The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine”: Understanding Zionism through the Work of Fayez Sayegh’, Liberated Texts, 10/11/25

19Dec25

Excerpt: November 10th, 2025, marks the fiftieth anniversary of UN Resolution 3379, when the United Nations General Assembly voted to declare Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. This statement effectively condemned Zionism as a racist political ideology and Israel as a racist state, to be relegated alongside other colonial, apartheid, and imperial state projects. Passing with a vote of 72 in favor and 32 against with 35 nations abstaining, it was overwhelmingly supported by the newly liberated Third World countries who saw the statement as a challenge to American and European hegemony. Resolution 3379 was not the work of a single individual. Nonetheless, several Palestinian intellectuals deserve special recognition for their efforts in passing the resolution. Foremost amongst them is Fayez Sayegh, who spearheaded the effort and argued the Palestinian case on the Assembly floor. This review will work through Sayegh’s writings to come to a better understanding as to just what he and his counterparts within the Palestine Liberation Organization meant when they argued that Zionism is racism. How did they understand ‘racism’ and where does Zionist racism fit within what Sayegh called ‘the Palestine Problem’ more generally? Given that context what then is ‘anti-racism’? Is racism the appropriate lens through which to approach the problem? Readers may know Fayez Sayegh from his 1965 essay, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. That was the first publication from the PLO Research Center, which Sayegh founded and directed for a short period. While interpreting Sayegh’s statements on Resolution 3379, I draw from both his own and his colleagues’ writings for the PLO Research Center, so it is useful to have some idea as to what that Center was. In its 18 years of operation in Beirut the Center published a total of 340 books. At its peak, the Center employed roughly 80 full-time researchers in a 6-storey building in downtown Beirut.


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Assimilation in the French colony: Nadia Zerrouk, ‘French assimilation in Algeria: Between its logical aspects and the racism of colonialism’, Art Law and Accounting Reporter, 44, 2, 2025, pp. 201-212

19Dec25

Abstract: This study aims to examine the reality of French assimilation policy in Algeria—between its purportedly logical justifications and the inherent racism of colonialism. Through this research, we seek to address the main issues related to the attitudes of Muslim Algerians toward France, the extent to which they were influenced by its civilization, and their attachment to their own identity and Islamic civilization. We also aim to provide a clear picture of the assimilation policy and to show how it represented a major dilemma for the colonial authorities, whether in terms of its partial or total application, or whether it was merely an abstract concept devoid of any real political or legal implementation. The study further highlights the positions taken by the French Parliament regarding this policy. Methodologically, we rely on a historical-critical approach to analyze the gap between the assimilationist French discourse and the actual political and legal practices in Algeria, drawing on important French sources. The study reveals that the colonial authorities were not genuinely willing to implement an assimilationist policy toward the Muslim Algerian population, because their objective was not to produce a society similar to French society in language, religion, customs, traditions, or ways of thinking. Nor was their goal to create French citizens with the same rights enjoyed by native Frenchmen.     Instead of true assimilation, the colonial administration pursued partial and limited forms of integration—such as the teaching of the Christian religion to undermine Islamic identity, recruitment into the colonial army, the employment of a small number of Algerians, mixed marriages, and migration to France. These measures aimed to produce a society stripped of inherited traditions, foundations, balance, and identity, in order to weaken its spirit of resistance. However, Algerians fully understood France’s intentions in their country: to spread fear and death, dispossess them of their lands and property, and reduce them to servitude. Thus, they rejected French “civilization,” being aware of its true meaning—namely, the eradication of their Islamic identity, to which they steadfastly clung. Ultimately, they demonstrated to France that its presence in Algeria was destined to come to an end.


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Settler medicine and the question of the body: Nina Salouâ Studer, ‘Female Agents of Colonialism: Women Doctors in Algeria at the Turn of the Century’, The Maghreb Review, 50, 4, 2025, pp. 423-438

19Dec25

Abstract: Dorothée Chellier was born in Algiers in 1860 to French settler parents and became the first female French doctor in colonial Algeria, after completing her studies in Paris. As she had in-depth knowledge of the country, she was sent on “medical missions” to various parts of remote Algeria in the 1890s with the express goal of observing the lives and medical problems of “native” women. Chellier published a short book about a mission to the Aurès region in 1895, in which she focused on gynaecological issues among Algerian women. She often described how these women voluntarily contacted and trusted her, apparently eager to get help from a female French doctor. She also highlighted the importance of female medical experts for the future of France’s colonial project in Algeria, as Muslim women had been mostly hidden from her male counterparts throughout the 19 thcentury. This article proposes to analyse Chellier’s detailed descriptions of (the limitations of) the agency of Algerian women and contrast this with her own actions, influences and reception. Upon publication in 1895, her book was well received in French newspapers and her pioneering work served as an example to those female French doctors, like Hélène Abadie-Feyguine and Françoise Legey, who became active around the turn of the century in colonial Algeria. While sympathetic to many aspects of the lives of Algerian women, it is important to understand Chellier as an agent of colonialism. She defined her goals as providing medical help to formerly neglected groups in Algeria, as well as helping to “educate” the masses that she clearly viewed as being ignorant and unwilling to conform with France’s guidance. This was in line with the ideology of France’s paternalistic mission civilisatriceand with the opinions professed by her male colleagues.


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Settler ecofascism: Casey A. Williams, ‘Settler Ecofascism, Fossil Capitalism, and Democratic Crisis’, Environmental Communication, 2025

19Dec25

Abstract: This chapter considers the racially motivated mass shooting in El Paso, Texas in 2019 as an expression of “settler ecofascism” – a distinct variant of ecofascism that yokes settler colonial justifications for racial violence to neo-Malthusian concerns about environmental degradation. Analyzing the rationale for murder laid out in the perpetrator’s manifesto, the chapter suggests that settler ecofascism is an antidemocratic environmental politics that is symptomatic of a deeper crisis of US democracy, in which the state’s perceived failure to manage core contradictions of a specifically fossil capitalism has further eroded the legitimacy of liberal democracy and created space for politics associated with the “ecofascist” right. Studying the episode in this context helps to explain both the mainstreaming of ecofascist ideas in recent years, as well as the limitations of “emergency” rhetoric in climate change communications. The episode suggests that persuading publics that climate change is an “emergency” does not guarantee that they will come to support effective, just, or humane responses. To the contrary: characterizing climate change as an “emergency,” without outlining a plausible strategy for resolving it, creates fertile ground for movements advocating a reactionary politics of personal or group preservation as necessary to manage the fallout from ecological catastrophe.


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Reflecting on Asian settler colonialisms: Malaya Caligtan-Tran, Marimas Hosan Mostiller, Megumi Chibana, Katherine Achacoso, ‘On the Politics of Indigeneity and Asian Settler Colonialism in Asia: A Roundtable Discussion’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

19Dec25

Abstract: This roundtable documents emerging conversations on Indigenous politics and settler colonialism in Asia. It brings together a diverse group of emerging diasporic/Indigenous scholars from the Cordilleras, Surigao, Okinawa, and the Champa Kingdom to examine contemporary issues in Indigenous politics in Asia and their implications for broader conversations on Asian/American Studies and Global Indigenous Studies. This roundtable asks: how might the place-based and regional specificity of Indigenous politics in Asia expand global conversations on Indigenous movements for self-determination and decolonization? How might settler colonialism in Asia inform more transnational and global theorizations of Asian settler colonialism?


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Settler mnemonics: Charles Sepulveda, José Francisco Gutiérrez, Kēhaulani Natsuko Vaughn, ‘Sohcahtoa: settler mnemonics and the state of exception’, AlterNative, 2025

19Dec25

Abstract: A Riverside, California, schoolteacher taught the mnemonic sohchatoa to her high school mathematics class in the fall of 2021. The lesson plan included “playing Indian,” with a headdress, tomahawk chopping, and war whooping. She was previously featured in several yearbooks and the school’s social media accounts wearing her headdress. Although her performance went viral and ultimately led to her dismissal, how do we account for the lesson plan and performance, given that it had been well accepted for years? In this article, we argue that settler mnemonics are beyond individual acts. They are the status quo. Settler mnemonics serve as memory devices that remind settlers of their nativeness, ensuring settler futurity. We argue that the performance illustrates a state of exception where standard rules, practices, and/or legalities are suspended. Despite mathematics’ supposed apolitical position in education, it is subject to discourse that reflects and recreates settler possession of Native people and their lands.


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Indigenous and raced: Nitasha Tamar Sharma, ‘Race and Indigeneity in Pacific Islands and Settler Colonial Studies’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 7, 2, 2021

18Dec25

Excerpt: Eiichiro Azuma and Greg Dvorak gift us with two important and richly researched books that deepen our understanding of how settler colonialism operates as a connective mechanism tying Japanese and US imperialisms. My response applies a concept from one study to the other; both questions stem from my interest in Blackness and the African diaspora in the Pacific, or the Black Pacific. Eiichiro: how would a focus on indigeneity, including Indigenous voices and lives—a particular strength of Dvorak’s Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands—illuminate the effects of your articulation of “adaptive settler colonialism?” Greg: How would a more encompassing analysis of race, highlighted in Azuma’s In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire, expand our understanding of the Marshallese and their experiences in and beyond Micronesia? Both books engage the interactive, overlapping, and distinct imperial interests and settler practices of Japan and the United States. They detail the diversity within and hierarchies among racialized, national, and Indigenous populations. Azuma and Dvorak theorize how global processes and individual actors come together to reveal the mechanics of domination, displacement, and resistance. Azuma offers a top-down approach in his study of Japan’s uneven success in implementing imperial ambitions though their settlements of “new Japans” in regions spanning North and South America, the Pacifc, and other parts of Asia. Dvorak pins his attention to Kwajalein, a main islet of the Marshall Islands in the Micronesian region of the Pacifc, to show how its people, reef, land, and missile-illuminated skies have been cumulatively affected by Japanese, US, and Marshallese exchanges.


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Conquering the future: Saifun Nahar, Muztaba Rafid, Mohammad Mozammel Haque, ‘Decolonising Futures: Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms in Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Literature’, IJELSS, 10, 6, 2025

18Dec25

Abstract: Latin American and Caribbean literatures have increasingly turned to speculative genres to confront crises of ecology, race, and identity. Moving beyond the hegemony of magical realism, writers across the region employ Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms to reimagine futures historically denied to marginalized communities. This article situates these currents within the broader speculative turn in the Americas, tracing how Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous epistemologies reshape science fiction, fantasy, and dystopian forms. Through close readings of works such as Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé and Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Iris, alongside anthologies like Prietopunk, the study demonstrates how Afro-diasporic spirituality and Indigenous cosmovisions function as speculative technologies, disrupting colonial temporalities and projecting decolonial imaginaries. Afrofuturist texts foreground diasporic hybridity, queerness, and oceanic memory, while Indigenous Futurisms emphasize cyclical time, ecological survival, and sovereignty. Their convergence signals a hemispheric movement where speculative fiction operates as resistance literature, rehearsing cultural survival against extractivism and ecological collapse. By reading these strands together, the article argues that speculative fiction in the Americas is a central site of decolonial thought and world-making.


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