« Older posts
Newer posts »

Migropessimists (when in settler colonialism): Lorenzo Veracini, Simone Battiston, Francesco Ricatti, ‘Migropessimism of the Intellect, Migro-Optimism of the Will: The Italian-Australian Experience’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: Focusing on the Italian-Australian experience, this article outlines its authors’ migropessimism and their subsequent migro-optimism. We initially focus on what we perceive as the migrant’s ‘ontological death’. We will then follow unsuccessful attempts to carve a political space and more successful attempts to pursue spaces of personal autonomy. The immigrants to a settler society like Australia witness a settler colonial sovereignty that is asserted and yet remains defective. Conversely, they face an Indigenous sovereignty that is denied and yet endures. This witnessing confirms that for migrants to settler colonial countries sovereignty is always someone else’s. For Indigenous peoples and for settlers, in their relational opposition, sovereignty is political life; for migrants, sovereignty is like the Epicurean death: they will never encounter it. If migrants are, then sovereignty is elsewhere, since they have already left. And if sovereignty is, then the migrants are no longer, since they have become settlers.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Sanctioned? Jessica Whyte, ‘Sanctioning Settlers and Settlers’ Sanctions: Financial Warfare and Economic Peace in Occupied Palestine’, Middle East Critique, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article examines the Biden Administration’s 2024 sanctions on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which were justified on the grounds that ‘extremist settler violence’ threatened peace and stability. While praised by some as a historic step toward accountability, these measures are best understood as part of a long US practice of using targeted financial sanctions to enforce the ‘peace process’ while legitimizing Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land. The article shows that, rather than being novel, the settler sanctions repeat the model of the Oslo Accords, when Washington used targeted financial sanctions against Palestinians, Arabs, and two Israeli organizations that it framed as threats to ‘peace’. The earlier Oslo sanctions were tools of a distinctly ‘economic peace’, in which Palestinians are expected to abandon the struggle for national liberation in favor of individual economic advancement. The more recent sanctions, introduced in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, functioned not as accountability but as deflection – reframing state violence as individual misconduct, stigmatizing Palestinian resistance, and reinforcing the coercive economic order underpinning Israeli colonization. These coercive underpinnings came to the fore in the form of settlers’ sanctions, as the Israeli state engaged in economic warfare to further Palestinian dispossession and expropriate more Palestinian land.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Fired up settlers: Nicholas Spengler, ‘Playing with fire: unhousing and unsettlement at the antebellum hearthside’, Textual Practice, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article compares Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Melville’s Pierre (1852) as antebellum US ‘romances’ in which the hearthside is represented not as a nostalgic emblem of domestic stability and sociality but as a contested site of property and labour. Through a framework that relates Paula Geyh’s ‘unhousing’ to Anna Brickhouse’s ‘unsettlement’ and Mark Rifkin’s ‘settler common sense’, I read the hearth in House and Pierre as inspiring thoughts and acts of fiery rebellion against the house and the legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism on which it is founded. Holgrave and Clifford fantasise about burning down the titular house in Hawthorne’s novel, and Melville’s Pierre sets fire to a part of his legacy – his father’s portrait – as he abandons the family hearth to live with Isabel, the dark-featured woman who claims to be his half-sister. While these arsonist impulses suggest a form of ‘unhousing’ that attempts to reform the settler sovereignty and racial narcissism of the family, I argue that Isabel performs the more radical gesture of ‘unhousing’, one that alludes to the domestic insurrections of Black servants and slaves who refused their subordinate position by burning the homes and bodies of their masters.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler womanhood now: Laura Rodriguez Castro, Barbara Pini, ‘Settler colonialism, neoliberal feminism and the ‘white middle-class farming woman’ in Australia’, Postcolonial Studies, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article examines how white middle class farming women are woven into the narratives of settler colonialism in Australia. Drawing on visual and textual analyses of 150 posts from three major institutional Instagram accounts featuring Australian farming women: @invisfarmer, @agrifutures and @nsw_rwn, we focus on the entanglement of settler colonialism with neoliberal feminism and its everyday enactment as neoliberal femininities. Neoliberal feminism promotes ideals of individualism, choice and self-optimization which are embodied by farming women through affective practices of positivity, resilience and passion, while other emotions, such as anger, are suppressed. These emotional performances legitimize settler claims to land and futurity, reinforcing the erasure of Indigenous presence in rural Australia. By centring rurality, this article extends discussions of settler colonialism, neoliberal feminism and neoliberal femininities which have largely focused on urban contexts.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settlers’ Manifest Undestiny: Zoltán Dragon, ‘Spaces in Crisis: Photography of Abandonment, Desolation and Emptiness in the U.S.A.’, Americana, 21, 1, 2025, pp. 28-38

30Nov25

Abstract: The essay explores the spatial myth of America as constructed through photography, focusing on the American West. It argues that photography has historically shaped the American myth by visualizing the frontier as a contact zone between wilderness and civilization. Using a theoretical framework grounded topological analysis, the essay juxtaposes 19th-century images of progress and expansion with contemporary photographs of desolation and abandonment, revealing a haunting return of the past through spatial configurations that challenge and perpetuate the myth differently. The essay traces the development of Western photography from Civil War-era documentation to the King Survey’s images that combined technological progress and wilderness, revealing how photography’s evidentiary power was intertwined with expansionist imperialism. It then examines the contemporary photographic representation of empty, decaying American spaces as a form of double exposure, where past progress and present abandonment co-exist and entangle topologically as one. This new perspective incorporates psychoanalytic concepts of extimacy and spatial theories such as Soja’s Thirdspace to argue for a breakdown of the binary myth of the frontier and a reconfiguration of photographic spaces as sites of lived experience and haunting. Ultimately, the analysis puts forward the notion of a photographic “ontopology,” where images are not mere temporal records but spatial analogies that sustain the myth of the West through an ongoing visual dialogue.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settlers against nationalists (rhetorically embracing indigeneity for colonialist purposes): José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Portuguese Late Colonialism and International “Indigenous” Politics: the Spectrum of Protection, Transformation and Discrimination (1945–1972)’, e-Journal of Portuguese History, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article examines a largely underexplored and non-obvious historical process: the interactions between the Portuguese imperial state and the emerging field of international indigenous law during the post-war period. It demonstrates how this process was shaped by contemporary dynamics of transformation, protection, and discrimination in relation to indigenous populations and their social, po-litical and physical environments. Although these processes were not directly or explicitly connected to environmental concerns, they reflected some of the logics that would later inform environmental actions and discourses at both local and international levels.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Emotional settler colonialism: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Colonizing emotions: Death and sociopoliticide in a besieged society’, Critical Sociology, 2025

29Nov25

Abstract: What does it mean to live in the specter of death, both literal and symbolic? How does it feel to witness the plausibility of the destruction of one’s peoplehood? This paper investigates the multifaceted presence of death in the lives of Palestinian citizens in Israel, situating their experience within the broader sociological literature on death and structural violence, and the colonizing of emotions. While historical tactics in settler colonial cases have ranged from displacement to genocide depending on a convergence of factors, a persistent feature across colonized experience is the specter of death—felt and anticipated. The article examines four intersecting forms of death: (1) The proliferating crisis of intracommunal crime and homicide; (2) the imposition of social death through settler colonial practices in the wake of the war; (3) the affective and political experience of witnessing the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023; and (4) the convergence of material and symbolic violences, including the constant threat of incidental death. Through a critical engagement with sociological theories of death—particularly as they relate to biopolitics, necropolitics, and indigenous survivance—the paper conceptualizes death not as an endpoint but as a sociopolitical condition under settler colonial rule. In doing so, it foregrounds how Palestinians confront the colonizing of emotions and articulate forms of endurance, refusal, and collective meaning-making amid conditions of ongoing elimination.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Prototypical settlers: Rashid Khalidi, ‘Settler’, New Literary History, 56, 2, 2025, pp. 395-406

29Nov25

Abstract: This essay takes a comparative perspective, looking at both Ireland and Palestine in order to assess the term “settler.” It argues that the planting of settlers in Ireland and Palestine was intended by Britain to subjugate their peoples and take control of their land, while providing a loyal local garrison for the colonial power, all of this under the rubric of a noble “civilizing” mission to tame and uplift the natives. Stripped of its ideological baggage, and placed in context, whether that of Ireland, North America, or Palestine, the term “settler” reeks of aggression toward, and disdain for, the native.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Indigenous peoples have reservations: Isabelle Merle, ‘Indigenous Reservations in Australia and New Caledonia: A Colonial Reality and Its Variations in Aboriginal and Kanak Worlds’, The Journal of Pacific History, 2025

29Nov25

Abstract: Based on the study of colonial archives relating to New Caledonia and on the rich historiography on Australia, especially pertaining to the colony of New South Wales, this article focuses on the ‘indigenous reservation’ as a particular object of study and attempts to shed light on its origins and its development in two territories built and conceived by France and Britain as settler colonies. Rather than providing a direct comparison, the article places in parallel two colonial contexts in which the ‘indigenous reservation’ became a familiar reality during the 19th and 20th centuries as a solution to ‘the problem’ of indigenous presence in territories claimed as ‘new’ by Europeans. As this article lays out, however, the indigenous reservations in New Caledonia and Australia had neither the same history nor the same function.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Should space law follow settler law? Muhammad Faisal Rasheed, Shouping Li, ‘Emerging Trends of Neo-Colonialism on Earth and the Future of Space Law’, Beijing Law Review, 16, 3, 2025

29Nov25

Abstract: The future of outer space and space law is closely related to the newly developing wave of neo-colonialism on earth. The increasing impact of major power relations, resource driven agendas and with this transformation in global geopolitics, world has seen populist leaders such as Donald Trump emerge in the United States, which means that much of mankind’s colonization in space will be shaped by these factors that are discretely happening on earth. This paper contends that as emerging geopolitical dynamics and the expansion of corporate entities in space alter the prospects for outer space and space law, there are also new challenges. The historical neo-colonial behavioral patterns on earth have increased the risk of “space colonialism”. Such practices threaten peaceful and sustainable exploration of space for all. The study looks at the weaknesses of current space law, particularly the Outer Space Treaty; resource exploration, the activities of the private sector i.e. non state actors and conflict prevention. It calls for a legal framework which is both robust and accommodating of the increasing participation by private actors, protecting equitable access to space resources and preventing this from being monopolized by just a few. The paper explores the need for international cooperation, innovative public private governance models and new mechanisms of law to manage resources to protect the environment and resolve conflicts. It emphasizes the need for perspectives from developing countries to be taken into account, to ensure that benefits are equitably shared and not widening already existing global inequalities. Finally, this paper calls for a multidisciplinary approach which combines perspectives from international relations with those of space law so that all humans can look forward to a time when development in outer space is peaceful, sustainable and fair.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »