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Beware of settlers planting trees: Lucía Gutiérrez Vázquez, Atxu Amann Alcocer, Flavio Martella, ‘Greening the occupation: colonial landscape regulation in Palestine-Israel’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

17May25

Abstract: Historically, the modification of the landscape through afforestation has been instrumentalized in the service of the colonization of the territory. In this context, the construction of green areas in Palestine-Israel in the twentieth century can be interpreted as an exercise of strategic territorial control linked to the Zionist project. The planting of forests under the Forest Ordinance of 1926 in the territory acquired by Israel, the cultivation of olives associated with Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 in the West Bank, and the designation of Parks and Nature Reserves thanks to the National Parks Law of 1998 alongside Order 373 in the West Bank are three interventions that demonstrate the synergy between plantations and prevailing regulations. Through its analysis, this article reveals the landscape as a material result of surveillance technologies and argues that green areas in Palestine-Israel are covertly instrumentalized against rootedness, autonomous reproduction, mobility, self-determination, and the memory of the Palestinian people, masking a colonization strategy according to a model of territorial ethnic cleansing.


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More settler colonial necropolitics: Robert L. Nelson, Frontiers of Empire: Max Sering, Inner Colonization, and the German East, 1871-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2025

17May25

Description: How did the homesteads and reservations of the Prairies of Western North America influence German colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Europe? Max Sering, a world-famous agrarian settlement expert, stood on the Great Plains in 1883 and saw Germany’s future in Eastern Europe: a grand scheme of frontier settlement. Sering was a key figure in the evolution of Germany’s relationship with its eastern frontier, as well as in the overall transformation of the German Right from the Bismarckian 1880s to the Hitlerian 1930s. ‘Inner colonization’ was the settlement of farmers in threatened borderland areas within the nation’s boundaries. Focusing on this phenomenon, Frontiers of Empire complicates the standard thesis of separation between the colonizing country and the colonized space, and blurs the typical boundaries between colonizer and colonized subjects. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.


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Settler colonial necropolitics: Ian Klinke, Life, Earth, Colony: Friedrich Ratzel’s Necropolitical Geography, University of Michigan Press, 2025

17May25

Description: Life, Earth, Colony explores the ideas, life, and historical significance of German zoologist turned geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), famous for developing the foundations of geopolitical thought. Ratzel produced a remarkable body of work that revolutionized the study of space, movement, colonization, and war. He also served as a source of intellectual inspiration for national socialism, particularly through his Lebensraum (living space) concept, which understood all life as being caught in an eternal struggle for space. This book closely analyzes this radical conservative intellectual, focusing on his often-overlooked ethnography, biogeography, travel, and creative writing, and colonial activism as well as his more widely-known political geography. Life, Earth, Colony finds that there is an as yet unexplored necropolitical impulse at the heart of Ratzel’s entire oeuvre, a preoccupation with death and dying, which had a profound impact on twentieth-century history.


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The birth of settler colonialism and its opposite: Margaret Jolly, ‘Embodied Connections: Gender, Race, and Reproduction in Oceania’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2025

17May25

Abstract: This review article juxtaposes two books, Placental Politics and Moral Figures, which
offer innovative decolonial, feminist approaches to reproductive politics and embodied
connections in colonial and contemporary Oceania. They evince an extraordinary
empirical and theoretical sophistication that has developed in scholarship over recent
decades in analysing the racialised and gendered logics of colonialism, in researching
the embodied relations between Indigenous and white settler women, and in
developing the theory and practice of Oceanic feminisms.


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The birth of settler colonialism: Erika Campbell, Melanie Murdock, Sarah Durant, Carole Couchie, Carmel Meekis, Charitie Rae, Julie Kenequanash, Lisa Boivin, Jacob Barry, Arthi Erika Jeymohan, Karen Lawford, ‘Indigenous Peoples’ responses to evacuation for birth in Ontario: conceptualizing risk through an Indigenous midwifery-led approach’, International Journal for Equity in Health, 24, 2025, #135

17May25

Abstract: Currently, pregnant Indigenous Peoples living in remote, rural, and northern Indigenous communities in Canada are subjected to evacuation birth policy, whereby they are evacuated out of their community to large, urban hospitals to give birth. Evacuation for birth is assumed to decrease biomedical risk because people are birthing in hospitals. In Canadian health systems, evaluating and mitigating biomedical risk has become a standard in health decision-making but this framework disregards Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies that guide Indigenous people in their evaluation of health risk. In this study, we sought to understand how pregnant Indigenous people in Ontario conceptualise health and risk.


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Concrete settler colonialism: Lila Sharif, ‘Settler Colonialism’, in Eli Elinoff, Kali Rubaii (eds), The Social Properties of Concrete, Punctum Books, 2025, pp. 373-382

16May25

Access the chapter here.


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Ongoing settler colonialism: Jamal Al-Nabulsi, ‘The Ongoing Zionist Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Al-Shabaka, 12/03/25

16May25

Abstract: This article examines the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Israeli regime against Palestinians in Gaza as a continuation of the Zionist settler colonial project. It argues that the massacres and displacement of Palestinians are not aberrations but intrinsic to the continuous Zionist colonization of Palestine over the past 75 years. The author identifies three key features of this colonialism: its permanent nature, its goal of displacing Palestinians, and its strategy of fragmentation of land and people to undermine Palestinian sovereignty. The piece concludes by emphasizing the need to dismantle the Zionist colonial project to achieve justice and freedom for Palestinians.


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The political economies of settler colonialism: Surbhi Kesar, Don Goldstein, ‘Introduction to the Symposium on Political Economy of Occupation, Colonialism, and Conflict in Palestine’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 2025

13May25

Excerpt: The discipline of economics and the subdiscipline of political economy have managed to, for the most part, distance themselves from studying the issue of occupation, colonialism, and conflict in Palestine. This engagement is aimed to remedy that. We consider such an engagement crucial for two reasons. On one hand, by way of this intervention, we are adding a speck to the brave and varied voices of resistance in the academic community to Israel’s violent onslaught on Palestine. The response has ranged from students occupying university spaces in asserting their right to protest and resist and calling for their universities to divest from the Israeli institutions complicit in genocide, to unions organizing and calling for action against scholasticide in Palestine, to students and academics organizing teach-outs to educate those around us about the historic forms of colonialism and the ongoing system of apartheid in Palestine. This has also led to a reckoning for many academics about how our own social positions might be implicated within global imperialism and continuing forms of colonial domination. It is not surprising that as radical political economists we consider this reckoning seriously. In the first issue of this journal, Weeks (1969) argues that economists are very much implicated within the status quo and are a part of the elite that gain from the way the system is structured, which makes it unsurprising that few utilize their tools to challenge it. In contrast, the mandate of radical political economics is to utilize and construct frameworks and tools geared toward systematically questioning and critiquing the contemporary economic structure, whose very dynamics are inherent with conditions for generating economic and social inequalities (Resnick and Wolff 1987). A failure to intervene in this current moment—which is probably the most destabilizing and politically charged one in the last few decades—would be a failure of the radical political economy project. On the other hand, this intervention is directed internally towards our academy in order to chisel space for engaging with some crucial questions about processes of racialization, colonialism, and dispossession that have underpinned capitalism’s expansion—dimensions that many political economy frameworks based on Western imaginations of capitalism have often considered peripheral. This is not a new critique levied against such frameworks. Over time, many debates have emerged to expand or reformulate the frameworks to include these “peripheral” dimensions. These include incorporating forms of structural domination, such as processes of identity, including gender and race, as mutually co-constitutive of capitalist class exploitation (see, e.g., interventions from Marxist-feminist scholars such as Matthaei 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996; Federici 2004). Another important dimension has been to incorporate colonialism as a central feature of development of global capitalism, along with the contemporary role of imperialism in shaping economies today (Luxemburg (1913) 1951; Lenin 1937; Rodney [1972] 2018; Amin 1974; Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Recent calls have pushed this forward to identify the specific dynamics of postcolonial economies, marked by dispossession without proletarianization, that cannot simply be analyzed as underdeveloped versions of advanced capitalist economies of today, but rather characterize the very dynamics of postcolonial capitalism (Sanyal 2013). These debates have challenged the Western-centric approaches to political economy and have, in response, reformulated and further developed the radical political economy frameworks. This project takes on new urgency in the wake of this moment.


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The citizenship of settler colonialism: Aaron Mills, ‘First Nations’ Citizenship and Kinship Compared: Belonging’s Stake in Legality’, The American Journal of Comparative Law, 2025, #avae032

13May25

Abstract: Many First Nation individuals appear to accept that debates about belonging to First Nations political community are properly framed as debates about citizenship. Interlocutors frequently identify the ongoing significance of kinship, but fold it into their conception of citizenship. This Article resists citizenship’s orthodoxy. Kinship is not a unique feature of First Nations citizenship, but rather is its own model of belonging to a political community: a model internal to First Nations law, understood on its own terms. There are, then, two models of belonging to First Nations political community, citizenship and kinship, within and over which debates about belonging play out. For First Nations political communities using their own systems of law, kinship is a source of fundamental legal interests, just as citizenship is a source of fundamental rights and freedoms in modern liberal democracies. However, comparativists, legal theorists, and political theorists have struggled to appreciate this reality because internal (or settler) colonialism disconnects kinship from legality conceptually and thus institutionally. Those connections must be reestablished. To that end, this Article shows that, functionally, kinship is a full answer to citizenship. The argument is made in two interwoven parts, each of which turns on the picture of kinship as a structural feature of First Nations law, understood on its own terms. First, kinship is citizenship’s political equal insofar as it offers a justificatory account of belonging to a political community; second, kinship is citizenship’s legal equal insofar as it, too, serves as a foundation for fundamental legal interests. The gravamen of this Article is, thus, twofold. First, one is not hearing what First Nations law says about belonging if one is only willing or able to listen in the language of citizenship. Second, the stakes in one’s choice of model are significant: citizenship and kinship structure legality in fundamentally different ways.


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The flower of settler colonialism: Anna Carsley-Jones, ‘The White Trillium: Naturalizing the Unnatural in Ontario’, Anti-Colonial Science: A Course Journal, 3, 2025

13May25

Excerpt: What does it mean for a native plant to be rendered representative of a settler colonial territory?


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