settler colonialism

“The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism”

Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. Colonialism is not the same as settler colonialism. Though both share the premise of external domination, settler colonialism is premised on occupation and the elimination of the native population, while colonialism is primarily about conquest.

Both colonialism and settler colonialism derive from imperialism (i.e. an archive, practice, and ideology based on and constituted through civilizational, racial, and gendered hierarchy) but settler colonialism is a distinct imperial formation that seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers.

This new society needs land, and so settler colonialism depends primarily on access to territory. This is achieved by various means, either through treaties with indigenous inhabitants or simply by “taking possession.”

The primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element. Settler colonialism destroys to replace. As theodor herzl, founding father of zionism, observed in his allegorical manifesto/novel, “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.”

In a settler colony, colonial authorities facilitate the settlement (later called “immigration”) of non-indigenous people on indigenous land; they build structures (laws, bureaucracies, infrastructure, states, and social/kinship relations) that privilege non-indigenous peoples over indigenous bodies, communities, sovereignty, political, social and economic structures and systems, and moral and intellectual cosmologies.

Settler colonial invasion of Indigenous lands should not be contained as a phenomenon of the past, but rather is continually reproduced throughout the history and present of settler societies. In this sense, settler colonialism does not really ever “end.”

Resistance and survival are weapons of the colonized and the settler colonized; it is resistance and survival that make certain that colonialism and settler colonialism are never ultimately triumphant.

Sources

We are grateful to the works of Bruyneel, Kevin (2019), Review essay: On settler colonialism, Cambridge University Press; Mikdashi, Maya (2017), Settler Colonialism, Jad Mag Pedagogy Publications; Veracini, Lorenzo (2013), Introducing settler colonial studies, Settler Colonial Studies; and Wolfe, Patrick (2006), Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native, Journal of Genocide Research, direct excerpts of which informed the content for this blog post.