
This forum focuses on the urgent necessity of understanding settler colonialism as an analytic, especially given the recent political assaults on the concept that have been concurrent with the Israel and U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people. The title of this collection points to our refusal of exceptionalist framings of settler colonialism, which in the case of Israel has historically isolated Palestine (politically and epistemologically). Each case of settler colonialism presented here tracks the specificity of different contexts, while all share the core logic of elimination, dispossession, and replacement. Thus, the collection illuminates the common structural dimensions of settler colonial projects across the globe, thinking with and through Israel-Palestine.
Posts in This Series

Introduction: Unsettling Exceptionalisms With and Through Israel-Palestine
The recent popular assault on the analytical theory of settler colonialism has been concurrent with the Israel and U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people. Circ... More

What Can the Middle East Teach Us About Indigeneity and Settler Colonial Studies? Some Initial Observations
Settler colonial and Indigenous studies have become influential frameworks in the study of the Middle East, and the Middle East has become increasingly interest... More

Scorched-Earth, Poisoned Water: Settler Violence from Diné Bikéyah to Palestine
Settler colonialism has been a useful framework to comparatively analyze violent histories of dispossession across myriad geographies and political contexts. Ho... More

Lessons from Mexico’s Caste War
For Maya communities in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, time is marked by war—specifically the Caste War, an insurrection led by Maya and mixed-race peasants that b... More

The Ruse of Settler Colonial Morality
Shortly after publishing my first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii (2018), I gave a talk in the community library of the Village of Masset, a histor... More

Lay Your Social Cohesion Down
The construct of social cohesion dates to the late nineteenth century, developing over time as a metric for measuring a society’s resilience and prosperity (Fon... More

What is a Border to a Settler-Colonial State? Thinking Lebanon Alongside Palestine
In September 2024, the Israeli military attacks across its northern border that had begun the previous fall escalated into a war on Lebanon. By the time a tenuo... More

Allochronization Under the Emergent Settler Colonialism in Kashmir
I had never felt so relieved to hear the sound of a phone ringing than the day I finally connected a call to Manzoor after months of trying and receiving automa... More

The Iterative Temporal Dynamic of Settler Colonialism in Kashmir
“Dear one, may my life be sacrificed for you Pray, tell us, where will we go to beg?”The lament of an 83-year-old elder resonates with the impending land dispos... More

Dignity as Indigenous Refusal: Palestinian Resistance to the Politics of Death
Almost a decade ago, Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat authored a critical essay challenging theorists of Israeli settler colonialism to reconceptualize the fram... More

Remembering / Forgetting Koxinga amidst Taiwanese Settler Multiculturalism
In 1661, as Manchu Qing forces tightened their grip on China, Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong—known to the West as Koxinga—led his fleet to Taiwan’s shores and se... More

Between Archive and Erasure
Thinking about the September 2023 ethnic cleansing of Armenians of Artsakh, with and through Palestine and the ongoing genocide, reveals direct connections betw... More

On Exterminability: Remembering the Napalpí Massacre (1924)
The massacreOn July 19, 1924, the Argentine state waged an extermination campaign against Indigenous workers on strike at Napalpí, resulting in one of the count... More

Lam/Jami’ Shamil and a Palestinian Lesson
On February 8, 2025, Shadi Barghouti emerged from a Red Cross bus that just arrived in a central square in Ramallah having made the short trip from the settler ... More