631Their own formulation is conjunctive---ending exports plus the structural argument. The perm is that.
Rossdale 25 — Chris Rossdale. Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol; author of Resisting Militarism. Global Studies Quarterly, “Racial Capitalism Must Be Defended: Reading the Arms Trade through Critiques of Policing,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf032, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf032 Clopus
Existing scholarship and research on the relationship between the arms trade and policing struggles to contend with these dynamics. In this section, I argue that even as much of this work is ostensibly critical, it tends to reproduce the racializing logics and legitimizing myths of policing. In contrast, critiquing the arms trade as policing allows us to move beyond the impasses and elisions common in both conventional scholarship and NGO/social movement analysis.
Most scholarship on the arms trade overlooks its connections to policing altogether, focusing instead on the circulation of martial technology as a vector of interstate conflict, a currency of imperial geopolitics, and a basis for military preparedness (Buzan and Herring 1998; Tan 2010; Hartung 2012), or on the conflict-driving effects of small arms and light weapons (Lumpe 2000; Patterson 2010). It is insofar as it produces and circulates the “paraphernalia of warfare” that the industry is noteworthy as a site of analysis and critique (Carver and Lyddon 2022, 91). The sale and transfer of arms for policing and “internal security” purposes is usually ignored, or dismissed as a minor statistical headache (James and Teichler 2010, 133). Nevertheless, some academic work does acknowledge a relationship between the arms trade and policing, often linking it to the supposed expansion of security concerns following the end of the Cold War and the opportunities and geopolitical calculations of the War on Terror (Stohl and Grillot 2009; Sköns 2010; Hartung 2012, 447–9). NGOs and social movements, by contrast, have brought a more consistent and critical focus on the role of the industry in supplying police and security forces.
While a focus on the relationships between martial technology companies and policing is welcome, it is notable that these are frequently drawn in a manner that ultimately sanitizes the concept of policing and obscures more foundational connections between the arms industry and racial capitalism. There are two frames through which this simultaneous exposure/elision operates. The first, a recurrent feature of liberal approaches, is that they tend to focus on technology transfers to police and internal security forces in “repressive regimes,” normalizing policing in “liberal democratic” states. The second concerns the framing of these transfers as “police militarization,” a feature of both liberal and more radical critiques. While arguments about police militarization often identify important shifts in the formation of police forces, they tend to do so while idealizing a (fictitious, ahistorical) nonmilitarized image of the police.
The first of these is a manifestation of a broader “repressive regimes discourse,” which challenges arms transfers on the terms that they may entrench authoritarian or repressive regimes, and/or be used to commit human rights abuses (Rossdale 2019, 237–60). For instance, Rachel Stohl, while claiming that “conventional arms have legitimate military, police, and civilian uses,” recognizes the problem of suppliers “willing to arm unscrupulous regimes and nefarious non-state actors” (2017, 1). Similarly, William D. Hartung is concerned that the arms trade provides “repressive regimes with the tools they need to suppress democratic movements and commit human rights abuses” (2012, 442). The repressive regimes discourse is also the dominant mode of critique for NGO and activist groups challenging the arms trade (Stavrianakis 2010). For instance, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) states that British-made anti-protest gear and equipment has been “approved for export to countries with serious records of human rights abuses, such as Libya, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, and Hong Kong” (Weitzberg 2022, 36).
The repressive regimes discourse places critical focus on transfers to controversial regimes. It often involves the use of country lists, as demonstrated in the CAAT quote, naming a series of self-evidently problematic actors to demonstrate the malign nature of the industry itself. The repressive regimes discourse is also constituted by a series of silences and omissions. Within the list of condemned regimes, there is a conspicuous absence of certain customers, whose domestic policing operations are not considered categorically troubling (Rossdale 2019, 245–6).
Anna Stavrianakis argues that the repressive regimes discourse reproduces the hierarchical structure of the international system:
[a]rguing for an end to controversial exports – which are usually exports to the South – without a wider argument about the structure of military power in international relations leaves the military dominance of Northern states intact and does nothing to challenge hierarchical North-South relations. (2010, 59)
The result is a “depoliticisation of militarism within the European world” (2010, 111) and the “production of the South as a site of intervention and its resultant disciplining” (2010, 114). While these arguments have previously been made in the context of the arms trade and militarism more broadly, they have specific resonance for thinking about policing. By making the arms trade problematic on the terms of its excesses , the discourse obscures the quotidian violence of policing in and by states in the global North, and especially within liberal contexts (Duff 2024). Liberal policing is thus positioned as an administrative matter, a mature form of state violence enacted by fundamentally legitimate governments (contra “regimes”).
632Nigerian scholarship says it---the airpower record is collateral damage and rights abuses.
Bamidele et al. 26 — Aiyemowa Bamidele, Asimi Jimoh Elebiyo and Aiyemowa Richard Femi. March 26. Department of History and International Studies, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria. Social Sciences, “The Dilemma of Airpower in Counter-insurgency: Politics, Tactics, and the Nigerian Air Force (2009-2022),” vol. 15, no. 2, p. 73-82, https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ss.20261502.12 Clopus
Political Controversy of Collateral Damage and Human Right Abuses: In the history of Nigerian National Security and joint ground troops operations in counter-insurgecy operations, the role of the Nigerian Air Force, Airpower campaign has been the greatest success story. However, the readily verified quantity and quality of airpower precision success against insurgency sits somewhat uneasily, in the company of controversy of collateral damage and human rights abuses during operational airpower campaigns. In one instance, up to one hundred and seventy civilians died on the 17 of January 2018 after the Nigerian Air Force bombed a refugee camp in the Northeastern town of Rann in Nigeria in error from an operational air campaign. [27] These are conjunctural moment that are inevitable in airpower campaigns against internal insurrections and insurgency battles.
633The alternative is abstraction---their own field calls it disciplinary decadence.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui equally critiqued the co-optation of indigenous or subaltern knowledge by high-theoretical social scientists in the Global North. For her, their use of terms such as rupture, de-linking, pluriversality, or even decolonialism/decoloniality itself is distant from the lifeworlds of humanitarian suffering: isolating ‘academic treatises from any obligation to or dialogue with insurgent social forces’. As such, the revolutionary humanitarian decolonial idea that ‘to decolonise is not to critique from within, it is to rupture and rebuild’ can be seen as irresponsible in its abstraction. Consider in this regard Olúfẹ́ mi Táíwò’s critique of ‘decolonialism’ tout court , and his words that he is:
Flabbergasted by the refusal to engage with … the desperate lifeworlds dominant in African countries and the denial to millions of their basic dignity as humans in these countries – and not all of this is traceable only to the depredations of colonialism. Olúfẹ́ mi Táíwò’s critique here echoes that of Kwasi Tieku: scholarship grounded in the reality of suffering rarely sees itself as pure in its thinking, whereas scholarship that is too distant from that reality, whatever its claims to radicalism, tends to fall into a form of ‘disciplinary decadence’. The critique, at its base, is that revolutionary decolonialism lacks a ‘programme of concrete changes’ to the world of comparable specificity to those offered by reformist or rejectionary strands. In large part, the critique continues, because these approaches are intensely metaphorical, relying on a far too vague aesthetic imaginary of the future, or blunt yet underspecified demands for Indigenous sovereignty. Reversing the critique that reformist decolonial humanitarianism represents simply a ‘move to innocence’ – a symbolic act that soothes institutional guilt – these critiques would see more radical decolonial approaches as equal moves to innocence, given they can fail to take the risk of acting, recommending, or engaging with the impurity of politics, instead maintaining an innocent radicalism.
634...or it bars the transfer critique---but their author says the elision is the problem, not the critique.
Rossdale 25 — Chris Rossdale. Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol; author of Resisting Militarism. Global Studies Quarterly, “Racial Capitalism Must Be Defended: Reading the Arms Trade through Critiques of Policing,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf032, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf032 Clopus
Existing scholarship and research on the relationship between the arms trade and policing struggles to contend with these dynamics. In this section, I argue that even as much of this work is ostensibly critical, it tends to reproduce the racializing logics and legitimizing myths of policing. In contrast, critiquing the arms trade as policing allows us to move beyond the impasses and elisions common in both conventional scholarship and NGO/social movement analysis.
Most scholarship on the arms trade overlooks its connections to policing altogether, focusing instead on the circulation of martial technology as a vector of interstate conflict, a currency of imperial geopolitics, and a basis for military preparedness (Buzan and Herring 1998; Tan 2010; Hartung 2012), or on the conflict-driving effects of small arms and light weapons (Lumpe 2000; Patterson 2010). It is insofar as it produces and circulates the “paraphernalia of warfare” that the industry is noteworthy as a site of analysis and critique (Carver and Lyddon 2022, 91). The sale and transfer of arms for policing and “internal security” purposes is usually ignored, or dismissed as a minor statistical headache (James and Teichler 2010, 133). Nevertheless, some academic work does acknowledge a relationship between the arms trade and policing, often linking it to the supposed expansion of security concerns following the end of the Cold War and the opportunities and geopolitical calculations of the War on Terror (Stohl and Grillot 2009; Sköns 2010; Hartung 2012, 447–9). NGOs and social movements, by contrast, have brought a more consistent and critical focus on the role of the industry in supplying police and security forces.
While a focus on the relationships between martial technology companies and policing is welcome, it is notable that these are frequently drawn in a manner that ultimately sanitizes the concept of policing and obscures more foundational connections between the arms industry and racial capitalism. There are two frames through which this simultaneous exposure/elision operates. The first, a recurrent feature of liberal approaches, is that they tend to focus on technology transfers to police and internal security forces in “repressive regimes,” normalizing policing in “liberal democratic” states. The second concerns the framing of these transfers as “police militarization,” a feature of both liberal and more radical critiques. While arguments about police militarization often identify important shifts in the formation of police forces, they tend to do so while idealizing a (fictitious, ahistorical) nonmilitarized image of the police.
635Their author concedes the object is real---these dynamics need contestation, not silence.
Rossdale 25 — Chris Rossdale. Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol; author of Resisting Militarism. Global Studies Quarterly, “Racial Capitalism Must Be Defended: Reading the Arms Trade through Critiques of Policing,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf032, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf032 Clopus
The repressive regimes and police militarization frameworks gesture toward dynamics that are in urgent need of critique and contestation. However, in critiquing only some policing some of the time, they insulate and normalize “normal” policing as an ideal away from which some (or many) policing actors have been diverted. They leave intact the ideal of policing as a nonpolitical, ultimately administrative project of protecting a virtuous order. Critiquing the arms trade as police, as deeply integrated and implicated in global policing, takes us away from this focus on occasional excesses toward recognizing the role of “normal” policing in defending and reproducing racial capitalism, and the role of the arms trade in stitching together a world of violence.
636The reporting is Nigerian---locals combed the village and gave the assessment themselves.
HumAngle 25 — HumAngle Media. December 26. Nigerian investigative outlet reporting conflict, security and humanitarian crisis in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel from the ground. HumAngle, “The US Launched an Airstrike in Northwestern Nigeria. Here’s How it Went,” https://humanglemedia.com/the-us-launched-an-airstrike-in-northwestern-nigeria-heres-how-it-went/ Clopus no byline recovered from the page
Meanwhile, locals in Jabo who spoke to HumAngle stressed that the locality targeted by the US forces is not controlled or infested by any terrorist group like other areas in the region. “It’s a peaceful place,” one local told HumAngle.
The locals said they have combed the entire Birikinin village and have found no civilians or terrorists hit by the US strike.
However, locals fear that this singular strike might cause the terrorists to beam searchlights on them. Unlike places like Isa, Sabon Birni, and Gada, which have had deadly terrorist attacks in the past, Jabo seems to be a haven for locals seeking calm and tranquillity in the state. The locals wondered why the US strike ignored terrorist enclaves in the state to target a thriving civilian community.
“It was the first time we heard what a bomb sounded like in this community,” Musa said. “Many of us couldn’t sleep throughout the night.”
Aliyu Garba, a local chief in Jabo, expressed concerns over how some locals have collected the relics of the explosive materials from the strike scene, saying some of the shrapnel might detonate or harm them. “It was as big as a car’s gearbox,” he said, describing one of the broken explosives found on the ground.
Garba added that they have lived in the community peacefully for years, praying that this new event would not bring calamity to them. Locals reiterated that they have not noticed any form of terrorist activities in the area for years, let alone the Islamic State operations that might call for such an airstrike.
According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) records covering 2010 to 2025, Tambuwal LGA has experienced only a handful of violent incidents, primarily involving small-scale attacks and abductions by criminal groups. The dataset records no previous incidents involving airstrikes, heavy artillery, or aerial bombardment in the area. In the past 15 years, for instance, only seven significant events were recorded in the LGA, and none happened in the Jabo town.
637The critique is of the patron’s management---the recipient is an active participant, not an object.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. May 12. Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex; works on the arms trade, militarism and export control. Middle East Critique, “Air Power, Controversy, and Colonial Continuities: UK Arms Sales and the War in Yemen,” https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2025.2496844 Clopus
The UK government response to controversy over the harms caused by airstrikes has been framed as part of ‘what we try to do overtly, but also quietly, to advance change in Saudi Arabia’ (Ellwood 2016c). Practices of military tutelage and Orientalist political cover demonstrate an attempt on the part of the British state to educate Saudi Arabia into liberal ways of militarism, including high-tech military responses to political crisis, justifications of war-fighting based on the notion of professionalism and occasional mistakes, and an emphasis on media management in lieu of accountability. These efforts are accompanied by legal deflection in an attempt to insulate the British state from accusations of complicity in war crimes. Taken together, these practices illustrate how the management of controversy over civilian harm is primarily about managing the fallout when a racialized friend misbehaves and shielding the UK from criticism. Yet Saudi Arabia is not a passive recipient merely subject to British maneuverings. The Saudi state has been an active participant in the legitimation of its practices in the war, co-opting British responses to try and justify itself, thus resisting British hierarchizing while simultaneously relying on British support. Saudi practice is thus doubly disruptive for the UK: its use of airstrikes generates problems for the British self-image as a responsible arms supplier and its comparisons to Western practice draw attention to the wider operation of air power in the Middle East.
638The alternative is necessarily vague---it is a coalition device, not a programme.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
Vis-à-vis decolonizing humanitarianism, the goal must therefore be to find ways to unite actors that are diverse and different not only in their specific postcolonial experience but also internally, where – for example – divisions also necessarily exist between domestic elites and those suffering from humanitarian crisis. As any form of global governance, the (utopian) goal is always to move beyond difference and find forms of solidarity. It is for this reason, perhaps, that decolonial humanitarianism must generally remain vague on its concrete image of the future, which is something that will emerge only after a long period of negotiation, contingency, and political uncertainty. To return to the humanitarian practitioner mentioned earlier, the idea that ‘we’ll figure out the other [technical] stuff’ on what decolonial humanitarianism means in practice ‘later’ might not be immediately pragmatically satisfactory at first glance, but is actually an astute strategy for coalition building.
Decolonial counter-aesthetics must, therefore, be necessarily vague, open, and imprecise – floating across different identities. In doing so, decolonial humanitarianism at its best, and in practice, embraces what Edouard Glissant described as a politics in which we do not have to ‘understand’ or ‘agree’ with everyone ‘in order to agree to live with them, to build with them, to take risks with them’. For us, understanding how all decolonialism is metaphorical, thus allows us to see the radicality that exists across its diversity. For example, despite critiques, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in Adeso’s refusal to accept funding from international development or humanitarian organizations, albeit one that then leads to a reliance on the private sector. Equally, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in the efforts of reformists to imagine a form of global ‘emergency fund’ led by local actors, albeit one that indeed risks retaining elements of white saviourism. And, despite the critiques above, there is naturally also a true form of decolonial praxis in revolutionary attempts to grapple at more structural levels with global capitalism and imperial structure. As Paustian’s discussion of critical humanitarian fiction makes clear, however, those who inhabit the ground truths of humanitarian violence are opaque in their preferences for one or another among these forms of humanitarian praxis. Indeed, they typically mix these approaches in action. The aesthetics of decolonial humanitarianism are thus also necessarily opaque in how they authorize expertise differently, maintaining an ambiguity that allows for allegiances to be built.
639They defend the opacity on purpose---an alternative nobody can specify is one nobody can hold.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
Understanding decolonial humanitarianism in this opaque and pluralistic manner is not simply a technical question relating to knowledge production, but also a means of protecting its potential to produce radical change. Despite controversies over the relationship between anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and other theoretical traditions, they all form part of the same lineage: the desire for emancipation from a colonially enforced ‘feeling of not existing’. Today – however – the attacks on this knowledge liberation movement are more acute than they have been for decades. Humanitarian organizations have been scrubbing references to terms linked to decolonialism from their web pages since the Trump administration’s onslaught. Political winds have turned, as they not infrequently do, against more progressive knowledge politics. Against such an onslaught, appreciating the power of aesthetically and metaphorically articulated decolonialism to preserve imaginaries of a different future is more crucial than ever given, to close with Achille Mbembe, ‘the basic goal’ of decolonialism ‘is not just to bring a specific political consciousness into being but to make it effective’.
640Aesthetic critique has changed very little---applied politics is a different practice.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
These debates are academic. But reading them through attempts to push them into the real world – as through decolonial humanitarianism – reveals something different. To see this, we can return to Koli Jean Bofan’s novel Congo Inc and his satire of the ‘experts in culture, humanitarianism, or conflict resolution’ heading to the Congo to ‘propagate holiness around zero latitude … muttering dogmas they’d memorized in the humanities departments in the northern hemisphere’. The theories underlying decolonial humanitarianism, of all kinds, have emerged precisely from those humanities departments in the northern hemisphere where – indeed – many ‘humanitarians’ are trained. On the one hand, it is thus easy to criticize, for example, reformist and rejectionary decolonial humanitarianism for a fundamental conservatism or co-optation and, therein, with having misread or failed to take seriously decolonial theory. Especially when most of the practical guidance on how to decolonize humanitarianism is written by researchers or practitioners based in the Global North.
On the other hand, it is also true that applied knowledge politics must necessarily be different from abstract knowledge politics. Decolonial humanitarianism makes this abundantly clear. It is a practical attempt to decolonize knowledge production at the centre of global power structures, and so will always deviate from theoretical treatises. Indeed, decolonial theory has largely pursued its own counter-aesthetic strategies at the level of the individual, often through high-artistic interventions that have changed very little in the ‘real-world’ of power politics. Decolonial humanitarianism, by contrast, mobilizes aesthetics organizationally and institutionally, working to challenge the hegemony of knowledge production at the centre of global governance. It is therefore a uniquely instructive arena in which to assess the practical efficacy of decolonial ambitions. In this regard, and to conclude, I want to suggest that it is important for the future of decolonial humanitarianism that it avoids becoming enmeshed in an endless cycle of internal theoretical critiques between its different forms.
641Force is transnationally constituted---the recipient’s practice is the local realization of the patron’s.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. May 12. Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex; works on the arms trade, militarism and export control. Middle East Critique, “Air Power, Controversy, and Colonial Continuities: UK Arms Sales and the War in Yemen,” https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2025.2496844 Clopus
The second move is to step away from Eurocentric and Orientalist assumptions about civil–military relations in Gulf states (e.g. Barany 2021; Cordesman 2003; Sayigh 2011) and recognize that the making of armed forces has long been transnational and marked by the dynamics of empire (Barkawi 2011, 2017). Foreign advisors, trainers, and pilots have been central to the development of the Yemeni and Saudi militaries and to the conduct of war in the region (Cooper 2017). Weapons have long been a site of circulation in the Arabian Sea and part of the creation of a capitalist global economy from the days of empire (Mathew 2016, ch. 4). And the practices of war have been marked by features of asymmetric war, such as the ability of northern tribesmen to take military and political advantage of the country’s mountainous terrain, stymying efforts at external control (Orkaby 2015a). The task, then, is to understand Saudi practice in Yemen as not merely (ineffectively) mimicking that of its Western arms patrons, as in a Eurocentric diffusionist model, but as ‘the local realization of general techniques’ (Barkawi 2017, 4) of transnationally constituted military power. A postcolonial approach also reminds us that those construed as militarily inferior – in Yemen, the Houthis – have the power to inflict surprises on the more powerful (Barkawi and Laffey 2006).
642Their founding distinction excludes us---franchise colonies extract, settler colonies replace.
Vaughan and Maddison 25 — Franka Vaughan and Sarah Maddison. April 2. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Settler Colonial Studies, “Thinking through the history of Liberia’s formation with settler colonial theory,” vol. 15, no. 4, p. 726-747, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2025.2485741 Clopus
Settler colonial theory has its foundations in the work of Indigenous activists and scholars in Australia and beyond, whose efforts exposed the violent political, economic, and socio-cultural arrangements and territorial dispossessions that continue to shape Indigenous lives and communities. Indigenous peoples’ assertions of their abiding sovereignties and right to self-determination invigorated the development of settler colonial theory and this article builds on the relational analyses of settler colonialism developed by Indigenous scholars including Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Simpson in particular, who describes settler colonialism as ‘a structure made up of processes’ that exist for the sole purpose of dispossessing Indigenous peoples, makes the case that colonialism ‘as a structure is not changing. It is shifting to further consolidate its power, to neutralize our resistance, to ultimately fuel extractivism.’
Nevertheless, the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe is credited with the first comprehensive articulation of a theory of settler colonialism, heralding a profound shift in colonial studies. Wolfe drew attention to the impacts of the abiding presence of the settler in societies that did not experience structural decolonisation and argued that settler colonial societies are premised on the elimination of Indigenous populations and societies, which are destroyed in order that the settler society might have unfettered access to land that it might claim as its own. Wolfe and others have outlined the ways in which settler colonialism is different from, although intertwined with, classical/franchise colonialism. Edward Watts provides a practical distinction:
[in classical colonialism], a minority exogenous population exploits local resources using the labour of a majority Indigenous population. In settler colonies, an exogenous majority population occupies the colonial space with an eye toward permanent inhabitation, unilateral sovereignty, and [a desire for] the full cultural and demographic removal of the [I]ndigenous populations.
The logic of classical colonialism is, then, the extraction of surplus value through the exploitation of colonised territories and Indigenous labour. Premised on the military and economic agendas of imperial expansions, classical colonialism is underpinned by a capitalist logic of exploitation and was characterised by the departure of colonists following structural political decolonisation. Settler colonialism, however, is focused on the acquisition of territory for permanent settlement through the logic of elimination of Indigenous peoples and their sovereignties to facilitate the construction of a settler state.
Settler colonial studies, therefore, argues that settler colonialism needs to be studied on its own terms because, from the viewpoint of Indigenous peoples, decolonisation has not happened in contexts like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and so on. The emergence of the field in the late 1990s was, thus, a response to postcolonialism and the homogenising tendencies of the theory. In settler colonial contexts, the colonisers came to stay, and that specificity is significant. Wolfe emphasises the importance of analysing how settler colonialism structures the lives of Indigenous peoples and their continuing history. Wolfe reasons that the primary objective of settler colonialism in Australia and beyond was the acquisition of land, and settlers’ access to these new territories was ‘predicated upon displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land.’ Settler colonialism, then, is a nation-building project, and its permanent nature requires continuous maintenance that relies on ‘logic of elimination’ aimed at disappearing Indigenous people and their sovereign entities ‘with that imported by the colonisers’.
Consequently, settler colonial theory emphasises that there is no end to settler colonialism because ‘elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence’. Thus, in settler-colonial contexts, Indigenous dispossession is continuous, making settler colonialism an enduring structure rather than a historical event in the history of capitalist development. Lorenzo Veracini maintains that both settler and classical colonialism are ‘defined by unequal relationships: settler vs native/indigenous in the former and coloniser vs colonised in the latter’. Like Wolfe, Veracini argues that a thriving settler colony is a violent act against geography, in that it transforms Indigenous lands/societies into space and then into a place that mirrors the settlers’ homelands. Thus, the logic of settler colonialism is the political, cultural and demographic elimination of pre-existing sovereign Indigenous entities by settlers seeking to establish a new society and stabilise their control over property and territory.
Systemic inequality is an enduring feature of settler colonialism. Colonial domination may take different forms, but as Enrich Steinman has argued, the ‘processes of [permanent] settlement institutionalise settler privileges materially and discursively’. Settler societies achieve dominant status by structuring economic and socio-political systems to benefit the settler class and often use racial violence to erase or weaken Indigenous sovereignties. Such violence manifests in entrenched inequalities of outcomes (land ownership, income wealth and educational attainment) and opportunities (access to economic gains and political power).
Settler colonialism is shaped by global histories of colonial structures, and like other imperialist endeavours, it is underpinned by white supremacy. It is this whiteness that rationalises the logic of possessive ownership that defines colonialism of all kinds. And so, like the European colonisers of the so-called Third World, settler-colonists justify their elimination of the natives and the appropriation of their lands and resources by racialising Indigenous peoples as ‘primitive’ and ‘savages’ who need civilisation. In this sense, indigeneity is located in the past, while whiteness is identified with the present and future. Settler-colonisers understand themselves to be culturally and intellectually superior and, therefore, as the proper managers of the civilising mission of the present and future. As Macoun and Strakosch explain, settler-colonial societies utilise both exclusionary and inclusionary practices and policies as ‘twin strategies’ that function dialectically to reinforce settler supremacy. These policies and practices are strategies of elimination because ‘the settler project imagines the beginning of settler society to coincide exactly with the end of Aboriginal society’. Consequently, the settler state’s strategies of reconciliation/ recognition of Indigenous entities all ‘serve the settler colonial attainment of sovereign legitimacy and the extinguishment of Aboriginal political challenges to the state’.
643The field excludes decolonised Africa---West Africa is barely in the literature at all.
Vaughan and Maddison 25 — Franka Vaughan and Sarah Maddison. April 2. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Settler Colonial Studies, “Thinking through the history of Liberia’s formation with settler colonial theory,” vol. 15, no. 4, p. 726-747, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2025.2485741 Clopus
In other words, by establishing new societies, settler colonialism involves the destruction of Indigenous societies and the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the seizure and privatisation of Indigenous lands, and the exploitation of marginalised groups in a capitalist system founded on white supremacy. These dynamics are evident in Liberia, where the encounter between the Black settlers and the Indigenous Africans represented a defining moment in the racialisation of the Indigenous peoples as ‘primitive’. Upon independence from the American Colonisation Society (ACS), the Black settlers advanced a settler-colonial relationship with the Indigenous Africans. Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard captures the settler-colonial relationship articulated here and discussed further in the subsequent sections (albeit in the context of Canada) as a ‘relationship characterised by a particular form of domination’ where ‘power has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority’. Like other settler societies, inequalities in Liberia emanate from socio-historical processes and structures that have produced uneven political and economic development outcomes that persist to this day. It is significant to note that African countries such as Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and others provided the context for some of the formative work of settler colonial studies. Nevertheless, these countries are relegated to the fringes of the theoretical framework because of their decolonised status. Additionally, the relatively small settler populations in these cases raise questions about the framework’s applicability to the African context, as well as the indigeneity of African native groups. Little of this literature engages with West Africa, with Liberia being a rare exception.
644Their demand is a break with US security policy---that is a decision, and the plan makes it.
Campbell 20 — Horace G. Campbell. Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. Africa Development, “The Quagmire of US Militarism in Africa,” vol. 45, no. 1, p. 73-115, https://journals.codesria.org/index.php/ad/article/view/653 Clopus
Sustainable peace and a transformation of the militarised institutions that have been established in Africa since the colonial era requires a break with the old US security policies. This author has joined in the forces of peace that are working to build a new pan-African peace infrastructure for Africans and peace-loving peoples all over the world. Such an infrastructure project must break with the pre-occupation with strategic minerals and energy that is based on the extraction of petroleum resources. Peace and transformation in Africa is inseparable from a break with environmental destruction in Africa. Just as how there is now an understanding in the US that the society needs an economic recovery programme that is based on the green collar economy, there is also an understanding in Africa that African economic transformation must be built around the provision of food, clothing, shelter and health care for its citizens. This also involves the fight against militarised global apartheid.