Colonial Violence Research Articles

Colonialism, Christian Realism and Mission as Translation.

Nigel Biggar’s controversial 2023 book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is explicitly founded on his concept of ‘Christian realism’ in assessing the legacies of European colonialism and, by implication, European-led Christian mission. This paper explores what this realism means, contrasting it with Jacques Ellul’s stricter realism in his stronger criticisms of colonial violence. However, I contend that the missing piece in both these assessments of Christian history is the need for a realistic analysis of the post-colonial growth of the church in the Global South (Africa in particular). Lamin Sanneh’s emphases on mission as translation and on indigenous agency provide a welcome counterpoint to Biggar and Ellul’s focus on what the West may or may not have done.

Material Realities and Ideological Paradigms in Afterlives: A Marxist Reimagining

Background: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) explores the aftermath of German colonial rule in an unnamed coastal town in East Africa, shedding light on how imperial economic agendas shaped and disrupted local lives. The novel critiques the far-reaching consequences of German colonial capitalism by portraying how systems of education, law, culture, and ideology were weaponized to establish a superstructure that justified and sustained material exploitation. Methods: This study adopts Karl Marx’s and Raymond Williams’s theory of base and superstructure to analyze both the tangible and intangible dimensions of colonial domination. It investigates how material exploitation operates through forced labor, military conscription, and social hierarchies, while ideological control is exercised through educational indoctrination, the promise of "civilization," and religious authority. Character trajectories are used as lenses to examine these intersecting modes of control. Results: The characters—Ilyas, Afiya, Khalifa, and Hamza—serve as case studies of individuals caught within the machinery of empire. Despite appearing to benefit from German rule through employment or association, they suffered emotional detachment, cultural dislocation, and internalized oppression. The colonial system maintains power not merely through force but through ideological instruments that obscure the nature of exploitation, leading to a distorted perception of material progress. Conclusion: The novel dramatizes a fundamental tension between the economic base and the ideological superstructure. It reveals how colonial institutions outlast political occupation, continuing to affect the thoughts, identities, and relationships of formerly colonized subjects. The narrative thus critiques not only colonial violence but also the lingering ideological residues that inhibit true liberation.Novelty: This study argues that the German colonial project in East Africa marks a period of deep psychological and socio-political trauma, where material gains such as education and employment failed to liberate the colonized. Instead, they reinforced dependence and obedience. The novel portrays a gradual awakening among the characters, suggesting that freedom only becomes possible through the decolonization of material conditions and internalized beliefs. This dual insight into structural and psychological liberation distinguishes the novel and enriches postcolonial discourse.

Trauma and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: J.M.Coetzee’s Age of Iron

This paper examines the representation of trauma in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron through a postcolonial ecofeminist lens, highlighting the intersections of bodily suffering, colonial violence, and environmental degradation. It argues that trauma in the novel manifests as both physical deterioration and moral conflict, reflecting the enduring scars of apartheid and colonial oppression. Mrs. Curren’s cancer-ridden body parallels the deterioration of the land, illustrating the entanglement of human suffering and ecological devastation. Through an analysis of trauma witnessing, ethical dilemmas, and the loss of identity, this study reveals how Coetzee intertwines individual and collective trauma within a postcolonial ecofeminist framework. By foregrounding the ecological dimensions of trauma, this paper expands existing postcolonial and feminist critiques, highlighting the underexplored intersections between bodily affliction and environmental violence. It further explores the rupture caused by ecological destruction and colonial dispossession, ultimately questioning whether healing and regeneration are possible within Coetzee’s postcolonial ecofeminist vision. This study contributes to trauma studies, postcolonial criticism, and ecofeminism by elucidating Coetzee’s critique of colonial legacies and the interwoven nature of trauma and ecological crisis.

Is Gravity Jewish?

Abstract This article proposes that Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow be read not in terms of the entropic but the diasporic. Such a reading departs from a postmodernist reading of the novel and enable the following three claims: first, that the very form of the novel is diasporic and Jewish as is its vision of colonial modernity; second, that the violence of this modernity embodied in the Holocaust is metonymically continuous with the violence of colonialism; and third, that the novel permits a recasting of the Jewish question in terms of empire, migration, and violence as opposed to terms of nation and rights. Pynchon’s novel offers a counternarrative of Jewishness in the postwar era. In lieu of familiar narratives of assimilation, prosperity, and nationhood, Pynchon’s novel suggests Jewish belonging, or the Jewish question, remains as not just a vexing problem but a ubiquitous and universal one of the postwar order whose emergence it describes.

Naming, sustaining, nurturing: Tensions, resistances and possibilities of Education, Antiracism and Decoloniality

In the spring of 2024, we issued a call for a thematic number titled “Education, antiracism and decoloniality: tensions, resistances, and possibilities” as part of Educação, Sociedade & Culturas [Education, Society & Cultures], a multilingual journal of CIIE – Centre for Research and Intervention in Education of the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto, Portugal, as a result of an open call for special issues promoted by the Journal. At the time, the call for contributions stated that, in the face of particularly vicious contemporary colonial and racist violence, it is vital to call upon all antiracist and decolonial powers to understand current struggles and envision transformed futures. Keeping engaged in critical reflections about antiracist and decolonial struggles seems more necessary than ever as contexts become more urgent and demanding, and we witness a growing – and increasingly more explicit – backlash against diversity, antiracism and decoloniality.

Exploring Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee Through Trauma Theory And Postmemory

This paper examines Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee through Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. It argues that Caruth’s notion of trauma - as an event not fully experienced in the moment but reemerging through involuntary repetitions and disruptions - explains Dictee’s non-linear, fractured narrative. The text’s frequent silences, gaps, and linguistic ruptures reveal how colonial, and war trauma remain unspoken, and resurface through fragmented testimonies and archival materials. Similarly, Hirsch’s concept of postmemory demonstrates how Cha, born after Korea’s colonial period, reconstructs a past she never directly experienced. Through multilingual experimentation, shifting narrative perspectives, and the integration of historical figures into personal and national memory, Dictee reflects postmemory by reinterpreting and embodying inherited trauma instead of merely narrating it. By engaging with both belated trauma and postmemory, Dictee deconstructs a linear historical narrative and instead presents a fragmented, multi-voiced testimony to the ongoing impact of colonial violence and displacement.

Colonization, complicity and resistance: A Fanonian discussion of the ‘Soldier Matrix’

Addressing concerns around positioning, (un)knowing, and action in relation to current geopolitical events, specifically the current Middle East context, this article offers some speculative analyses from my own perspective as a UK-based Jewish group analyst. Retracing the trajectory of my associative process, it considers sociocultural as well as individual defensive processes at play in remembering and responding to both past and current existential threats. I start by reflecting on French suppression of the memory of Vichy-Nazi occupation as seen in sublimated form within the writings of Holocaust survivor and author Georges Perec. Some disjunctions between Israeli Jewish and Diasporic Jewish identifications (both attributed and assumed) in relation to the Holocaust/Shoah are also considered. This traumatic history is set alongside Frantz Fanon’s account of the devastating impacts of racialization and colonial violence to reconsider both forms of resistance to, and resistance to knowing about, such violence. Group analytic discussions of ‘chosen trauma’ and the ‘soldier matrix’ are evaluated as analytical resources exploring subjective states enabling the current Israeli state genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The article concludes by addressing wider geopolitical responsibilities and positionings at play in maintaining—and hopefully ending—the current genocide, highlighting the urgent need to take up calls to ‘de-identify’ from national identities to counter settler colonial logics .

Russophilia and Justifications of Russian Imperialism: Reflections on Dostoyevsky in Psychoanalysis as the Mirror of Rationalizing Russian Colonial Violence

ABSTRACT Russophilia, or the valoration of the supposed “greatness” and superiority of Russian culture and politics, especially paralleled with purposeful erasure of its engagement in violent ideologies and acts, has been present in “Western” (i.e. external to Russia) accounts, including in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic contributions on Fyodor Dostoyevsky as a “great” literary and allegedly psychologically salubrious figure are illustrative of this tendency. Russophilic filters are evident in how and what works by Dostoyevsky are read in psychoanalysis while Freud’s original appraisals of Dostoyevsky’s social and political sadism are minimized or expunged. These Russophilic tendencies in relation to Dostoyevsky parallel similar processes of continued promotion of Russian and Soviet imperialism, which are used to rationalize current Russian aggression toward Ukraine, including among psychoanalytic intellectuals. This contribution conceptualizes these trends via psychoanalytic theories on group psychology and social defenses against realities of cultural-political sadism, totalitarianism, and ideological intellectualizing.

Strategies for Colonizing Death: The Online Dead, Griefbots, and Transhumanist Dragons

Digital immortality and transhumanist longevity proposals are currently researched and debated independently. This essay claims that both ideas represent two sides of the same cultural denial of death, reconceptualizing them as interconnected forms of thanato-colonialism. The first form includes the digital immortality industry, in both its passive and active versions. Interpreted from the framework of data colonialism, digital immortality represents a masterful maneuver, guaranteeing that the dead can continue to contribute to the extractive logic of this new economy by endlessly generating data and serving as bait for the appropriation of human lives. In this way, data colonialism is no longer constrained by physical disappearance—transforming death itself into a profitable colonization strategy. The second kind of thanato-colonialism surfaces within the transhumanist imaginaries, which inherit the violence of historical colonialism and resort to the argument of progress to justify their ends. Nick Bostrom’s fable of the Dragon Tyrant allegorizes old age as a mythological beast, an archetype of the “other”—fundamentally different, threatening, and impossible to negotiate with—who must be subdued without contemplation. A team of engineers—humanity’s saviors—is tasked with slaying it.

Kinship Relations and Decolonial Solidarity in Chelsea Vowel’s Métis Futurism

This article explores two short stories by Métis writer Chelsea Vowel, “Buffalo Bird” and “Maggie Sue,” from her collection Buffalo Is the New Buffalo (2022), focusing on principles of kinship relations present in various Indigenous cosmologies. These involve relations with nonhuman animals, the land, and natural forces, and I argue that such notion of kinship can be crucial for decolonial manifestations of solidarity. Where Euro-Western conceptualizations of solidarity seldom extend beyond human relations, decolonial solidarity guided by kinship principles will most effectively uncover histories, past and present, of colonial oppression and violence against Indigenous peoples and land. This will also contribute to the creation of worlds otherwise, like those (re)imagined in Vowel’s stories, where Indigenous lives may thrive.

Children as parties of encounter on Australian frontiers: girls in colonial Victoria, 1835–1856

ABSTRACT Indigenous-settler relations on antipodean frontiers have been well analysed by numerous scholars, yet the actors and agents are usually framed as adult and often male. Focusing on the Australian colony of Victoria from its invasion in 1835 to the mid-1850s, I position young people as parties of encounter in this contact zone. I focus on three case studies of settler girls with vastly different upbringings who interacted with First Nations communities near their homes. Using contemporary writings, memoir and art, I demonstrate that the complex cross-cultural encounters and relationships formed between Indigenous peoples and settler children could at once reinforce and unsettle settler colonial imperatives. I show that positioning girls as interlocutors and contributors within a settler colonial context illustrates how colonial violence was embedded in domestic domains. However, the connections between Aboriginal peoples and these settler girls could unsettle and resist the negation and elimination of Indigenous sovereignty. By centring settler children’s experiences within the processes of dispossession which characterised the invasion of the Australian continent, this article unsettles understandings of the settler colonial frontier and expands conceptions of who could be an actor in this context.

A scoping review of harm reduction practices and possibilities among indigenous populations in Australia, Canada, and the United States.

A scoping review of harm reduction practices and possibilities among indigenous populations in Australia, Canada, and the United States.

Decolonizing Feminisms

Abstract This state-of-the-field essay explores decolonizing feminisms through consideration of four recent books: the twentieth-anniversary edition of Aileen Morton Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2021), White Tears/Brown Scars (2020) by Ruby Hamas, Rehearsals for Living (2022) by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Becoming Kin (2022) by Patty Krawec. It examines such themes as white feminist complicity with colonial white supremacist violence, the collective survival wisdom of Indigenous and Black women, abolition, and the revolutionary potential of becoming kin. It also makes clear that accountability and action are fundamental components of becoming accomplices in the war against dominant social systems of oppression.

Children's agency and well-being in spaces shaped by colonial violence: A participatory methodology

In recent decades, the discourse surrounding children's participation in research has undergone a profound transformation, shedding light on their evolving role from passive subjects to active agents. This shift has placed a strong emphasis on incorporating participatory methodologies while researching with children, which enables us to capture their perspectives and place them at the core of the research process. In this study, to explore the experiences of Palestinian children growing up in a refugee camp, we present an innovative and participatory methodology known as “walk-along.” This approach allows children to guide the research through the fabric of their daily lives, actively engaging and sharing their unique perspectives. Our findings highlight the many ways in which Palestinian children utilize their physical, social, and political environment as a source of well-being and survival, providing invaluable insights into their everyday agentic practices. Furthermore, our findings underscore the significance of giving voice to marginalized and vulnerable populations, such as children living in conflict-affected regions, and highlight the invaluable insights that can be gleaned when they are actively engaged in the research process.

Listening to Silent Geographies of Indigenous Self-Determination

Silence is often written about as a negative by-product of colonial violence, a response to intergenerational trauma, sexual assault, abuse, and other forms of direct and indirect violence that silences survivors from telling their own stories. This article explores how Indigenous peoples in diaspora refuse damage-centered narratives by selectively telling their own stories and harnessing a collective silence as a form of self-determination that prioritizes the survival of future generations. Indigenous peoples in diaspora then engage with silence as pedagogy by learning how to listen to silence, a form of place making that gives rise to silent geographies. Silence, in this sense, is more than just a by-product of violence or lack of substance. Silence is the way that the voiceless speak, the way that diasporic communities learn from one another, and the way they continue to dream with their ancestors. Silent geographies are worlds where silence is woven into the fabric of affective knowledge, and listening to nondiscursive forms of storytelling offers pathways toward healing and reconciliation.

Student talk, everyday colonialism, and the Aotearoa New Zealand history curriculum

ABSTRACT This article interrogates claims that the implementation of newly prescribed history content in New Zealand English-medium schools can help students understand the present day. It draws on discussions with 14- and 15-year-old students following a unit of history lessons that prompted many students to reassess familiar nationalist narratives. The article explores how a logic of what Mark Rifkin terms ‘settler common sense’ informed what are deemed to be practical and desirable ways of discussing colonisation and appropriate responses to this history. Attending to this common sense helps to reveal settler colonialism as an ongoing remaking that is renewed to respond to moves to confront histories of colonial violence. However, responses to the confiscation of Māori land, and different conceptions of land, also reveal a threshold to this logic. Examining this threshold illustrates the ways that understanding how history shapes the present requires pedagogies that make explicit the dominant ways of knowing and belonging.

On the monopoly of violence: Ideal types of settler colonial violence and the habitus of sumud

Political sociologists have articulated state-making as the concentration of power and violence within state apparatuses. However, classical theories have often overlooked the distinctive characteristics of settler colonial nation-state formation, whose raison d’état is the preservation of settler sovereignty and supremacy, accumulated largely through practices of dispossession, appropriation, subjugation, and elimination, and whose power is dispersed at times to settler-citizens. Examining the case of Israel, and identifying divergent ideal types of settler colonial violence, the article pinpoints the unique features that define Israel as a settler colonial state. Moreover, it explores how the monopoly on violence is variably applied depending on contingent dynamics, and dialectical interactions with the indigenous and their habitus of sumud (steadfastness). The analysis delves into the themes of state violence and the state of exception, examining the case of the ‘Dignity Intifada’ in May 2021, alongside the genocidal war since October 7, 2023. By comprehending the material and symbolic processes shaping the persistence of settler colonialism in its different formations, the article contributes to a nuanced understanding how ‘war-by-other-means’ and indigenous resistance both endure.

Environmental injustice in Russia: internal and settler colonialism in the 21st century extractivist empire

ABSTRACT This review explores the colonial land practices employed by Imperial and Soviet Russia and their enduring influence on environmental inequality in contemporary Russia. Drawing on secondary histories and academic literature in Russian and English, it situates Russian environmental issues within global patterns of colonial ecological violence, emphasizing the historical and ongoing exploitation of Indigenous lands, the marginalization of ethnic minorities, and centralized governance reliant on extractive industries. By employing the decolonial lens, this paper bridges the macro-historical processes of Russian imperialism with micro-level research on resource extraction and pollution. In so doing, it contributes a nuanced perspective on how enduring colonial structures and centralized governance perpetuate environmental inequalities. By synthesizing insights from Environmental Sociology and Russian Area Studies, this paper addresses existing gaps in understanding how colonial legacies shape the contemporary unequal distribution of pollution and environmental harm. The review calls for a decolonial environmental justice lens to analyze these systemic inequalities and to challenge state-promoted narratives of equality, prosperity, and the denial of colonialism in Russia’s history.

Far From Ypres: Colonial Violence and the Shadow of the Great War in Turkana

ABSTRACT The Turkana Patrol of 1918 is an often-overlooked episode in Britain’s colonisation of East Africa. The Turkana Patrol occupies a liminal position within established lines of discipline and historiographical periodisation; it took place in the shadow of the First World War, long after many of Britain’s wars of colonial conquest had come to an end, in the remote homeland of the nomadic Turkana people. This article seeks to place the violent British efforts to subjugate the Turkana in the wider ideological context of militarism and imperialism in the immediate aftermath of WWI. I argue that the British officers who participated in the Turkana Patrol and the subsequent administration of the Turkana region perceived the violence that they perpetrated against their Turkana adversaries as upholding the paradigms of racial hierarchy, imperialism and militarism that had been called into question by the mechanised slaughter of WWI. British narratives of the 1918 Turkana Patrol represented a counter-discourse to the literary and popular criticisms of militarism and imperialism that emerged from WWI, with depictions of colonial violence acting as a form of escapism into prewar notions of imperial certainty and righteous violence. Furthermore, I contend that, although the British failed to fully conquer Turkana, the writings of British officers who served in the region demonstrate that the existence of unconquered peoples such as the Turkana was an essential justification for the continuation of the imperial order. This essay, based on memoirs and archival materials, illuminates how the traumas of WWI and the anxieties engendered by postwar societal upheaval in the West were reflected in and exorcised through colonial violence.

Salmon propagation and settler colonialism in California: the United States Fish Commission, the McCloud River Hatchery, and the dispossession of the Winnemem Wintu

ABSTRACT Congress created the United States Fish Commission (USFC) in 1871 to investigate the causes of fish diminution on the Atlantic seaboard, but the USFC’s remit soon expanded from study to intervention. In settler California, the USFC set up one of its first hatcheries for chinook salmon propagation on the McCloud River, a tributary of the Sacramento. In so doing, the USFC dispossessed and subordinated the Winnemem Wintu people who lived on the river, a sad story of colonial violence that has been downplayed in existing historiography. The USFC distributed the products of this hatchery – millions of chinook salmon eggs and juvenile fish – across America and to foreign nations interested in fish ‘acclimatization’, the contemporary term for non-native species introductions. New Zealander and Australian acclimatization societies contracted with the USFC in the 1870s and 1880s to introduce chinook salmon there in hopes of aggressively remaking waters to better suit the culinary tastes and angling preferences of European-descended settlers. Over time, the salmon productivity of the river declined, ceasing entirely with the Shasta Dam’s construction in the 1940s. But in an exemplar of Indigenous resilience and environmental stewardship, today the Wintu are leading efforts to restore chinook salmon to the river.