Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview

Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the present as a thing of the past. In this book, Lorenzo Veracini explores the settler colonial `situation' and explains how there is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler colonialism because settler colonialism itself is a resillent formation that rarely ends. Not all migrants are settlers: settles are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity. And settler colonialism is not colonialism: settlers want indigenous people to vanish, although often only once their labour indigenous people to vanish, although often only once their labour has been exploited. Sometimes settler colonial forms operate within colonial ones, sometimes they subvert them, and sometimes they replace them. But even if colonialism and settler colonialism interpenetrate and overlap, they remain separate as they co-define each other.

Lorenzo Veracini is Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Israel and Settler Society.