On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

by Adam Kirsch

settler colonialism is best understood not as a historical concept but as an ideology,

I look at how this way of thinking developed, what it has to say about America and Israel, and why it falls prey to some of the same crucial errors as earlier radical ideologies. Indeed, the main reason why I believe it’s important to reckon with the idea of settler colonialism is that I see it leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory, in ways that are all too familiar in modern history.

For many academics and activists, describing Israel as a settler colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack, because for them the term encapsulates a whole series of ideological convictions—about Israel and Palestine, but also about history and many social and political issues, from the environment to gender to capitalism.

What is new about settler colonialism is the idea that this original injustice is being renewed at every moment through various forms of oppression, some obvious, others invisible. Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler.

The concept is so fertile because it offers a political theory of original sin. Settler colonialism means that the violence involved in a nation’s founding continues to define every aspect of its life, even after centuries—its economic arrangements, environmental practices, gender relations. The only way for a society to purge that sin is to decolonize,

land acknowledgments

serve to ritually renew the audience’s responsibility for the act of dispossession, in accordance with the settler colonial view of history. The institution making the acknowledgment affirms its virtue by confirming its guilt.

On October 7, Hamas did more than imagine it. By killing old people and children inside the borders of Israel, it acted on the principle that every citizen of a settler colonial state is a fair target, because none of them has a right to be there.

But part of the appeal of radical ideologies, of the right and the left, is that they make violence virtuous.

Like other radical ideologies, this one can be difficult to oppose because it is rooted in a praiseworthy moral instinct: indignation against injustice.

Unfortunately, indignation against past injustice is not a sufficient basis for remedying it. On the contrary, history shows that it can easily become the source of new injustices.

In exploring the ideology of settler colonialism, we will see that it falls into many of the errors to which radical ideologies are traditionally prone. It attributes many different varieties of injustice to the same abstraction and promises that slaying this dragon will end them all. It cultivates hatred for people and institutions it sees as obstacles to redemption, and even justifies violence against them. And it offers a distorted account of history, to make it easier to divide the world into the guilty and the innocent. These ways of thinking have traditionally produced disastrous results, and the ideology of settler colonialism is already leading idealistic, educated young people down a similar path. That makes it urgent to understand where the idea comes from and where it is likely to lead.

In the 1980s and ’90s, however, the definition of settler colonialism underwent a crucial shift as Australian theorists began to apply the term to their own country, even though it did not meet the traditional definition of a colony.

Unlike French Algeria, Australia was not governed by its mother country, maintaining merely formal ties to Great Britain through the British Commonwealth. And unlike South Africa, there was no settler class ruling over a native population. Rather, in Australia as in the United States, a white, European-descended population had largely replaced indigenous peoples.

anthropologist Patr...

For Wolfe, unlike for Good, this form of society is not defined by a settler class exploiting indigenous labor. Rather, he argues that the creation of settler colonies required clearing the land for a new society, which meant getting rid of the people already living there.

In this new definition, settler colonies are precisely those countries—like Australia, Canada, and the United States—where people do not think of themselves as settlers, because they have taken over the land so successfully that they see themselves as natives. Wolfe sums up his definition of settler colonialism in an often-quoted sentence: “The colonizers came to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.”

the passage of time can never turn these invaders or their descendants into authentic inhabitants.

What is distinctive about the ideology of settler colonialism is that it proposes a new syllogism: if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.

expand the definition of genocide

condemn every possible relationship between settler and native.

Indeed, because settler colonialism is such a comprehensive crime, extending hundreds of years into the past and embracing every facet of society, it is very difficult to imagine how it might be overcome, or even what it would mean to overcome it. This makes the struggle against settler colonialism essentially different from other progressive causes.

This dead end became unavoidable the moment settler colonialism was redefined to describe countries like the United States and Australia, rather than countries like Algeria and Rhodesia.

If the definition of a progressive movement is that it believes the future can be better than the past, then the ideology of settler colonialism is not progressive, because it believes the past was better than the future. Its impossible goal is to turn the clock back to the world that existed before 1788 or 1607 or 1492.

The struggle against settler colonialism, by contrast, indicts the many in pursuit of justice for the few.

demand that cannot be satisfied even in principle, since the only way to undo the wrongs of settlement would be for America never to have existed.

This counterfactual aspiration removes the ideology of settler colonialism from the realm of politics, which helps explain why it has only a limited appeal to the people it claims to vindicate—Native Americans.

the discourse of settler colonialism in the United States. It is primarily a conversation among “settlers” about their own identity, and what it offers is less a program for action than a political theology. Ironically, it has clear parallels with the Calvinist theology of predestination that inspired the first New England settlers, the Puritans, long ago in colonial Massachusetts.

For the Puritans, it was urgently necessary to bring people to an understanding of their fallenness, since it is only after embracing guilt that the workings of grace can begin. The ideology of settler colonialism thrives on a similar paradox. By insisting that settler colonial societies are guilty of an irredeemable crime, it validates the most extreme criticism and denunciation of those societies, as long as it can be cast in the language of decolonization. The goal is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist. One of the most potent ways to do this is to teach Americans a new way of thinking about the history of their country.

One of King’s most effective strategies was to develop a new understanding of American history that didn’t completely repudiate the traditional one.

he compared the “magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” to a promissory note that, for Black Americans, had never been paid. The goal of the civil rights movement was to force the United States to make good on its promises, to pay its debt. With this metaphor, King recast America’s historical failure as an opportunity. By finally achieving racial equality, the United States could become the country it had always claimed to be.

One of the goals of the ideology of settler colonialism is to discredit this hopeful narrative. For the metaphor of America’s unpaid debt works only if a creditor wants that debt to be paid—that is, if their demand is full inclusion in American society.

The difference between the language of civil rights and the language of decolonization is that the former aims to perfect America, while the latter rejects it.

it follows that, in seeking equality with white Americans, Blacks are embracing the guilt of the settler.

Seen through the lens of settler colonialism, it makes little difference that Europeans came to the United States voluntarily while Africans were sold into slavery, since the end result is the same: both are now living where they don’t belong.

the grievances of settler colonialism can’t be redressed in the framework of multiculturalism.

this difference between history and settler colonial studies is that the former is primarily interested in the past, while the latter is primarily interested in using a story about the past to change the present. And for that purpose, it’s necessary to make the past as morally legible as possible. One way of accomplishing this is to describe the violence of white settlers against Natives, while omitting any mention of the violence deployed by Natives resisting settler expansion.

Settler colonial studies inherits this tradition of moralizing against Western vice by exalting Native virtue.

settler colonialism, which is less interested in the reality of the past than in the construction of an alternative future.

on the question of exactly how settler colonialism is to disappear, and what will take its place when it does, settler colonial studies tends to slip into evasive pieties.

In the meantime, there is critique. Because invasion is a structure, not an event, one way to combat it—perhaps the only way actually available today—is to deconstruct the social order founded by settler colonialism. This requires a double struggle: a public one against political and economic institutions, and a private one against the assumptions and behaviors that make us individually complicit, often in ways we hardly suspect until they are pointed out. These baleful legacies constitute “settler ways of being,” a totalizing yet nonspecific term that makes it possible to blame virtually anything one objects to in modern American life—from selfishness to strip mining to the scientific method—on the original sin of settler colonialism.

the claim that settler colonialism is behind every variety of social injustice

implies that settlers think about the world in a way that necessarily produces evil, today no less than in the seventeenth century. The continued existence of injustices like racism and sexism is proof that settler ways of being persist in us, and we in them.

For the ideology of settler colonialism, the essence of this evil disposi...

This rapacity is the nexus between colonialism and the “interlocking forms of oppression” it sponsors. In taking for granted that he should grab as much of the world as he can, the settler assumes that no one else has rights that need to be respected.

Attributing those evils to an abstraction called settler colonialism, however, creates a serious obstacle to effective political action. It suggests that every desirable social outcome—economic equality, environmental conservation, sexual liberation, an end to racism—is not only compatible but in a sense identical. If settler colonialism is a hydra—or, as a group of public health experts wrote in 2023, “a shapeshifter with tools and technologies that evolve in conjunction with other oppressive structures (e.g., heteropatriarchy and white supremacy)”13 —then once the monster is slain, all these evils will disappear at the same time. The great appeal of radical ideologies has always been this promise of a final solution. But history shows that once it becomes clear that slaying the hydra has not solved all problems—that different goals appeal to different constituencies and often require incompatible policies—the only solution radicalism can offer is to keep looking for shapeshifters, this time in its own ranks.

The ideology of settler colonialism offers a presentiment of this failure in its inability to specify what decolonization would actually mean or look like.

The idea that settler colonialism is responsible for this insatiable appetite ignores the fact that, of the five countries with the highest carbon emissions in 2020, only the United States can be considered a settler colonial society. For China and India, the huge growth of their carbon emissions is in fact an anti-colonial victory, showing that countries formerly dominated by the West can achieve industrial might.

for settler colonial studies, this modern voracity for knowledge bears an uncomfortable resemblance to colonialism’s insatiable desire for land.

Thus it is not only political and economic institutions that cry out for decolonization. Abolishing settler colonialism means transforming the ways that we individually experience and understand the world. To avoid every practice that has been condemned as a settler way of being, one would have to renounce things like moving from one place to another