The Violence of Settler Imperialism – and Why the Concept of Coloniality Cannot Grasp It

TY - JOUR

T1 - The Violence of Settler Imperialism – and Why the Concept of Coloniality Cannot Grasp It

AU - Rosenow, Doerthe

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2023.

PY - 2023/10/20

Y1 - 2023/10/20

N2 - Against a background of ongoing public and academic debate about how to best address the legacies of colonialism and slavery, there is now an ever-expanding body of International Relations (IR) literature that makes use of the concept of ‘coloniality’. Indeed, coloniality, which attempts to make sense of past and ongoing colonial oppression in global terms, seems a particularly apt concept for IR, which, after all, is interested in understanding the nature of global power. This article is critical of the way that coloniality is increasingly used in a unitary ‘catch-all’ manner to describe global colonial domination in often unspecific ways. It argues, based on an in-depth exegesis of key Latin American decolonial texts, that the way the concept has been developed makes certain colonial violence, and the resistance against it, invisible; with the violence of (global) settler colonialism being a prominent example. Using and further developing Jodi Byrd’s concepts of transit and settler imperialism, in dialogue with Latin American settler colonial literature and radical Black thought, this article aims to bring this violence to the forefront of IR debate. I will conclude by elaborating on the concrete consequences that understanding ongoing colonial violence with the help of these concepts has for thinking about decolonisation in IR.

AB - Against a background of ongoing public and academic debate about how to best address the legacies of colonialism and slavery, there is now an ever-expanding body of International Relations (IR) literature that makes use of the concept of ‘coloniality’. Indeed, coloniality, which attempts to make sense of past and ongoing colonial oppression in global terms, seems a particularly apt concept for IR, which, after all, is interested in understanding the nature of global power. This article is critical of the way that coloniality is increasingly used in a unitary ‘catch-all’ manner to describe global colonial domination in often unspecific ways. It argues, based on an in-depth exegesis of key Latin American decolonial texts, that the way the concept has been developed makes certain colonial violence, and the resistance against it, invisible; with the violence of (global) settler colonialism being a prominent example. Using and further developing Jodi Byrd’s concepts of transit and settler imperialism, in dialogue with Latin American settler colonial literature and radical Black thought, this article aims to bring this violence to the forefront of IR debate. I will conclude by elaborating on the concrete consequences that understanding ongoing colonial violence with the help of these concepts has for thinking about decolonisation in IR.

KW - coloniality

KW - Indigenous politics

KW - settler colonialism

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85174467929

U2 - 10.1177/03058298231202554

DO - 10.1177/03058298231202554

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85174467929

SN - 0305-8298

VL - 52

JO - Millennium: Journal of International Studies

JF - Millennium: Journal of International Studies

IS - 2

ER -