Settler Colonialism
revisiting Raymond Williams' Keywords
In 1976, Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which explored the meanings of concepts within the context of the social, political, and economic transformations of the post-World War II period. After a 1983 revision, it grew to contain 176 entries. Much has changed since the 20th century, including the end of the Cold War, the advent of neoliberalism, an intensifying climate crisis, the rise of far-right extremism, and religious nationalism. What are the most important keywords for understanding the central experiences of our current political moment?
Thus begins the call for contributions organized by the editors of the journal Dialectical Anthropology.
My contribution to the collection is a commentary on the terms ‘settler’ and ‘settler colonialism’ [read in full here] and was published May 4, 2026. For some time now I have tried to avoid the analytically vacant term ‘settler.’ This published article dives head on into the murky terrain of a term that has become freighted with moral turpitude. An insult veiled as an analytic term.
Settler, it might seem, is easy to define. It is someone who takes up residence in someone else’s home. When settler is tied to an economic intention to exploit, occupy, or otherwise encroach upon other people’s land we find ourselves in the terrain of settler colonialism.
I go on to say:
The rhetorical utility of ‘settler colonialism’ lies in its ability to draw a sharp line between right and wrong, good and bad. It lumps all those (new immigrant or old; white, asian, or black) who are not Indigenous into one category. It simplifies and it allows clarity in discourse. It offers a simple decolonial solution – sublimate the settler within the Indigenous and dissolve the settler structures. But beyond the rhetorical, how does one actually ‘decolonize’ a settler state? Send the settlers home? Adopt the settlers into the Indigenous world? Throw out the colonial state apparatus and replace it with ‘the’ Indigenous one? This may sound like an abstract question, but in parts of our world this abstraction is worked out through interpersonal violence, expulsion, and armed conflict.
Sometimes something that has elegance in it’s simplicity enables brutality in its execution.
Paired against the malevolent settler has emerged a stereotyped ideal of The Indigenous that has been applied way beyond its conceptualization more familiar in BC. Groups once self-identified as oppressed nationalities can now be found claiming to be Indigenous in ways that belie history and empirical reality. When categories shift from the analytic to moral violence often follows as ethnonationalists justify their atrocities as morally just acts of resistance. Deploying settler in this frame balkanizes debate and silences reasoned conversation. It turns settlers into fair game for mass murder and the global Indigenous into valiant agents of resistance whose acts of brutality are poetically celebrated by erstwhile progressive anthropologists.
The above cherry picked passages highlight some of the conclussions of my piece, but not all of it. Part of the story also involves the shift from a class-struggle politics in the mid-20th century to the ethno-nationalist and identity-based politics of the contemporary moment. It also picks up on the idea of the ‘ontological’ turn that roots itself in essentialist notions of irreconcilable difference. It’s not a long piece, but I trust it may well be thought provoking.
It is unfortunately not open access, so needs to be viewed via subscription or a university research library (or with this author-share link). The DOI URL is: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-026-09840-z .