Articles by: Lorenzo Veracini

Author Biography:

Lorenzo Veracini is Associate Professor of History at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His [research] (https://swinburne.academia.edu/LorenzoVeracini) focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism as a mode of domination. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006), Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010) and The Settler Colonial Present (2015). He co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (2016), manages the settler-colonial studies [blog] (https://settlercolonialstudies.blog/), and is founding editor of Settler Colonial Studies. His next book, The World Turned Inside Out: Global History of a Political Idea, is forthcoming with Verso.

A Virus Is Colonising Our Public Life

Viruses, bacteria and colonialism are related; the connection linking colonialism and pathogens is metaphorical as well as literal. We can make sense of one by referring to the others.

Informit: Containment, elimination, settler colonialism

One of the founding statements of settler colonial studies as an autonomous scholarly field, a field that has consolidated in the last two decades, is that the 'settler invasion is a structure, not an event'. Patrick Wolfe's invitation was to look for settler colonialism in the ongoing subjection of indigenous peoples in the settler societies. The contemporary settler polities, he noted, have been 'impervious to regime change'. It was an Australian-produced response to the consolidation…

Why Settler Australia Needs Refugees by Lorenzo Veracini

A specifically settler society relation to our borders

Informit: Interpreting a Settler-related Impulse in Today’s Middle East

A dramatic shift in US policy towards the Middle East has manifested itself in recent years. The Bush administration has been adamant in its commitment to war, even against the evidence provided by intelligence agencies and Wall Street's view that it was not in the United States' long-term interests. A number of observers and scholars have tried to explain this policy shift in economic terms, for example, the protection of US oil interests or that…

Informit: Why settler Australia needs refugees

Australia's newest refugee policy, like its predecessors, is ostensibly designed to address the refugee 'problem'. However, in this article I argue that despite concerns about 'national interest', 'security', and 'border protection', asylum seekers - dehumanised people piled up in different configurations outside of Australia's borders - are useful, indeed necessary, to settler Australia. Here I adopt the specifically Australian definition of refugee: someone who must not be allowed to enter a particular space no matter…

Informit: A new political geometry

We were told that this was a boring campaign contested by unremarkable rivals who could not or would not concentrate on real political issues.We were also told that this was an election characterised by substantial convergence on policy and stances. It was true, of course. And yet this was also an election fought by two resilient rivals over essentially incompatible visions for Australia: one envisages a country primarily based on mineral extraction; the other aims…

Informit: The being of the occupier is that of a settler: Response to ‘indigenous sovereignty’ and the ‘being of the occupier’

The argument Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos present in Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier is similar to the one I make in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. In the twentieth century individuals with whom one shared a history of political engagement were called 'fellow travellers'. Fellow travellers retained their specific positions beyond established orthodoxies. Those orthodoxies and the contradictions that they produced have now vanished, and have given way to the unchallenged…

Informit: Settler colonialism: A global and contemporary phenomenon

There used to be East and West, North and South, expressing the colonial divide; they were there for centuries, if under different names. The colonial relation, by definition, develops some areas by exploiting others; it is part of the dynamic that powers the establishment of North and South and their reciprocal co-constitution. But how does reflection on settler colonialism, as distinct from colonialism, contribute to these shifting taxonomies?

Informit: The Fourth Geneva Convention

The first section of this article explores some of the reasons why Australia might need to address a specific body of international law. In the second section the focus is on the concepts of 'occupation' and 'genocide' in relation to Australia's past. Ultimately, an Australian historiography of race relations necessitates the delineation of an unambiguously post-settler approach, which in turn requires a renewed postcolonial compact for the Australian polity.

Informit: Decolonization in France and Israel: A Comparative Approach

A comparative analysis of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the French-Algerian situation in the 1950s and early 1960s that shaped the institutional transition to the Fifth Republic is presented. This will shed light on current contestations in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Informit: Israeli Apartheids

The concept of 'apartheid' has become a common reference point in the analyses of developments in Israel-Palestine. The two characteristic elements of apartheid - a racialized constituency of humiliation and restriction of movement are highlighted.