NB. In March of 2025, the 21st edition of Arena Quarterly, featured this special section on settler colonialism. Here it is, collected together, complete with a short introduction from the editors. You can buy a copy of the whole issue here.
There were many opinions on the left, progressive and radical side as to how the 2023 referendum on the Voice should be responded to. It would seem fair to say that practically no one would have wished that the Voice proposal be the entity over which the future of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia be fought out. Whether wanted or not, the referendum has been taken as a marking-point between one period and the next, and a comprehensive process of reflection on the ideas underlying radical, progressive and left strategies as applied to political struggle is now underway.
Here, the approach focused on settler colonialism has become dominant, both as an account of a specific form of colonisation and as a current process of oppression that is something more than an adjunct to capitalism. In this special section we have sought to debate, and open out, some central aspects of this approach and the political imperatives it dictates. Do this and related approaches offer the best framing for a strategy towards—however it may be understood—resistance, survival, liberation and flourishing? Or are there contradictions within these approaches that prompt impasse? This special section is offered as one starting-point among many for debates that need to be, and are, taking place across a continent which has become a place of struggle, driven by and driving questions of what it means to be peoples in the flow of history, violence and transformation.
Settler colonialism in the twenty-first century
Settler colonial theory, and the ‘logic of elimination’ provides the best framework for a new politics after the referendum debacle. But only as a fully critical approach to history and activism.
The Rush That Now Has Ended?
Though the role of colonialism can’t be denied, the politics of class and contemporary capitalism must guide political renewal.
The Long March To This Place?
Settler-colonial approaches have evolved as Marxism and the Left have reframed the world colonialism made, to change it.
Some Unsettled Questions on Theory and Strategy
Did the referendum mark the end of a certain type of relations between state and insurgency? If so, do strategies and assumptions around colonial social constitution need to be radically re-examined?
