The Canadian child welfare system has been characterized as being in crisis for over a decade; the number of children in care (and dying in care) has increased dramatically, straining an overburdened system. Physical or sexual abuse is not the reason most children are removed from their homes; rather, the state deems them lacking the necessities of life, usually because their family is impoverished. Because the majority of children in care are Indigenous, the child welfare system is described as the new version of residential schools. Using the lens of historical institutionalism, this study argues that the current child welfare system reflects colonial and neoliberal assumptions that some parents are incapable of sound decision making by virtue of their race or socio-economic situation. Canada's child welfare system is both a product and contributor to the institutions and policies that reinforce intergenerational poverty, a key determinant of removing children from their families.

By tracing Zionist and German Templer efforts to buy arable private property in Palestine between 1897 and 1922, I show the ways in which the changing balance of Ottoman and Levantine forces over land and labor—as well as political and economic institutions and social structures—facilitated settler-colonialism in northern Palestine. In this article, I examine official records of the Ottoman state, Jewish organizations, and Levantine, Jewish, and Templer real estate papers. I argue that changing capitalist practices in northern Palestine, driven especially by interactions of Beirut-based companies with the changing global capitalist market, facilitated settler-colonialism in the region. Specifically, Ottoman state-sponsored violence during World War I increased peasant dispossessions in the fertile region of northern Palestine, already in progress since at least the mid-19th century, making settler colonies possible.

IR proceeds on a Eurocentric ontological assumption that sovereignty has universal validity today. How can IR be decolonised, when in spite of countless examples of the enactment of ‘sovereignty otherwise’, the discipline remains unconcerned with the fact that the logic of sovereignty remains uni-versal. The question is as much political as it is intellectual, because as a discipline, we have allowed the inertia of our professional rhythms to marginalise pluri-versal sovereignty, or the organisation of sovereignty along different ontological starting points. I argue IR must abandon its disciplinary love affair with uni-versal sovereignty. The tendency to ‘bring in’ new perspectives by inserting them into an already ontologically constituted set of assumptions works to protect IR’s Eurocentricity, which makes disciplinary decolonisation untenable. I propose that as a starting point, IR needs to be more mature about recognising the decolonisations that are happening under our very feet if we are to stand a chance at disciplinary level decolonisation. As an illustrative example, I explore an ongoing collision of settler-colonial and Mi’kmaw sovereignty through the issue of lobster fisheries in Mi’kma’ki, or Nova Scotia as the territory is known to Canadians.

Private security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique of Western military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

This article introduces White identity as an understudied concept in Canadian politics and compares how White settlers’ ingroup attachments and their outgroup attitudes—specifically, White settlers’ anti-Indigenous attitudes—shape Canadian politics. We find that White identity is associated with greater support for government spending on policies that disproportionately benefit White Canadians, such as pensions, whereas Indigenous resentment is associated with greater opposition toward government spending on policies that are often perceived as disproportionately benefiting Indigenous peoples, such as welfare. In Canada outside Quebec, both White identity and anti-Indigenous attitudes are associated with voting Conservative. In Quebec, White identity mobilizes support for the Bloc Québécois, while White settlers’ negative attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are not associated with vote choice.

Understanding the legacy of settler colonialism requires understanding the nature and scope of anti-Indigenous attitudes. But what, exactly, are the political consequences of anti-Indigenous attitudes? Answering this question requires recognizing that attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are distinct from White racial attitudes toward other disempowered groups. In this paper, I introduce a novel measure of Indigenous resentment. I then show that Indigenous resentment is an important predictor of policy attitudes using data collected from an original survey of White settlers. I estimate the effect of both Indigenous resentment and negative affect on policy attitudes—opposition to welfare and support for pipeline developments—to make the case that Indigenous resentment is a better measure of anti-Indigenous attitudes than affective prejudice, and that Indigenous resentment is an important omitted variable in the study of public opinion in settler societies.

Victims of colonial, Indigenous child-removal policies have attracted public expressions of compassion from Indigenous and settler-state political leaders in Canada since the 1990s. This public compassion has fueled legal and political mechanisms, leveraging resources for standardized interventions said to “heal” these victims: cash payments, a truth-telling forum, therapy. These claims to healing provide an entry-point for analyzing how and why the figure of the Indigenous child-victim, past and present, is morally and politically useful for settler-states and their public cultures. I use the formulation of “settler-humanitarianism” to express how liberal interventions of care and protection, intended to ameliorate Indigenous suffering, align with settler-colonialism's enduring goal of Indigenous elimination (Wolfe 2006). Removal of Indigenous children was integral to the late nineteenth-century formation of the Canadian and Australian settler-states. Missionaries and colonial administrators represented these practices as humanitarian rescue from depraved familial conditions. Settler-humanitarians have long employed universalizing moral registers, such as “idleness” and “neglect,” to compel state interventions into Indigenous families. More recently, “trauma” has emerged as a humanitarian signifier compelling urgent action. These settler-humanitarian registers do political work. Decontextualized representations of Indigenous children as victims negate children as social actors, obscure the particularities of how collective Indigenous suffering flows from settler-colonial dispossession, and oppose children's interests with those of their kin, community, and nation. I analyze how and why Aboriginal healing as settler-humanitarianism has been taken up by many Indigenous leaders alongside settler-state agents, and examine the ongoing social and political effects of the material and discursive interventions it has spawned.