Alternative Vagueness – Decolonization is not a clear tactic and only acts to confuse goals making resistance to codified legal principles impossible.

(Bashir, Sociology@OpenUniv., Rachel, ACUs National School of Arts , The Politics of Decolonisation and Bi-Nationalism in Israel/Palestine Vol 67, Issue 2, 2019)

For all its attached redemptive prospects and radical possibilities, it is important to emphasise that the meanings of decolonisation as both a concept and political project are not just broad, but also multifaceted and highly contested. What it means to ‘undo’ colonialism is deeply contextual (Jansen and Osterhammel, 2017). While colonialism can be defined broadly as a relationship of domination in which a people or territory is politically and economically subjugated to a foreign power, actual colonial situations vary quite widely from each other, depending on, among others, the particular political systems instituted to maintain control, types of exploitation and expropriation (resources, labour, plantations), relationship between the metropole and colony and patterns of migration they compel (slavery, settlement). Projects of decolonisation accordingly take different forms even if they are united by the common concern of ending or overturning structures of domination instituted by colonialism, which has historically taken place mostly through the withdrawal of colonial powers and achievement of independence for the colonised (Buchanan, 2010). Decolonisation speaks to the aspiration of self-rule and its concomitant critique of colonialism as the ‘systematic denial of freedom’ (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 6) and is therefore entangled with a variety of concerns, namely, self-determination, justice, equality, freedom and solidarity against colonialism and imperialism. As Todd Shepherd (2006: 3–4) writes, decolonisation is ‘a much wider concept than the mere “winning of Independence” or “transfer of power”… It entails the exploration of dreams, the analysis of struggles, compromises, pledges and achievements, and the rethinking of fundamentals’. Traditional literature on decolonisation approached it in terms of the historical process that began in the immediate aftermath of World War Two in which countries previously under (typically European) foreign rule transitioned to constitutional independence (Buchanan, 2010). Decolonisation was one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century, radically changing the face of the globe from one in which a small number of empires had dominion over some 80% of the earth’s surface to an international order based on the principle of self-determination and made up of ostensibly independent states (Hopkins, 2008). Scholars in this tradition have done much to illuminate the widereaching structural transformations that accompanied decolonisation, including the emergence of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles at the turn of the century, shifts in world economy that made the maintenance of traditional forms of Empire increasingly difficult, the development of a ‘Third World’ political project and the institutionalisation of human and civic rights principles that rendered systems based on ideas of racial and ethnic superiority less viable (Hopkins, 2008: 216). Yet, the focus on transition has been critiqued for its narrowness insofar as it seems to take for granted the meanings of selfdetermination and temporally restricts decolonisation to the moment of national liberation. Postcolonial scholars, among others, have been at the forefront of this charge, arguing that decolonisation did not produce a postcolonial world per se, but rather one that continues to be shaped in significant ways by the legacies of European colonialism (e.g. Spivak, 1999). As Ella Shohat (1992) has argued, there is no way of turning back from the world colonialism set in play nor did colonial modes of domination end with the formal period of decolonisation. From this broadened perspective, decolonisation is the difficult task of tracing the economic, political, social, cultural, relational and linguistic consequences of colonialism and is therefore also an ongoing imaginative project seeking ‘a new form of consciousness and way of life’ (Pieterse and Parekh, 1995: 3) beyond the coloniality of modern modes of culture, identity and knowledge more generally. While the transitional focus of conventional scholarship is quite illuminating in the contexts of Africa and Asia, for example, it furthermore excludes a great many decolonisation efforts that have taken place and continue to take place in other regions. This includes countries that remained dependent or only achieved semi-independence as dominions, decolonising projects carried out in territories never formally under colonial rule (the Iranian Revolution, for instance) and – as is particularly important to our discussion here – settler colonies that only partially decolonised, whether by way of loosening ties with the Motherland or achieving independence, but which continue to dominate substantial indigenous populations (Hopkins, 2008). There is a significant lacuna in the decolonisation literature when it comes to settler colonialism, which has increasingly been recognised as a distinct form of colonial practice – and one that is particularly resistant to decolonisation (Veracini, 2007). As the transfer of an exogenous population to a territory they intend to claim as their permanent home, settler colonialism establishes quite a different structural relationship to ‘traditional’ forms of colonialism, especially when settler colonial projects succeed in creating a state (Bateman and Pilkington, 2011). Rather than governing native peoples in order to extract resources for economic gain, settler colonisers instead aim to ‘seize their land and push them beyond an ever-expanding frontier of settlement’ (Elkin and Pedersen, 2005: 2). For Patrick Wolfe (2006), what distinguishes settler colonialism is thus that it is guided by a logic of elimination as opposed to a logic of exploitation, wherein the eradication of indigenous presence is essential to the success of settler colonial projects. The primacy of national liberation in the literature makes it especially difficult to imagine, let alone theorise, decolonisation in many settler colonial contexts. Whereas some settler colonial projects like Algeria and Kenya saw decolonisation by way of a mass settler exodus, paving the way for the establishment of independent states, the more successful ones established permanent settler communities (e.g. Northern Ireland) or their own states (e.g. Australia, Canada, the United States) which preclude a simple transition from foreign rule to sovereign status (Veracini, 2007). This is of course not to say that self-determination of the type aspired to by anti-colonial national movements was an easy or even necessarily achievable task. As Kohn and McBride (2011) suggest, in pursuing the dream of self-rule, anti-colonial thinkers had to reckon with the difficulties of articulating alternative political foundations that would make for a genuinely self-determining polity, an enormous task which demands decolonising of minds as much institutions and territory (see Fanon, 2001[1963]). Decolonisation must pursue a convincing ‘break’ between a colonial past and a postcolonial future ‘through decisive action in the present’; it must also ‘seek to reinterpret the past in such a way that it may help in the present and future struggle for self-rule’ (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 19). While these pursuits are invariably contingent, partial and commonly symbolic, national liberation struggles very often provide the fodder for a reinterpreted past that is robustly positive and the establishment of an independent state serves as that aspired for ‘break’. Settler colonial contexts, especially those where indigenous peoples live as minorities in settler states, make these types of symbolic transitions challenging, as they do the imagining of postcolonial alternatives. If the narrative structure of colonialism is circular (leave, stay, return), making that symbolic break possible, settler colonial narratives are linear insofar as the settler comes to stay and the line continues on unbroken (Veracini, 2007). As Ann Curthoys (1999: 288) writes, settler colonial spaces are simultaneously colonial and postcolonial, colonising and decolonising, which makes decolonisation temporally ambivalent at best. Lorenzo Veracini (2007) suggests that there are only two alternatives to settler evacuation for decolonising settler colonial forms and it is dubious whether one of these counts as decolonisation at all: the decolonisation of relationships through ‘the promotion of various processes of Indigenous reconciliation’ or the maintenance of the status quo ‘with the explicit rejection of the possibility of reforming the settler body politic’. Again, what the former might mean is often vague, and historically it is the decolonisation of relationships that is hardest to come by considering the psychological consequences of colonialism for coloniser and colonised alike (Memmi, 1965). Like traditional forms of colonialism, settler colonialism was legitimated by a belief in the colonised’s racial and cultural inferiority. However, the specific settler colonial pursuit of land seizure compels additional stereotypes of native peoples or unique applications of existing colonial ones, wherein their supposed inferiority makes them ill-equipped to develop that land (premodern, nomadic, barbaric) or, alternatively, voids any claims to ownership (terra nullius). In other words, settler colonialism is as much premised on the denial of indigenous peoples as a political constituency with rights to land as it is their purported inferiority, which is typically enshrined in their status as second-class citizens with all the economic, cultural and social disadvantage this entails (Bateman and Pilkington, 2011: 3). Given that settler societies are marked by ‘pervasive inequalities, usually codified in law, between native and settler populations’ which preserve political and economic privileges for the latter (Elkin and Pedersen, 2005: 4), decolonising relationships demands structural changes that often encounter significant resistance from settler constituencies. Likewise, it requires a reckoning with historical injustice – specifically violence and conflict at the colonial frontier – that is challenging for settler states and populations because it opens questions of settler identity, privileges, legitimacy and reparations and expressly seeks to scrutinise disavowed and long suppressed histories. Settler colonial decolonisation is thus complicated by a multitude of hurdles, which bring the postcolonial caution of the impossibility of a ‘break’ into stark relief. Kohn and McBride (2011) suggest that decisive action in the present is essential to decolonisation, but in settler colonial contexts this is hindered by power discrepancies between settler and native constituencies, a general lack of settler political will to enter into difficult processes of historical introspection as well as the constraining of Indigenous claims within the settler state. Indeed, even a commitment to a postcolonial polity as expressed through processes of historical reconciliation often encounters strong resistance when it comes to judicial, constitutional or legislative change genuinely decolonised relationships would demand. Nevertheless, even if it remains difficult to comprehensively imagine the decolonisation of ‘settler societies vis-à-vis Indigenous constituencies’ (Veracini, 2007), the central question must be how to construct political foundations which simultaneously acknowledge ‘the practices of racism, violence and subordination’ (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 18) that preceded them while also paving the way for a postcolonial future in which natives and settlers are equal parties and share the right to narrate the polity. Equality, freedom and justice may come from legally enshrining Indigenous rights to self-determination or, alternatively, doing away with the categories of ‘settler’ and ‘native’ altogether (Mamdani, 2001). What shape such efforts are likely to take depends, among others, on the ‘size and tenacity’ of Indigenous populations as well as the power of the settler constituency (Elkin and Pedersen, 2005: 3, 6). But we would suggest that the measure to which they may