Between 1894 and 1936, Imperial Japan fought several “small wars” against Tonghak Rebels, Taiwanese millenarians, Korean Righteous Armies, Germans in Shandong, Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, and “bandits” in Manchuria. Authoritative accounts of Japanese history ignore these wars, or sanitize them as “seizures,” “cessions,” or occasions for diplomatic maneuvers. The consigning the empire's “small wars” to footnotes (at best) has in turn promoted a view that Japanese history consists of alternating periods of “peacetime” (constitutionalism) and “wartime” (militarism), in accord with the canons of liberal political theory. However, the co-existence of “small wars” with imperial Japan's iconic wars indicates that Japan was a nation at war from 1894 through 1945. Therefore, the concept “Forever War” recommends itself for thinking about militarism and democracy as complementary formations, rather than as opposed forces. The Forever-War approach emphasizes lines of continuity that connect “limited wars” (that mobilized relatively few Japanese soldiers and civilians, but were nonetheless catastrophic for the colonized and occupied populations on the ground) with “total wars” (that mobilized the whole Japanese nation against the Qing, imperial Russia, nationalist China, and the United States). The steady if unspectacular operations of Forever War– armed occupations, settler colonialism, military honor-conferral events, and annual ceremonies at Yasukuni Shrine–continued with little interruption even during Japan's golden age of democracy and pacifism in the 1920s. This article argues that Forever War laid the infrastructural groundwork for “total war” in China from 1937 onwards, while it produced a nation of decorated, honored, and mourned veterans, in whose names the existing empire was defended at all costs against the United States in the 1940s. In Forever War—whether in imperial Japan or elsewhere–soldiering and military service become ends in themselves, and “supporting the troops” becomes part of unthinking, common sense.

In contemporary Japan Ainu women create spaces of cultural vitalization wherein they transit between Ainu identity determined by their natal relationships and actively negotiating with Ainu identity through their art. Engaging in self-craft through cloth arts has empowered Ainu women to imagine new expressions of self and to redefine their identities as Ainu or mixed ancestry, and thus reflects women's lived realities and struggles. Women's clothwork, as well as musical performance and other arts, has also been pivotal to the Ainu Indigenous rights movement and to cultural revitalization efforts. By carefully positioning heritage cloth, ritual regalia, and ancestral patterns as mouthpieces of Ainu indigeneity, Ainu women have leveraged traditional knowledge to claim Indigenous rights in UN forums and the Japanese Diet.

As such, Ainu women move between “being Ainu,” a racist label attached to Ainu bodies by settler society, to actively “becoming Ainu” and determining what this means on their own terms. The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum, and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and Indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles.

This article defends grounded normative theory (GNT) as a more appropriate methodology to tackle questions of territorial justice in settler states over the dominant approach in territorial rights theory. I contrast the central aims and methodological commitments of territory theories and GNT: the former are engaged in an ideal, conceptual project primarily directed at other liberals, while the latter is oriented towards addressing injustices through deep engagement with the narratives and power relations that normalize them. I then outline three limitations of the territorial rehabilitation project undertaken by territory theorists that result from their failure to engage the robust critical and empirical literatures on settler colonialism. Finally, I sketch how GNT can reorient the territorial rehabilitation project towards decolonization.

Bringing critical race theory and settler colonial theory to bear on legal mobilization scholarship, this article examines the ongoing campaign to strike down the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA sought to end the forced removal of American Indian children from their tribes. If successful, the challenges to ICWA’s constitutionality stand to undermine tribal sovereignty writ large. Drawing on a content analysis of documents from 17 major court cases (2013–2023) and a unique dataset of public-facing documents from the leading ICWA challengers, I interrogate the argumentative architecture of this legal mobilization. I find that the campaign to strike down ICWA is structured around three ideological maneuvers: erasure, settler normativity, and reclassification. These maneuvers scaffold a fourth – colorblindness – and the claim that ICWA is an unconstitutional race-based statute. I show how ICWA adversaries use these ideological maneuvers to legitimate white possession of Indigenous children and delegitimize tribal sovereignty. While existing work tends to treat colorblind racism and settler colonialism as analytically distinct, these findings shed light on the linkages between the two. They also marshal empirical analysis to illustrate how the embeddedness of settler colonialism and racism in the law enables broad claims to and defense of whiteness as property.

This article investigates whether environmental planning law can demonstrate ethical responsibility for its role in settler colonialism. Planning law contributes to settler colonialism by diminishing, excluding, and eliminating alternative views of land that are fundamental to First Nations culture, philosophy, and law/lore. The article adopts a transnational legal frame that recognizes and promotes First Nations as sovereign. The investigation is focused primarily on the planning law system in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, while being guided by interpretations and applications of the rights of First Nations peoples by courts in Canada. It is argued that state planning law in NSW fails to give effect to ethical responsibility because its operation continues to dominate and marginalize Aboriginal legal culture by eroding the necessary ontological and epistemic relationships with land. However, there is potential for change. Opportunities to disrupt settler colonialism have emerged through bottom-up litigation, which has promoted interpretations, applications, and implementation of law that can be performed in ways that resonate with Canadian case law. While the absence of treaty or constitution-based rights protection in NSW and Australia means that the transplant is not seamless, the article argues that laws should not be interpreted and applied in ways that perpetuate settler colonialism where alternative interpretations can lead to a different outcome.

In political science, federalism is often treated as an “antithesis” to empire. While Canadian Politics has recently become more attentive to the importance of ongoing settler colonialism as conditioning Canadian political life writ large, this has yet to induce a paradigm shift in understanding how the institutional logics of the state were established by, and in order to advance, colonial and imperial ends. This article contributes to this broader understanding by exploring how, in Canada, the federal arrangement congeals a constitutionalized whiteness that facilitates both the internal coherence of a settler class and its subsequent continental expansion. Attentive to the importance of this constitutional development within a world-spanning imperial context, this article also suggests that the simultaneous innovation of Dominion status contoured the early twentieth-century's global colour line, as self-determination was increasingly devolved to other white settler polities. The contradictory realities of these processes are also noted.

In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.

Although land loss is among the most profound impacts that settler colonialism had for Indigenous societies across North America, archaeologists rarely study one of the principal colonial mechanisms of land dispossession: allotment. This process forever altered the course of North American history, breaking up collectively held Indigenous lands into lots “owned” by individuals and families while further stressing local Indigenous subsistence patterns, social relations, political organization, and more. Archaeology's long-term, material, and sometimes collaborative vantage stands to offer insights on this process and how it played out for Indigenous peoples in different times and places. As its case study, this article considers the allotment of Mohegan lands in southeastern Connecticut (USA). An archaeology of Mohegan allotment speaks to more than land loss and cultural change. It provides evidence of an enduring and long-term Indigenous presence on the land; of the challenges faced and overcome by Mohegan peoples living through, and with, settler colonialism; and of the nuances of Indigenous-colonial archaeological records. This study also shows the importance of Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies for shedding new light on these challenging but important archaeological traces.