In 1991 Australia instigated a national reconciliation project between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Despite being the longest-running reconciliation process, there has been no authoritative study of Australian reconciliation to date. Reconciliation and Colonial Power is the first book to analyze Australian reconciliation as a process, filling a significant gap in theoretical and empirical understanding. Damien Short offers a sociological interpretation of this process which suggests that, rather than being a genuine attempt at atonement, Australian reconciliation is perhaps better understood as the latest stage in the colonial project. He considers the relevance of acknowledgement and apology, restitution and rights, nation building and state legitimacy to the reconciliation project. This work compliments the burgeoning literature on reconciliation theory and practice and provides fertile material for comparisons with reconciliation processes in other countries such as Chile and South Africa.

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

Anti-Colonial Solidarity: Race, Reconciliation, and MENA Liberation confronts the racialization of Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) perceived peoples from a global perspective. George Fourlas critiques the ways that orientalism, racism, and colonialism cooperatively emerged and afforded the imaginary landscapes of the recently recategorized Middle East. This critique also clarifies possibility, both in a past that has been obscured by the colonial palimpsest, and in the present through exemplary cases of MENA solidarity that act as guideposts for what might be achieved through effective coordination and meaning-making practices. Hence, in confronting the problem of racialization, the author reflects on the conditions of the possibility of a solidarity amongst MENA peoples, and subjugated peoples more generally, that resists the cyclical character of violent domination which has defined colonial power since at least 1492. Rather than offer a blueprint for a well-ordered free society, however, Anti-Colonial Solidarity explores what is required to enact an open-ended collectivity that resists rigid universalism, as well as reification, and prioritizes reciprocal relations with others and the environment. At once a rejection of orientalist narratives and a critique of solidarity that illuminates defensive possibilities for MENA people beyond the insufficient, yet still necessary, politics of recognition, Anti-Colonial Solidarity is a call to action for MENA people, and subjugated people more generally, to reclaim ourselves and our history from the trappings of colonial domination.

This book examines how justice and reconciliation in world politics should be conceived in response to the injustice and alienation of modern colonialism?

In 2008 the Canadian government apologized to the victims of the notorious Indian residential school system, and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose goal was to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that engineered the system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation, non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization. They must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience. Today’s truth and reconciliation processes must make space for an Indigenous historical counter-narrative in order to avoid perpetuating a colonial relationship between Aboriginal and settler peoples. A compassionate call to action, this powerful book offers all Canadians – both Indigenous and not – a new way of approaching the critical task of healing the wounds left by the residential school system.

Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.

This book examines the performative life reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives, as well as the way the past is mobilized and reworked in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the 'age of apology'.