Orwell Comes to Campus: The Ideology of Settler Colonialism

Adam Kirsch on the critical theory sweeping academia and its insidious reach beyond the ivory tower

If you don’t know about the ideology of “settler colonialism,” you need to. If you want to understand how student activists and elite academics – who cherish progressive values – can gleefully support Hamas, you need to understand settler colonialism. Or if you want to know why the term “genocide” no longer means killing people. Or why the term “settler” no longer means someone living in the West Bank. It’s all arcane and complicated, but Adam Kirsch, poet, literary critic and Wall Street Journal editor, explains it all clearly in On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice, a short, lucid and critically important book. In our conversation, Kirsch explains what this theory is, its real world implications, and how it went from obscurity in Australia to take over the academic and now political world in a very short period of time.

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Octavian Report: Can you explain what exactly “settler colonialism” is?

Adam Kirsch: Absolutely. After the October 7 attacks by Hamas, a lot of progressive groups who issued statements endorsing it, or at least apologizing for it, used the term “settler colonial” in their statements. They said Israel was a “settler colonial” country, or that the attack was a form of resistance to settler colonialism. That is an idea that has been around in the academy and become popular over the last 15 or 20 years. Unless they have studied academic humanities in that time period, most people were not familiar with it.

Settler colonialism, historically, has meant different things. But when people use it today, they're thinking of countries that were founded by European colonization, where the settlers replaced the original indigenous population, meaning that they evicted them or exterminated them, and replaced them on the land. So that makes settler colonialism a little bit different from the kind of colonialism, say, that the British practiced in India, where the British dominated trade and exerted military control, but they didn't go there to settle in large numbers and get rid of the native population They ruled over the native population and extracted profit, whereas in Australia or in the United States, you had people who came from Britain to settle in these new territories, take over the land and in the process displace the original indigenous populations of those places.

So settler colonialism is the process by which that kind of settlement and replacement happens. That's not a new idea, of course. That has been central to the history of these places. Everyone who's an American knows about this fact of American history. What's really new in the last quarter century is the idea that settler colonialism offers a key to explain the things that are wrong with these societies today, that it's not just a description of events that took place hundreds of years ago but that a settler colonial society is constantly reenacting and perpetuating the original crime of settlement. So the things that you might criticize or object to in these societies now, in the year 2025, are directly linked to the fact that they were colonial societies starting in the Eighteenth or even Seventeenth century.

So that is what I call the ideology of settler colonialism. It’s really a kind of critical theory. It's not so much a historical theory as it is a way of criticizing contemporary injustices or getting to the root of what's wrong in a society.

Octavian Report: What are the things that they believe are wrong coming out of settler colonialism?

Adam Kirsch: The basic idea is that settler colonialism is the product of a mindset which sometimes is referred to in this literature as “settler ways of being,” which is inherently rapacious, greedy, exploitative, and can never be content and never says that we've had enough. It always wants more.

So when people talk about exploitation of the environment, they say that this is an example of settler colonialism. That in the same way the original American settlers took land and resources, today mining and oil represents a similar kind of unlimited greed and disrespect for the Earth.

Other examples have to do with capitalism and inequality, with gender inequality. There are lots of different ways to apply this concept. That's one of the reasons why I think it's become very popular in academia, you can use it in lots of different ways. There are classes about settler colonialism in the Gender Studies Department, in the School of Public Health, in American history, in Middle Eastern Studies. It's a very flexible concept.

Octavian Report: On environmentalism, how do they reconcile the fact that, for example, the Maya basically destroyed their civilization by deforestation? They collapsed but the jungle grew back, I believe.

Adam Kirsch: The settler colonial critique is definitely very selective. It focuses on particular countries, and it doesn't have a lot to say about Latin America for that reason. Because the history of Latin America, both before Columbus and after, is quite different from the history of North America. So when academics, especially in the United States and Canada, talk about settler colonialism, they’re mainly referring to the history of North America, where there wasn't that kind of large scale urbanism and intensive use of resources.

“There are people who say even descendants of African American slaves are settlers.”

A historian named Pekka Hämäläilen, who wrote a book called Indigenous Continent, argues on a very slender basis of evidence that at some point the Native Americans in North America deliberately rejected urbanism and monarchy and large scale society and chose to go back to another way of living which was more egalitarian and less hierarchical.

Another element of it, of course, is the idea of indigeneity. If you're an indigenous people, then you have a particular relationship to the land that later settlers can't have. So you get the idea that Americans, even today, are settlers, not just people who are descended from the original English settlers. And it doesn't mean just people whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, but anyone who lives in North America today who's not an indigenous person, not descended from people who were here before European settlement, are settlers even now. So settler is an identity category. It's not a historical description. It doesn't mean that you personally settled anything. It means that your presence in this land is the result of historical injustice, and in some ultimate sense should not exist and should be remedied in one way or another.

Octavian Report: So the African Americans who are the descendants of slaves are considered settlers?

Adam Kirsch: Yes. Well, this is a live debate within this field. There are people who say, yes, even descendants of African American slaves are settlers because they are now occupying the position of a settler vis-a-vis Native Americans. Their ancestors didn't come here voluntarily, but they are still in a place where they don't belong, where they didn't originate, and taking advantage of a society that was built on top of Native American society.

Octavian Report: And why is it only focused on the Anglophone world? What about other European or Asian colonial powers?

Adam Kirsch: These ideas first emerged in Australia in the 1990s and then spread to Canada and the United States,. So they were developed and framed in the context of those countries’ histories, and they take the form of criticizing those countries’ histories. The people who are most invested in this idea are drawn to it because it is a way of criticizing their own societies. And, I think it's important to note, that almost all of this discourse is among people who consider themselves settlers.

If you look at the main Native advocacy groups in the United States, they don't talk about settler colonialism. They don't talk about decolonizing North America. They talk about holding the US Government to its treaty obligations and things that could be adjudicated in a court of law. It's people who are looking at themselves and their own society, and don't like what they see and want to understand why it is the way it is who talk about decolonizing and settler colonialism.

Octavian Report: What is their proposed solution?

Adam Kirsch: So the term “settler colonialism” really was invented to describe places like Algeria and Rhodesia in the mid-Twentieth century, where there was an active struggle against maybe the ten or fifteen percent of the population that was European who were dominating a much larger native population and taking advantage of their labor and their resources. And in those places, it's very clear who the settlers are and who the natives are, and it's clear that the struggle against settler colonialism means you get rid of the settlers. That's decolonization in a very concrete sense.

In America, ninety-eight percent of the population is not native. You can't stop settlers being here. So instead, the discourse becomes much more about how do you stop being a settler in various ways? What could we do to make our society free of the guilt of the sin of settler colonialism?

One Australian theorist named Lorenzo Veracini talks about 26 different ways that settler colonialism is perpetuated. For him examples of settler colonialism range all the way from actual killing of native peoples or forcing them off the land to dressing up as an Indian on Halloween. Even having full equality and citizenship for native peoples in the settler society is also a form of abuse, because it's saying the settler society is the real society.

People who write about this are very vague when they talk about what the solution would be. There's a lot of talk about dreams and fantasy and memory and hope. And there's also a lot of hostility towards anyone who says, “Well, what does that actually mean on practice?” There's a lot of defensiveness. People write things like, you know, if you really cared about it, you wouldn't ask that question. I think that a big part of the motive or the appeal of this way of thinking is that people who acknowledge their guilt as settlers are paradoxically morally superior to other settlers who don't acknowledge their guilt. So if you lead by saying “I'm a settler,” and some people do say that in their bios, it's a bit like an evangelical Christian saying, “I am a sinner.” It's that by acknowledging that you're guilty, you become better than the people who don't acknowledge that they're guilty, because you have seen the truth.

Octavian Report: How do they reconcile the reality of the diversity of Native American cultures, including some that were quite violent, with their belief they were peaceful utopias?

Adam Kirsch: The use of the term “Turtle Island” is a good example of how some of this works. The idea of behind the term is that some Native American creation myths said that the earth was created on the back of a turtle. So this became the idea that Native Americans thought of North America as Turtle Island. In fact, that's a very ahistorical claim. It's not true that most creative myths involved turtles. And it's not true that native peoples before 1492 thought that there was such a thing as a continent of North America. There was no concept of this continent that we are living on is something called Turtle Island. That is an invention of the post-1960s where people are trying to rethink the history of North America, and they're saying, if the US and Canada and Mexico are not legitimate, what would we call that primal original country before those countries were established? People have adopted the term Turtle Island. So if there's a protest, and someone says we're here in occupied Turtle Island, what they're saying is, American civilization shouldn't be here. It's an occupying presence, and it ought to be removed so that Turtle Island can reemerge in its original pristine condition.

Now, as you say, there's no reason to think that the original pristine condition of Native America was completely peaceful. Like every human society everywhere it was full of conflict and war. There's plenty of evidence of that in paleontology and other forms of reconstructing the past. Even in early colonial English chronicles you get a very clear sense that when the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts, they were stepping into a very complicated situation where there were different groups that were traditional enemies. So the idea that Native America was a Utopian society where people didn't fight, didn't have war, didn't use resources too much, that is a myth.

There's a tension between settler colonial theory and Native American history which I talk about a little bit in the book. People who are serious historians of Indigenous American culture are usually uneasy with settler colonial theory, because they recognize that it is very monolithic and oversimplifies because it's not primarily historical study. It's a model of how society works.

Octavian Report: So how is this related to Israel? Why are they so focused on it?

Adam Kirsch: From the beginning of this academic field in the 1990s, Israel was very prominent in it. Often when people talk about settler colonialism, they're talking about Australia, Canada, the United States, and Israel. And there's an obvious incongruity in that the history of Israel is very different from the history of those other countries. The reason why it's very prominent in settler colonial theory is that it's the only place in the world where there is a current active conflict between a settler colonial society and an indigenous society as perceived through the lens of this theory.

You have people who say the Israeli Jews are European “colonial settlers” who came here and took land away from an “indigenous” Arab population, and that we are fighting to get it back from them and to get rid of them. And so that is a struggle against settler colonialism with guns, an active struggle, not just on the level of theory. People who sympathize with the Palestinian cause have found settler colonialism is a powerful way to talk about the conflict that sways public opinion, especially in North America. If you say that the Israelis are to the Palestinians what Europeans were to Native Americans, it brings into play a whole set of assumptions about power, about race, about genocide and violence that gets superimposed on Israel and Palestine. I think that that way of seeing the conflict has really changed the way especially younger people think about Israel and Palestine.

One of the things that was really surprising to a lot of people, including me, after October 7, was that on campuses and in certain progressive groups like Democratic Socialists of America and Black Lives Matter you had a lot of very fervent, idealistic young people saying: we celebrate this attack. We celebrate killing 1,200 Israeli civilians because to them this was a blow against settler colonialism, and since settler colonialism is the main thing that's wrong in the world, a fight against settler colonialism is by definition a progressive fight.

“You have radical, progressive American college students waving the Hamas flag [because] the idea is that they're they're both fighting together against settler colonialism.”

And that's how you get the very strange bedfellows that you see in this issue, where you have radical, progressive American college students waving the Hamas flag even though Hamas is an Islamic fundamentalist movement that shares absolutely zero beliefs with these people, and, in fact, would detest everything that they stand for. The idea is that they're they're both fighting together against settler colonialism in the form of Israel and Israeli Jews.

Octavian Report: But how do they justify the embrace of gruesome violence?

Adam Kirsch: I think one way to understand it is to compare it to the way that college students and young radicals in the 1960s embraced Third World Communist movements like Fidel Castro's Cuba and Maoist China and North Vietnam. Not because they really understood what those places were like, and certainly not because they wanted to live there or wanted to be in a society like that, but because from their perspective the main problem in the world was American imperialism and American violence, and the war in Vietnam. So anyone who was opposed to American imperialism was on the side of justice. So you just you don't look too closely at the things that are actually happening in Maoist China. You just say Mao represents a progressive alternative to Western imperialism and capitalism. And I think that for people who are really hardcore supporters of the Palestinian cause, it doesn't matter what's actually happening there. I think probably a lot of them don't really know what's actually happening there. They know that Israel is the bad guy, and therefore the people who are fighting Israel are the good guys.

Octavian Report: But how do they argue that the Jews are not native to the land when there is so much historical and archaeological evidence that they are?

Adam Kirsch: It's a very complicated question, because Zionism is so different from other other historical phenomena. It doesn't really fit a lot of the other models of nationalism or colonialism that you might try to to compare it to.

But of course the great irony is that Zionism was precisely not a colonial movement. It was a movement of a return of an indigenous people to its indigenous homeland. The Jews, who had been in the land of Israel in ancient times, and who had always made the land of Israel the center of their religion, decided, after 2,000 years of exile, to reclaim their land and make a home there. Zionism was people returning to this land as they saw it and they recognized, of course, that in the meantime other people now lived there. From the Palestinian point of view this was a project against their interests, they were unable to stop it, and so they see it as people came here illegitimately and took their land. For the Israelis, it was a national renewal project that was justified by the extreme danger that Jews were in in Europe, and it was a rebirth of the Jewish nation in its original homeland. So these are two different ways of seeing the situation, and I think that by seeing it as an example of settler colonialism, people are able to radically oversimplify what's actually going on there, which leads to some bad results for the way they understand it.

Octavian Report: It’s a bit confusing that the term “settler” means different things in the context of Israel and some people conflate “settlers” in the West Bank with “settlers” as you are describing them.

Adam Kirsch: Exactly. It's an important terminology distinction. When people talk about Israel usually, and they're talking about settlers, they're talking about Jews who have built homes in the West Bank, territory that Israel conquered in 1967 and rules it under military occupation. And so when Jews go and settle there, they're called settlers. The idea is that this is land where these people are not supposed to be. Whether that's true or not, whether any individual agrees with that, is a more complicated question. There are certainly people in Israel on both sides of that question. But that's what people mean when they say “settlers” in the Israeli context.

But then, after October 7, when people talked about killing Israeli settlers, they weren't talking about the West Bank. They weren't talking about Jews who had gone to live in occupied territory. They were talking about Jews who lived in a part of Israel that is part of Israel by anyone's definition, its legally recognized international borders. So if that's your idea of what a settler is, if a settler is basically any Jew in Israel, what that suggests is that no Jews in Israel have a right to be there at all, that the country did not have the right to come into existence, and, in fact, should be abolished if possible. That's basically what people say about North American countries as well. The US is also in that sense a settler country. But you can't really get rid of America, because it's too big and powerful. There's a much greater chance that you might be able to get rid of Israel because it's quite small and surrounded by enemies. So to call all Israeli settlers is a very important ideological signal. It's saying these people should not be here, and therefore we should struggle to get rid of them.

Octavian Report: So how does this ideology affect things in the real world?

Adam Kirsch: It's true that the theory of settler colonialism is only known to academics and experts for the most part. But I think that in the same way that an idea like Marxism filters down, beginning in a very abstract and complicated way and then becoming a political movement that shapes people's real world behavior, I think you can see that starting to happen, especially with young people, with the idea of settler colonialism. It has to do with your basic attitude towards the United States, or Canada, or Australia, and also to Israel. If your basic attitude towards this country is that it should not exist, and that its creation was a great injustice, that is going to shape people's political ideas and instincts throughout their life in all different kinds of contexts. I think that that's already been institutionalized in various ways In American society.

“If your basic attitude towards this country is that it should not exist, that is going to shape people's political ideas and instincts throughout their life.”

Probably the most concrete way is the land acknowledgements. A land acknowledgement is the statement that basically now all universities and also a lot of other institutions like museums and theaters and some city governments have, formulas that say, our institution sits on the land that once belonged to a native people, and it names the native people, and makes a statement of either outright apology or at least gratitude or acknowledgement. In a very short period of time land acknowledgements became de rigueur on college campuses at public events, or on your department website, or people introduce themselves that way. Next time you go to a museum or a college campus, if you look for it, you'll see it or hear it actually recited out loud.

What's interesting about that is not that what's said in those statements isn't true, because, of course, it is true. If you go back far enough any place in North America was originally inhabited by native people. What's new is the idea that when institutions represent themselves in public, the first thing that has to be known about them is that they are illegitimate. That the first thing that you have to get out of the way is, we are here on someone else's land. This is not our land, this is not where we belong, and we are taking advantage of this land, and we acknowledge from the outset that we are trespassers here. That that in itself doesn't lead to anything, because none of these institutions are actually making reparations or saying we're going to shut down and give the land back to the descendants of the people who were here in the Nineteenth century. But it does shape the way that people and audiences think about themselves, think about their country. And I think that that can have a real long-term effect

Octavian Report: Can you also talk about what they mean when they use “genocide” and how that has been changed as well?

Adam Kirsch: It's a very important term in settler colonial theory. Within this discourse, “genocide” means something very different than most people assume. In journalism or politics, if you talk about genocide, you think of a quick mass murder of an entire people like the Holocaust, like Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Rwanda genocide.

There is, however, a ambiguity in the term genocide, which was invented by Raphael Lemkin during World War II to talk about the Nazi genocide of Jews. “Genocide” takes the Greek word for a people and the Latin word for killing, and puts them together to mean the killing of a people. So in some basic sense, the killing of a people is not the same thing as killing people. It means destroying the things that make a people a people. And if you think about it in that way, then all different kinds of acts that are hostile or inimical to a group's identity can also be called genocidal.

And that's what happens in settler colonial contexts. Lots of things are described as genocidal. If a people is losing its language, for example, or losing its traditional way of life, then those things can be considered genocidal. And anything that sustains settler colonial society is therefore genocidal by implication. I quote one writer who says that national parks are part of a genocide system, because national parks institutionalize European settler dominance and and their hold on the land. Or coal mining is part of genocide, because it violates the land that native peoples lived on so. One writer literally says, no one has to die for there to be a genocide.

So there's a real divergence in the way that most people think about that term and the way theorists use it. And that became very important politically when it came to the war in Gaza because it very quickly became a requirement on the Left that you say that what was happening in Gaza was a genocide. I think that became a very dishonest way of attacking what was going on in Gaza, of attacking Israel, and of arguing against its legitimacy as a country to say, this country is committing a genocide. But “what is a genocide?” “what do you mean by that?” is jumped over.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.