The interpretative framework of settler colonialism

Settler colonialism is now an established framework for analysing societies like Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and the US. What links these societies is their foundation in British imperialism and the forceful dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, legitimised by logics of modernity and progress.Footnote ¹⁴ Unlike extractive colonialism, settler colonialism describes a distinctive practice in which colonisers ‘come to stay and to establish new political orders for themselves, rather than to exploit native labour’.Footnote ¹⁵ To exemplify, consider how British colonial rule in India was cemented through trade and political relationships with local elites, and eventually ended, whereas in Australia, settlers claimed the land as uninhabited, dispossessed Indigenous peoples, and never left. Although settler colonialism is often associated with Anglo-states and Israel, Veracini notes that it is a global contemporary phenomenon, as many postcolonial states pursue their own settler colonial projects towards their internal peripheries.Footnote ¹⁶

Settler colonialism emerged as a field of academic inquiry in the 1990s in the context of the increasingly vocal demands for Indigenous rights and recognition.Footnote ¹⁷ Veracini traces its analytical roots to the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Algeria under French settler occupation.Footnote ¹⁸ While Indigenous struggles were initially taken up in postcolonial studies, activists and scholars highlighted that the Indigenous colonial condition is unique to the extent that it is ongoing. This renders the concept of ‘postcolonialism’ inadequate to capture contexts where colonialism never formally ended.Footnote ¹⁹ As Aboriginal scholar Tony Birch succinctly puts it: ‘[W]e live in a colonial society. Postcolonialism in this country [Australia] is a job, a luxury enjoyed only by the academy’.Footnote ²⁰ Settler colonial studies developed alongside Indigenous studies, with the former focusing on the enduring structures of governance in societies where colonisation never formally ended, and the latter on the Indigenous experience of colonisation, resistance, and resurgence. Although SCS is concerned with the Indigenous experience of colonisation, its primary aim is to capture a specific mode of colonial domination where a group of colonisers indigenise themselves to the land and establish authority through relations of domination and exploitation with Indigeneity as the alterity.Footnote ²¹

Settler colonial studies emphasises that settler colonialism is a structure of governance that enables the prolonged control of Indigenous land by settlers, rather than a historical event.Footnote ²² Settler colonialism rests on the ongoing appropriation of Indigenous land, which is essential for creating and reproducing the settler society. Settler colonial land tenure, therefore, presupposes Indigenous dispossession, assimilation, or elimination, which is secured through what Wolfe calls ‘the logics of elimination of the native’.Footnote ²³ These are the rationalities underpinning practices of Indigenous dispossession, including assimilation, displacement, confinement, miscegenation, and the erosion of cultural and spiritual ties to land. Importantly, while settler colonialism can involve genocide (and has), it does not have to. Wolfe notes that settler colonialism ‘is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal’.Footnote ²⁴ Settler genocide is different than, let’s say, the Holocaust or the current Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. It is structuralFootnote ²⁵ and a form of slow violenceFootnote ²⁶ intended to remove Indigenous peoples as the obstacle to settlement without undermining the legitimacy of the settler state.Footnote ²⁷

Central to settler colonialism is a racialised system of meanings that secures settler legitimacy. At the core of this system is the management of Indigeneity, whereby settlers indigenise to the land they occupy by distancing themselves from the metropole,Footnote ²⁸ and Indigenous people are reframed as racial minorities needing inclusion and protection.Footnote ²⁹ As Saito argues, settler colonialism rests on differential racialisation, a fluid racial regime that creates hierarchical racial categories to secure the legitimacy and productivity of the settler state.Footnote ³⁰ In settler societies emerging from European imperialism, whiteness is at the top of the hierarchy and sets the standards of civilisation that produce racialised modes of governance enabling settler colonialism. Goenpul scholar Moreton-Robinson conceptualises this through the ‘logic of white possessive’,Footnote ³¹ which refers to the discursive and material practices that legitimise settler claims to the land through racialised assertions of ownership, authority, and entitlement. Within this framework, not only Indigenous peoples are subjected to erasure, subordination, or conditional inclusion, but migrants are also racialised differently, welcomed for their labour or as evidence of multiculturalism, yet positioned hierarchically below white settlers and above Indigenous peoples. This racialisation reinforces settler authority while deflecting attention from fundamental questions of Indigenous sovereignty. Following this logic, settler colonialism does not require the physical elimination of the natives as long as race relations sustain the supremacy of white settlers. Both Indigenous people and migrants are welcome in a settler society as long as they conform to the racialised discourses that naturalise settler possession of the land.

While the framework of settler colonialism has advanced our understanding of the present manifestations of settler colonial land tenure and racialisation, some have expressed concerns that SCS can displace Indigenous studies and overshadow Indigenous resurgence by portraying settler colonialism as an all-encompassing and finished process.Footnote ³² Furthermore, the dominance of non-Indigenous scholars in SCS has raised concerns about the field functioning as a settler epistemology that can displace Indigenous scholars and knowledge.Footnote ³³ While Wolfe’sFootnote ³⁴ work is central to SCS, he himself acknowledged that he did not invent the field, but rather only formalised insights that Indigenous activists and scholars had articulated long before him.Footnote ³⁵ Despite existing disciplinary tensions, the value of settler colonialism as an interpretative framework is widely acknowledged, even by Indigenous studies scholars. Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and CorntasselFootnote ³⁶ note that, by focusing on power, land, and racialised disciplining practices, the framework of settler colonialism has sharpened our understanding of the persistent nature of colonialism, Indigenous land dispossession, and the real or attempted efforts to eradicate Indigenous communities. Non-Indigenous scholars Macoun and StrakoschFootnote ³⁷ identify two key contributions of SCS. First, it provides a conceptual language to challenge myths of decolonisation and expose how liberal ideals of multiculturalism and inclusion work to sustain settler legitimacy. Second, SCS deepens theories of race by situating racialisation within the maintenance of settler legitimacy.Footnote ³⁸ While it remains a field distinct from Indigenous studies, SCS works at its best when integrated with Indigenous perspectives.Footnote ³⁹ As Kauanui cautions, ‘Settler Colonial Studies does not, should not, and cannot replace Indigenous Studies’, but must be understood as its analytical counterpart.Footnote ⁴⁰

The case for settler colonial analysis in IR

Despite the emergence of SCS and the growing popularity of the concept of settler colonialism across disciplines such as history, anthropology, and legal studies, IR has been comparatively slow to incorporate this analytical framework. Two reasons stand out for the limited uptake of settler colonial analysis in IR. First, the disciplinary division between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ relegates colonial settlement, land tenure, and Indigenous sovereignty to the sphere of internal state affairs, thus obscuring how these are constitutive of international politics.Footnote ⁴¹ The Eurocentric assumptions of IR prevent the recognition of Indigenous interpolity relations as international relations.Footnote ⁴² Second, IR has developed a strong postcolonial critique, which has incorporated settler colonialism into its conceptual repertoire and treats it as a subcategory of colonial rule, coloniality, and postcolonialism.Footnote ⁴³ In this respect, RosenowFootnote ⁴⁴ critiques the growing tendency in postcolonial IR to use ‘coloniality’ as a catch-all, non-specific descriptor for global colonial and racial relations. While this concept has been an important disciplinary addition to IR to highlight how colonial power and hierarchies endure after formal colonisation, I concur with Rosenow that it risks flattening the distinction between different forms of colonial oppression and obscuring the specificities of settler colonialism, which is an ongoing form of colonial domination as described in the previous section. Rosenow’s critique underscores that rather than subsuming settler colonialism under broader colonial frameworks, it should be treated as a distinct locus of analysis.

Most of the (limited) IR literature that speaks about settler colonialism is primarily concerned with making space for Indigenous peoples and epistemologies, and thus, draws primarily from Indigenous studies rather than SCS. For example, Wilmer, Shaw, and KealFootnote ⁴⁵ examine how international relations logics, such as modernity, and practices, such as sovereignty and international law, exclude, marginalise, and assimilate Indigenous peoples. Other scholars, such as Shadian (2010), Lightfoot (2016, 2021), Brigg, Graham, and Weber (2021), Georgis and Lugosi-Schimpf (2021), de Leon (2022), and the contributors to Beier’s edited book (2009), recover Indigenous voices, practices, and knowledge to unsettle foundational disciplinary assumptions and push for more pluralistic and historically grounded understandings of global politics. This body of work highlights that IR reproduces hierarchies of sovereignty that privilege the state at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty. While legal scholars increasingly recognise the coexistence of Indigenous and settler state sovereignty and conceptualise them as ‘shared’, ‘overlapping’, or ‘parallel’,Footnote ⁴⁶ IR has largely subordinated Indigenous sovereignty to state sovereignty and treated it as a domestic matter of governance. As IraniFootnote ⁴⁷ points out, IR’s marginalisation of Indigenous political theory and lack of recognition of Indigenous peoples as international actors reflects a disciplinary investment in settler ontologies of statehood. Accordingly, scholars argue that IR must confront the racialised nature of sovereigntyFootnote ⁴⁸ and embrace plural and relational conceptions of sovereignty, including Indigenous sovereignty, if it is to decolonise and confront the colonial assumptions embedded in its frameworks.Footnote ⁴⁹

In this scholarship, settler colonialism is acknowledged as the political and epistemic condition oppressing Indigenous peoples but is only addressed in passing rather than treated as a central focus of critical analysis. To be fair to the authors just reviewed, defining or analysing settler colonialism in depth is not their main concern, which is instead to demonstrate that bringing Indigeneity to IR breeds new questions about epistemic silence, political authority, and the violence of the state and international law. Thus, while this scholarship acknowledges settler colonialism in IR, it misses the opportunity to develop a settler colonial analysis of world politics. A very few IR scholars have dedicated sustained attention to settler colonialism as a practice of world-making, mostly focusing on settler state-building. Some have examined the consolidation of settler states through practices such as policing Indigenous peopleFootnote ⁵⁰ and war commemoration,Footnote ⁵¹ and discourses such as civilisation,Footnote ⁵² the supremacy of white people over Indigenous people,Footnote ⁵³ and settler sovereign jurisdiction.Footnote ⁵⁴ Others have focused on settler state practices of security, bringing to the fore how the securitisation of Indigenous people and protests is a practice that reproduces the settler state.Footnote ⁵⁵ Crucially, this settler colonial analysis in IR reveals how state sovereignty is not only constituted through international recognition but is continually reproduced through the disavowal, elimination, and securitisation of Indigenous alternatives. Settler sovereignty is a project that requires constant practices that reinscribe settler authority and erase Indigenous jurisdiction.

This scholarship shows that analyses of settler colonialism and Indigeneity contribute critical tools for decolonising IR. It redirects attention to ongoing processes of colonial domination and practices of Indigenous resistance, thereby challenging IR’s tendency to treat colonialism as a closed chapter. Furthermore, unlike traditional postcolonial frameworks that focus on formal decolonisation and the legacies of overseas empires, these analyses foreground structures of ongoing occupation, land dispossession, and Indigenous rights that continue to shape ostensibly postcolonial states.Footnote ⁵⁶ They also open critical space within IR to centre Indigenous epistemologies, sovereignty, and political practices in ways that denaturalise the state system and the demarcation between domestic and international. It shows that the jurisdictional erasure of Indigenous sovereignty is an intrinsic matter of settler state security as well as an international phenomenon manifesting in a domestic context.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, settler colonial analysis does not merely call for the inclusion of Indigenous peoples within existing paradigms but demands the reconfiguration of the field’s foundational concepts and methods.Footnote ⁵⁸

Despite these valuable contributions, what remains striking is how this emerging literature has yet to fully confront the imperial dimension of settler colonialism. Although postcolonialism has warranted IR’s ‘imperial turn’,Footnote ⁵⁹ settler colonialism remains underexamined as a constitutive force within imperial ordering. It is often glossed over and rarely treated as analytically distinct within broader analyses of empire. A revealing example is Anghie’s book, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law,Footnote ⁶⁰ which opens up with the case of Australia’s colonial administration of Nauru to demonstrate that imperialism was central to the construction of the sovereignty doctrine in international law. Yet, Anghie does not engage with the specific settler colonial dynamics of Australia’s imperialism and sovereignty (a topic that he addressed over a decade later).Footnote ⁶¹ Settler colonial analysis is an underutilised tool that can bring to IR a distinct and indispensable lens to centre enduring practices of colonial occupation, racialised hierarchies, and the jurisdictional contests that shape international political ordering. In particular, I demonstrate that settler colonial analysis offers IR tools to understand settler imperialism as a form of colonial domination that continues to organise global power relations today.

The sidelining of settler colonialism within the IR imperial turn reflects a broader tendency in SCS to treat settler colonialism and imperialism as separate phenomena. For example, Elkins and Pedersen contend that the two concepts are ‘rightly’ distinguished because settler colonialism identifies questions of ‘land seizure or internal governance’, whereas imperialism is concerned (at best) with ‘Indigenous partners and chartered companies’ allied to imperial powers.Footnote ⁶² This conceptual separation was crucial in establishing SCS as a field focused on Indigenous dispossession, racialisation, and the logic of elimination. Wolfe, often considered a founding scholar of SCS, advocated for this separation, arguing that scholarship on imperialism, such as that on the British Empire in India, is fundamentally analytically unsuitable for understanding the racialised dynamics of occupation in contexts like Australia and Palestine.Footnote ⁶³ Veracini further notes that this separation was necessary because scholarship on imperialism often spatially distances settler states such as Australia and Canada from colonial violence, treating it as something that happens somewhere else in Africa and the Third World.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, distancing settler colonialism from imperialism has been a strategic move to relocate colonial violence within liberal and ostensibly post-imperial states.

Although in SCS, colonialism and imperialism are forcefully separated, Arneil finds that in other scholarly disciplines and in international law, they are conflated.Footnote ⁶⁵ She nevertheless advocates for the distinction, noting that colonialism is an ideology that enacts power as productive, aimed to improve idle and/or backwards lands and peoples both domestically and abroad, and imperialism as an ideology enacting domination of foreign people and land based on their perceived inferiority. She finds that when the two terms are conflated, Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism as a form of domestic domination are written off on the account that colonialism is equated to imperial foreign domination. This maps onto SCS insistence on separating imperialism from settler colonialism to bring to light settler violence within liberal states.

Conversely to SCS and Arneil, Indigenous studies scholars have readily emphasised the intertwining of settler colonialism and imperialism. ByrdFootnote ⁶⁶ (2011) and Tuck and YangFootnote ⁶⁷ argue that in settler colonial states like the US, decolonisation is particularly fraught because imperialism is an extension of its settler colonialism. Notably, for these Indigenous studies scholars, Indigenous people are emphatically not domestic populations but domesticated by practices of settler imperialism. From an Indigenous perspective, Indigenous people experience imperialism as a form of foreign domination framed as domestic governance. Other scholars like Kumar also suggest that settler colonialism is a form of imperialism.Footnote ⁶⁸ On his account, settler colonialism was a subtype of European imperialism that established ‘neo-Europes’ around the world by displacing Indigenous peoples from their land and implanting European creoles who eventually claimed a native identity as a way of distinguishing themselves from the imperial metropole.Footnote ⁶⁹

While sympathetic with the strategic logic for the conceptual distinction, I follow Indigenous studies scholars to suggest that reconsidering how settler colonialism and imperialism interact offers a productive intervention in the field of IR. While settler colonialism is a useful analytical lens to examine domestic politics against Indigenous people and ongoing colonial violence in liberal states, within an IR framework, it sheds light not only on the constitutive role of Indigenous dispossession in the formation and governance of settler states but also on imperial practices of ordering. International relations can look at settler colonialism as an imperial ordering practice that produces gradations of sovereignty premised on racialised logics, such as the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land, the indigenisation of settlers, and the selective and hierarchical inclusion of Indigenous people and migrants. The remainder of this article argues that settler colonialism is a function of imperial ordering that operates by producing, reproducing, and globalising racialised hierarchies of sovereignty.

Settler colonialism as a function of imperial ordering

When putting on an international lens, we can zoom out on settler colonialism as an analytical lens to examine domestic politics and see that it operates as a form of imperialism enacted by settler states to impart or secure the imperial order. Drawing on Stoler and Bell,Footnote ⁷⁰ I understand imperial order to be inherently hierarchical and racialised, and thus fundamentally at odds with the liberal international order’s professed principles of sovereign equality. In defining the imperial order, Stoler’s reconceptualisation of empire as ‘imperial formation’ defined as a dynamic polity of dislocation, appropriation, and displacement producing ‘gradations of sovereignty’Footnote ⁷¹ is particularly useful. It underscores that the imperial order is not reducible to the organisation of territorially demarcated macro-polities but is instead a system of ordering that produces hierarchies of sovereignty. Within this framework, settler colonialism is a constitutive logic of imperial ordering enacted by imperial formations. In IR, therefore, we can look at settler colonialism as a form of imperialism at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty. Defined by CoulthardFootnote ⁷² as a ‘sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples of the lands’, settler colonialism both generates domestic orders of domination and secures international hierarchies of rule.

Settler colonialism has historically been a function of imperial ordering. Bell demonstrates that settler colonialism played a crucial role in the emerging liberal international order amid the age of empires in the 19th and 20th centuries.Footnote ⁷³ According to Bell and Belich,Footnote ⁷⁴ settler colonialism was a form of imperial governance that gave the British Empire strategic superiority over other empires to the extent that the settler colonies were not merely an expansion of the empire but its extension. The British Empire not only had colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, but also neo-Britains in North America and the Pacific. These colonies were intimately connected with the motherland through the settlers, immigrants who departed from the metropole en masse to form the bulk of the colonial society rather than just its rulers. In fact, the connection was so strong that the British settler colonies could enact self-government without threatening the integrity of the British Empire (except the US). Bell explains that the British settler societies were connected to the settler empire by race patriotism, a form of ‘loyalty and affective signification that identifies race as a privileged site of political devotion’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Importantly, Bell discusses that race patriotism sutured the US with the British Empire and its settler colonies even after secession.

Settler colonialism was a significant global ordering practice enacted by the British Empire that gave rise to the Anglosphere, an enduring informal political structure of English-speaking countries comprising the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, which share not only language, but also culture, political traditions, and roots in the Anglo-Saxon race.Footnote ⁷⁶ Far from being merely a cultural phenomenon, scholars demonstrate that the Anglosphere is a racialised strategic alignment that was forged through British settler imperialism and has survived the demise of the British Empire. Vucetic argues that the Anglosphere remains alive as a post-imperial security alliance sutured by a racial identity and solidarity forged during the imperial era.Footnote ⁷⁷ Today, this manifests as strategic cooperation among Anglophone states such as the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement and AUKUS, and the exclusion of Commonwealth members such as India.Footnote ⁷⁸

To further examine how settler colonialism operates as a practice of imperial ordering, it is useful to engage with the limited scholarship on ‘settler imperialism’. Though settler-led imperial expansion is centuries old, the theoretical articulation of settler imperialism is relatively new and underutilised, especially in IR. FinzschFootnote ⁷⁹ traces its intellectual roots back to Karl Marx, who discussed the process of Indigenous dispossession and land appropriation driven not only by frontier settlers but also by metropolitan elites, financiers, and states that commodified land for profit. As he puts it, ‘those sequestering the land are thus not just the settlers and squatters on the frontier, but also the state and the financiers who acquired land to sell it off to land-hungry farmers or plantation owners’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Historically, this process has activated Indigenous resistance to occupation and sparked low-intensity warfare involving armed settlers, militia corps, mounted police, or the regular army deployed in frontier zones, which vanquished, dispersed, or forced Indigenous peoples to retreat, thus moving the frontier of the empire while simultaneously treating Indigenous peoples as domestic subjects. Hence, Finzsch notes that settler imperialism entails constant deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of the international into the domestic, where the political border is located in the body of the settlers who occupy and of Indigenous people who are dispossessed.Footnote ⁸¹ He then continues that the consolidation of this order depends on secondary processes, including land commodification, mass settlements of imperial subjects, and the embedding of family farming systems to claim possession and use of the land. To this, we can add the process of constructing Indigenous people as domestic populations to be governed.Footnote ⁸²

Building from an Indigenous perspective, Chickasaw scholar ByrdFootnote ⁸³ argues that settler imperialism is not merely an extension of imperial sovereignty over distant Indigenous lands, but a racialised and durable structure of domination that enables imperial expansion by domesticating Indigenous nations. This perspective neutralises the distinction between settler colonialism as domestic domination and settler imperialism as international domination, for Indigenous peoples are rendered into domestic subjects by international and foreign domination. For Byrd, settler imperialism highlights that the foundation of US imperialism is ‘the making of American Indians into domestic dependents belonging to the US’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Byrd’s concept of ‘transit of empire’ captures how settler empires like the US move across time and space with a variety of legal, cultural, and geopolitical practices about Indigenous land and bodies that reproduce the empire over time. A key technology of the transit of empire is the modular concept of ‘Indianness’, which is used by the US empire as a tool to facilitate, justify, and maintain its hegemony both over Indigenous peoples in North America and around the world. Domestically, it is used to manage Indigenous alterity by domesticating Indigenous peoples such that they cannot threaten the foundation and legitimacy of the settler state. The Indian is racialised as a savage, but ultimately as a domestic subject that can be subjected to the discipline and violence of the state. Abroad, it is used as a template of the ungrievable subject projected onto foreign racialised peoples to justify their colonial governance, occupation, or elimination. As Tuck and Yang reveal, ‘Indian Country was/is the term used in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S. military for “enemy territory”’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Byrd reveals that settler imperialism fundamentally operates by normalising the distinction between domestic and international spheres while simultaneously blending the two, such that domestic settler colonial processes directly enable and structure international imperial expansion and posture. While Byrd focuses primarily on how settler imperialism makes the international domestic by domesticating Indigenous nations, Kim extends the scope of this analysis, showing how US settler imperialism operates transnationally in Asia and the Pacific through militarised logics that reflect practices of settler colonialism at home.Footnote ⁸⁶ By establishing permanent military bases sustained by a culture of indebtedness (both monetary and moral) in foreign territories such as Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines, the US has extended its settler imperial sovereignty beyond its state borders. Kim captures this imperialism through the concept of ‘settler garrison’ because it fuses land seizure premised on racialised governance and the global projection of military power. These permanent US military bases rely on the subordination of Indigenous populations whose sovereignty is denied while their labour and land sustain the US military order. Notably, in Kim’s analysis, racial hierarchies are a key structuring logic of US settler imperialism abroad that determines whose lands are occupied, whose bodies and labour are exploited, whose lives are securitised, and whose lives are expendable and can be sacrificed. Indigenous lands are major targets of settler garrisons because Indigenous peoples are racialised through longstanding settler colonial logics of elimination and denial of full sovereignty that make them vulnerable to economic exploitation.

From these accounts, it emerges that settler imperialism is a ‘structuring force in global relations’ maintained through the ‘ongoing transit of Indigenous lives’.Footnote ⁸⁷ It captures the expansion of the settler state both ‘domestically’ (that is, over Indigenous Country within the boundaries of the settler state) and internationally, premised on the management and governance of Indigenous people and Indigeneity. This perspective demonstrates that the imperial expansion of settler states towards foreign lands is intrinsically interconnected with practices of settler colonialism towards domesticated Indigenous peoples. As Kim describes in the US case, settler imperialism can function through militarism, but its fundamental quality is the reliance on Indigeneity as a racial construct that enables the occupation of land and the domination of ‘othered’ peoples. Far from being confined to the margin of imperial history, settler colonialism has played a pivotal role in consolidating imperial formations, particularly through the appropriation of Indigenous land, the erasure and subordination of Indigenous sovereignty, and the production of racialised categories of governance. Claiming that ‘settler imperialism [is] an interconnected global phenomenon from the start’, Rosenow highlights the importance of situating settler imperialism within broader global hierarchies, beyond US-centric perspectives.Footnote ⁸⁸ Answering this call, the following section takes on an analysis of Australia’s settler colonialism as a function of imperial ordering in the Asia-Pacific.

Australia’s settler imperial dynamics

Australia offers a compelling case for examining how settler colonialism functions on the international stage as an imperial ordering practice. While Australia’s settler colonialism is commonly analysed as a domestic logic of Indigenous dispossession and domination, here, I expand the framework to highlight its broader imperial dimension. Viewing Australia’s settler colonialism as a mode of imperial ordering reveals how practices of Indigenous dispossession are acts of racialised world-making. Australia’s settler colonialism originates from British liberal imperialism, and its establishment was fundamental not just for the expansion of the British Empire in the Pacific but also, as mentioned above, for the creation of the Anglosphere, a political community premised on the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race spanning across the globe.Footnote ⁸⁹ Australia was not merely an object of British imperialism; it was also the subject of its own imperialism in the Pacific, reflecting what Biccum calls ‘imperial filiation’, that is, the idea that empires give birth to new empires.Footnote ⁹⁰ Following Stoler’s redefinition of empire as an imperial formation that produces hierarchies of sovereignty, Australia can be understood as an imperial formation that extended British imperial authority in the Pacific, subordinating Indigenous and Pacific sovereignties. These racialised hierarchies continue to shape the region in the present, revealing ongoing settler imperial dynamics. This final section illustrates this case.

After losing its American colonies, the British Empire turned eastwards in search of new markets and strategic footholds. The settlement of Australia was thus not an isolated colonial venture but a calculated act of imperial reorientation that also redefined modes of liberal governance in colonial contexts. Unlike the North American expansion that involved lengthy declared wars and alliances with Indigenous Nations, in Australia, the British exercised the doctrine of discovery and, without declaring war or making treaties with the natives, ‘proceeded to take the land as if it were their own, as if it were uninhabited’,Footnote ⁹¹ giving origin to Australia’s settler colonialism. The colonisation of Australia was an act of imperial invasion masked as a civilising mission. Deemed savages who did not own the land, Indigenous people were stripped of their sovereignty and made into British subjects, but with an inferior status governed by the Protection System.Footnote ⁹² This process of Indigenous domestication gave British imperialism a domestic flavour that made imperial violence palatable to liberal thinkers’ ideals of progress and civilisation. Nevertheless, the justification of imperialism as benevolent colonisation was tenable only in the mind of the Victorian liberal thinker.Footnote ⁹³ Indigenous people were subjected to imperial domination in the form of militarised repression exercised by the so-called Native Police, a paramilitary organisation in charge of dealing with Indigenous reappraisal.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Native Police exemplified how imperial practices of warfare and domination were recorded as domestic governance, transforming frontier conquest into an internal matter of law and order.

Not only was the colonisation of Australia never separate from British imperialism, it also underpinned Australia’s own imperialism. The racialised logics that structured the colonisation of Indigenous people became the blueprint for Australia’s own imperial ventures in the Pacific. For example, in 1883, the colony of Queensland attempted to annex to its territory the eastern part of New Guinea, claiming it terra nullius. Footnote ⁹⁵ Reproducing the settler logics that founded the Australian colonies by asserting the civilisational superiority of the British over Indigenous peoples, Queensland denied the existence of legal and political order in New Guinea and the ability of its people to govern themselves. Although Britain initially disavowed the annexation, it soon acknowledged the strategic concerns posed by France and Germany in the region and declared the south-east part of the island a British protectorate. In recognition of Queensland’s contribution to imperial security, the Australian colony was given administrative responsibilities, effectively being recognised as an imperial partner, albeit with lesser status.Footnote ⁹⁶ This episode marked a foundational moment in the emergence of Australia’s own settler imperialism, extending the racial hierarchies of sovereignty that structured colonial domination into the region.

The consolidation of Australia’s settler authority after Federation in 1901 further institutionalised racial hierarchy as the organising principle of settler sovereignty, both domestically and regionally. Built on Indigenous dispossession and surrounded by Asian and Pacific ‘others’, Australia sought to secure its national identity through racial exclusion.Footnote ⁹⁷ Whiteness was institutionalised through policies such as the Electoral Act which excluded Indigenous people from voting, and the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act (infamously known as the White Australia Policy), the Post and Telegraph Act, and the Pacific Island Labourers’ Act which restricted immigration, banned the employment of non-white labourers, and authorised the deportation of Pacific workers.Footnote ⁹⁸ Together, these laws made whiteness into the organising principle of Australian sovereignty that not only consolidated settler authority at home but also justified claims of regional imperialism premised on the civilisational superiority of white people. Following Federation, Australia performed its sovereignty through imperial governance in the Pacific, presenting colonial administration as a measure of national maturity. Australia sought to demonstrate its capacity for self-government and its rightful place within the imperial international order through its rule over Papua.Footnote ⁹⁹ Embracing the imperialist ideology that colonialism was the white man’s burden to civilise savage populations, Australia portrayed itself as a benevolent colonial power and a model of civilisation in the Pacific.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Australia’s imperial aspirations intensified with World War I, when it occupied the German part of Papua. After the war, Australia insisted on self-representation at Versailles (despite being part of the British Empire) and advocated for itself to gain the mandate of German New Guinea and Nauru, claiming its proven ability to govern and civilise Pacific peoples.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, this was not an act of imperial betrayal. As Anghie notes, ‘[i]t was by exercising its new-found powers over its mandate territories that Australia could test, manifest, and perform its sovereign powers and its emergence as an international actor notwithstanding its status as a loyal member of the British Empire’.Footnote ¹⁰² Acting as an imperial formation that produced gradations of sovereignty, Australia’s claims over the Pacific Islands reflected a dual racial hierarchy: deference to the British Empire and the Anglo-Saxon race on one hand, and domination of Pacific Islanders considered incapable of self-government on the other.Footnote ¹⁰³

The formation of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901 was not an anti-imperial act, but the consolidation of the imperial system under new administrative forms, to which Australia was uniquely committed. The British decision to devolve political authority to Australia rested on the assumption that white settlers were capable of self-rule without undermining imperial cohesion.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The British dominions developed distinct national identities but remained bound within the imperial order through race patriotism, the belief that whiteness is the foundation of civilisation and order.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Among them, Australia was the most devoted to this racialised imperial identity. While other dominions sought greater autonomy, Australia resisted moves toward equality, fearing that autonomy might have weakened imperial unity. Its reluctance to ratify the Statute of Westminster, which established the Commonwealth of Nations as equal polities, exemplifies this anxious attachment to the imperial order.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ A racialised sense of insecurity was at the core of Australia’s attachment to the British Empire. Australia believed that its survival as a white settler polity in a non-white region depended on Britain’s protection. Thus, geographic isolation combined with fears of Asiatic invasion from China and Japan made Australia’s loyalty to Britain both a racial and existential imperative.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Just like settler colonialism is an ongoing structure rather than a historical event, it continues to situate Australia within contemporary imperial ordering logics and practices, most clearly identified by scholars in AUKUS. The trilateral security agreement binding the US, the UK, and Australia re-centres an Anglo-strategic architecture and sidelines other non-Anglo regional partners, such as Japan, India, and South Korea, with whom Australia cultivated bilateral security relationships prior to the agreement. AUKUS also entailed breaking a security contract with France to prioritise Anglo-allied partners and interoperability. According to Fernandes, AUKUS demonstrates Australia’s sub-imperial nature, subordinate to the US but capable of projecting its own power and influence in the region.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The role of Australia as a sub-imperial power sustains the US hegemony in the Pacific, for example, granting the US presence in the region through military rotation on Australian bases. It also advances Australia’s strategic interests by projecting force to deter China. Clayton and Newman more explicitly link AUKUS to settler imperial logics of racial ordering.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ They describe AUKUS as a manifestation of Australia’s ‘settler strategic culture’, a defence orientation that privileges imperial alliances and responds to regional threats through a racialised lens. Notably, AUKUS revitalises the Anglosphere at a time when the rise of China threatens the international liberal order, which Bell describes as Anglocentric in origin and nature.Footnote ¹¹⁰

While scholars have used AUKUS to illustrate Australia’s place within contemporary imperial ordering, in this paper, I aim to demonstrate that the dynamics of Australia’s settler imperialism are more fundamental, showing up, first and foremost in domestic politics. In fact, settler imperialism is not merely a foreign policy, but as discussed in the previous section, it is a racialised ordering practice premised on the subordination of Indigenous sovereignty and domestication of Indigenous peoples. Australian settler imperialism is thus primarily concerned with the reassertion of settler authority over its domesticated Indigenous peoples. This manifests in domestic politics through the reproduction of racialised hierarchies of sovereignty that continue to subordinate Indigenous sovereignty to the authority of the settler state. Despite growing calls to recognise the coexistence of Indigenous sovereignty with that of the Crown as articulated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a petition by Indigenous Australians to settler Australia, progress towards this recognition remains minimal. The 2023 defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum starkly illustrates this. The referendum asked Australians to vote on the establishment of an Indigenous advisory body to provide Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a formal say in laws and policies affecting their communities. This was a modest mechanism of political recognition that was envisioned in the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a step towards the formalisation of Indigenous sovereignty. Yet, the very act of putting Indigenous recognition to a popular vote reinscribed the settler state’s power to determine the legitimacy and visibility of Indigenous political authority. The campaign became a site where misinformation, fear, and racialised narratives were mobilised to defend the sanctity of settler sovereignty.Footnote ¹¹¹ Ultimately, the failure of the referendum reaffirmed the settler state’s claim to exclusive sovereignty. It also had material effects against Indigenous sovereignty. Notably, the outcome of the referendum was invoked to stall treaty-making in states such as Queensland on the grounds that it demonstrates that treaties are divisive. In this sense, the referendum was not just a setback for reconciliation but an expression of how settler colonialism reproduces gradations of sovereignty that sustain the monopoly of the settler state and the domestication of Indigenous people.

This reassertion of settler authority at home is then mirrored in foreign policy initiatives framed as pro-Indigenous but constrained by settler logics. While Australians were voting against the Voice to Parliament, the government was simultaneously attempting to advance its First Nation Diplomacy Agenda, officially intended to ‘shape international norms and standards to benefit indigenous [sic.] peoples’.Footnote ¹¹² Despite good intentions from key figures such as the Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong and the Ambassador for First Nations People Justin Mohamed, this agenda remains situated within the logics of settler colonialism that reproduce gradations of sovereignty at the expense of Indigenous peoples both in Australia and the Pacific region. So far, the agenda has primarily focused on trade, intellectual property, and the promotion of Indigenous culture and knowledge abroad, rather than empowering Indigenous peoples in matters of sovereignty. Crucially, it has not afforded Indigenous people a voice in matters of national security, most notably on Australia’s participation in AUKUS. This agreement has significant implications for Indigenous people both in Australia and in the Pacific region. Through AUKUS, Australia plans to acquire nuclear-powered submarines and expand the militarisation of northern Australia serviced by American personnel and weapons alongside Australian forces. It not only consolidates the Anglosphere through a security agreement and military interoperability but also enacts gradations of sovereignty at the expenses of Indigenous peoples. The introduction of nuclear infrastructure contravenes the Treaty of Rarotonga, signed by Australia in 1986, led by Pacific Indigenous activists to preserve the South Pacific as a nuclear-free zone, while the militarisation of northern Australia, territories largely held under native title by Indigenous nations, violates the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which requires effective consultation before any military activity on Indigenous territories.Footnote ¹¹³

The First Nations Diplomacy Agenda can thus be understood, following Byrd, as a transit of empire that uses Indigeneity to reproduce settler imperial power. By incorporating Indigeneity into the performance of state diplomacy, Australia does not disrupt its settler foundations but rather rearticulates them in a more palatable, postcolonial idiom. Indigeneity becomes a vehicle through which the settler state can project an image of inclusivity and reconciliation, thereby renewing its moral authority both domestically and internationally, especially at a time when the rejection of the Voice to Parliament can be mobilised by international actors such as China against Australia’s reputation as a trustworthy Pacific partner.Footnote ¹¹⁴ But the First Nations Diplomacy Agenda does not redistribute sovereignty to Indigenous peoples; it serves to cleanse Australia of its colonial stigma as it continues its imperial practices in the Pacific. This allows Australia to position itself as an enlightened, decolonising actor in the region while continuing to secure the geopolitical and economic interests of the settler polity. Despite its First Nations Diplomacy Agenda, Australia continues to engage with Pacific Islands, ignoring or disrespecting Indigenous Pacific diplomatic protocolsFootnote ¹¹⁵ and treating Pacific Island states as pawns in the geostrategic competition with China in the region rather than as partners with security concerns of their own. While Australia prioritises geopolitical competition through AUKUS and bilateral security agreements with Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Nauru, and Papua New Guinea to contain the military spread of China in the region, Pacific and Indigenous leaders consistently identify climate change as the region’s most pressing security threat, with wildfires and floods threatening human security and the very existence of Pacific Islands.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The subordination of the First Nations Diplomacy Agenda to settler imperial interests is made explicit by commentators such as Medcalf, who insists that Australia’s First Nation Diplomacy is only viable as it serves the state and its aspirations in the Asia-Pacific.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He warns that advancing Indigenous interests in the region through a First Nation Diplomacy decoupled from Australia’s settler interests could pose new security challenges for Australia. For example, supporting Indigenous peoples in West Papua and Bougainville who assert claims to autonomy and independence, clashes with the interests of internationally recognised states such as Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. Medcalf also cautions that if Australia were to support these Indigenous struggles, it could embolden other Indigenous or minority movements in Asia, such as those in Tibet and Xinjiang, potentially destabilising the liberal international order. Supporting these Indigenous movements would risk jeopardising longstanding diplomatic relations with countries such as India and provoking new tensions with powers like China. Thus, for commentators such as Medcalf, the First Nations Diplomacy Agenda is not to serve Indigenous peoples and rights but the national and security interests of the settler state, and is only permissible insofar as it does not challenge the geopolitical status quo structured by settler and imperial powers.

This exposes the paradox at the heart of Australia’s First Nations Diplomacy Agenda, whereby while it claims to promote Indigenous voices in international affairs, it does so under the auspices of a settler state that continues to benefit from and reproduce imperial forms of governance both domestically and in the Pacific. Australia’s First Nations Diplomacy agenda does not disrupt the foundations of settler colonialism. Rather, it repackages Indigenous presence as a diplomatic asset to bolster its settler legitimacy and regional influence. In this way, Indigenous identity is selectively mobilised to serve Australia’s geostrategic interests while remaining subordinate to Australia’s settler sovereignty. Thus, Australia’s First Nations Diplomacy Agenda should be understood not as a decolonial project but as a form of settler imperial management, a transit of empire, that allows the state to contain Indigenous sovereignty within the acceptable poltical framework while serving Australia’s strategic objectives.

These dynamics and examples show that Australia’s settler colonial project was never isolated from imperial structures. Instead, it was and remains a constitutive part of them. From the assertion of racialised settler sovereignty in the Pacific to contemporary practices of imperial security alliances and opportunistic diplomacy, Australia’s domestic and foreign policies are animated by settler imperial logics that uphold Anglo-dominant hierarchies over Indigenous and Pacific nations. This demonstrates that settler colonialism is not merely a domestic or historical concern, but an enduring mode of imperial ordering that operates by creating, reproducing, and exporting racialised hierarchies of sovereignty.