Who’s Afraid of “Settler Colonialism”?

Who’s Afraid of “Settler Colonialism”?

If we dismiss concepts because of particular examples of misuse, we encourage the repression of discomforting histories and ideas.

A defining hallmark of the second Trump administration has been the extremity of the violence and threats it has directed at immigrants, especially those who are brown and Black. Masked agents in unmarked cars grab workers, parents, and students off the streets. Noncitizens languish in detention for purely political speech, while others are forcibly removed to maximum security prisons overseas or to “third countries” in secretive arrangements. Government videos revel in cruelty toward the growing numbers effectively disappeared. The very same Department of Homeland Security that houses ICE is now populating social media with images of nineteenth-century Euro-American settlers colonizing Native American land, with the caption, “A Heritage to be proud of.”

There is a term—indeed an entire interdisciplinary framework—that helps to make sense of these developments. That term is settler colonialism. But across a broad swath of the political spectrum, that term is now treated as practically off limits.

On the right, Trumpists embrace colonialist iconography while accusing anyone who puts the pieces together as promoting “anti-American ideology.” Beyond the right, it is the term’s invocation in protests over Gaza and in debate about Israel/Palestine that has made it a lightning rod. Before October 7, 2023, settler colonialism rarely if ever appeared in text in the New York Times. Since then, the paper has published multiple skeptical think pieces on the subject, as has the Atlantic, one of which was adapted from a recent book that castigates its scholarly and political uses.

What has made settler colonialism such an object of both apprehension and dismissal? To its critics, the concept is analytically unhelpful since it evokes a fact about all societies; if you go back far enough, they all have original sins. In this argument, settler colonialism isn’t a scholarly tool so much as an unhelpful accusation of political guilt. What’s worse, critics fear that under the “political theology” at play, the scales of justice can only be made right by removing those excoriated as “settlers.” In the United States, this may be a farcical nonstarter, but for Israel/Palestine, it is ultimately what Adam Kirsch calls a “theory of a massacre.”

If that were all settler colonialism meant or entailed, it would be right to reject it. But this interpretation is reductive, to say the least. All concepts can be politically misused or poorly applied, and there are no doubt people that have used the term in ways that I find ethically wrong. Yet a concept’s value lies in its ability—when employed with care—to explain phenomena that are otherwise opaque. If concepts are dismissed because of particular examples of misuse, the consequence is not only a loss of understanding. It also opens the door wide to a public culture willing to repress discomforting histories and ideas.

The gravest charge against settler colonialism is the ethical one—rather than the matter of its analytical utility—so that is the necessary place to start. For critics, to call something “settler colonial” is to promote, implicitly or explicitly, a politics of removal. At root, this fear derives from naming any practice or context “colonial,” since overcoming the injustice of colonialism requires decolonization. And during the twentieth century, a common feature of decolonization was for a relatively thin layer of European administrators and inhabitants, presumptively without deep ancestral connections, to leave the newly independent country—whether the British in India or the Belgians in Congo.

Perhaps the most dramatic example is Algerian independence, which resulted from a brutal armed struggle between the anticolonial FLN and the French government, alongside a wave of violence from the OAS (the French settler paramilitary group). In the context of independence, nearly 800,000 French settlers faced a mass exodus to France. This was due to a combination of factors—from fears about retribution, brought home by real anti-settler violence, to the deep suspicion many had of basic equality and Algerian sovereignty. Setting aside for now the appropriateness of a colonial frame for any specific case, the worry is that in a demographically intertwined context like Israel/Palestine, calling for decolonization mostly means replicating the most extreme treatment of French Pied-noir.

One cannot guarantee that anticolonial efforts will always avoid morally objectionable paths. In part this is because the experiences of injustice in any context can generate responses that are motivated by a desire for redress, but that reproduce their own inhumanity. Still, it would be a massive distortion to read all decolonization through such fears. Decolonization was a historical process affecting most of the planet. As with any global process, there were politically and ethically worthy approaches to it, and approaches that should be opposed. The direct line critics make between decolonization and removal rests on ignoring this variety and presuming that there is only one real means for decolonization. It also requires ignoring the depth of thinking, writing, and policymaking by anticolonial activists and politicians who for the better part of a century grappled with how to conceive of decolonization in places with deeply diverse and divided societies, whether South Africa, the United States, Latin America, or even Israel/Palestine.

Such voices often took as a given an unavoidable fact across conflict-ridden societies: there could be no resolution without compromise. Decolonization had to proceed through practices of mutual accommodation—with gains and concessions negotiated among the relevant sides. This practical reality is also why many anticolonial figures treated as their political centerpiece the concrete aim of combining redress with space for all in a shared future.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and others understood their freedom project in terms of decolonization.  But they very consciously sought to learn from earlier anticolonial achievements and failures, and to make decisions better tailored to the particularities of their plural and enmeshed country. They had extensive internal debates about the ethics of armed struggle. When and under what circumstances could violence be a legitimate tool—and even if so, what were the necessary limits on the use of force? Indeed, a critical reason why those like Mandela pushed for constraints on employing violence and for prioritizing nonviolent means had to do with the ends sought. They appreciated that white society and Black society were constitutively joined and would require coexistence and reconciliation. No simple politics of removal was viable. Moreover, the very idea of such removal was morally unacceptable, since all South Africans—Black and white—had built their lives on the same land.

Mandela’s analysis of colonialism was that its driving logic was an us-versus-them mindset; it presumed the impossibility of living together on equal terms. Carrying forward a zero-sum mentality would defeat decolonial aspirations. Decolonization would only succeed if it overcame such thinking. The only long-term solution was a true multiracial democracy.

This framework led to policies that established political and legal equality, desegregation, and historical accounting through mechanisms such as a truth and reconciliation commission. It also meant addressing structural economic issues with a variety of redistributive tools, including the drive for universal provision of basic public goods and services (such as health, housing, and education) and of a nonexploitative job. It further entailed engaging seriously with the issue of land expropriation through land reform and even return.

All of these policies have no doubt proven complex to navigate, perhaps especially when it comes to land. Today, white South Africans make up 7 percent of the population but still own three-quarters of private land, while Black South Africans are 81 percent of the population but only own 4 percent of private land. The persistence of these difficulties highlights just how hard decolonization can be, and the real costs many Black South Africans see in mutual concession on the path out of apartheid. Even Mandela’s legacy is thus a complicated one, especially around issues of land access and economic equality. But still, generations of South Africans—Black and white—have held onto and struggled for a decolonial future premised on inclusive democracy.

One can say the same thing about the basic orientation of Indigenous politics across the Americas. In the United States, from 1972’s Trail of Broken Treaties to the more recent Red Deal, countless activists have avoided treating decolonization as a millennial call for returning to a world before today’s nation-states and instead offered rich accounts of concurrent sovereignty: how Native peoples—as distinct political communities—could share the same landmass with the United States while still enjoying actual self-determination.

Along with material investments in health, housing, education, and social welfare, such projects call for all existing treaties to be enforced, with Native nations enjoying the ability to seek restitution for the violation of rights before an appropriate arbiter. They also emphasize the need for real land return—an obviously hard question—as well as extensive legal protections for nature. And they highlight the importance of new institutional arrangements to promote genuinely shared U.S.-Indigenous decision-making over common resources. Similar arguments have circulated in Latin America, with new constitutions now incorporating pluri-nationalism and the rights of nature and governments experimenting with participatory budgeting—all aimed at making concurrent Indigenous sovereignty real in the twenty-first century.

Perhaps most strikingly given the fears that decolonization means “settlers out,” Native American activists in the United States have allied with immigrant rights groups to argue for a far more inclusive approach to migration, complete with “abolishing ICE” and opposing coercive border policies. (Red Deal activists responded to the Trump Muslim ban by declaring “No Ban on Stolen Land.”) They also see these policies as of a piece with basic transformations to the carceral state and the broader security apparatus, linking their demands with voices in the Movement for Black Lives. They champion a version of decolonization grounded in ethno-racial openness, alongside far greater freedom of movement and greater legal and political rights for everyone—Indigenous or not.

All of this echoes the insight of James Boggs, the Black American activist and writer, that the American condition could never be resolved through ethno-racial separation and removal. Separation was both a practical and a moral error. According to him, any liberation project—including an anticolonial one—had to entail “tackling” together “all the problems of this society, because at the root of all the problems of black people is the same structure and the same system which is at the root of all the problems of all people.”

Such a sensibility mirrors the approach pursued by numerous voices in the Israel/Palestine context, who for decades have struggled with how to ensure equal rights for equal people without compelling any community to leave or to repudiate their identity. These approaches have taken numerous institutional forms—the familiar one-state versus two-state debate, but also ideas of confederation. The latter imagines the possibility of both peoples having rights across two states, with shared institutions to manage resources, security, and to ensure basic legal safeguards for all. As an idea, confederation has parallels with projects of concurrent sovereignty from the Americas as well as federative arrangements everywhere from the Middle East to Europe aimed at navigating ethno-religious and communal divisions.

Yet institutional forms are, in the end, simply means. What matters most is the underlying vision. For Palestinian writer Bashir Bashir, any institutional framework for Palestinians and Israelis should be driven by “the ethical principle” of what he calls “egalitarian binationalism.” This is a commitment to “national self-determination of both national groups while insisting that this right ought to not be realized” through ethno-domination or by “means of separation, fragmentation and segregation.” Such a vision leaves open difficult issues about how to define each national community and how to address profound imbalances in power. It is thus only one potential ethical route, and its vision for the future is far from our catastrophic present.

Yet what such thinking represents is a decolonial aspiration that rejects zero-sum conclusions and that is invested in how two peoples inhabiting the same landmass can enjoy freedom and equal dignity. While decolonization may take other, more corrosive paths, neither extreme violence nor removal are predetermined. Nor do more transformative ends necessarily implicate more violent means. The history of political conflict speaks to how means and ends can be arranged in countless ways—with seemingly small-scale reforms pursued through intense violence and radical social changes proceeding on strikingly peaceful terms. And of course, our very idea of what a nonviolent social movement can look like comes from Mahatma Gandhi’s organizing as part of Indian independence efforts. It is ultimately our political responsibility to develop and apply our conceptual frameworks in ways rooted in common humanity.

The politics of decolonization are ours to make. But is the concept of settler colonialism actually helpful for understanding our world, or is it just a new language of liberal guilt? The phrase has spread in the academy, especially since the 1990s, above all due to a dramatic growth in interest in the global history of colonization and decolonization. That interest shouldn’t be treated with suspicion, if for no other reason than because this history is among the most defining experiences of the twentieth century. It affected billions of people and must be understood. And it makes sense that with greater attention paid to these processes there would be a proliferation of connected concepts across disciplines. It also makes sense that this would occur at a time when the academy began including more scholars with a diverse set of backgrounds and identities—many of whom, like myself, had families directly shaped by this history.

Settler colonialism, however, has a much longer past than this recent story of the academy would suggest. As Laleh Khalili notes, “The terms ‘settler’ and ‘colonist’ were already in use well before the dawn of the 20th century, and the specific anglophone phrasing of ‘settler colonialism’ . . . can be traced to the 1960s,” when anticolonialist authors from Asia and Africa had their writings translated into English. During roughly the same period, historians of the British Empire like D.K. Fieldhouse were developing typologies of colonization based on how labor and land arrangements influenced political institutions. I discovered the concept in this context. I was in a PhD program studying the British Empire in sub-Saharan Africa, but I found myself increasingly struck by parallels in land and labor policy between the early United States and places like Kenya and South Africa under the British.

If settler colonialism has a variety of intellectual roots, what is typically meant by the term? The most classic definition is a setting in which an imperial power colonizes a separate polity through a process that involves transplanting substantial home country populations—or settlers—to the new territories. These colonies of settlement institute economic, legal, and political systems that distinguish between the rights and resources of colonists and their descendants—settler insiders—and those of native inhabitants and other disfavored migrant populations, including enslaved persons in the Americas.

But this ideal type masks countless variations. Sometimes settlers push to remove and demographically replace native populations. In places like the United States or Australia, there was often less interest in governing Indigenous peoples or using their labor for economic projects and far more in annexing land and, as historians Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen write, moving “them beyond an ever-expanding frontier of settlement.” In other settings, such as the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, or the Japanese in Manchuria and Korea, settler populations “found themselves locked in protracted negotiations or struggles with always more numerous” native inhabitants. The value of thinking comparatively about these cases is how they suggest new approaches for enduring questions: What accounts for differences in race relations—aggressive separation in one context and hybridity in another? And why have societies that strongly identify as democratic nonetheless participated in mass, even genocidal, violence against disfavored groups?

In my own work, I find the concept useful for explaining a persistent dynamic of American life: how U.S. institutions combine genuinely rich accounts of equality and freedom internally with extreme forms of domination for those on the outside looking in. The American story of immigration—the focal point of today’s Trumpist violence—is a perfect microcosm of this dynamic, or what I have called “the two faces of American freedom.” For many liberals, it is hard to reconcile DHS actions and symbolism with long-held beliefs about the United States as “a nation of immigrants,” to use the title of John F. Kennedy’s famed 1958 monograph. How can the United States, home to a Statue of Liberty emblazoned with Emma Lazarus’s words declaring the border to be a “golden door,” run headlong into such brutality?

The historic terms of U.S. immigration are deeply intertwined with colonial settlement. As I’ve written, before and after the founding, Americans saw their economic independence and social mobility as bound up with access to land. The result was a project of persistent expansion and the Euro-American peopling of previously Indigenous territory. The scale of this undertaking created a need for new migrants beyond the descendants of existing colonists. (This goal of encouraging migration is one of the reasons why the vast majority of countries today that have birthright citizenship, like the United States, are in the Americas and began as colonies of settlement.) But these migrants also had to be the “right” kind—the type of migrant capable of replicating U.S. republican values and practices in new land, of producing an American society on territory where it had not existed.

To induce the right type of migration, officials implemented a set of policies that would surprise many Americans today. For Europeans on the move, the border was truly a golden door, more a port of entry than a harsh barrier. There were limited controls and limited federal deportations, in the latter case none until well after the Civil War. Under the 1802 Naturalization Act, European migrants merely had to reside in the country for five years, declare their intent to be naturalized at least three years before admission to citizenship, pledge an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, and give minimal proof of good character.

More remarkably, the desire for greater migration meant that Europeans enjoyed economic and political opportunities in the United States even before citizenship. A European migrant that declared their intent to naturalize would have been eligible for western land grants, like those established under the 1862 Homestead Act—a core mechanism of nineteenth-century social provision and one vital to demographic and territorial expansion. Most surprisingly, European noncitizen settlers that declared their intent to naturalize routinely enjoyed voting rights, especially on the frontier. This approach had its roots in the colonial era and even applied under early congressional policy for the Northwest Territory.

That same desire for the “right” type of population produced rigid movement controls for other communities. Native Americans faced wholesale removal. And before the Civil War, enslaving states barred the admission of non-enslaved Black people that were not already residents. Oregon along with Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa had laws that effectively banned Black presence in their territory at all. And the first sustained federal deportations in the late nineteenth century were organized to control Chinese migration. Asians found themselves part of a new legal category—“aliens ineligible to naturalize”—barred from ever becoming formal citizens through naturalization. Western states incorporated new laws to target Japanese farmers and prevent all “aliens ineligible to naturalize” from owning land. Much like what happened to Mexicans after the Mexican-American War, the effect was to dramatically curtail and ultimately dispossess non-Euro-American landholding. All of this created a state of affairs in which it was commonplace for European noncitizen settlers to enjoy greater rights and opportunities than Indigenous peoples as well as Black, Mexican, and Asian Americans who had long histories on the land or may have even been formal citizens.

Only with the closing of the frontier and the effective completion of the U.S. project of settlement did American immigration policy come to approximate the features we know today: formal racial inclusion combined with harsh quotas for the Americas and a massive infrastructure for detention and deportation. This began in the early twentieth century, when heightened industrial class conflict among Euro-Americans, alongside the declining need for new migrants, shifted policymaker views away from the goal of inducing more European migration and led to the end of noncitizen voting. It also produced a racialized quota system that for the first time targeted European migrants too, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe. The result was that by the time John F. Kennedy was putting pen to paper in the 1950s, only 5 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born. Numerous other countries at the time would have had a greater claim to be a nation of immigrants.

Then, against the backdrop of the Cold War, global decolonization, and the civil rights movement, Americans increasingly came to redefine their national identity on more inclusive, civic terms. This involved the elimination of the category of “alien ineligible to naturalize” and the end, in 1965, of all racially restrictive quotas. Immigration pathways opened to Asian and African populations who had been excluded almost completely by 1920s immigration laws. That 1965 reform shapes today’s far more ethno-racially plural United States, but it also placed quotas on polities in the Americas. The effect was to treat migrants from countries like Mexico as more or less equivalent to those from any country in Europe or Asia, despite the thick cross-border social and economic ties. Many Mexican workers had long lived on one side of the border while working on the other, with family and communal life built around movement. The 1965 quotas practically overnight created new categories of undocumented migrants, subject to emerging legal sanctions.

Finally, in the 1990s, as anti-immigrant sentiment reconsolidated itself in U.S. politics, especially on the right, new harsh laws dramatically expanded who was subject to deportation and detention. They created a world in which even legal permanent residents live on what historian Mae Ngai calls “a condition of permanent probation,” since minor offenses carry mandatory deportation irrespective of whether immigrants have served their sentences or have long-standing ties to the country—including military service. Well before Trump, the United States had become notorious for housing the largest immigration detention system in the world, with nearly 300,000 people detained in 2023. A nation of immigrants was also a nation that jailed immigrants. Trump’s return pushed this contradiction to the breaking point.

The concept of settler colonialism can help illuminate the historical processes that led many Americans to see their society as uniquely open to the immigrant experience despite these contradictory facts. Emma Lazarus, who descended from German and Portuguese Jewish immigrants, was not wrong to understand her family’s story as genuine proof of American inclusivity. Indeed, that very drive to induce migration meant that for many Europeans, ethno-racial divides (French versus German versus Italian) and even religious ones (Protestant versus Catholic versus, eventually, Jewish) were far less salient in the U.S. context. Even the turn to “white” as a central social category indicated a growing internal equality, hybridity, and amalgamation among Euro-Americans. All of this went hand in hand with extreme controls for those deemed outsiders.

Racial quotas and formal Jim Crow may be gone. But at the same time, new migrants, the bulk of whom since 1965 have been nonwhite, have not enjoyed nearly the same embrace—never mind noncitizen voting and easy access to land—that marked earlier eras. Certainly, some immigrants from the Global South, especially those highly educated, have found pathways to real inclusion as “model minorities” or the “right” kind of immigrant. But undocumented individuals, by contrast, often find themselves engaged in hard and exploitative work, the result of longstanding and state-sponsored patterns of production, and under the continuous threat of legally sanctioned violence. They overwhelmingly come from parts of the world that would have marked them as the “wrong” type of migrant; devoid of legal let alone political rights, their experiences mirror elements of work and life under the old Jim Crow.

Thus, the dynamics of settlement offer productive answers to questions of why the golden door opened, and why it has been so firmly closed. The experience by many Americans of the country as a nation of immigrants was birthed out of policies aimed at territorial expansion and demographic transformation. When those needs declined, those policies were clawed back. During the Cold War, the desire to win hearts and minds in the Global South and to answer to domestic civil rights politics led to a meaningful if partial revival of immigrant inclusion. Today, however, with the civil rights era and the Cold War imperative of global inclusivity both faded memories, the U.S. baseline is a militarized border of detentions and deportations, further intensified by Trump.

Trump has taken advantage of a longstanding pattern in these dynamics: the fluidity of the boundary between insider and outsider. At each historical stage, who gets to benefit from American prosperity has shifted. Now one sees the willingness of even some nonwhite immigrants and Black Americans to embrace nativism and to view their own freedom as threatened by more recent migrants.

Yet this history also highlights the liberatory elements in the idea of a “nation of immigrants.” Immigrant activists today often invoke the ideal while refusing to ignore its settler links or to turn it into a device of national self-congratulation. They ally again with Indigenous efforts like the Red Deal. For both groups, embracing immigrant freedom—while rejecting settler preconditions—requires opposing persistent insider/outsider boundaries, and embracing genuine inclusion for those at the margins.

Whatever one might say about the usefulness of the concept for explaining American puzzles, many argue that when transposed to Israel, settler colonialism becomes an unproductive descriptor—one that primarily functions to excoriate. Some critics of this application, like Michael Walzer, do accept that “Israeli settlement” in places such as the West Bank, which are part of Palestine’s internationally recognized territory, “fits the ideological construction all too neatly.” These settlement projects parallel historic and recent examples of states engaged in economic and territorial expansion through population movement, including ongoing examples like Moroccan settlement in Western Sahara or Indian-promoted land purchase and settlement in Kashmir, buttressed by Indian legal shifts since 2019.

Still, for Walzer, “This account of West Bank settlement actually proves, by contrast, the falseness of the settler colonial account of Israel itself.” Jewish migrants to Israel were not the transplants of an imperial home country. Israel instead was the nation-building project of a “diasporic community,” to use Elkins and Pedersen’s language, a community moreover that experienced extreme discrimination and eventually genocide in Europe. Just as significantly, Jewish migrants had an ancestral relationship to the land that unsettles the divide between settler and native.

These are real divergences from the ideal type, but rather than ending the conversation they invite further engagement. Settler colonialism is not a single totalizing definition of a society or a monocausal explanation for all practices within it. No concept—race, capitalism, empire—should be treated this way. The weakest applications of settler colonialism are precisely when someone reduces the complexity of all national experiences to a single root. Rather, settler colonialism is best seen as a lens that helps explain particular dynamics. All cases are marked by variation and difference. The potential value of the concept as an analytical tool is in highlighting family resemblances across such difference and, in the process, pairing cases in ways that illuminate.

In the Israeli context, one productive application might be to pair it with Liberia, the other notable example of “diasporic” settlement and nation-building. Throughout the nineteenth century, the extremity of enslavement and then of Jim Crow bondage spurred imaginings of a national homeland in Africa for Black Americans kidnapped and exiled from the continent. It fed the idea among some that, given Euro-American racism, only through emigration and national self-determination could Black people ever be free. Especially with the violent defeat of Reconstruction, these sentiments became one piece of what Cedric Robinson calls the politics of “populist Black separatism,” which swirled particularly across the South. Black-led organizations like the Colonization Council reported signing up some 98,000 Black Americans for emigration from the South. Such efforts focused on Liberia, but also on Haiti, Canada, and even states like Kansas (long associated with John Brown and radical abolition). Ultimately, very few of those enrolled succeeded in making it out of the country. And overseas colonization was deeply opposed by other voices within Black life, like Frederick Douglass, who saw it as a rejection of what Black Americans had struggled and died for during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Still, the idea of a separate national homeland, while generally pushed to the margins, remained a persistent feature of Black politics.

The greatest success for colonization came earlier in the century through the efforts of the white-led American Colonization Society, which established a Black American settlement in Liberia in 1822, one that settlers in 1847 declared to be an independent republic. Backers of Liberia included a number of U.S. presidents, both enslavers and anti-slavery voices: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and later on Lincoln. In his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln called to “free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.” As historian Nicholas Guyatt has explored, Euro-American elites often supported colonization out of fears about what a large emancipated Black population in the United States might entail. White proponents took a basic racial hierarchy for granted and were deeply unsettled by the prospect of integration. They turned to Black emigration as the answer to the “race problem.” Some of the earliest Black settlers in Liberia were previously enslaved persons forced to leave as a condition of manumission.

The numbers were never that large: only 16,000 migrants went to Liberia by the end of the nineteenth century. Although Lincoln recognized the country in 1862, the Civil War and abolition—along with suspicions in Black communities—pushed against large-scale movement. In a sense, the Great Migration in the early twentieth century became the practical embodiment of the Black desire to leave the South. As for Liberia, U.S. support proved vital—including key assistance in suppressing uprisings by native West Africans—even as American governmental and popular interest in the project waxed and waned over time.

Nonetheless, thousands of nineteenth-century Black Americans migrated to Liberia, and many of them were inspired by principles of national self-determination and by an attachment to West African soil as an ancestral homeland for an enslaved people. Historian Claude A. Clegg also notes that “Liberia’s founding was marked by incessant conflicts with indigenous Africans, who were dispossessed of land and sovereignty. Ironically, while African Americans had come to Liberia for freedoms and rights that were denied them in the United States,” the society that they established “largely excluded Africans . . . from the political and social life of Liberia.”

There are numerous discontinuities between Israel and Liberia, including the very different places these states occupy today in U.S. domestic cultural life and geostrategic alliances. To underscore the point, Trump officials are now actually considering adding Liberia—a country that American presidents once cultivated and presented as a beacon of American liberty—to its list of countries whose nationals are banned from entering the United States.

More generally, during the twentieth century, while the practical investment in a Black American nation-state remained at the edges of Black American identity, the cultural and political significance of an independent nation-state for Jewish people gained profound traction. The Holocaust had a decisive impact on this development, both within European and American Jewish life and with respect to the investment of existing global powers in Israeli nation-building.

Yet the comparison remains instructive. It underscores that invoking settler colonialism does not imply that a polity has only one socio-political identity or meaning. Black American self-determination in Africa, through projects like Liberia, was very much understood by Black proponents as a national movement of emancipation in the face of extreme and enduring dehumanization. The Liberia case suggests that state-building efforts can both replicate colonial dispossession and embody for participants a liberatory project of ancestral return.

Looking at the two countries together also speaks productively to the complexities of both the issue of imperial support and who claims native status—two of the complicating features for applying settler colonialism to Israel. Although neither polity is an example of straightforward imperial transplantation of citizens or subjects, the way antebellum American officials and early twentieth-century British administrators approached these projects of diasporic migration is worth interrogating. Each power facilitated settlement—for instance, through preferential tariffs alongside electrical and other public works monopolies in Mandatory Palestine—suggesting that imperial backing itself occurs on a spectrum rather than a simple binary. And Euro-American and British elites themselves often held deeply discriminatory views about Black and Jewish communities, treating emigration of a marginalized group as a way to resolve internal issues of membership and cohesion. At the same time, although both Black and Jewish thinkers imagined numerous sites for potential emigration, a key part of the cultural resonance of Liberia and Israel specifically—not to mention their actual nation-building success—had to do with deeply felt ties to the territory. These were nation-building projects fostered by imperial dynamics but also grounded in historical and cultural connection.

Such connection, though, is distinct from how those who study settler-native relations approach these terms. And it’s useful here to reflect briefly on the related idea of “indigeneity.” In ordinary speech, indigenous may mean originating from a place and so potentially extend back millennia. As a category in international law, indigeneity is typically defined in relation to global processes of colonization. An Indigenous people usually denotes the community “who inhabited the country or geographical region at the time of conquest, colonisation or establishment of present state boundaries.” Native Americans are “indigenous” to North America because of their presence at the time of European conquest.

Regardless, in a settler colonial analysis, the focus isn’t on who may or may not have lineage that extends back to earliest occupation. This analysis doesn’t even require that the inhabitants at the time of external reshaping are an “Indigenous” people, although the treatment of Indigenous societies has certainly been central to the development of the concept. Akin to the legal approach, it means looking to those concrete processes of disruption and dispossession during specific historical periods that shape a society’s law, politics, and economics. Settler and native are not immutable and permanently fixed categories. Settler colonialism is an analytical framework, not a characterization of a people for all time.

The Black American relationship to Liberia is again instructive here. African enslavement and kidnapping from West Africa was part of a project of European colonial disruption and dispossession. Stolen Africans from West Africa were “native” with respect to those processes. But nineteenth-century Black American migrants to Liberia were no longer conceptually native. Liberia was marked by land expropriation, segregation, exclusionary citizenship, and even at points forced labor—the latter despite the country’s identity as a response to the evil of slavery. To understand how these practices emerged, one has to interrogate the distinctions established between the rights and resources afforded Black American settlers and their descendants and those provided to nineteenth-century native West Africans. Similarly, a settler colonial frame would treat Western Sahara’s inhabitants at the time of the Moroccan state’s push toward dispossession as “native.” And for Mandatory Palestine, “native” would denote the historically rooted and non-diasporic population on the ground, regardless of religion or ethnicity, that found itself facing new structures of control during the process of British colonization.

To add further nuance, these “native” populations included local Jewish communities, a small percentage in Mandatory Palestine. Yet during those decades and especially with the establishment of Israel, their analytical place in the society shifted. They were not “diasporic,” and they faced discrimination in Israel. But through co-religious identity, they also were ultimately able to claim status benefits denied other “native” populations.

Critically, one can apply these settler colonial categories while at the same time accounting for the ancestral connection of Black and Jewish diasporic populations to the land. In fact, this accounting is vital for conceptual clarity, because such ties produced real differences in the development of Liberia and Israel as opposed to other experiments in settlement. These differences invite a host of questions: how do “diasporic” conditions compare with more standard imperial relationships to their transplanted citizens? What shapes diasporic commitments to migration and to state formation? How do geostrategic rivalries and foreign policy choices intersect with transnational political movements? And what are the cultural and material dynamics of support from powerful state backers?

Even across cases in which the polity juxtaposed more closely approximates the classic type, comparison is still worthwhile. Like the U.S. example during the era of settlement, for example, Israeli migration policy is notable for the degree to which it combines openness with movement control. Laws governing return and citizenship allow people of Jewish descent and their spouses ease of migration to Israel and ease of citizenship once there.

Palestinians, by contrast, do not have the right of return, and they face significant barriers to movement across distinctly governed locations—Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel’s pre-1967 territory, among others. And like policies that once shaped non-European migration to the United States as well as the lives of those migrants within it (for example, the experience of Asian workers), the rules governing return and citizenship also place limits on the capacity of non-Jewish migrant workers to gain naturalization. All of this resonates with Liberia’s approach to nationality, which denied native West Africans citizenship until 1904. And in keeping with the idea of the country as a refuge for Black people, to this day only people of Black African descent can become citizens by birth or naturalization.

These comparisons draw attention to the differences between settler and non-settler contexts when it comes to migration and membership. They also highlight the similarity with nation-building in contexts of co-ethnic or co-religious settlement. The value of comparison extends to apartheid South Africa, the most controversial parallel to Israel for many critics. But if approached with intellectual responsibility, there are clear reasons to study them together. Alongside extensive differences in their founding, history, identity, and the complexities of ancestral connection, there are also resonances around land rights, resource distribution, border policy, and population segregation, to name a few domains. At a time when ever-growing numbers, including human rights organizations in Israel, are calling the assault on Gaza a genocide, it is especially incumbent upon us to interrogate thorny parallels.

All of this speaks to why settler colonialism has spread across numerous disciplines. Just as with any concept, there are writers motivated by ideological priors. But its analytical success is not ultimately driven by a desire to moralize about the ills of a given society or to stoke guilt. Concepts often spread because their application tells us something we may not have appreciated. Settler colonialism, like any other lens, does not and cannot tell you everything. And indeed, the concept isn’t necessary to condemn overwhelming brutality or to affirm a people’s basic humanity. But it nonetheless illuminates aspects of our condition that we may not otherwise see.

We are living in what feels like apocalyptic times. But we must resist the temptation to treat the terms that we have to make sense of the world—even if some may use them in morally troubling ways—as apocalyptic in themselves. If we dismiss the terms, we undermine the intellectual infrastructure we have for understanding our communities, for forging solidarity across difference, and for jointly reforming the societies we inhabit.

Aziz Rana teaches law at Boston College. He is the author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them and The Two Faces of American Freedom.