E-scaping apartheid: Digital ventures of Zionist settler colonialism

The ongoing “Intifada of Unity” against Israel's settler colonialism has resuscitated discussions about the liberatory potential of digital emancipation due to the massive data traffic circulation through its international media coverage. In fact, in a process that has intensified since the outbreak of the global pandemic at the very least, social media platforms and geospatial mapping tools have been subverted from more mundane uses, developing into new forums for organizing, imagining, and practicing more just futures. Yet, the centrality of infrastructure both as a means of digital extractivism and as a site for rupture and resistance demonstrates that the path toward new trajectories of e-scaping cannot be conceived as a virtual venture directed at designing alternative volatile geographies alone, but should always involve facing and challenging power in its everyday forms. By investigating the materiality of cyber colonialism, this paper explores the entanglement between imperial cartography and digital map-making which has reduced Palestinians and their space to a pixelated terra nullius, sanitized from the paradigmatic sites of the occupation and overwritten by a pseudo-biblical narrative that aims to legitimize the re-indigenization of the Zionist settlers . At the same time, it unpacks online processes of hyper-visibility through which Palestine suddenly materializes as a signifier for its dangerous nature, yet fragmented and enclaved by an intangible and discretional regime of im/mobility enforced through the neglect of permits and visas, as well as by the material constraints posed by apartheid roads, barriers, checkpoints, gates, and walls. Finally, it retraces the rationality of Israeli violence diluted through the technical means of built environment, infrastructure, machines and algorithms which, on one hand, contributes to the de-development of Palestine and the censorship of its people, and on the other, normalizes Israel’s position in the region due to its perceived technological superiority vis-à-vis its neighboring counterparts.

Doonstruck Diaries of Victorian Memsahibs: Between the Journal and Jhampaun in Mussoorie and Landour

Established as colonial hill stations in Indian's Doon Valley, in the 1820s, Mussoorie and Landour emerged in Victorian literary imagination with the journals of Emily Eden, Fanny Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlop sisters. This paper argues that the Doon's female imperial architextures invented new prospects of grafting Anglo-Saxon aesthetics on the Himalayan terra nullius, diminishing, miniaturizing, and depopulating aspects of the hazardous, the alien, and the local. A thread of archetypes —jhampauns (Himalayan loco-armchairs) and Himalayan vistas— link the aesthetic arcs in the journals of Eden, Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlops. Although the architexture was ostensibly apolitical, it imbued the Doon's representational spaces with a reproducible English character, rendering its terra incognita into terra familiaris in imperial psyche, while carving a distinct imperial subjectivity for Memsahibs.

Earthing Theology

The encounter of Aboriginal Australians with European settlers led to appalling injustices, in which Christian churches were in part complicit. At the root of these injustices was the failure to comprehend the Aborigines’ relationship to the land. In their mythic vision, known as The Dreaming, land is suffused with religious meaning and therefore sacred. It took two hundred years for this to be acknowledged in British-Australian law (Mabo judgement, 1992). This abrogated the doctrine of terra nullius (the land belongs to no-one) and recognized native title to land, based on continuous occupation and ritual use. But land disputes continue, and at a deeper level, there is little appreciation of the Indigenous spirituality of the land and the significance it could have for reconciliation with First Nations and the ecological crisis. Aboriginal theologies can help Christians to appreciate the riches of this spirituality and work towards justice.

Menelaah Klaim Republik Korea dan Jepang atas Kepulauan Dokdo atau Takeshima: Pendekatan Historis

Wilayah merupakan bagian yang tak terpisahkan dari keberadaan suatu negara. Betapa pentingnya suatu wilayah menyebabkan suatu sengketa wilayah antar negara dapat saja terjadi. Demikianlah yang terjadi antara Republik Korea dan Jepang. Keduanya bersengketa atas suatu wilayah kepulauan di Laut Timur, yaitu Kepulauan Dokdo atau Takeshima. Republik Korea dan Jepang sama-sama bersikeras bahwa Kepulauan Dokdo atau Takeshima berada di bawah kedaulatan negaranya. Keduanya memiliki argumentasi masing-masing terhadap klaim mereka tersebut. Penelitian ini akan membahas argumentasi kedua negara serta menganalisisnya dari sudut pandang hukum internasional. Metode penelitian dalam penulisan ini ialah metode penelitian hukum normatif dengan pendekatan sejarah, kasus, dan konseptual. Dari penelitian yang telah dilakukan, didapati bahwa Jepang mengklaim Kepulauan Dokdo merupakan wilayah terra nullius yang kemudian diokupasi, serta wilayah tersebut masih dalam kedaulatannya berdasarkan Perjanjian San Fransisco. Akan tetapi, klaim Republik Korea lebih kuat di mata hukum internasional, bila memperhatikan fakta historis, tindakan yang telah dilakukan, preseden yang ada, serta prinsip efektivitas. Berdasarkan prinsip efektivitas dalam hukum internasional, kontrol efektif yang telah dilakukan Korea selama ini, bahkan sebelum Jepang masuk dan menganeksasi Dokdo atau Takeshima, telah mematahkan klaim terra nullius yang dikemukakan Jepang, dan meneguhkan klaim kedaulatan Korea atas Dokdo atau Takeshima. Hal tersebut sebagaimana yang juga berlaku dalam kasus Sipadan-Ligitan dan kasus Pulau Palmas.

The Flying Heads of Settler Colonialism; or the Ideological Erasures of Indigenous Peoples in Political Theorizing

This essay relies on the insight that settler colonialism is an ongoing structure geared toward the elimination of Indigenous presence to argue that ideologies that legitimate and naturalize settler occupation are equally ongoing. More specifically, the ideologies that justify settler colonialism in major states like Australia, Canada, and the United States, are like Flying Heads that shape-shift and recur over time. We explore how two notorious ideological tropes—terra nullius and the myth of the Vanishing Race—recur in the work of contrasting contemporary theorists. Ultimately, Flying Head ideologies of settler colonialism cannot be defeated by reasoned argument alone, but by structural transformations beyond the settler-colonial relations that necessitate and sustain them. Following diverse Indigenous theorists and activists, we briefly explore prefigurative resurgent practices and how Indigenous political imaginaries, like the Dish with One Spoon, offer alternatives to transcend the settler colonial present.