Arabic Translation: Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native (2006)

This article was originally published in English as: Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409. DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240. This translation is published with the permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd (www.tandfonline.com). Original English abstract: The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life---or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be---indeed, often are---contests for life. Yet this is not to say that settler colonialism is simply a form of genocide. In some settler-colonial sites (one thinks, for instance, of Fiji), native society was able to accommodate---though hardly unscathed---the invaders and the transformative socioeconomic system that they introduced. Even in sites of wholesale expropriation such as Australia or North America, settler colonialism's genocidal outcomes have not manifested evenly across time or space. Native Title in Australia or Indian sovereignty in the US may have deleterious features, but these are hardly equivalent to the impact of frontier homicide. Moreover, there can be genocide in the absence of settler colonialism. The best known of all genocides was internal to Europe, while genocides that have been perpetrated in, for example, Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda or (one fears) Darfur do not seem to be assignable to settler colonialism. In this article, I shall begin to explore, in comparative fashion, the relationship between genocide and the settler-colonial tendency that I term the logic of elimination.1 I contend that, though the two have converged---which is to say, the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal---they should be distinguished. Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.