From #occupy to #IdleNoMore: Rethinking space, settler consciousness and erasures within the 99%

Abstract

Postcolonial theory has been a relative latecomer to the cloistered world of international relations (IR). In 2002, Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair’s edited volume Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations and LHM Ling’s Postcolonial International Relations both marked an important turn towards interrogating the ethnocentric, imperialising and racialised geographies of IR’s mainstream (see also Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Doty, 1996; Grovogui, 2009; Henderson, 2007; Jones, 2006; Shilliam, 2011; Vitalis, 2010). A similar scholarship has emerged within nationality and citizenship studies in Canada (Bannerji, 2000; Razzaq, 2002; Thobani, 2007) and among indigenous scholars who directly challenge the problematics of sovereignty, racial formation and territorial consolidation as they relate to Anglo-American settler states (Amadahy and Lawrence, 2009; Anderson, 2001; Lawrence, 2004; Lawrence and Dua, 2005; Shaw, 2008; Smith, 2005; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999).