Description
In 2019, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, committed two massacres in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand killing fifty-one Muslim worshippers and wounding forty-nine. Tarrant saw in Muslims ‘invaders’ in a white man’s country whose presence is a threat to both white civilisation and white dominance in the settler colony. Tarrant saw himself as part a global network of white supremacist movements across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand attempting to reassert white supremacy as the organising principle of political order.
This paper examines the relationship between white supremacist violence and settler colonialism through focusing on the responses from the political class in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia, the ways in which the media class across the political spectrum framed and reported on the attacks, and Tarrant’s own representations of his motivations. The settler state and Tarrant hold competing notions of settler nationhood, and act to secure that settler nation in distinct ways. Through a critical reading of these sources of discourse, we can better understand the distinct ways that settler colonial dominance is secured through violent processes that can either undermine state control in favour of white settler nationalism or reaffirm the sovereignty of the settler state. However, both are ultimately still underpinned by white possessive logics of settler colonialism.
By engaging literature from settler colonial studies, critical theories of race, and Indigenous studies, the paper centres whiteness and settler colonialism in understanding both acts of white supremacist violence and state security responses.
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