Description
In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework to analyse the technologies through which settler colonial projects are upheld and secured by drawing on a comparative analysis of legal, spatial, and biopolitical technologies across Turtle Island/US, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir/India. I argue that settler colonialism operates through adaptable yet structurally consistent technological assemblages that serve three interconnected functions—facilitating Indigenous dispossession, legitimating settler sovereignty, and naturalising the permanence of settlement. Through close examination of different dimensions of technological operation in each of these three sites, this analysis demonstrates the ways in which technology adapts to diverse political conditions, from consolidated liberal democracies to militarised occupation to postcolonial territorial integration. In so doing, this paper theorises settler colonial technologies as a distinct form of colonial governance in its specific orientation toward elimination and investment in constructing settler futurity through concrete mechanisms of specific legal, infrastructural, and technological configurations. Moreover, by developing a comparative framework, this analysis demonstrates settler colonial technologies as operating across and constituting a transnational repertoire rather than as isolated national practices, revealing further patterns of adaptation, circulation, and mutual reinforcement across sites. Importantly, by theorising the distinct relationship between technology and temporality in settler colonialism, I argue that settler technological assemblages fundamentally orient towards securing futures that consistently render Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty illegible within settler governance frameworks. Thus, this analysis highlights the significance of understanding both historical patterns of dispossession and contemporary intensifications of settler technological governance, while emphasising the political work required to interrupt their settler futural orientations.
