Chapter 1 introduces the topic of historical abuses of states and churches. The chapter outlines the existing and related conceptions of justice that may inform a response to historical abuses and positions transitional justice as the dominant but flawed approach to addressing the violent aspects of the past. The third section considers the application of these justice approaches to the context of historical abuses of Western states and Christian churches. The final section previews the remaining chapters of the book.

Chapter 4 considers power as essential to understanding who is legally liable and who is socially and politically responsible, for addressing historical-structural injustices. The chapter outlines competing conceptions of power, preferring and applying political scientist Mark Haugaard’s four-dimensional conception of power to address the complexities of historical-structural injustices, namely power as agency, structure, epistemic, and ontological power. The chapter then examines the role of national and religious myths as justification narratives that maintain existing distributions and structures of power and construct limitations in addressing the past in transitional justice. As a result, it argues that changes in the distribution of power are central to addressing historical-structural injustices, which have coalesced to form national and religious myths that support the existing distributions of power and modern national and religious identities.

Chapter 10 argues the practices and discourses of reconciliation have tended to operate as a form of inappropriate and premature settlement or closure of the grievances of victim-survivors and their descendants. To encourage victim-survivors and a society to pursue reconciliation in the absence of addressing other elements of transitional justice may operate as a reaffirmation of the power structures of states and churches. While the experience of Canada and Australia contains an explicit reconciliation discourse and practice, in the absence of significant change in and imagination regarding power relationships in those societies, they join the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom in remaining deeply unreconciled societies. In addition, the reconciliation practice of the Catholic church regarding historical abuse demonstrates its inability to effectively self-critique in its processes of reconciliation.

Chapter 11 concludes the book by arguing that absent consideration of structural injustice, power, and emotions, transitional justice may be used to legitimate structures of power and emotional narratives that continue to subordinate and marginalise historically abused groups and individuals. It concludes that a different conception of progress and transition is required to navigate the meaning of historical abuses for the legitimacy of Western liberal democracies and Christian churches. On this account, the book concludes, transition and transformation are matters of the character of progress itself, progress that lives in the tension between wrongs that ‘can never be repaired and must never be forgotten’.

The idea of ‘home’ had long served as a pervasive metaphor for transoceanic British belonging, routinely employed to invoke patterns of long-distance intimacy. With the onset of decolonization, however, these everyday assumptions came under scrutiny. The colonial administration of Kenya took remedial action in 1947 in the form of a wedding gift to Prince Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh - a home of their own in the foothils of Mt. Kenya. The symbolism of a permanent Royal residence in the heart of Africa was meant to ensure that ‘home’ retained a sense of long-range reciprocity. But by the time the royal couple took possession of Sagana Lodge in February 1952, the violent incursions of the ‘Mau Mau’ insurgency had arrived on their doorstep. Throughout the ensuing crisis, familiar depictions of the settler home appeared graphically in British newspapers and newsreels. The violation of British notions of ordered domesticity became a potent means of mobilizing empathy for the embattled settler community of Kenya, widely depicted as ordinary Britons abroad in need of extraordinary relief measures. The intersecting story of Sagana Lodge, the Monarchy and the domestic horror of Mau Mau provides a unique window into the eclipse of Greater Britain in Africa’s settler heartland, revealing the limits of home as an enduring symbol of Britain’s spurious place in Africa.

The experiences of John William Bannister as Chief Justice of Sierra Leone are brought into conversation with those of his brother Thomas Bannister, a settler in Australia, as both tried urgently to mobilize the global resources of empire to rescue failing family fortunes. In Sierra Leone, John William Bannister tried to administer impartial justice in a deeply racialized context. Thomas was one of the ‘pioneers’ in the Swan River colony in western Australia and an investor in the project of Van Diemen’s Land settlers to colonize Kulin lands in what would become the colony of Victoria, in the aftermath of genocidal violence in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He promoted consensual colonialism through treaties, echoing his brother Saxe, former Attorney General of New South Wales. The chapter examines the invasion of Australia, including violence against Indigenous peoples, ‘exploration’, ecological change including the importation of livestock, British elite patronage and the highly controversial effort of disingenuous settlers to create a treaty with the Kulin. The chapter closes with comparison between West Africa and Australian coastal colonies in the 1820s and 30s, disparate sites along the sea lanes of empire tenuously linked by imperial markets, military control and common justificatory ideologies.

The introduction traces the main arguments of the book and provides an overview of key events discussed. It begins with the Sullivan Campaign of the American Revolution. This campaign ethnically cleansed Haudenosaunee people from territory that would later be ceded by the British to the Americans after the Revolution. The chapter asks what this campaign can tell us about the larger history of Indigenous–settler relationships. Among other things, it takes the campaign as an example of the rejection of real and fictive kinship ties between Indigenous peoples and settlers that was, I argue, a necessary precursor to the creation of settler nations. At the same time, some prominent imperial policy makers would struggle, as the book to come will also argue, to maintain different conceptions of Indigenous–imperial kinship in an effort to create a manageable and moral colonialism. The introduction outlines the book’s methodology of using microcosmic analyses to illuminate a macroscopic process: the project of British settler colonialism as it sprawled across time and space during this critical period of the creation and consolidation of settler colonial states. It gives an overview of pertinent scholarship and describes the topics of chapters to come.

Drawing on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork singing and playing with three Diné country-western bands, I explore how one Native band lives and responds to border town racism and settler nativism in towns bordering the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the United States. I illustrate how country music, a genre that has been embraced by Diné people since the late 1930s, serves as a flashpoint for racialized forms of difference and belonging within the liminal space of the Navajo reservation “border town.” I argue that country music performance serves as a condensed site for the enactment and negotiation of border town tensions, microaggressions, and more blatant forms of racism, providing key insights into the ways in which Indigenous country music unsettles Colorado’s own settler-colonial and settler nativist histories in the border town Southwest.

“How Hybrid Bureaucracy and Permit Regimes Made Citizenship” tracks the bureaucratic response to the violence of partition, war, and independence in each of the states, focusing on the mobility regimes established to prevent return in Israel and India, where the documents and evidentiary demands of the mobility regimes enabled claims to citizenship. Focusing on the adoption of the colonial bureaucratic toolkit of emergency by the governments of independent India and Israel to restrict the mobility of returning Muslim and Palestinian refugees, the chapter show how mobility restrictions became obstacles to claims to citizenship. Demonstrating how the transfer of bureaucratic practices governing mobility depended on the continuity of emergency laws, this chapter shows the divergent outcome in Cyprus, which relinquished emergency laws at independence.

Woody Guthrie attempts to compose an anthem that will speak for all Americans: “This Land Is Your Land.” Does he succeed? For some, the answer is “Yes.” For others – notably Indigenous Americans who see it as little more than an homage to settler colonialism – the answer is a resounding “No.”

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

Indigenous resurgence scholars have theorized the concept of grounded normativity as a relational, place-based, and nation-specific framework from which to pursue Indigenous freedom. Though primarily a turn away from settler colonial relations and towards Indigenous forms of subjecthood and agency, grounded normativity can also serve as a turn outward and a basis for diplomacy. This occurs, for example, when Indigenous resurgence movements invite others to stand with and act alongside them. This chapter reflects upon three such engagements with Indigenous resurgence movements, which refuse the sense of permanence and limited political possibilities that settler colonialism produces. This chapter argues that these engagements constitute a politics from below that complements grounded normativity, which generates relational and place-based collectivities that are informed by ethics of responsibility and reciprocity expressed within Indigenous legal orders. These collectivities form networks of democratic movements that, in recognizing Indigenous political authority, offer alternative forms of subjecthood and agency that disrupt the concretization of settler colonial relations.

Jeanne Morefield maintains that a truly democratic response to the crisis of liberal democracy requires citizens in the global North to embrace a radically reflective, deconstructive subjectivity that relentlessly calls into question the historical and contemporary shape of “the people” under consideration. To develop this subjective perspective, the chapter draws upon Edward Said’s notion of exilic criticism and compares it with contemporary liberal cosmopolitanism and left populism. Morefield explores the way this unhoused, unstable perspective enables contrapuntal engagement with those histories of imperialism, settler colonialism, and racialized logics of extraction and dispossession that went into the creation of modern liberal democratic states in the first place. Ultimately, she argues, it is only by reflecting on this constitutive history that citizens in the global North can create the kind of solidaristic, compassionate, and authentically democratic practices necessary to fight the rise of white nationalism and the decline of liberal democracy on a global scale.