The Violence of Settler Imperialism – and Why the Concept of Coloniality Cannot Grasp It

Against a background of ongoing public and academic debate about how to best address the legacies of colonialism and slavery, there is now an ever-expanding body of International Relations (IR) literature that makes use of the concept of ‘coloniality’. Indeed, coloniality, which attempts to make sense of past and ongoing colonial oppression in global terms, seems a particularly apt concept for IR, which, after all, is interested in understanding the nature of global power. This article is critical of the way that coloniality is increasingly used in a unitary ‘catch-all’ manner to describe global colonial domination in often unspecific ways. It argues, based on an in-depth exegesis of key Latin American decolonial texts, that the way the concept has been developed makes certain colonial violence, and the resistance against it, invisible; with the violence of (global) settler colonialism being a prominent example. Using and further developing Jodi Byrd’s concepts of transit and settler imperialism, in dialogue with Latin American settler colonial literature and radical Black thought, this article aims to bring this violence to the forefront of IR debate. I will conclude by elaborating on the concrete consequences that understanding ongoing colonial violence with the help of these concepts has for thinking about decolonisation in IR.