Settler Colonialism is not Finished

Abstract

Why was an apology for settler colonialism like Goodin’s issued now? The world that settler colonialism made is not being challenged by particularly successful decolonising attempts and the settler colonial present still goes without saying. I would like to point to two possible answers. On the one hand, we are now collectively facing what Australian geographer and designer Tony Fry aptly referred to as the coming ‘age of unsettlement’:

Having perhaps 10% of the global population as refugees, together with large numbers of ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs), combined with the climate-forced relocation of many towns and cities, means that is possible that the ‘twelve thousand year epoch of human settlement’ will come to an end and be replaced by an age of unsettlement.¹