Settler-Colonialism on emsenn.net

Coloniality

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Coloniality is a decolonial term for the way colonial domination persists even when formal colonial rule ends. Where colonialism names direct conquest and administration, coloniality names the ongoing organization of power through racial hierarchy, extraction, legal regimes, and epistemic authority.

In a Marxist register, coloniality matters because it marks limits of accounts that treat dispossession as merely a prehistory of capitalism. It insists that the colonial order is reproduced in the present: in the governance of land, in who is made available for exploitation, and in which forms of knowledge count as “universal.”

Misopedy

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Misopedy is the hatred or denigration of children and childhood. The term derives from Greek miso- (hatred) and paidos (child). Unlike individual acts of cruelty toward children, misopedy names a structural condition: the systematic devaluation of childhood as a category, the treatment of children as pre-persons or incomplete adults, and the exclusion of young people from political agency and self-determination.

Toby Rollo, a political theorist at Lakehead University, has developed the concept’s most sustained theoretical treatment. In “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child” (Settler Colonial Studies, 2018), Rollo argues that the relationship between misopedy and European colonialism is not an analogy but a structuring principle. The conceptual apparatus used to justify colonial domination — the savage as child, the colonized as requiring tutelage and civilization — is itself rooted in the prior subordination of actual children. Modern colonial thinkers inherited the conceptual legacy of misopedy: the figure of the child as sinful, bestial, or irrational provided the template through which Indigenous peoples were categorized as unfit for self-governance.

Puritan Covenants, Harvard Yard, and the Making of U.S. Intelligence

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

¶Abstract

This paper reconstructs a genealogical line from the covenantal culture of New England Puritanism, through the institutional formation of Harvard College, to the emergence of the modern U.S. intelligence community. Rather than treating these as merely analogical or metaphorical continuities, it argues that Puritan practices of mutual surveillance, introspective documentation, and covenantal epistemology were progressively institutionalized in Harvard’s pedagogical and social order, and that this Harvard order then directly staffed, shaped, and legitimated early U.S. intelligence organs, especially the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and its successors. The analysis combines intellectual, institutional, and socio-cultural history to show how a distinctive Puritan mode of truth-seeking—plain-style writing, disciplined self-examination, and communal vetting of knowledge—became the basis for elite formation at Harvard and, in the twentieth century, the core of American intelligence analysis. The result is a historically grounded model of U.S. intelligence as the secularized, technocratic descendant of a seventeenth-century covenantal regime.

Decolonization