CITIZENSHIP STUDIES
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Palestinians citizens and which serves as a tool of domination (Tatour 2019) – and ‘settler
citizenship’ which is bestowed on Jewish Israelis, that is, the privileged status that entails
belonging both to the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’.9
Citizenship in the settler state is thus both the outcome and the bearer of the violence
of the settler state. In this context, it is now possible to go back to activists-settlerscitizens. Are they, through acts of resistance, able to move away from this violence? Can
they be something other than settler-citizens? In this line of analysis, citizenship emerges
as a structure of opportunity for action that might push for change, but also persists as an
inevitable limitation – when juxtaposed with the reality of struggles against the settlercolonial state. The next section elaborates this point.
The settler colonial condition and the limits of (acts of) citizenship in the
settler state
Settler colonialism is built upon a set of relations based on a binary between the settler
and the native (the coloniser/colonised) (Coulthard 2014; Fanon 2001 [1961]; Mamdani
1998). We also need to account for the incorporation of the ‘arrivant’ (Byrd 2011) – the
racialised non-natives coerced – to various degrees – into the settler colonial project. This
triad (settler, native, arrivant) is the basis of other distinctions that aim to normalise the
presence of the settlers and isolate the natives physically and politically. It is manifested in
state policies, political institutions, legal and social structures and forms of knowledge.
What is important to understand is that:
settler colonialism does not work at the individual level [. . .], for it is a way of governing
through naturalized nation-states that erases Indigenous people and implicates us [settlers]
all, however well-intentioned we are . . . (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel 2014, 7).
The privileged position of the settlers/colonisers thus does not depend on the individual’s
good will or actions. They exist before the settler’s arrival (or birth) and ‘whether he
accepts or rejects them matters little’ (Memmi [1957] 2003, 82). Indeed, the settlers’
privileges are structural. They are the unearned and unequal benefits of living as a settlerturned-citizen on indigenous land. ‘Racialised privilege’ is a core feature of the (settler)
colonial relationship, given to one group (even if uneven and stratified amongst itself), and
denied from the other. It is, then, the binary that determines the position of each one of the
members in this unequal relationship: the settler is part of the oppressing group, and
shares a collective responsibility by the fact of her/his membership of this group, either
willingly or by default. The native is oppressed, dispossessed, marginalised and subject to
extreme forms of violence. Their mere existence is perceived as an existential threat to the
stability and continuity of the settler’s society and polity. Thus, the anticolonial settlercitizen is never separate from these structural lines. As Kauanui and Wolfe (2012, 237)
explains:
. . . in a structural sense, in terms of the history that has put me where I am and Indigenous
people where they are, my individual consciousness, my personal attitude has got nothing to
do with this. I am beneficiary and a legatee of the dispossession and the continuing
elimination of Aboriginal people in Australia. As such [. . .] I am a settler.