CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 273 Anticolonial struggle, decolonisation and the paradox of (non)violence Decolonisation, as a material process, must be tied to the nature of the colonial order itself. In settler colonial states decolonisation is a particularly troubled/troubling process because empire, settlement, and internal colonialism have no spatial separation. As Tuck and Yang insist, any treatment of decolonisation that does not consider the repatriation of and/or reparation for the loss of indigenous land and sovereignty is an evasion that ‘kills the very possibility of decolonization; it centers whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future’ (Tuck and Yung 2012, 3). Palestinian literature about decolonisation and futurity, centres discussions and practices that rather than finding ‘solutions’ (one/two states) centres modes of existence, imagining and return with a focus on liberation – both material and epistemological (for such notions, imagina­ tions, and thoughts, see Abu Sitta 2016 and the Palestine Land Society; Azeb 2017, 2021; Hawari 2020). In such thinking, and among these practices, discussion of settlers’ future is side-lined or is non-existent and the centre stage is dedicated to indigenous sovereignty and futurity. It is worth pausing to think about the notion of ‘settler futurity’ referred to above, a future in which the settler not only has a place, but defines her/his place amidst/among indigenous futures (as opposed to indigenous people defining these futures). Tuck and Yang (2012) challenge this point precisely: in decolonisation, the settlers’ future does not exist (as a demand). Any notion of a future for the settler society obscures the complete and full meaning of decolonisation as the restitution of land and sovereignty. When ‘settler futurity’ is constituted on the stage of decolonisation, at least as a part, if not equal, desire of the process (as some sort of ‘reconciliation’ or ‘shared vision for the future’), these strategies ‘only serve the settler, and thus are incompatible with decolonisation’ (ibid., 10).16 Rejecting such claims to a future, Tuck and Yang instead call for an ‘ethic of incommensurability’ accompanied by acknowledgement that the future need not be foreseen in order for decolonisation to exist as a framework for its actuality will be determined by and through resistance, and first and foremost by indigenous people Violence is integral to shaping settler-native/indigenous relations, and is translated into the legal infrastructure of the state and its key structural apparatuses (including citizenship). The settler state’s violence – whether barriers, curfews, settlements, check­ points, arrests, demolitions, dispossessions, denial of essential services, assaults and killings – are ever so common. They are so deemed ‘necessary’ that they disappear and are overlooked (by the settler state and its allies). Violence is part of the very identity of the settler and structures of the self (Kotef 2020a, 2020). It seems almost inevitable that violence also accompanies decolonisation. Fanon’s discussion of violence offers a crude and realistic depiction of decolonisation as a process that sets out to change the order of the world, epitomised in ‘the last shall be first’ and a programme of ‘complete disorder’ (Fanon 2001 [1961]] 2004, 2), that cannot come as a result of a ‘magical process . . . nor of a friendly understanding’. Fanon insists that ‘decolonisation never goes unnoticed’ (ibid.), since it is designed to fundamentally alter the foundations of the colonial world and inverse its relations. With this in mind Fanon understands that: