Geopolitics, Settler Colonialism, and Eugenics

Speakers include: Mona Bhan, Goldie Osuri, Toufic Haddad, Mehroosh Tak, Leon Sealey-Huggins, Lisa Tilley, Nivi Manchanda,  Haris Zargar, Gargi Bhattacharyya and Muna Dajani.

This event brings the key terms in this title into conversation during a time when the climate crisis and shifting geopolitical relations create a global landscape of extreme jeopardy for many. This time marks a continuation of colonial violence and renewed conversation around settler/colonialist land dispossession, racialised forms of elimination, the extractivist theft of the life-sustaining resources, alongside rapidly advancing technologies of mass murder. 

As we enter an escalated phase of technologised militarism and global conflict, the analytic repertoire arising from studies of settler colonialism suggests modes of understanding that can link the ecological and the geopolitical as part of the material practices of extractivism and eugenics. These practices are often narrated explicitly as a matter of capturing and enclosing access to resources for both established and would-be ‘great powers.’ This event brings together scholars and thinkers with expertise on geopolitics, ecology, extractivism, settler/colonialism and eugenics, across a number of contexts, in order to understand how these interconnected practices shape our global (dis)order.

The colloquium will be followed by a book conversation with Professor Mona Bhan (Syracuse University, US), Professor Gargi Bhattacharya (UCL) and  author - Professor Goldie Osuri (University of Warwick) – on their book, Settler/Colonialism in Kashmir: sovereignty, catastrophe, indigeneity (MUP, 2026). 

There will be a reception after the event.

Photo credit: Bobby Banerjee.