Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many of the ideologies that (...) sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Reflecting on Smith (2021) in this issue, this commentary extends our consideration of issues in carceral health and questions the dehumanizing language we sometimes use—including in public health and public health ethics—to talk about persons held in incarceration. Even the language we use for the carceral system itself (such as ‘criminal justice system’) is fraught: it casts a laudatory light on the system and papers over its role in compounding racial health inequities and in sustaining colonialism. A host of issues (...) call out for ethical analysis, using lenses that can encompass the tensions and contradictions experienced by people within the system who deliver healthcare and those within the system trying to access that care. Beyond access to health care (promotion, prevention, treatment and palliation), the societal commitment to dealing with social issues by depriving people of many key social determinants of health is at the heart of many of these tensions and contradictions. (shrink)

Building on recent feminist scholarship on the complicity of feminist antiviolence movements in the build-up of mass incarceration, this essay analyzes the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work by carceral logic, taking the Gender-Responsive Justice and Community Accountability movements as countervailing examples. Both strategies claim to be a feminist response to violence. Gender-Responsive Justice arises from feminist criminology and has genealogical roots in the American prison reformatory movement. Community Accountability stems from grassroots intersectional and decolonial feminisms that are fundamentally at (...) odds with the professionalization and state-centrism of the mainstream antiviolence movement. We argue that Gender-Responsive Justice is a form of carceral humanism that repackages carceral control as the caring provision of social services, while Community Accountability advances a radically creative abolitionist and decolonial project of an irreducibly epistemological order. (shrink)