Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 3: The Settler Structure

In Chapter 3 of the series, Chisom turns to the present tense. Settler colonialism is not a phase that European empires went through and emerged from. It is a structure that continues to operate, on every populated continent, in 2026. The chapter opens by naming the three forms of white terrorism’s modern operation: extractive colonialism, plantation slavery, named briefly and flagged for a future chapter; and settler colonialism, the focus of the rest of the episode. 

Chisom walks through three live cases chosen to show the structure operating across its full register. Greenland under Denmark, where the Spiral Case is delivering individual compensation in 2026 while the colonial relationship continues, shows what the structure does to bodies. Indigenous nations in the United States, where the Doctrine of Discovery still operates in property law and where Indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average, shows what the structure does to land and to law. Palestine, where the July 2024 ICJ ruling has been ignored, where the UN concluded in September 2025 that Israel committed genoc!de in Gaza, and where settler violence and settlement expansion in the West Bank reached unprecedented levels in 2025, shows what the structure does to both at once. 

Chisom weaves the Doctrine of Discovery through the chapter as one variant of a global legal pattern of fictions that empty the land, alongside terra nullius in Australia, the Absentee Property Law in Israel, and state-land doctrines in the Nordics. She names directly that white terrorism, in the historical sense, is a system built by specific European institutions across specific centuries, now operated by multiple actors including the UAE, China, Russia, and corrupt African leaders, none of whom are the architects, all of whom are profiting from the architecture. She locates herself, as a Nigerian Black woman living in a country occupying Sami land. She closes with three principles for repair: restitution, sovereignty, truth. 

Transcript

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I am Chisom and this is Overnight Wisdom Chapter one of this series, argue that we should stop calling this system white supremacy and start calling it white terrorism and white terrorism essentially is the systematic use of violence to control populations through fear. The second episode traced forms of that systems through extractive colonialism on the African continent where European powers essentially took resources and labour And eventually we drew, leaving the architecture in place to keep extracting, of course. This episode is about a different form of the same system, the form that did not withdraw the form that came to stay. Settler colonialism is what white terrorism does when the colonizers decide not to leave. They bring their families, they bring their institutions, they bring their God and their property laws. They build a permanent society on the land of the people they found there and the people they found there by the logic of the project become a problem to be solved. Sometimes the solution is warfare. Sometimes it is forced assimilation through residential schools or language bans and child removal. Sometimes it is demographic replacement through settler population growth. it is legal erasure through citizenship arrangements that exclude Indigenous nationhood. The methods change, the structural goals does not. Patrick Wolf wrote in a 2006 essay that was published in the Journal of Genocide Research, and it has become quite foundational to the field, that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Settler colonialism is not a phase that European empires went through and emerged from. It is a structure that continues to operate on every populated continent in 2026, in countries that pride themselves on being post-colonial, in countries that pride themselves on never having been colonial, and also in countries that organize themselves as settler societies. and continue to function as them anyway. Some of the countries you might want to think of here are the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Morocco in the Western Sahara, India in Kashmir, China in Tibet and Xinjiang, Indonesia in West Papua, Russia in occupied Ukraine and across indigenous Siberia. the Nordic states across Sapmi and the Inuit territories in Greenland, So yes, the structure varies and yet the structure remains the same. So today, what I'm going to talk about is essentially what settler colonialism is, how it sits alongside other form of white terrorism in its modern operation. I'm going to talk about the war in Sudan as the present tense African case that shows what extractive colonialism look like I'm also going to talk about the legal architecture that makes settler structure legible to itself, including the doctrine of discovery and its global cognates essentially. will also talk about three life cases in 2026. And I chose them because, you know, together they show how settler structure operates in its full register, you know, on bodies, on lands, and sometimes on both at once. I'm going to talk about Greenland under Denmark. I'm going to talk about indigenous nations in the United States. And I'm going to talk about Palestine. So let's begin. Before we go into the settler structure, I wanna name the three forms of white terrorism together because the typology matters and the systems I am describing, it's not essentially a single thing. The first form I'm going to talk about is extractive colonialism. what happens here is that colonizers come, they extract resources and labor. They leave eventually, but most of the time they leave like the formal political administration in place that even when they withdraw from it, they continue to extract through corporations, through debt, through currency and through trade arrangements. In the previous episode, I traced this from an African context and also clarified that it is not history because as I record this, the Democratic Republic of Congo is still the source of more than 70 % of the world's cobalt that is mined by children for the batteries and chips of Western and Chinese consumer electronics. Niger's uranium has powered French nuclear electricity for 50 years and the contracts are still currently being negotiated. Chinese state-owned enterprises operating within the same extractive architecture So basically the architect they have multiplied and the continent of Africa is still the very resource they extract from. Sudan is the case that shows how extractive colonialism in 2026 looks like when it operates through violence. In April 2023, the Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces who I will refer to as the RSF, essentially a paramilitary descended from the Janjaweed militias that committed genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. They began the war that is still ongoing as I record this. 14 million people. It has killed tens of thousands And it has produced famine confirmed by the United Nations agencies in 2025. after an 18 month siege, the RSF took El Fasher, basically the last Sudanese army stronghold in Darfur. And the violence that followed has been described by the United States government, which formally designated the RSF as committing genocide in January 2025. The Masalit people have been targeted in Masalit killings and sexual violence, echoing the genocides their parents and their grandparents survived. Sudan is one of Africa's largest gold producers flows to the United Arab Emirates and Much of it is laundered through Dubai's refineries into the international bullion markets. the United Arab Emirates has been credibly accused by the United States intelligence, by the United Nations panel of experts, by Amnesty International, and by the government of Sudan itself in a case filed in the International Court of Justice in April 2025 of supplying weapons and financing to the RSF. include Chinese manufactured drones and atileries supplied by the Norinco state-owned armed group routed through Emirati intermediaries. the UAE denies the allegations, but the gold keeps flowing and the Masalit - keep dying. This is the architecture that white terrorism builds, uh operated as well in 2026 by Gulf capital and Chinese weapons, with African lives at the substrate of the transaction. a quick note on who's doing the extracting in 2026 as well. White terrorism in the historical sense that this series has engaged it so far is a system. was constructed by European powers and the American successors across five centuries with white supremacy, which I basically like to call white terrorism as its justifying ideology. And it also has racialized violence as its method. The architecture has been installed, the global extractive economy, the weak post-colonial African states, the raw resource dependencies, in former imperial capitals, the currency arrangements tying African economies to former colonizers, the entire premise that African resource belong on global markets. at prizes set elsewhere. is now operated through multiple actors and not all of them are white. laundering Sudanese gold through Dubai operates within that architecture. Chinese state-owned enterprises acquiring mines operates within it. Russian mercenaries securing gold concessions in the Sahel also operates within it. African leaders who loot their own countries operate within it. The point of naming them is not to dilute the original argument. It's basically to show that the architect of the systems were specific European institutions across specific centuries. The operators of the systems have continued to multiply. The harm to Africans continues regardless of who currently holds the extraction contract. So basically, white terrorism built the structure that many people are now profiting from. The second form of white terrorism that I want to name is plantation slavery, which I want to name briefly here and return to it in a future episode because the typology is incomplete without it. The plantation system imported African labor to extract value from land whose indigenous population had often already been eliminated by an earlier wave of arrival. The Caribbean is the largest case. The indigenous Taino, Arawak, and Caribe were largely destroyed in the first century of Spanish contact. The plantation economies that followed in Cuba and Jamaica, Hispaniola, Barbados, Bermuda, and the wider British and French Caribbean were built on enslaved Africans whose descendants now form the demographic majority of many of those countries. The relationship of those descendants to the land they now live on is unlike either the extractive colonial relationship or the settler colonial relationship. So that deserves its own episode and I hope to get to it. The third form is settler colonialism, and that is the focus of this episode. So what is essentially settler colonialism? Patrick Wolfe was distinguishing two forms of colonialism and the distinction is important because the diagnosis they require are different. Extractive colonialism takes resources and labor and leaves. The colonizers, they come, they extract what they came for, and eventually they depart, sometimes after centuries. The wealth continues to flow back to the metropole though, and the local population, even though they have been brutalized, they persist. most of European colonialism in Africa is closer to this model. Settler colonialism is different. Settler colonialism comes to stay. They settle they bring their own families, they bring their own institutions, they bring their own legal systems, they bring their own God. and the intent to build a permanent society in the place they have arrived. The indigenous population for the Settler project is essentially a problem to be solved and the solutions, they vary. Sometimes it's elimination through warfare, removal to reservations, forced assimilations through residential schools, language bans and child removal. demographic replacement through settler population growth. sometimes it's reproductive violence through forced sterilization and contraception campaigns. erasure through citizenship arrangements that exclude indigenous nationhood. Sometimes it is genocide. The point is that the land must eventually belong to the settlers and the indigenous people must either be absorbed into the settler society on the settlers terms or basically be rendered politically invisible. So this is essentially why Patrick Wolfe said it is a structure rather than an event. Settler colonialism is not a moment in the past when the settlers arrived and did terrible things. It is an ongoing project. As long as the settler society is still operating with its institutions and its land titles and its legal architecture, the colonial relationship is still active. It's important to note that the indigenous nations inside that society are not historical curiosities. They are sovereign people whose continued existence is, by the logic of the settler structure, an unsolved problem. So let's talk a little bit about the legal and political architecture. It's important to note that settler colonialism does not function on military force alone. In its law, it needs a legal architecture that converts dispossession into legitimacy. Different settler regimes have used different legal doctrines, but every one of them rests on a legal fiction that empties the land of its indigenous inhabitants so that the settlers claim can be presented as claim to the empty space. In the United States and Canada, the doctrine is the doctrine of discovery traced back to the 1493 Papal bulls in inter ceatera that I talked about in episode one. In Australia, the legal doctrine was terra nullius so basically land belonging to no one. and that doctrine held until 1992 when the High Court of Australia in the Mabo decision finally rejected it. The rejection did not undo two centuries of dispossessions that was built on the doctrine. In Israel, the legal architecture is layered combination of Ottoman, British mandate and the post 1948 Israeli land law, including the absentee property law of 1950, which basically transferred the property of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war to the state of Israel. The Land Acquisition Law of 1953, which retroactively legalizes those transfers. dual administrative regime in the West Bank under which Israeli settlers and Palestinians residents live under separate legal systems on the same land. The legal fiction here is not the discovery, it is the absentee status, security necessity and historical claim. The function is identical, indigenous presence is converted through law into something other than ownership. In the Nordic countries, including Norway, where I live, the doctrine is state ownership of land deemed wilderness or vacant. The architecture has historically treated Sami Reindeer Herding as use rather than ownership. The Sami have lived in Sapmi, their traditional territory across what is now Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia for thousands of years. Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Russian state laws has treated the land as belonging to the state. In October 2021, the Norwegian Supreme Court ruled unanimously that 151 wind turbines built on the reindeer pastures on the Fosen Sami violated their cultural rights and that licenses for the turbines were void. As I record this in 2026, more than four years after that ruling, the turbines are still spinning. The Norwegian states which lost the case negotiated settlements that included compensation and a veto on future licenses, but they did not include removing the turbines. So essentially, the legal architecture absorbed the ruling without dismantling itself. The doctrine of discovery is one variant of a global pattern. Terra nullius is another. State land doctrines are another form. The absentee law is another form. The names differ, but the function is essentially the same. Law is how the settler structure tells itself over and over again that what it's doing is legitimate. how that structure shakes out in 2026, I want to talk about three main cases. have chosen these cases because together they show settler structure operating across its full register. I chose Greenland because it shows what the structure does to bodies. I chose the United States because it shows what the structure does to land and to law. Palestine because it shows what the structure does to both land and to bodies simultaneously in real time while we have international legal rulings against it. So I do want to note that the Sami, the Indigenous people of Australia, the Mapuche, the West Papuans, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the indigenous nations of Canada and New Zealand are all live cases of the same structures, but I don't have room to cover all of them in this episode. So first, so let's talk Greenland on the Denmark. There's a case called the Spiral case. It's how it's known in Danish. It comes from a formal reckoning between 2022 and 2025. so basically what happened is that between 1965 and 1991, Danish health authorities fitted thousands of Greenlandic Inuit women and girls, some as young as 12, with intrauterine contraceptive devices without their consent. The campaign was designed to reduce the birthrate in Greenland and it succeeded. births in Greenland fell by approximately 50% in the early 1970s. according to the records released from the Danish National Archives between 1966 and 1970 alone, 4,500 IUDs were fitted. Basically, this corresponds to roughly half of all fertile women and girls in Greenland in that single five-year window. number of women and girls affected across the full 26 year campaign is believed to be substantially higher than that. The story was broken open in 2017 by Naja Lyberth a Greenlandic psychologist who had been 13 years old when she was taken from school for the procedure. In 2022, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation produced a podcast series that forced the case into the political mainstream. In May 2023, Denmark and Greenland launched a joint investigation. And I think in October 2023, the first 67 women filed compensation claims, and that number rose to 143 by March 2024. In August 2025, Denmark and Greenland issued formal apologies through joint press release. And in September 2025, the Independent Investigation Report was published documenting testimonies from more than 350 women out of the thousands believed affected. In September 2025, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen flew to Nuuk to deliver Denmark's apology to affected women in person. December of 2025, Denmark announced compensation of 300,000 Danish kroner per woman, which basically amounts to about 46,000 US dollars. Applications open in April 2026 and they will close in June 2028. Greenlandic politicians, including former Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede Danish parliament, Aki-Matilda - Høegh-Dam have publicly described the campaign as genocide. Danish jurists have framed it as injustice without a genocidal intent. The Greenlandic independence movement has also gained ground throughout this reckoning. Greenland remains in 2026, one of the very few territories on earth still formally governed direct colonial jurisdiction. as a part of the Danish realm with home rule but not sovereignty. In early 2026, the Trump administration revived his interest in acquiring Greenland for the United States U.S. president stating that Denmark's claim to the territory was no stronger than that of Vikings who have landed there 500 years earlier. So basically what they shows is the doctrine of discovery openly invoked and openly rejected by an American president against a NATO ally over an Inuit homeland that has been governed on that Danish sovereignty without. in which consent for two centuries and that the United States has no claim to whatsoever. This is essentially what settler colonialism does to bodies. It controls fertility. It servers reproduction from consent. It uses the medical system as an instrument of population engineering. And then when survivors get old enough to be heard, it offers individual compensation while leaving the colonial relationship in place. The women each get 300,000 kroners and Greenland remains a Danish colony. Next, I want to talk quickly about the Indigenous nations in the United States. in 2005 is not a historical artifact. It is still being used in 2026. The Wet'suwet'en - in Canada and the Standing Rock Sioux in the United States have spent years fighting pipeline constructions across treaty land. The Apache at Oak Flats in Arizona are fighting to prevent a copper mine on land that holds religious significance to them. Land Back is the political project of returning lands to indigenous nations. It has moved in the last decade from a rhetorical demand to a serious negotiation. The Lakota have also refused for nearly 50 years to accept 1980 federal compensation award of $105 million for the theft of the Black Hills. compound interest to roughly $2 billion sitting in a US Treasury account. accepting that amount would extinguish the Lakota claim to the land itself and so the Lakota has not accepted and have not stopped saying that the land was never for sale. so one must also pay attention to is that the structure also extends to bodies. according to the FBI, there were 10,248 missing indigenous persons reports filed in the United States in 2024 alone, On reservations, indigenous women are murdered at rates more than 10 times the national average in the US. Homicide is roughly the third leading cause of death among indigenous women between the ages of 10 and 24. The movement that organizes around these numbers calls it's Missing and Murdered uh Indigenous Women and Relatives And the wider crisis it names is the cumulative violence of jurisdictional gaps between federal, state, and tribal law enforcement of resource extraction that bring in transient male workforce to indigenous areas of the century-old colonial pattern that says indigenous women's bodies are not protected because indigenous people are not fully sovereign. The Bureau of Indian Affairs created a missing and murdered unit in 2021. The killings continued, the land was taken, the bodies are still being taken. listen, the doctrine of discovery has been repudiated by the Vatican, but it's still operating US property law. The Black Hills are still not back. Indigenous women have still been murdered at rates that on some reservations exceed the national average by more than tenfold. The structure that took the land is the structure that continues to take the lives. So next, I'm gonna talk about Palestine. There is no episode on contemporary settler colonialism where Palestine can be omitted. the term for the Israeli project traced back to the foundational work of Patrick Wolfe And it has been extended by Ilan Pappé, Lorenzo Verracini, Rashid Khalidi, and also a generation of Israeli, Palestinian, and international historians. and it is rigorous and it is established. I also want to say that this is a structural analysis, not an ethnic or religious accusation. Settler colonialism applied to Israel names what the Israeli state has been doing. It doesn't refer to Israeli Jewish people. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued its advisory opinion on the legal consequence of Israeli policies and practices in occupied Palestinian territory. The court ruled that Israel continues presence in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in East Jerusalem is unlawful under international law. It also ruled that Israel must end its occupation as rapidly as possible, that Israel must cease all new settlement activity immediately, that Israel must evacuate all settlers from occupied territories. that Israel must make full reparations to Palestine for damages costs. the ICJ also found that Israeli policies in the occupied territories violate international uh prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. On September 18, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for the enforcement of the ICJ opinion, with 124 states voting in favor, 14 voted against, and 43 abstained. Israel and the United States voted against. So basically as of May, 2026, the opinion has not been implemented. Israeli military as of today has killed at least over 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October, 2023. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, in a study published in the Lancet Global Health, it placed the true figure substantially higher and the Israeli military have formally accepted the Ministry of Health's figure in January 2026, In September 2025, the UN Independence International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded formally that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention that was filed in December 2023 has produced multiple sets of provincial measures rulings and those remain in proceedings. was announced in October 2025, according to the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva, Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since. So the West Bank is where the settler structure is operating without cover of war. According to reports, the 2025 olive harvest was the worst in decades. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced in the West Bank since October 2023. The UN Human Rights Office described this in March 2026 as a concerted Israeli policy aimed at permanent displacement, raising concerns of ethnic cleansing. Palestine shows what the settler structure does when it does everything at once. The land is being taken through settlements, the bodies are being taken through war, the law is being defied through rejections of international rulings. The reproduction of indigenous population is being attacked through the destruction of hospitals and the killings of children. The legal architecture has not been dismantled. The settler structure is operating in 2026 with the international legal system having ruled against it and the international political system having declined to enforce that ruling. This is what it looks like when the structure is allowed to finish its work without interference. I will touch on four critics that I anticipate. So the first that I want to name is that Indigenous people are not all the same, so they should not be flattened into one. The Inuits, the Diné the Lakotas, the Palestinians, the Sami, the Tibetans, the Kashmiris, they are all different people with different histories and different relationships to their land. They have different political situations and they also have different demands. I want to say that the things that they share is not their experience. It is the settler structure that has been imposed on them. So when I talk about Indigenous people in this context, the unity I'm talking about is more that of structure, not the unity of the people it has dispossessed. Also important is that indigenous people are not without agency or internal politics or complicity. Indigenous leadership in many places has its own failures, its own internal disagreement, its own histories of collaboration with extractive industries or with settler authorities. But none of this dilutes the structural arguments I am making. The structural arguments I am making is an analytical object. The internal politics of those inside the structure is its own subject, important and complicated, and not the subject of this episode. The third is that constitutional protections, treaty rights, and UN declarations exist. The rights on paper have improved, absolutely. The Norwegian Supreme Court, for example, ruled against the Fosen turbines, and yet the turbines remain. The ICJ ruled the Israeli occupation unlawful, and the occupation continues. The Vatican repudiated the doctrine of discovery, and the US courts continues to cite it. So rights without enforcement are just an accounting entry. It's not really a remedy. The structure is what continues to produce the gap between the law on paper and the dispossession on the ground. and forth. My naming of the settler structure is not a personal accusation against people living in settler societies. I live in Norway. many of the people listening to this live in settler societies of one kind or the other. The argument is not that. every non-indigenous person in a settler society is responsible for the structure. The argument is that the structure exists, that it benefits the settler society as a whole, even when individual settlers oppose it, and that dismantling it requires collective work that has yet to be done. I really want to state that naming a system is not the same as blaming a person. refusing to name the system is basically the ways in which the system continues to protect itself. So basically looking at what is owed, how can we start making amend? I think I will frame this also the same way as I framed the last episode. The first is restitution. Specific tracts of land returned to specific indigenous nations beginning with the land that is currently being held by state and federal government that has no other competing claims and that holds particular significance to the original peoples. This also includes Palestinian land returned in accordance to the ICJ ruling, the Inuit communal harm in Greenland addressed through collective measures, not only the individual 300,000 Kroner compensation scheme. Reparations of ancestral remains and cultural actifacts held by museums in settler states, Completing the work that Greenland, Australia, the United States, Canada, and European museums have begun but not finished. I think compensation should also match the scale of what was taken, calculated by Indigenous nations themselves, not handed down as a settler-determined number. also important. treaty enforcement where treaties exist, treaty making where they do not, Recognition of Indigenous Nations as present-day sovereign actors in international law. free, prior and informed consent as a real legal standard, not as an advisory one, on every project that affects indigenous land. Sovereignty also means indigenous control of indigenous education systems, indigenous languages restored as functional public languages where they have been suppressed, and indigenous legal systems operating in parallel with settler legal systems on indigenous land. And of course, truth. The work the Truth Commission has begun needs to be sustained and extended. And the history needs to be taught in settler state schools. Of course, the doctrine of discovery needs to be dismantled in law, not just in church statements. The Spiral case taught to every Danish child, So facts like the doctrine of discovery, the missing and murdered indigenous women and the broken treaties need to be taught to every child in the US. The Nakba needs to be taught the world over The structure is invisible when it's not taught. Teaching is one of the conditions of dismantling. Listen, recording this from a country that has acknowledged its colonial relationship with the Sami in a truth and reconciliation commission report that has issued a parliamentary apology. and that continues to operate wind turbines on Sami land that its own Supreme Court declared illegal. I am Nigerian. I am Black. I am the child of one settler colonial history through the British in Nigeria. and also a beneficiary of the extractive architecture of white terrorism. So by location, I am present in a country occupying Sami territory in a way that is uncomfortable to name and also in a way that is necessary to name. Norway is a settler state in relation to Sami and I live inside it. I benefit from Norwegian infrastructure, from Norwegian public services, from Norwegian institutions. settler structure I am critiquing. I am also not standing outside of it. I am inside it doing what I can from the inside. to name it accurately and ask the questions that the inside of the structure prefers not to be asked. The point here is that very few of us do not have a handprint in the system. Like I said in the previous episode, there are only beneficiaries and victims and people who are both. The work is to be honest about which category you are sitting in, in any given conversation, in any given question, on any given day. Settler colonialism is not a phase that European empires went through and emerged from. It is a structure that continues to operate on every populated continent in 2026 I am reminded of a guest episode that I have with Dr. Yaba Blay when she said, there is no post to Colonial. The Spiral Case Compensation of Denmark is being paid to individual women one at a time, and the colonial relationship that produced the campaign has not been dismantled. the doctrine of discovery is still in US property law. The Black Hills are still not back, and $2 billion sits in a Treasury account that the Lakota will not accept. Indigenous women are still being murdered settlers are still expanding in the West Bank, Gaza has been reduced to rubble while international courts and the rest of us watched. The Masalit are still being killed in Darfur, and the gold from the killing is still being laundered are still spinning at Fosen built the systems, the operators have multiplied, and the harm continues. Settler colonialism is not what your grandparents or my grandparents did. it is what your government and mine is doing right now. Naming the structure is literally the floor. Dismantling it is the work that follows. This was part three of a series. Future episodes will continue to go deeper. episode challenged you, share it. Share it with someone who needs to know the settler structure is not just history, that it's operating in present day. Of course, subscribe to Overnight Wisdom wherever you get your podcasts. Join my newsletter at chisomudeze.com I also want to thank you for being here. Until next week, I'm Chisom and this is Overnight Wisdom