ABSTRACT
The relationship between settler colonialism as a mode of domination and genocide has been analysed in what is by now an important debate, and a similar discussion has addressed the relationship between American history specifically and genocide. This chapter proposes a heuristic framing for understanding colonialism as violence. Settler frontiers are sites that empires, states, their bureaucracies and their armies find hard to reach, even if often this disconnect is only temporary. Colonialism and settler colonialism are equally violent modes of domination premised on unequal relationships and they are both predicated on displacement, but the former is centripetal, while the latter is dispersed, diffused, centrifugal. Colonialism unleashes violence as it is constituted in institutional forms. Violence had to be concentrated and dissipated simultaneously. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
