Colonialism(s) in transit: Making settler imperialism visible in decolonial IR

In a context of widespread calls for the need to “decolonize” IR, this article is interested in the concepts used to understand (de-)colonial strategies. Focusing on the arguments of Latin American decolonial IR, it maintains that the concept of “coloniality”, as descriptor for global phenomena, is in danger of obscuring colonial strategies in specific contexts. The article provides an in-depth analysis of the binary spatial and temporal imaginaries that underlie coloniality – “Global North” versus “Global South”, and past versus contemporary colonialism – to demonstrate how they can reinforce the exercise of colonial violences against Indigenous peoples in the settler states of the Global North. The article proceeds to examine Jodi Byrd’s concept of “transit” and Tiffany L. King’s use of the concept of “fungibility” to make sense of what Byrd calls strategies of ongoing US “settler imperialism” – strategies that centre the nature of the US as a settler state and that are difficult to grasp with the concept of coloniality. However, rather than replacing one concept with another, the article concludes that we need multiple concepts emerging from specific contexts to better understand how different colonial and imperial strategies intersect, as well as what this means for decolonization.