Summary

Population settlements/settlers as a means for obtaining territorial control have been an omnipresent phenomenon throughout recorded history of human society. Whereas scholarly debates about settlers have typically been associated with European imperial settler colonialism, an emerging research agenda has started to develop in the 21st century around the politics of settlers, or population settlements, in contested territories in the post-WWII era, primarily in the postcolonial world. The research around this ubiquitous phenomenon is still in its infancy, however, and is characterized more by studies of specific cases and less by comparative analysis that aims to identify patterns of theoretical relevance.

Cases of settlers in contested lands are abundant all over the world: from Xinjiang and Tibet in China, to Israel and the West Bank in the Middle East, the Casamance in Senegal, Abkhazia in the Caucasus, Aceh and Papua in Indonesia, and the islands of San Andrés and Providencia in Colombia. Multiple questions can be drawn from studies of these cases as well as the emerging body of literature around them: How have population settlements been conceptualized? What drives them? How have they been pursued? What array of variables has been identified by scholars to explain their proliferation in different cases? What broad patterns and categories can be identified and used for comparative and theoretically driven research? Finally, how can these general categories be useful for generating more robust theory-building scholarship?