MACMILLAN Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the ‘Post-Welfare’ State

This book examines recent changes to Indigenous policy in English-speaking settler states, and locates them within the broader shift from social to neo-liberal framings of citizen-state relations via a case study of Australian federal policy between 2000 and 2007. Review “Strakosch’s work offers empirical evidence of exchanging Indigenous rights founded within precolonial settler sovereignty for domestic institutions founded in colonial settler states. The case study evidence is undeniable. … this is a great book highlighting a sorely under-researched topic. … My hope is that this work will cause contemporary Indigenous scholars to rethink their own policy positions.” (Michael Lerma, NAIS, Vol. 4 (1), 2017) Review "Reading Elizabeth Strakosch's incisive account of the procedural mechanisms whereby neoliberal settler colonialism seeks to reduce the politics of conquest to a welfare issue reminds me of second-wave feminism's transformative insistence that the personal is political. Lucidly, methodically and with great intelligence, Strakosch shows how, in the twenty-first century, the technical has become political, as she uncovers the technocratic ruses whereby Australian governments have sought to convert the unresolved question of Indigenous sovereignty into a depoliticised managerial agenda, the preserve of service delivery rather than international relations. The implications of this astute analysis are immediate and profound". - Patrick Wolfe, La Trobe University, Australia. About the Author Elizabeth Strakosch is Lecturer in Public Policy and Politics at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research focuses on the intersection of policy and political relationships, and explores the ways that new public policies and administration techniques transform our political identities in liberal and settler colonial contexts.