Settler colonialism is a logic and structure of displacement by settlers, using colonial rule, over an environment for replacing it and its indigenous peoples with settlements and the society of the settlers.

Settler colonialism is a form of exogenous (of external origin, coming from the outside) domination typically organized or supported by an imperial authority, which maintains a connection or control to the territory through the settler's colonialism. Settler colonialism contrasts with exploitation colonialism, where the imperial power conquers territory to exploit the natural resources and gain a source of cheap or free labor. As settler colonialism entails the creation of a new society on the conquered territory, it lasts indefinitely unless decolonisation occurs through removal of the settler population or (more debatably) through reforms to colonial structures, settler-indigenous compacts and reconciliation processes.

Settler colonial studies has often focused on former British colonies in North America, Australia and New Zealand, which are close to the complete, prototypical form of settler colonialism. However, settler colonialism is not restricted to any specific culture and has been practised by non-Europeans.

During the 1960s, settlement and colonization were perceived as separate phenomena from colonialism. Settlement endeavours were seen as taking place in empty areas, downplaying the Indigenous inhabitants. Later on in the 1970s and 1980s, settler colonialism was seen as bringing high living standards in contrast to the failed political systems associated with classical colonialism. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the field of settler colonial studies was established distinct but connected to Indigenous studies. Although often credited with originating the field, Australian historian Patrick Wolfe stated that "I didn't invent Settler Colonial Studies. Natives have been experts in the field for centuries." Additionally, Wolfe's work was preceded by others that have been influential in the field, such as Fayez Sayegh's Zionist Colonialism in Palestine and Settler Capitalism by Donald Denoon.

Settler colonialism is a logic and structure, and not a mere occurrence. Settler colonialism takes claim of environments for replacing existing conditions and members of that environment with those of the settlement and settlers. Intrinsically connected to this is the displacement or elimination of existing residents, particularly through destruction of their environment and society. As such settler colonialism has been identified as a form of environmental racism.

Some scholars describe the process as inherently genocidal, considering settler colonialism to entail the elimination of existing peoples and cultures, and not only their displacement (see genocide, "the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part"). However, the opposite argument has also been made by Lorenzo Veracini, who argues that all genocide is settler colonial in nature.

Depending on the definition, it may be enacted by a variety of means, including mass killing of the previous inhabitants, removal of the previous inhabitants and/or cultural assimilation.

Therefore colonial settling has been called an invasion or occupation, emphazising the violent reality of colonization and its settling, instead of the more domestic meaning of settling.

Settler colonialism is distinct from migration because immigrants aim to join an existing society, not replace it. Mahmood Mamdani writes, "Immigrants are unarmed; settlers come armed with both weapons and a nationalist agenda. Immigrants come in search of a homeland, not a state; for settlers, there can be no homeland without a state." Nevertheless, the difference is often elided by settlers who minimize the voluntariness of their departure, claiming that settlers are mere migrants, and some pro-indigenous positions which militantly simplify, claiming that all migrants are settlers.

The settler colonial paradigm has been applied to a wide variety of conflicts around the world, including New Caledonia, Western New Guinea, the Andaman Islands, Argentina, Australia, British Kenya, the Canary Islands, Fiji, French Algeria, Generalplan Ost, Hawaii, Hokkaido, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Italian Libya and East Africa, Kashmir, Korea and Manchukuo, Latin America, Liberia, New Zealand, northern Afghanistan, North America, Posen and West Prussia and German South West Africa, Rhodesia, Sápmi, South Africa, South Vietnam, and Taiwan.

During the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Castile sponsored expeditions by conquistadors to subjugate under Castilian rule the Macaronesian archipelago of the Canary Islands, located off the coast of Morocco and inhabited by the Indigenous Guanche people. Beginning with the start of the conquest of the island of Lanzarote on 1 May 1402 and ending with the surrender of the last Guanche resistance on Tenerife on 29 September 1496 to the now-unified Spanish crown, the archipelago was subject to a settler colonial process involving systematic enslavement, mass murder, and deportation of the Guanches, who were replaced with Spanish settlers, in a process foreshadowing the Iberian colonisation of the Americas that followed shortly thereafter. Also like in the Americas, Spanish colonialists in the Canaries quickly turned to the importation of slaves from mainland Africa as a source of labour due to the decimation of the already small Guanche population by a combination of war, disease, and brutal forced labour. Historian Mohamed Adhikari has labelled the conquest of the Canary Islands as the first overseas European settler colonial genocide.

Since 1975, the Kingdom of Morocco has sponsored settlement schemes that have encouraged several thousand Moroccan citizens to settle Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara as part of the Western Sahara conflict. On 6 November 1975, the Green March took place, during which about 350,000 Moroccan citizens crossed into Saguia al-Hamra in the former Spanish Sahara after having received a signal from King Hassan II. As of 2015, it is estimated that Moroccan settlers constitute two-thirds of the population of Western Sahara.

Under international law, the transfer of Moroccan citizens into the occupied territory constitutes a direct violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (cf. Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus and Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territories).

In 1652, the arrival of Europeans sparked the beginning of settler colonialism in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company was set up at the Cape, and imported large numbers of slaves from Africa and Asia during the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station for ships sailing between Europe and the east. The initial plan by Dutch East India Company officer Jan van Riebeeck was to maintain a small community around the new fort, but the community continued to spread and settle further than originally planned. There was a historic struggle to achieve the intended British sovereignty that was achieved in other parts of the Commonwealth. State sovereignty belonged to the Union of South Africa (1910–1961), followed by the Republic of South Africa (1961–1994) and finally the modern day Republic of South Africa (1994–present day).

In 1948, the policy of Apartheid was introduced South Africa in order to segregate the races and ensure the domination of the Afrikaner minority over non-whites, politically, socially and economically. As of 2014, the South African government has re-opened the period for land claims under the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act.

Liberia is often regarded by scholars as a unique example of settler colonialism and the only known instance of Black settler colonialism. It is frequently described as an African American settler colony tasked with establishing a Western form of governance in Africa.

Liberia was founded as the private colony of Liberia in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, a White American-run organization, to relocate free African Americans to Africa, as part of the Back-to-Africa movement. This settlement scheme stemmed from fears that free African Americans would assist slaves in escaping, as well as the widespread belief among White Americans that African Americans were inherently inferior and should thus be relocated. U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison publicly endorsed and funded the project. Between 1822 and the early 20th century, around 15,000 African Americans colonized Liberia on lands acquired from the region's indigenous African population. The African American elite monopolized the government and established minority rule over the locals. As they possessed Western culture, they felt superior to the natives, whom they dominated and oppressed. Indigenous revolts against the Americo-Liberian elite such as the Grebo Revolt in 1909–1910 and Kru Revolt in 1915 were quelled with U.S. military support.

In colonial America, colonial powers created economic dependency and imbalance of trade, incorporating Indigenous nations into spheres of influence and controlling them indirectly with the use of Christian missionaries and alcohol. With the emergence of an independent United States, desire for land and the perceived threat of permanent Indigenous political and spatial structures led to violent relocation of many Indigenous tribes to the American West, in what is known as the Trail of Tears.

In response to American encroachment on native land in the Great Lakes region, the Pan-Indian confederacies of the Northwest Confederacy and Tecumseh's Confederacy emerged. Despite initial victories in both cases, such as St. Clair's defeat or the siege of Detroit, both eventually lost, thereby paving the way for American control over the region. Settlement into conquered land was rapid. Following the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, American settlers poured into southern Ohio, such that by 1810 it had a population of 230,760. The defeat of the confederacies in the Great Lakes paved the way for large land loss in the region, via treaties such as the Treaty of Saginaw which saw the loss of more than 4,000,000 acres of land.

Frederick Jackson Turner, the father of the "frontier thesis" of American history, noted in 1901: "Our colonial system did not start with Spanish War; the U.S. had had a colonial history from the beginning...hidden under the phraseology of 'interstate migration' and territorial organization'". While the United States government and local state governments directly aided this dispossession through the use of military forces, ultimately this came about through agitation by settler society in order to gain access to Indigenous land. Especially in the US South, such land acquisition built plantation society and expanded the practice of slavery. Settler colonialism participated in the formation of US cultures and lasted past the conquest, removal, or extermination of Indigenous people. In 1928, Adolf Hitler spoke admiringly of the impact of white settler colonialism on the Natives, stating the US had "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage". The practice of writing the Indigenous out of history perpetrated a forgetting of the full dimensions and significance of colonialism at both the national and local levels.

The Karabakh conflict has been described as settler colonialism targeting Armenians.

Near the end of their rule the Qing tried to colonize Xinjiang, Tibet, and other parts of the imperial frontier. To accomplish this goal they began a policy of settler colonialism by which Han Chinese were resettled on the frontier. This policy was renewed by the People's Republic of China, led by Chinese Communist Party.

Zionism has been characterized by some scholars as a form of settler colonialism concerning region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This academic framework has also been embraced by leftist groups and individuals involved in anti-Israel activism and campus protests. However, this viewpoint faces substantial criticism from scholars and is largely rejected by many Jews due to its perceived denial of the historical Jewish connection to Palestine, among other reasons.

Many of the founding fathers of Zionism themselves described the project as colonization, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure." Founder of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, described the Zionist project as "something colonial" in a letter to Cecil Rhodes in 1902.

In 1967, the French historian Maxime Rodinson wrote an article later translated and published in English as Israel: A Colonial Settler-State? Lorenzo Veracini describes Israel as a colonial state and writes that Jewish settlers could expel the British in 1948 only because they had their own colonial relationships inside and outside Israel's new borders. Veracini believes the possibility of an Israeli disengagement is always latent and this relationship could be severed, through an "accommodation of a Palestinian Israeli autonomy within the institutions of the Israeli state". Other commentators, such as Daiva Stasiulis, Nira Yuval-Davis, and Joseph Massad in the "Post Colonial Colony: time, space and bodies in Palestine/Israel in the persistence of the Palestinian Question" have included Israel in their global analysis of settler societies. Ilan Pappé describes Zionism and Israel in similar terms. Scholar Amal Jamal, from Tel Aviv University, has stated, "Israel was created by a settler-colonial movement of Jewish immigrants". Damien Short has accused Israel of carrying out genocide against Palestinians during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since its inception within a settler colonial context.

Writing in the 1990s, the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe is credited with originating the field. He theorized settler colonialism as a structure (rather than an event) premised on the elimination rather than exploitation of the native population, thus distinguishing it from classical colonialism. Wolfe argued that settler colonialism was centered on the control of land, that it continued after the closing of the frontier, and that continued to exist today, classifying Israel as a modern form of settler colonialism. His approach was defining for the field, but has been challenged by other scholars on the basis that many situations involve a combination of elimination and exploitation.

Critics of the paradigm argue that Zionism does not fit the traditional framework of colonialism. S. Ilan Troen views Zionism as the return of an indigenous population to its historic homeland, distinct from imperial expansion. Most Jews oppose the paradigm, saying it denies their historical connection to the land and aspirations for self-determination. Moses Lissak asserted that the settler-colonial thesis denies the idea that Zionism is the modern national movement of the Jewish people, seeking to reestablish a Jewish political entity in their historical territory. Zionism, Lissak argues, was both a national movement and a settlement movement at the same time, so it was not, by definition, a colonial settlement movement.

Some scholars describe Russia as a settler colonial state, particularly in its expansion into Siberia and the Russian Far East, during which it displaced and resettled Indigenous peoples, while practicing settler colonialism. The annexation of Siberia and the Far East to Russia was resisted by the Indigenous peoples, while the Cossacks often committed atrocities against them. During the Cold War, new forms of Indigenous repression were practiced.

This colonization continued even during the Soviet Union in the 20th century. The Soviet policy also sometimes included the deportation of the native population, as in the case of the Crimean Tatars.

According to a PhD thesis by Lin-chin Tsai, the ethnic makeup of Taiwan's contemporary population is largely the result of Chinese settler colonialism beginning in the seventeenth century.

Europeans explored and settled Australia, displacing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Indigenous Australian population was estimated at 795,000 at the time of European settlement. The population declined steeply for 150 years following settlement from 1788, due to casualties from infectious disease, the Australian frontier wars and forced re-settlement and cultural disintegration.

Settler colonialism exists in tension with indigenous studies. Some indigenous scholars believe that settler colonialism as a methodology can lead to overlooking indigenous responses to colonialism; however, other practitioners of indigenous studies believe that settler colonialism has important insights that are applicable to their work. Settler colonialism as a theory has also been criticized from the standpoint of postcolonial theory. Antiracism has been criticized on the basis that it does not provide a special status for indigenous claims, and in response settler colonial theory has been criticized for potentially contributing to the marginalization of racialized immigrants.

Political theorist Mahmoud Mamdani suggested that settlers could never succeed in their effort to become native, and therefore the only way to end settler colonialism was to erase the political significance of the settler–native dichotomy.

According to Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd, in contrast to settler, the term arrivant refers to enslaved Africans transported against their will, and to refugees forced into the Americas due to the effects of imperialism.

In his book Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought, political scientist Adam Dahl states that while it has often been recognized that "American democratic thought and identity arose out of the distinct pattern by which English settlers colonized the new world", histories are missing the "constitutive role of colonial dispossession in shaping democratic values and ideals".

• Pre-modern human migration
• European emigration
• Transmigration program

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