A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of settler colonialism. Across its nation states, the unacknowledged, undead pasts of settler colonialism trouble the present as the fact of genocide is brought once again into public view.

I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together.