Book Review
Unsettling Colonial Automobilities: Criminalisation and Contested Sovereignties. By Thalia Anthony, Juanita Sherwood, Harry Blagg, and Kieran Tranter. Leeds, United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing. 2023. Pp. xx, 195. $110.00.

Introduction

Unsettling Colonial Automobilities: Criminalisation and Contested Sovereignties is a compelling interdisciplinary and multileveled study that sits at the intersection of law, criminology, settler colonial studies, and cultural analysis.¹Thalia Anthony, Juanita Sherwood, Harry Blagg, & Kieran Tranter, Unsettling Colonial Automobilities: Criminalisation and Contested Sovereignties (2024). Where colonialism refers broadly to the political, economic and cultural domination of one polity over the territory of another, settler colonialism is a specific form in which outsiders migrate permanently to a territory and seek to establish a new society that erases the previous. The authors are well-suited to this task. They include Professors Harry Blagg, with expertise in First Nations community-engaged criminology; Thalia Anthony, from legal and carceral studies; Wiradjuri scholar Juanita Sherwood, who studies Indigenous health and community research; and Kieran Tranter, an expert in cultural legal theory. Together, they offer a layered interrogation of how the motor vehicle and automobility shape the settler colonial ordering of Australia.

At its core, Unsettling Colonial Automobilities argues that automobility has been a fundamental participant in the dispossession, criminalization, and ongoing regulation of First Nations peoples. Yet, crucially, it also documents how First Nations communities appropriate the motor vehicle in ways that unsettle these colonial designs, transforming vehicles into sites of resistance, cultural strength, and sovereign practice. Framing constraint and resistance, imposition and appropriation in a dialectical tension structure the text and are central to its analytical contribution. In the authors’ words, this book “exposes the dialectics of automobility in occupier colonial societies . . . the ways in which First Nations peoples are continually coerced by the colonial carceral infrastructure and also constantly unsettling its imposing menace” by resisting and reclaiming its technologies, like automobility.²Id. at 2.

By drawing attention to settler colonial and First Nations automobilities, Unsettling Colonial Automobilities not only raises issues and debates in other areas but also opens avenues for further research. There is room for additional research on the various cultures of automobility.³See, e.g., Regina Austin, Neighborliness vs. Car Culture: Traffic Violence, Pedestrian Deaths in Philadelphia, and Vision Zero’s Concept of Equity, 2025 J. L. Mob. 115; Car Cultures (Daniel Miller ed., 2020). The authors make occasional references to First Nations in Canada and Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. Still, the primary focus remains on First Nations communities in Australia and the Northern Territory. Its focus is on the Northern Territory Intervention—a controversial federal program from 2007 targeting remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to address child abuse and family violence—and its aftermath.⁴See Amnesty International Australia, The NT Intervention and Human Rights (2007), https://www.amnesty.org/es/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SEC010032010ENGLISH.pdf. This compelling but limited study underscores the need for research in other settler colonial jurisdictions, including the United States of America.⁵See generally Natsu T. Saito, Tales of Color and Colonialism: Racial Realism and Settler Colonial Theory, 10 Fla. A&M U. L. Rev. 1 (2014); Natsu Taylor Saito, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law Why Structural Racism Persists (2020) (applying the settler colonialism theory to the U.S.). Then, considering the different cultural manifestations of automobility in these states and their relation to Indigenous automobility raises questions about the role of law in those cultures, the harms that arise from automobiles,⁶Ian Loader, Concerning Cars: Automobility and the Contours of Control, Order, and Harm, 8 Ann. Rev. Criminology 215 (2025); Patrick Miner, et al., Car Harm: A global Review of Automobility’s Harm to People and the Environment, 115 J. Trans. Geography 103807 (2024). and other means of resistance, pointing toward the need for decolonial mobilities.

This review is comprised of three parts. Part I introduces the main concepts – carceralism and necroautomobility. Part II then examines how these concepts structure the book, which provides a summary of the book. Part III provides a discussion and analysis, highlighting the book’s novel contributions, the questions that arise, and areas for further research.

I. Colonial Automobility: Carceralism and Necroautomobility

The introduction of Unsettling Colonial Automobilities sets out the theoretical architecture. The motor vehicle, the authors argue, is not a politically neutral artefact or an inevitable component of modern life. Instead, in settler colonial societies, it is a tool, a “colonizing force,” facilitating displacement, segregation, and new forms of policing and surveillance. The authors develop two key concepts to examine and interrogate this force: carceralism and necroautomobility.

Carceralism is obviously a rephrasing of “carceralism.” Articulated by Michel Foucault, the “carceral” is a “punitive model” in society, a “series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago.”⁷Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 296-7 (Alan Sheridan trans., 2d ed. 1995). Although it involves law and legal processes, this “archipelago” is a network, or extension and diffusion of prison-like control and criminal discipline through society to achieve state goals. The concept of carceralism has been embraced (and changed) in other studies.⁸Michael J. Coyle & Mechthild Nagel, Contesting Carceral Logic: Towards Abolitionist Futures (2022); Elizabeth Bernstein, The Sexual Politics of the “New Abolitionism”, 18(3) Differences 128 (2007). Emphasizing the “car” in carceralism refers to the ways motor vehicles are used as mobile technologies of restraint, immobilization, and incarceration. The motor vehicle is an extension of the colonial state’s coercive apparatus that can transport, confine, and discipline Indigenous bodies and more. It can also be murderous. This leads to the second concept, necroautomobility.

Necroautomobility describes the culturally weaponized use of motor vehicles to take Indigenous life. This concept is a portmanteau of two robust concepts: necropolitics and automobility. Each requires some explanation to see how they combine to form necroautomobility.

Building upon the idea of carceral discipline, Foucault developed the concept of biopolitics (or biopower) to understand how modern states do not just regulate through law or punishment. Instead, institutions foster, regulate, and optimize the life of populations. Biopolitics is the form of power that make life (birth, health, sexuality, population, and death) its object. Pithily summarized as “make live and let die.”⁹Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France 1975-76 241 (Mauro Bertani, et al. eds., David Macy trans., 2003). Achille Mbembé argues that colonial, racialized, militarized, and other political orders are not adequately explained by focusing on life and making the population thrive.¹⁰Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 15(1) Pub. Culture 11 (2003). Instead, he supplements Foucault’s biopolitics with the concept of necropolitics. Necropolitics is the power of death or governance that exposes populations (or parts of populations) to slow violence, abandonment, incarceration, militarization, and neglect. Colonial orders exercised power through the production of death, where life is reduced to survival. This phrase might summarize it: “make die and let live.” This concept combines with automobility.

Although ‘automobility’ simply means that automobiles are the major means of transportation, as originally developed by John Urry, automobility is a system that includes: manufactured objects (automobiles), items of individual consumption (that support ideas of personal value and also preoccupy criminal justice systems), a complex of technical and social interlinkages, a form of quasi-private mobility, a dominant culture, and a significant cause of environmental resource use.¹¹Anthony, et al., supra note 1, at 25-6. In essence, for Urry, automobility is “a self-organizing autopoietic, non-linear system that spreads world-wide, and includes cars, car-drivers, roads, petroleum supplies and many novel objects, technologies and signs.”¹²John Urry, The ‘System’ of Automobility, 21 Theory Culture & Soc’y 25, 27 (2004). Autopoiesis, the concept that a system reproduces itself through its operation,¹³See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (John Bednarz Jr. & Dirk Baecker trans., 1995) is central to Urry’s formation. In other words, for Urry, automobility is not simply the use of cars, but a vast, self-reproducing socio-technical system that organizes mobility, space, subjectivity, and social life around the private automobile. The creation of automobility generates demand for more cars and the systems they depend on.

Mbembé shifts attention from biopolitics to necropolitics by considering colonial, racialized orders, and necroautomobility arises from a similar shift to settler colonial, racialized orders. It is the “use of the motor vehicle in the pursuit of colonial oppression of First Nations peoples” which is seen in the police vehicle chases as well as in the (over)policing of First Nations drivers.¹⁴Anthony, et al., supra note 1, at 2. In short, “colonial automobility in the twentieth and early twenty-first century embodies necroautomobility as defined by its carceral and necropolitical use to segregate, control, harm and kill First Nations people.”¹⁵Id. at 6.

In the context of necroautomobility, the authors importantly stress that problems do not arise from the technology itself.¹⁶Id. at 2. This is a point I return to below. For the authors, the settler colonial deployment of this technology imbues it with deathly potential. Because the technology is not itself problematic, it allows them to put forth First Nations automobility—the co-optation and appropriation of the motor vehicle and put it in service of their anti-colonial projects.

The authors use the concepts of carceralism and necroautomobility throughout to illuminate the broader claim: automobility must be understood not just as a system of transportation but as a deeply legal, political, and culturally embedded technology within settler colonial societies. These concepts structure Unsettling Colonial Automobilities.

II. Carceralism and Necroautomobility as Structure

This section provides a summary of Unsettling Colonial Automobilities. The first three chapters focus on carceralism; the following three, on necroautomobility; and the final chapter considers First Nations’ automobility.

Carceralism

The first three chapters trace the emergence and evolution of carceral automobility in Australia.

Chapter 1 examines the early twentieth-century colonial occupation of central and northern Australia. They explain how motor vehicles enabled pastoralists to make incursions onto First Nations’ lands. The motor vehicle was a tool of “exploration” to “claim” land, facilitating the displacement of communities and creating their enforced immobility. The creation of mobility for settlers also created immobility for First Nations, revealing the interrelation between settler mobility and Indigenous immobility. The authors emphasize that a paradox like this persists today: motor vehicles are now indispensable to First Nations people seeking healthcare, government services, education, family connection, or access to country (the ability to travel to, celebrate and connect with their homelands), yet the very system that necessitates reliance on motor vehicles simultaneously deploys them as tools of surveillance and control. The chapter also situates motor vehicles within the broader project of criminalization, including their use in child removals during the Stolen Generations era (from the early 1900s to the 1960s, governments removed First Nations children from families, rupturing families, communities, and cultures).¹⁷ Bringing Them Home, Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997) https://humanrights.gov.au/?a=51037.

Chapter 2 shifts to the 1960s onward, when First Nations drivers increasingly became the focus of police attention, regulatory enforcement, and then imprisonment. Although driving regulations appear neutral, the authors show that their application is racially biased.¹⁸For an all too familiar analogy with racial profiling of drivers in the U.S., see Jamila Jefferson-Jones, “Driving While Black” as “Living While Black”, 106 Iowa L. Rev. 2281 (2021), and the rich literature on which it builds. First Nations drivers are more frequently stopped, charged, and incarcerated than non-Indigenous drivers, often for regulatory breaches that stem from structural barriers to acquiring licences or maintaining roadworthy vehicles. The authors illustrate how “race-neutral” laws serve as mechanisms of exclusion. A striking example involves the imposition of a government stop sign in a Warlpiri community.¹⁹Anthony, et al., supra note 1, at 37. Despite the community’s existing cultural protocols of safety, the stop sign was put in place to regulate their “safety.” Some Warlpiri expressed concerns that the sign was “another layer of rules that would make Yuendumu like a ‘white-fella’ town, with ‘no place for Yapa [Walpiri people].’”²⁰Id. (citing Thalia Anthony & Harry Blagg, Addressing the “Crime Problem” of the Northern Territory Intervention: Alternate Paths to Regulating Minor Driving Offences in Remote Indigenous Communities 41 (Criminology Research Council 2012). Police reportedly heavily policed the signs to ensure breaches were enforced and criminalized, illustrating how seemingly mundane safety measures become techniques of control and colonial governance. These regulatory interventions not only fail to enhance safety but actively set First Nations people up to fail.

Chapter 3 turns to the judiciary and its role in perpetuating carceral automobility. Through an analysis of sentencing decisions involving First Nations drivers, the authors show how courts rely on racially charged narratives that mask the structural conditions produced by colonial policy. Even when couched in ostensibly neutral legal reasoning, judicial portrayals emphasize individual moral failure (based on race) rather than recognizing the depth of social determinants or the relational and cultural obligations that shape First Nations automobility. While First Nations drivers often describe driving as an expression of kinship, culture, and collective responsibility—an indication of First Nations automobility—courts routinely privilege settler colonial understandings that individualize responsibility and ignore historical injustice. The legal system “whitewashes” First Nation approaches to mobility and reinforces the legitimacy of colonial regulatory structures.

Where the first three chapters examine the creation and maintenance of carceralism – a settler colonial project that uses the automobile to perpetuate incarceration and dispossession – the following chapters delve into the sharper edge of the knife.

Necroautomobility

The middle section of the book, Chapters 4 through 6, examines necroautomobility, the motor vehicle and its system of pursuit, violence, and death.

Chapter 4 explores artistic representations of the “hunt” and “chase” (i.e., hunting or chasing Aboriginal peoples to remove them from land), tracing how motor vehicles appear in both settler colonial imaginaries and First Nations counter-representations. Paintings such as Sidney Nolan’s Aboriginal Hunt sit uncomfortably alongside Tony Albert’s We Can Be Heroes and Scott Marsh’s murals, each offering divergent commentaries on the meaning of vehicular pursuit. Films such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Rabbit-Proof Fence further illustrate the weaponization of mobility in the capture and assimilation of First Nations peoples. These cultural works reveal and critique the enduring reality of police pursuits today.

Chapter 5 analyses police vehicle pursuits as contemporary expressions of necroautomobility. Although numerous First Nations people have died following police chases, the authors note that major inquiries, such as the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, did not meaningfully examine pursuits. The chapter catalogues cases where police have chased First Nations people to their death in Australia (including TJ Hickey, Merbyn Drage, Trijack Simpson, Raymond Noel Lindsay Thomas) and Aotearoa New Zealand (including Pacer Willacy-Scott and Hoani Korewha). Tearful apologies by police are shown to mask institutional mechanisms that absolve officers of responsibility, and coronial processes tend to sanitize, rather than confront, the systemic and racialized nature of deadly pursuits. They also examine the terrifying confinement and death of Ngaanyatjarra Elder Mr Ward. He was arrested for driving without a license on a dirt track, but denied bail, so he was transported from his remote community, 219 miles to prison. In the back of the van, which had faulty air conditioning, Mr Ward “boiled to death as temperatures soared to above 56 degrees Celsius (133 degrees Fahrenheit).”²¹Anthony, et al., supra note 1, at 100 (citing Harry Blagg & Thalia Anthony, Decolonising Criminology: Imaging Justice in a Postcolonial World 35 (2019)). It is another harrowing example of how motorized state technologies become instruments of lethal neglect.

Chapter 6 extends the analysis beyond police to consider settler vigilante chases, acts that enact what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls the “possessive logic” of settler colonialism.²²See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015). The notorious “Ute 5” case, in which settlers (not police) chased down and killed a First Nations person and received lenient sentences, exemplifies the asymmetrical valuation of Indigenous life. The chapter also connects these dynamics to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit Individuals along British Columbia’s “Highway of Tears.”²³Anthony, et al., supra note 1, at 122; see Deena Rymhs, Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America (2018). Throughout, the authors foreground First Nations artistic and cultural responses, including poetry, song, film, and protest, that honor and humanize the victims.

Resistance, Appropriation, and Sovereignty

While the first six chapters focus on colonial deployments of carceralism and then necroautomobility, the seventh chapter foregrounds First Nations resistance. Here, the authors argue that First Nations communities have also appropriated the motor vehicle to serve communal, cultural, legal, and sovereign purposes.

The authors’ most significant example is the Night Patrols that emerged in the 1980s. Usually staffed by First Nations women, these community-run services are neither police nor private security but operate as culturally-grounded safety initiatives.²⁴See, e.g., Henry Blagg & Thalia Anthony, If Those Old Women Catch You, You’re Going To Cop It’: Night Patrols, Indigenous Women, and Place Based Sovereignty in Outback Australia, 8 African J. Crim. & Just. Studies 103 (2014). They act as buffers between police and community members, offering transportation, crisis support, dispute resolution, and assistance with homelessness or substance use. They draw on First Nations law and lore, demonstrating that communities can generate their own governance strategies rather than merely “consuming” state interventions. However, state attempts to incorporate or regulate these services, such as the Northern Territory government’s Operational Framework, end up reframing them as responses to Indigenous dysfunction rather than expressions of Indigenous sovereignty. More on this below.

Other forms of First Nations automobility include the creative engineering practices of Bush Mechanics, a TV show produced by First Nations media in the 1980s. It is about bush mechanics, who keep vehicles operational in remote contexts through ingenuity, improvisation, and cultural knowledge. Throughout this chapter, as in the book, the authors also highlight the proliferation of artistic and cultural works that reclaim the motor vehicle (and First Nations automobility) as a space of meaning, memory, and community safety.

Unsettling Colonial Automobilities concludes with a broader reflection on the dialectics of automobility in settler colonial societies. First Nations people are coerced by carceral automobility but continually unsettle its authority. Despite this unsettling, the authors insightfully and rightfully describe automobility as a “sticky technology”—the settler state positions itself as the gatekeeper of automobility and motor vehicles, ensuring that even when First Nations communities innovate, their programs risk being co-opted or reframed through colonial logics.

The probing and unsettling book has clearly identified a fecund area—one that does not neatly fit into law, history, criminology, sociology, or anthropology. It gestures to other areas that need further investigation.

III. Discussion and Contributions

The discussion that follows situates the authors’ contributions within some broader literature and highlights several directions for future research. These observations are not intended as criticisms or shortcomings of the book; instead, they identify productive avenues for extending and deepening the insightful and unsettling analysis.

The Many Cultures of Automobility

Automobility is a comprehensive means for thinking about cars and automobiles. Instead of a utilitarian means of moving from point A to B, the automobile is one “element in a hybrid assemblage of commodities, bodies of knowledge, national projects, laws, techniques, institutions, environments, nodes of capital, sensibilities, representations, practices, emotions and modes of perception.”²⁵Georgine Clarsen & Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonial Automobilities: A Distinct Constellation of Automobile Cultures?, 10(12) Hist. Compass 889, 889 (2012). Given the breadth of this concept— really an autopoietic system if we follow Urry’s initial articulation—it has proliferated.

Georgine Clarsen and Lorenzo Veracini, a professor of history and mobilities and a professor of settler colonial studies, both from Australia, initially sketched the various cultures of automobilities.²⁶Id. As the literature on automobilities had primarily focused on automobility in Britain, Europe, and the US, it had produced a skewed view that the automobile assists freedom, citizenship, or class. Crucially, Clarsen and Veracini argue that not only is the research changing, but the object of comparative analysis should not be the national experience. Instead, it should focus on social formations, which provide more nuanced understandings of how the automobile shapes experience. They argue that the settler colonial automobilities remain unexamined. For them, this provides a basis for critiquing the exceptionalism in US automobility historiography by highlighting the overlooked fact that the US is another settler state. They also argue that it provides a basis for understanding the unique culture of automobility in Australia – it is another settler state, but it is also different from the US.

In the “Old World,” the nation’s landscapes had been tamed by the advent of the automobile.²⁷Id. at 893. Driving in the metropole was a pleasure that became “democratically available and incited” into a “commodity culture” that was policed and patrolled by the nation.²⁸Id. at 894. That differs from automobilities in colonies (in Africa), where automobilities reinforced differences between the colonizer and colonized, the mobile and the immobile, those who can travel to and from the metropole, and those stuck in the periphery.²⁹Id. at 893.

There are other social formations of automobility, too. Conservative traditions view the car as a status marker, while reactionary automobility embraces it as a tool for ordinary people, a means of breaking down class barriers.³⁰Id. at 894-5. By contrast, revolutionary regimes rejected individualized automobility. They were “structured around the revolutionary dream of societal regeneration through technological utopias, for example, by bringing women and children into the technological age.”³¹Id. at 895.

Under Clarsen and Veracini’s treatment, settler colonial automobilities differ from those. In the settler colonies of the “New World,” the automobile was a tool for opening “empty” landscapes, the vast wastelands to claim and appropriate.³²Id. at 894. Indigenous peoples were “intruders in their own country, ‘stone age’ people – and therein create ‘indigenous’ subjects – who occupied a different temporal order entirely.”³³Id. Clarsen and Veracini also note that when settler colonial automobilities focus on expansion, they elide concerns about status and class. Similarly, progressive utopias of revolutionary regimes are contrasted with the settler colonial automobility’s backwards-looking expansion that preserves and demands individual mobility.

Having sketched the cultures of automobility, Clarsen and Veracini offer it as a “fertile ground for historians of settler colonial formation.” The authors of Unsettling Colonial Automobilities plant seeds into this rich soil. The first chapter of the book largely accords with Clarsen and Veracini’s sketches. They consider how the pastoralists used automobilities to open up Australia’s interior, claim it, and remove First Nations from the territories. The authors’ description of the Stolen Generations, which involved clearing territories of Indigenous peoples and assimilating them into expanding urban centers (or sequestering them on missions), is also consistent with Clarsen and Veracini’s insights. Unsettling Colonial Automobilities, then, goes well beyond.

The bulk of the book is focused on carceralism, necroautomobility, and First Nations automobilities, which are new analytic concepts that broaden our understanding of the politics of mobility, the ongoing colonial effects of the automobile, and how apparently neutral law continues to discriminate. They further open the door to investigating differing, sometimes clashing automobilities.

Just as Clarsen and Veracini indicated, there are many avenues for further research in these spaces. Unsettling Colonial Automobilities discusses other settler colonies’ treatment of Indigenous peoples at points. Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand and First Nations in Canada are mentioned most prominently in Chapters 5 and 6. Having focused primarily on Australia, they point the way to future studies and comparative projects. There are similarities between Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the US, but there are differences, too – especially when understanding the relationship between Indigenous peoples and those states.

For instance, how have automobilities in Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the US had different expressions? Where are they similar? How have Indigenous peoples differently appropriated automobility? Where and how do they overlap, interrelate? Native Americans within the US have long been considered “domestic dependent nations,”³⁴Cherokee Nation v. State of Ga., 30 U.S. 1, 17 (1831). a sovereign status for Indigenous peoples that is not recognized in other settler states. This status arose in the time of horses and carriages, not automobiles. This legal difference is one of many that likely shape the US’s approach and Indigenous approaches to automobility as well as their interrelation.

As Daniel Bowman has pointed out, automobility in the US maintained a symbolic relationship with Indigenous identities “from the founding of the Geronimo Motor Company in 1916 and the subsequent Pontiacs, Apaches, Cherokees, Cheyennes, Dakotas, Navajos, and Winnebagos” (all types of automobiles—there are more, too: Aztek, Comanche, Touareg, etc).³⁵Daniel Bowman, Nation of Mechanics Automobility, Animality, and Indigeneity in John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934), 19(1) Eur. J. Am. Stud. 1 (2024), https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.21304. This symbolism suggests a deep, complex relationship—one of naming, reclaiming, inhabiting, and, likely, erasing Indigenous identity in the pursuit of expansion, freedom, belonging, and individualism.³⁶Philip J. DeLoria, Indians in Unexpected Places 146 (2004). The symbolism is mirrored in its material relationship. In a rereading of John Joseph Mathew’s Sundown³⁷John Joseph Mathew, Sundown (1934).—a novel from 1934—Bowman uses it to examine how an Indigenous author views Indigenous ownership and operation of automobiles, which arose following an oil boom in Osage Country. The subtext is that the oil boom was, itself, driven by the boom in automobiles, leading to Osage wealth and the ability to purchase vehicles. This led to a “double-bind,” alienating the Indigenous owner from the animal world and transforming him into a dangerous, violent object. “Necroautomobility” seems like a useful concept here. It is a valuable story, but reality is probably more complicated, especially today, given the complex jurisdictional contests among tribes, states, and the federal government.³⁸See, e.g., McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. 894 (2020).

The authors of Unsettling Colonial Automobilities gesture to essential questions about the various cultures of automobility and these areas for future research. While this focus on culture is certainly appropriate, it raises some questions about the relationship between law and culture.

Law, Culture and Power

In the field that might be called “Foucault studies,” there is ongoing debate about Foucault’s understanding of law. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, he contrasts sovereign powers (like law, prohibition, and punishment—the right to kill or take life) with disciplinary power and, later, biopolitics (norms, regulations, risk assessment, administration, and the administration of life).³⁹See Foucault, supra note 4; Foucault, supra note 6. For some, Foucault’s law is marginal, reduced, an outdated or symbolic residue in a society governed by norms, standards, tables, and metrics.⁴⁰See, e.g., Alan Hunt & Gary Wickham, Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance (1994); Alan Hunt, Foucault’s Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval, 17 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1 (1992); Gary Wickham, Foucault, Law, and Power; A Reassessment, 33 J. L. & Soc. 596 (2006). On such a reading, modern power operates through expertise, institutions, and normalization, not through legal command. Law is secondary, “epiphenomenal,”⁴¹Hunt & Wickham, supra note 35, 57. perhaps even obsolete.

There is another view of Foucault—one where law cannot be subsumed or subordinated.⁴²Ben Golder & Peter Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Law (2009) (arguing against interpreting Foucault as embracing the “expulsion” thesis). It is, instead, reconfigured and intertwined with disciplinary and biopolitical mechanisms. It is more pervasive and technical, operating through administrative regulations, rights discourse, and legal standards embedded in the process of normalization.

What’s at stake (aside from claims to who has Foucault “right”) is, if we desire some change, where to set our sights, invest our energies? If law has been eclipsed by discipline and biopolitics, then legal reform and rights-based strategies will be ineffective—change the laws, and the other forces of power will override it. If power operates through norms, then critique must be levelled at expertise and institutional sites of knowledge production and bodily regulation. If law remains a location of power, then it can remain a site of struggle and change. Critique and action should focus on courts, legislation, and legal interpretation. This shapes remedies for policing, welfare, immigration, public health, and, well, everything else, from cars to stop signs.

This abstract debate is relevant to Unsettling Colonial Automobilities in two ways. First, the authors rely on Foucauldian theory: carceralism and necroautomobility stem from Foucault’s conception of the carceral and biopolitics. The stakes of Foucault’s law are, hence, implicit in Unsettling Colonial Automobilities. Second, and more generally, the debate over Foucault’s law is a proxy for understanding the primary locus of power in society—is it law or other forces, like culture? The tension between law and culture arises in Unsettling Colonial Automobilities: can we use law to alter discriminatory culture, or should we focus on changing culture to mitigate the harsh effects of the law?

The aim of Unsettling Colonial Automobilities is primarily diagnostic. The authors do not clearly indicate which is more central: the law or culture. Instead, they identify the automobile and automobility as a violent tool in advancing settler colonialism. This requires discussing both law and culture. Throughout the text, law is a focus: they discuss driving laws, licensing, criminalization, sentencing decisions, coronial processes following police chases, and more. This is paired with analyses of culture. It examines Night Patrols as a cultural practice of First Nations’ communities. It considers arts, movies, poems about policing and vehicular pursuits, and a TV show about bush mechanics. It also explains, for example, how cultural deployments of “race-neutral” laws become discriminatory. In the clash between settler colonial automobility and First Nations automobility, the stakes of Foucault’s law might be heightened—do we use law or culture to find a way out of this terrible situation? However, it also seems that the distinction between law/culture or law/power is also swept aside.

In the same way that Indigenous law is inseparable from cultural practices, it seems that settler colonial law is inseparable from the culture. In settler colonial law and culture, the advent of the automobile also produced necroautomobility. In avoiding any prescriptive claims about how to solve necroautomobility, it is left to the reader to speculate about ways out.

This is not a failure of the book. But, if an answer is needed, it may suggest that both culture and law are necessary components. If so, the authors also provide a warning.

How Sticky?

As mentioned above, the authors emphasize that problems do not arise from the technology itself.⁴³Anthony, et al., supra note 1, at 2. This seems correct because First Nations automobility is different from settler colonial automobility. This insight, however, also appears to be in tension with the concept of ‘automobility’ as a self-reproducing system: a vehicle is just an object, but it requires a system to operate within. Even if this object can be integrated into other systems, how much of the settler colonial system comes with it as a result of automobility’s self-reproduction? The authors of Unsettling Colonial Automobilities call it a “sticky” technology.⁴⁴Id. at 156. But how “sticky” is automobility? What are the ways out of it?

The last chapter discusses Night Patrols, the culturally-based safety initiatives that help protect First Nations from policing. They started in the 1980s, drawing on community-led, place-based self-government, law, and culture that embrace reciprocal obligations and responsibilities. These patrols are embedded in a series of safety strategies, including Men’s and Women’s Family Safety Groups, children’s and youth programmes, cultural trips, and more.⁴⁵Id. at 133-4. Their patrol vehicles were adorned with symbols of cultural authority, a mobile expression of First Nations law, culture, safety, and sovereignty. While it may look like a police vehicle, it is not. It is a “place of safety,” where Elders and kin offer support.⁴⁶Id. at 135. Essentially, the various night patrols divert First Nations peoples from the state’s legal system and reintegrate them within their communities. It protects individuals and First Nations. It is not policing. It is not private security. It is an example of anti-colonial automobility, an “inversion of the colonial necroautomobility” that the authors map in the prior chapters.⁴⁷Id.

However, as the authors write, “patrols are in constant danger of being co-opted to fit the policy agendas of powerful government agencies.”⁴⁸Id. at 131. While the patrols are guided by their own cultural protocols and laws, they also rely on motor vehicles. These expensive machines are “also a point where patrols become entwined with the colonial apparatus.”⁴⁹Id. at 147. The need for funding links the night patrols and First Nations to the settler state and its policies, opening the door to the imposition of state redefinition, bureaucracy, and hierarchy.

As governments became interested in the patrols’ work, they saw them as a taxi service or a supplement to state policing. In seeking to support these efforts by purchasing new vehicles, the government began incorporating the night patrols into its administrative and management structures, decreasing their independence and undermining their ability to provide safety. Then, with the Northern Territory Intervention, Aboriginal-elected community councils were disbanded. Regional councils overtook night patrol governance and structured them to meet risk management ends and “narrow Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).”⁵⁰Id. at 132. The core funding came from the federal government, and it would support “people at risk of either causing or becoming the victims of harm in order to break the cycle of violence and crime in the community.”⁵¹Id. at 148 (citing Indigenous Solutions and Services Delivery Section—NT Team, et al., Night Patrol Services in the Northern Territory: Operational Framework 4 (Austr. Gov. Report, 2007), https://www.aph.gov.au/~/media/Estimates/Live/legcon_ctte/estimates/bud_0809/ag/104attach.ashx). Framing the patrols in this way indicates that First Nations are inherently violent and unable to set priorities and services, which elides and obfuscates the state’s roles and responsibilities in continuously creating dysfunction for First Nations.

So, what are we to make of this? On the one hand, First Nations have and can appropriate the automobile and put it into the service of their own sovereign plans. Doing so can be in service and accordance with Indigenous law. It is also deeply cultural. But vehicles come with a system, an autopoietic, self-producing system. It is “sticky.”⁵²Anthony, et al., supra note 1, at 156. At a minimum, vehicles require roads, maintenance, and gasoline, all of which cost money and resources that tend to fall under state-based political-economy. Bush Mechanics—as the TV show discussed in Chapter 7 demonstrates—shows that bush mechanics can improvise maintenance (and roads are optional). But these “illegal” modifications, at least according to the state, operate to criminalize any driver. The stickiness of settler colonial automobility is cultural, indeed biopolitical (most explicitly when upholding normative regulations involving risk management and KPIs). But it is supported and justified in law, through sentencing and coronial reports.

The authors convincingly show that necroautomobility is a legal and cultural project. In the clash of necroautomobilities and First Nations automobilities, any potential division between law and culture disappears. Automobility can affirm First Nations sovereignty, but it requires entanglement with the settler state—the gatekeepers of this technology. Although the authors, at times, use the word “dialectical” to describe First Nation appropriation, hybridity, and stickiness,⁵³Id. at 2. the relationship does not seem to be a progressive linear relation of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Instead, having relied on Foucauldian theorization, it seems discontinuous, contingent, and non-progressive.

They end Unsettling Colonial Automobilities with several illustrations of First Nations resilience, resistance, refusal, and resurgence that unsettle colonial authority. These include First Nations roadblocks in Hawai’i and by the Shinnecock Nation on the Sunrise Highway, and First Nations vehicle convoys during COVID-19 that condemned the killing of First Nations people in custody.⁵⁴Id. at 157 (citing Sarah Marusek, Law, Space and Vehicular Environment: Pavement, Pavementalities, and Pavementeering (2023); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin (2021); Thalia Anthony, Prisons, COVID-19, BLM, and Abolition, 2 Infrastructural Inequalities 1-15 (2021). To this, we can add Māori checkpoints during COVID-19, roadblocks that controlled entry and exit to vulnerable whānau (family), provided resources (food, health care), and enforced lockdown rules.⁵⁵Luke Fitzmaurice & Maria Bargh, Stepping Up: COVID-19, Checkpoints and Rangatiratanga (2021). There were assertions of tikanga (Māori law/culture), rangatiratanga (self-determination or sovereignty), and safety.⁵⁶Id. at 34-41. This indicates that the clearest ways to avoid entanglement and unsettle colonial automobility are for First Nations to use mechanisms like roadblocks and convoys to slow down or deny access, fraught and potentially “illegal” acts. This then becomes an invitation to think of how mobility might be done differently.

Final Thoughts

Unsettling Colonial Automobility adeptly demonstrates how mundane and seemingly neutral regulatory regimes, like traffic laws, licensing requirements, and road safety measures, are central to the continuation of settler colonial practices and logics. The authors show, with exceptional clarity, that automobility is a legal-cultural system that produces racialized immobility, facilitates the expansion of the carceral, and naturalizes state authority. The critical diagnosis, however, should not overshadow First Nations practices of resistance and appropriation. The authors foreground this aspect to illuminate how legal orders coexist, clash, and hybridize in settler colonial contexts. This work provides analytic tools—primarily carceralism and necroautomobility—that will be useful in comparative settler and Indigenous automobility studies as well as in projects that examine how technologies mediate sovereignty, legality, and cultural resilience. It also opens up further avenues for research, learning and activism.

In persuasively dissolving any neat separation between law and culture, Unsettling Colonial Automobilities shows that necroautomobility is both legal (embedded in sentencing, coronial reasons, risk regulation, and policing) and cultural (saturated with norms and attitudes that give shape to law). The question, then, is not which is more powerful, but where transformative energy is most productively invested. If law represents the hardened sediment of cultural practices and assumptions, concentrating solely on doctrinal reform risks failing to address underlying animating forces. From this arises a demand to treat culture—protocol, kinship obligations, ceremony, reciprocal obligations, and refusals—as the generative domain for alternative, counter-mobilities that can then give rise to alternative legal orders. A strategy like this, however, must remain attentive to the distinct legal-cultural terrain of settler states. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori assertion of tikanga and rangatiratanga operate within a Treaty-inflected environment. In Canada, treaties and section 35 constitutional structures recognition and its limits. In the US, tribal sovereignty exists within and seeps through a fragmented federal structure that provides Congress with plenary power. These differences matter. However, in each, the task might be similar: learn to observe, appreciate, and cultivate Indigenous cultural authority as an engine of counter-mobilities. Such practices would require, at a minimum, concerted action to reduce automobility and dismantle necroautomobility. This would be a project of decolonial mobilities.

Unsettling Colonial Automobilities is therefore a significant and original intervention. It expands the understanding of automobility, deepens the literature on settler colonial criminalization, and foregrounds First Nations knowledge and resistance in ways that are methodologically generous and theoretically rigorous. It is worth reading this profoundly unsettling book.

* Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Otago, Stephen.young@otago.ac.nz.