Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. - Patrick Wolfe

Rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion.

The tide of history canonizes the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of the law of nations to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse.

When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society.