Colonisation was not a topic that figured largely in Deleuze's work. He made only occasional passing remarks about it, such as those in a 1982 interview with Elias Sanbar. Here, in discussing an analogy drawn between the Palestinians and Native Americans, he contrasts the position of colonised peoples who are retained on their territory in order to be exploited with the position of those who are driven out of their territory altogether. The Palestinian people, like the indigenous inhabitants of North America, are a people driven out (Deleuze 1998: 26). This analogy is limited in a number of respects. First, as Deleuze himself notes, the Palestinians, unlike the Native Americans, do have an Arab world outside of Israel from which they can draw support. Second, like indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, neither the Native Americans nor the Palestinians are completely in the situation of refugees. Rather they are peoples who are often displaced from their traditional homelands but who, whether displaced or not, remain captives of the colonial state established on their territories. In this sense, they are subject to ‘internal’ colonisation of the kind practised in North America, Australia and parts of Africa rather than the ‘external’ colonisation practised by European powers in other parts of Africa, Asia and the South Pacific.

I have argued elsewhere that, despite their relative lack of concern with colonial issues, Deleuze and Guattari do provide conceptual resources for thinking about the problems of internal colonisation and decolonisation (Patton 2000: 120–31). Their theory of the state as apparatus of capture is especially helpful in understanding the mechanisms by which new territories and peoples are subsumed under the sovereignty of existing states.