Settler colonial studies aims to contribute to the consolidation of a new scholarly field. This process requires that colonial and settler colonial phenomena be analytically disentangled. They have generally been seen either as entirely separate, or as different manifestations of colonialism at large. Neither stance, however, allows a proper appraisal of settler colonialism in its specificity. In contrast, in this introduction to this new scholarly journal, I suggest that colonialism and settler colonialism should be understood in their dialectical relation. On the basis of this distinction, in the second part of this introduction I reflect on the need to develop dedicated interpretative tools capable of sustaining an approach to the decolonisation of settler colonial formations.