Colonial Relations Research Articles

Indigenous Diffuse Support and Descriptive Representation in the Canadian House of Commons

Abstract Do Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada display lower levels of diffuse support than non-Indigenous settlers? Given settler colonial relations (both historic and contemporary) and Indigenous peoples’ own political thought, we can expect that Indigenous peoples would have even lower perceptions of state legitimacy than non-Indigenous peoples. However, there are conflicting expectations regarding whether the descriptive representation of Indigenous peoples in settler institutions is likely to make a difference: on one hand, Indigenous people may see themselves reflected in these institutions and consequently feel better represented; on the other hand, these forms of representation do not challenge the underlying colonial nature of these institutions. Using data from the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, our statistical analysis demonstrates that: (1) diffuse support is significantly lower among Indigenous peoples than non-Indigenous peoples, including people of color; (2) Indigenous respondents across multiple peoples have similarly low levels of diffuse support, and (3) being represented by an Indigenous Member of Parliament does not change the levels of diffuse support among Indigenous peoples. Overall, our research highlights the outstanding challenges to achieving reconciliation through the Canadian state and points to ways large-N analyses may be made more robust.

Beyond Compensation: Reparations and the Ongoing Colonization of Australia

ABSTRACTThis article examines the relationship between reparations as compensation and reparations as transformation in settler colonial Australia. Much of the global reparations debate on colonization and slavery has focused on important demands confronting the historic damages and ongoing accumulation of disadvantage from colonization in ex‐colonies or from plantation slavery. Much less has been said about reparations for settler colonialism which is a specific form of ongoing colonization in the here and now. Drawing on long‐standing work around reparations for colonization by Indigenous peoples in Australia, and the woeful compensatory responses the state and judiciary have offered, this article argues that reparations for ongoing colonization could consider options beyond monetary compensation. This includes the critical domain of reparations as transformation that aim less to offset damage and reconcile suffering, but rather to comprehensively transform colonial relations.

Against capture: notes on recording and the problem of extraction in education research

Against Capture offers a methodological intervention to the current popularization of videomaking in participatory visual research, a genre of arts-based method, with a particular emphasis on the regime of extraction that is ignored in one of its most significant steps: recording. Often rendered as a visual metaphorical substitute or a backdrop, the author discusses how colonial relations to the built and natural environments have set the conditions for extractive practices where audio-visual recording as a form of capture demands a reimagined relational ethics to place. Within this extractive relation, the author observes how built and natural environments are understood as readily available and unlimited aesthetic resources for artmaking. This intervention seeks not to be prescriptive but rather offers a descriptive account of the epistemological and ontological contradictions in the current celebration of innovative approaches to research in education.

‘We must be happy that times are different now’. Shaping public memory of Danish colonial history in popular culture

ABSTRACT In recent years Denmark’s legacy as a colonial power has become a topic of political, cultural, and public debate. The article discusses how Denmark’s colonial relationship with Greenland is presented to a contemporary Danish audience in the film, The Experiment (2010), and in the fourth season of the TV drama, Borgen (2022). These popular cultural artefacts, we claim, not only reflect, but have informed public and political debate in Denmark about its colonial past, including historical and present-day civic norms and their implementation into political practice. In this way, they have contributed to a renegotiation of public morality and memory.

Cultivation of honeybush (Cyclopia spp.) in neo-colonial and multispecies landscapes of South Africa

The indigenous wild plants of Southern Africa are intertwined with human cultures, histories and livelihoods. By focusing on commercial cultivation of a wild plant, honeybush (Cyclopia spp.), an indigenous plant that is endemic to parts of South Africa, we discuss changing colonial relations of domination and alienation affecting its use by local communities. We draw from an interdisciplinary study of honeybush conducted in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa, which included archival research, life history interviews, participant observation and a review of honeybush cultivation science. Anna Tsing’s notion of non-scalability and a multispecies critique of plant domestication guides our analysis of the changing relations and approaches to honeybush use. We show the impact these changes exert on human and human-non-human relations. We conclude that the persistence of scalable projects in the commercial use of honeybush sustains and reconfigures relations that strengthen the alienation of (certain) humans from nature. Our interdisciplinary research highlights how historical violence continues to be subsumed in plant domestication and commercialisation.

Decoding air passenger flows: Identifying the role of network autocorrelation in air travel

With the rapid expansion of the global aviation industry, especially in the Eurasian continent, understanding the factors driving interregional air passenger flow is of increasing importance. While most existing studies emphasize node-level and edge-level influencing factors such as economic scale, population size, and geographic distance, they often neglect the pivotal variable of network autocorrelation. This research is the first to introduce network autocorrelation within the Eurasian context and systematically analyze it using the Eigenvector Spatial Filtering Negative Binomial Gravity Model. Our findings highlight: (1) A significant network autocorrelation in the Eurasian continental aviation network. The eigenvector spatial filtering negative binomial regression model effectively captures this autocorrelation, considerably reducing model estimation bias. Specifically, the leading 3.28% of eigenvectors capture a high degree of this network autocorrelation. (2) The presence of network autocorrelation introduces estimation biases in related variables, resulting in underestimations of economic size, population size, visa restriction, and international trade, while overestimating cultural and institutional differences, geographical distance, colonial relationship. (3) Various factors affect the Eurasian continental sub-region's air passenger flows differently, indicating regional variations. This study takes a step towards improving our understanding of network autocorrelation in air passenger flows research.

Planetary media: Decolonizing the space industry through Indigenous ownership

The colonial relationship between Indigenous people and people of European origin has been characterized by conflicts, economic exclusions, and epistemological discriminations as well as the mutual sharing of knowledge, practices, and technologies. In many cases, the industrial development of space technologies such as telescopes and rocket test sites has continued the exploitative nature of colonialism. This article, however, offers a different story and concept of Indigenous decolonization that is not antagonistic but complementary to the space industry and Western liberalism more generally. The case is Space Enterprises, a company and Earth station owned by the Center for Appropriate Technologies in Alice Springs, Northern Territories, Australia and conceived by its Aboriginal owners, workers, and board of directors as representing a beneficial integration of their Indigenous self-determination and the space industry. This essay offers synthetic decolonization as an example of this integration with Western liberalism. Understanding the flows between the Indigenous-owned Earth station and satellites, as well as the connections between Indigenous and Western liberal planetary imaginaries, requires a theory of mediation. Towards that goal, planetary media is offered as a way of conceptualizing the flows of information between local Indigenous and planetary spaces and imaginaries. This essay argues that another decolonization is possible, one based on mediation between Indigenous and Western liberal systems of thought.

Colonial Dis/Continuities in Cameroon and the Postcolonial Dilemma in the Archive

Abstract Despite how significantly processes of decolonization have shaped contemporary political and social realities, their study remains marginal in the peace and security fields. Understanding historical legacies and how embedded they are in today’s peace and conflict structures is essential to the analysis of current conflicts. This article argues that by tracing dis/continuities in colonial relations, we can gain a better understanding of these contentious processes and of the marginalized positionalities they create. In doing so, much needed research on the ambiguities of these legacies and on who had a say in shaping historical events can be done without reiterating colonial power relations. Alongside its analysis of the Cameroonian internationalized decolonization process under a UN Trusteeship and of how it developed into the current Anglophone conflict, this article uncovers and explores the existing dilemmas in, and potential new avenues for security studies research on colonial dis/continuities using post- and decolonial theories. Its findings and discussion contribute widely to debates within post- and decolonial research, peace, security, and conflict studies.

Zimbabwe, Marechera, Veit-Wild

Abstract In this article, I explore the following relationships: the relationship between Dambudzo Marechera and Rhodesia/whiteness, Dambudzo Marechera and Zimbabwe, Dambudzo Marechera and Flora Veit-Wild, Zimbabwe and Europe/Britain, and the relationship between Zimbabwean critics and Flora Veit-Wild. These relationships are all examples of the complex conditions that shaped Marechera’s writings and their reception, and Veit-Wild’s writings (about Marechera) and their reception among Zimbabwean and African readers. Using these relationships, I want to propose a reading of Marechera and Veit-Wild’s works, together with a reading of their critics’ responses, informed by the concept of mistrust. I argue that the mistrust stems from Africa/Zimbabwe’s colonial relationship with Europe/Britain, a coloniality that continued even after independence. Thereafter, the good that Europe could bring to Africa, or Britain to Zimbabwe, or Veit-Wild to Marechera began to be regarded with suspicion and mistrust because (post)colonial relations were [still] predominantly meant to benefit the coloniser. Marechera’s writings are fraught with that kind of mistrust. However, Marechera takes the mistrust further and is suspicious of the vision of Zimbabwe that he believes is anchored on an elitist foundation, itself a product of a vanguard that had become ‘white.’ Marechera’s readers suspect him of being European because of his ‘European’ style of writing and perceived lack of commitment to the African/Zimbabwean cause. In the same vein, the readers are suspicious of Marechera’s relationship with Veit-Wild and suspect her of gaining, just as a colonialist, from her relationship with Marechera. Utilising Marechera’s writings and interviews, Veit-Wild’s They Called You Dambudzo and critical works on these writings, I argue that reading Zimbabwe, Marechera and Veit-Wild is like reading three biographies of mistrust.

Postcolonialism in the Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful

The history of colonization has always been expressed in many recent Taiwanese films, either intentionally or unintentionally. The 2017 film The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful is the subject of numerous studies on male gaze or feminist film noir, but few studies inspect its implicit postcolonialism. This study aims to assess the rhetorical manifestation of colonial relationships in The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful within its three main characters. Through discussing and analyzing several examples taken from the film, this study believes that Madam Tang takes the position of the colonizer in the personified colonial relationship, and her two daughters as the colonized. Moreover, two kinds of colonial relationships are discovered, which are colonial stereotype between Madam Tang and Tang Ning and colonial mimicry of Tang Zhen. The findings of the present study appear to be the first systematic research into the film’s postcolonialism in terms of its character relationships, which will be helpful in expanding the understanding of the filmic manifestation of colonial relationships worldwide.

Beynəlxalq münasibətlər diskursunda postkolonializm

Turning to history has always been an important tool for understanding international relations, and this trend remains relevant today. However, if earlier researchers mainly focused on individual events and their possible interpretations, now the main attention is focused on determining the historical characteristics of systems and reflecting this legacy in modern international relations. That is why the postcolonial approach, focused on the gradual evolution of colonial relations into the modern system of international relations, has become especially important; postmodernism is used to explain the concept of postcolonialism. In these concepts, an important place is occupied by the terms colonialism and postcolonialism, which seem to be a continuation of each other, despite the fact that they oppose each other. This article explains some of these concepts. Looking at the development and theoretical history of the concept of postcolonialism, it can be concluded that the concept was first used by Edward Said in his work entitled “Orientalism”. In Edward Said's “Orientalism” (1978) [Said, 1978], although many derivative terms from the concepts of colonialism and imperialism are used, the word postcolonialism does not appear even once in this work. No less important than Edward Said's research into the consolidation of postcolonialism as a concept is Subaltern Studies, first developed by Indian Marxist historians in 1982. Thus, although postcolonialism has not yet reached its final form in terms of naming, thanks to the book "The Empire Writes Back" [Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989] published in 1989, today both the term and the theoretical concept are used in modern scientific circles.

There’s more Spain beyond the sea? Contemporary documentaries on Equatorial Guinea

In the last decade of the twenty-first century, the colonial issue between Spain and Equatorial Guinea has been approached with greater interest than in previous periods, and numerous theses, research works and books have attempted to broach an issue that is little known in Spanish society. We start from the hypothesis that colonial relations between Spain and Africa are gaining greater interest in the Spanish academic world, and especially in the artistic field; where a notable number of film directors have dealt with the subject of Equatorial Guinea in their documentaries, in an attempt to seek keys to understanding aspects related to colonialism, racism, memory and Afro-descendance. This article presents five contemporary documentary films. These documentaries are: Un día vi diez mil elefantes (One Day I Saw 10,000 Elephants) (Guimerà and Pajares 2015: 00:77:00); El escritor de un país sin librerías (The Writer from a Country without Bookstores) (Serena 2019: 00:79:00), Manolito Nguema (Grunfeld 2019: 00:85:00); Anunciaron Tormenta (A Storm Was Coming) (Vázquez 2020: 00:88:00) and A todos nos gusta el plátano (We all Like Plantain) (Bermúdez 2021: 00:60:00).

Forging the medieval amidst loss: The Public Record Office of Ireland and Ireland’s medieval history

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) in June 1922 during the opening battle of the Irish Civil War, and with it seven centuries of records, historians and archivists have had to be creative in their search for sources for medieval Irish history. In response to this loss, they have forged a distinctive historiographical tradition using records now in English collections, as well as antiquarian transcripts and publications. Beginning with the work of Edmund Curtis in the 1920s, this tradition has sought to list, identify, and edit for publication replacement sources for records lost with the PROI for an Irish and international audience. More recently, scholars have made these collections digitally and publicly accessible worldwide with the CIRCLE and Beyond 2022 Projects at Trinity College Dublin. This article looks at how the lost records and a century of recovery efforts have shaped understandings of Ireland’s medieval past and its colonial relationship with England.

Obstetric violence: socioeconomic and ethnics disparities in brazilian territory

As a country with a history of racial exploitation, aspects of colonial relationships persist in modern healthcare. The institutionalization of obstetric violence reflects structural racism, leading to the dehumanization of non-white women and the submission of birthing individuals to a paternalistic medical figure. The objective is to elucidate racial and social inequities in obstetric violence rates in Brazil. This literature review is restricted to the last five years, covering four databases, with the selection of 13 articles following exclusion criteria. There is a high maternal-fetal mortality rate due to direct obstetric causes, associated with increased rates of iatrogenic interventions and physical and verbal violence during childbirth. Resistance from the medical community, coupled with elitism in leadership positions of movements against obstetric violence and the normalization of abuses, makes it challenging for black women to recognize the violence. It is mandatory to implement legislation directly prohibiting obstetric violence.

Power to the people: exploring glocality as a framework for SDG implementation at universities in Canada and Mexico

ABSTRACT This paper uses the concept of glocality to illuminate the ways in which the global operates as a hegemonic social construct for settler and colonial states to infiltrate and repress other local epistemological domains to assert and maintain control. Identifying four prominent and interconnected themes in the glocality literature: developing deep understanding; addressing power dynamics; privileging Indigenous knowledge systems; and accountability to place, the authors draw on their experience working in health scholarship to reflect upon how the social development goals can be approached by universities in ways that do not reify colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples.

Green and climate colonialities: Evidence from Arctic extractivisms

This article examines 16 environmental conflicts across the Arctic that demonstrate resistance to both climate and green extractive colonialisms. Resistance movements counter green-labelled developments, such as a 350 km road project in Ambler (Alaska) needed for copper extraction; large-scale wind power industries on Sámi territories; palladium and platinum mega-projects on Dolgan, Evenks, and Sámi lands in the Russian North; as well as the biggest natural gas project in the world on the Yamalo-Nenets peninsula, promoted as "the cleanest" of all fossil fuels. The article contributes to the field of political ecology by arguing that past colonial ties mediated by fossil fuels are inextricably linked to the increase of green extractivism and climate colonialism in the Arctic, both of which are embedded in socio-ecological crises that deepen colonial relations. In most places these crises drive new extractivisms, but in others, they function as possible barriers, increasing risks and costs of extraction while not reducing the will to pursue extractivist endeavors. 

Degrowth, global asymmetries, and ecosocial justice: Decolonial perspectives from Latin America

Abstract Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North. While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achieving development, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the Global North to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own paths toward ecosocial transformation. Based on a Latin American post-development and post-extractivist perspective and drawing on dependency theory, this article suggests another approach: first, it argues that the growth imperative, which in the peripheral world translates into the imperative to develop, also causes harm in societies of the Global South. Throughout Latin America, in the last decades, economic growth has mainly been achieved through extractivism with negative impacts, which are now being pushed further by green growth strategies. Second, I explore some possibilities for a cross-fertilisation between degrowth and International Relations scholarship, calling into question the assumption that degrowth in high-income countries would automatically ‘make space’ for the Global South to engage in self-determined paths of ecosocial transformation, as long as the structures, institutions, and rules of global governance and trade which secure profoundly asymmetric, colonial relations are not challenged.

(De)Coloniality in Teacher Education: Reflections on Student Teachers’ Mobility from the Global North to the Global South

Emphasis on the need for Norwegian student teachers to conduct part of their teacher education programme abroad is increasing. Among the arguments for this emphasis is the idea that globally aware teachers have better intercultural competence that can facilitate sustainable development and more just education. Evidence to support these claims is contested. In this paper, we explore how facilitators of student teachers’ mobility between Norway and countries in the Global South reflect on student mobility as part of the (de)colonial project. We apply decolonial frameworks (Mbembe, 2016; Mignolo, 2021) that interrogate the colonial matrix of power (CMP) (Quijano, 2000) to identify and challenge colonial relations and expectations. Findings are based on interviews from four facilitators from Tanzania and Zambia (Global South) and three teacher educators from Norway (Global North) who facilitate Norwegian student teachers’ mobility. The findings show that student facilitators from the Global North had more freedom to shape mobility activities, including the freedom to choose partners, reproducing asymmetrical power relations exerted through mobility.

Statelessness and Solidarity: Palestinians, Dhofaris, and Saharawis in Tricontinental Media

Abstract From its beginning, the Organisation of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (ospaaal) used its print media to campaign on behalf of Palestinian nationalism, articulating the concerns of displaced Palestinians from a perspective of unrecognised and thwarted national liberation movements. This organisation, responsible for carrying out the activities of the Tricontinental group that began meeting in Havana in 1966, identified the issue of Palestinian statelessness as a key feature of ongoing colonialism. From this perspective, ospaaal developed a platform from which to articulate solidarity against ongoing imperialism, one which could be usefully extended to explain and render solidarity with other causes. We argue that ospaaal’s visual and narrative framework, extended to the anti-colonial advocacy first for Dhofar (from the late 1960s to middle of the 1970s) and later for Western Sahara (late 1970s to 1990), presented a powerful, though limited, critique of international governance institutions from the Global South. Tricontinental publications’ reporting and solidarity media, in framing statelessness as an inherent problem of an incomplete process of decolonisation, critiqued the rhetorical strategies employed by imperial powers to maintain colonial relationships through international organisations like the United Nations.

Colonial necropolitics in responding to gender‐based violence amidst cascading disasters in Puerto Rico

AbstractThis article analyzes how the practice of cascading disaster responses and the relative erasure of increasing cases of gender‐based violence (GBV), including feminicidio, or feminicide, by the government in Puerto Rico evidence the structural and regularly reproduced vulnerability of marginalized populations. Drawn from fieldwork in southwestern Puerto Rico between 2019 and 2020, this essay juxtaposes the lived experience of frontline GBV service providers with the relative absence of GBV from the public record until 2022. For activists and scholars, the prevalence of GBV and its relative exclusion from state discourse and records is rooted in ideological, cultural, and operational concerns: operationally, GBV is too often excluded from planned disaster response. Culturally, state‐supplied statistics on GBV minimized and otherwise naturalized GBV into a cultural norm or reality‐to‐be‐expected. Ideologically, the exclusion of GBV is also tied to the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. We argue that GBV and its relative exclusion from the public record sustains high levels of violence that have already fueled notable public protest and the constrained working conditions of GBV frontline service providers. The article's focus on frontline worker experiences highlights their important role at the forefront of decision‐making on how to mitigate GBV during and in the wake of cascading disasters.