Colonial Relations Research Articles

Nation-States and International Law

This article explores the frictions between national sovereignty and the universalization of human rights, highlighting the deep colonial roots and persistent coloniality within the nation-state system and international law. It critiques the liberal framework of nation-states that marginalize “non-nationals” while also perpetuating colonial relations and racial hierarchies through unequal integration into the nation-state system. The ongoing assault on Gaza starkly illustrates the violence inherent within the nation-state and points to the limitations of the current human rights framework. Advocating for a decolonial approach, the article argues that the violence in Palestine underscores the need to rethink and debate international law and human rights, expanding on decolonial scholarship to liberate these frameworks from their colonial, modern, and capitalist contexts.

Language activism and the power of language in Ukraine during the war (2022–23)

ABSTRACT The article addresses how language is fuelled by political actions and accrues sociopolitical meaning in the context of war. The focus is on public discourse on languages in Ukraine in response to the full-scale Russian war. Texts that appeared on two publicly available platforms, Facebook and TikTok, since 24 February 2022, were collected. These are predominantly verbal texts that contain explicit references to languages and include arguments about languages and language matters during the war. The texts are analyzed qualitatively within the framework of language ideologies. Viewing language ideologies as “the beliefs and attitudes that shape speakers’ relationships to their own and others’ languages” (in the words of Jillian Cavanaugh), the study focuses on the power of images or how languages are portrayed, the power of signs or what distinguishes one’s “own” language from that of the “other,” and the power of language practices. All of these relationships, it is argued, contribute to language activism as a reaction to the war. The discussion places the results within the broader context of the multiple language ideologies that are being constructed, promoted, and enacted in Ukraine, dismantling the colonial relationships of languages, thereby empowering the Ukrainian language.

On the concept of the pluriverse in Walter Mignolo and the European New Right

AbstractToday, the ‘pluriverse’ is considered to be a radical new concept capable of decolonising political thought. However, it is not only decolonial scholarship that has taken up the concept of the pluriverse; far-right intellectuals, too, have been cultivating a decolonial imaginary based on the idea of the pluriverse. This article compares the way the concept of the pluriverse appears in certain strands of Latin American decolonial theory exemplified by Walter Mignolo, on the one hand, and the ethnopluralism of the European New Right represented by Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin, on the other. Despite Mignolo’s pluriverse being an ‘open pluriverse’ of entanglement between peoples, while the European New Right’s is a ‘closed pluriverse’ of ethnic separation, I argue that these uses of the pluriverse are nevertheless underpinned by a shared analytical and normative framework. This framework is defined by a simple refrain: that what oppresses the world is ontological and epistemological sameness, and what will liberate it is ontological and epistemological difference. I argue that this schema, which misapprehends imperialism as a form of epistemic domination geared purely towards homogenisation, rather than as a set of material relationships that also produce (e.g. racial, sexual, and class) difference, does not provide a solid foundation for contesting colonial relations.

How does colonial history matter for expatriate adjustment? The case of Brazilians in Portugal

AbstractThe literature on expatriation typically assumes that cultural and institutional familiarity facilitates expatriate adjustment. This assumption underplays the role of the historical context, especially the influence of painful colonial pasts that often lie beneath such familiarity. In addition, seeking to capture expatriate adjustment as a single measure, such literature does not engage with the differences in the extent to which expatriates achieve cognitive, behavioral, and affective adjustment. Using a qualitative study addressing the work experiences of Brazilians living in Portugal, we argue that to fully understand expatriate adjustment, we must pay attention to the historical colonial relationship between the expatriate’s home and host country. Specifically, we discuss the importance of social representations of history for how expatriates narrate, interpret, and act in response to their experiences. Our research makes two theoretical contributions. First, we explain how historical colonial relationships affect expatriate adjustment and how this leads to adjustment only being partial. Second, we develop a nuanced understanding of expatriate adjustment by drawing attention to its three interdependent dimensions (cognitive, behavioral, and affective), showing that an expatriate may be well adjusted in one dimension but less adjusted in another. We call for organizations to engage more, and more critically, with history.

Why “Trying to Keep the War Alive”?: Exploring the Shanghai Postcolonial Flâneur in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun

ABSTRACT J. G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun narrates how Jim, a British boy, survives in wartime Shanghai, particularly after the 1941 Japanese invasion. Existing interpretations of this story as a “Bildungsroman” have largely neglected Jim’s abnormal inclinations to “keep the war alive” even as the Japanese army faces defeat. To unravel this paradox, this paper draws upon the concept of “postcolonial flâneur”, and proposes that as a flâneur Jim’s Shanghai life encompasses evolving forms of mobility, reflecting shifting colonial relations. On the surface, Jim’s journey may appear as a tale of personal growth, yet it exposes an underlying colonialist mentality infused with imperial chauvinism. By placing the novel within the comparative context of Western and Eastern coming-of-age narrative traditions, the study also explores why Western interpretations tend to accept this paradox as natural, while Eastern perspectives may take a more critical stance.

Anticolonial co-design: a methodology for including agricultural workers in the development of new AgTech

ABSTRACT Collaborative design (co-design) is becoming a popular method for including end-users in the design process of technologies which may affect them. The research in this paper emerges from an agricultural technology (AgTech) co-design project located in settler colonial state of Aotearoa New Zealand. Inspired by methodological insights from anticolonial science and technology studies (STS), the paper details the authors’ experiences with attempting to include local and migrant agricultural workers within the AgTech co-design project in a way that did not perpetuate colonialism (i.e. was anticolonial). Based on these experiences, the authors identify four practices that can support other researchers wanting to engage in anticolonial co-design: (1) understand the historical context of your research; (2) create a place –and community-based guidelines for technology development; (3) build and maintain strong relationships with collaborators; and (4) be prepared to slow-down or to stop innovation. These practices offer methodological insights into how to do anticolonial co-design within the uneven power relations of settler colonialism and within projects not necessarily designed to engage in anticolonial co-design.

Holding Hands at the Heart of Empire

In 1905, people from the different corners of the Danish empire held hands at the colonial exhibition (Dansk Koloniudstilling (Grønland og Dansk Vestindien) samt udstilling fra Island og Færøerne) in Tivoli, Copenhagen. This article uncovers colonial relations of the past by analysing photographs from a scrapbook presumably created by the main organ- iser of the exhibition, Emma Gad. The photographs show participants interacting at the exhibition, and the article asks: What kind of conversations about this forgotten past are made possible by these photographs? How can these photographs be used to reflect upon the ways ideas of race, whiteness, civilization, nationality, and empire have operated in the colonial encounters facilitated at the Tivoli exhibition? The article seeks to answer these questions with a particular attention to the role of the Faroe Islands in order to counter the fact that the country is routinely relegated to the margins of discussions on colonialism. At first glance, the scrapbook photographs visualise unlikely community and friendships between participants. Yet placing the participants’ intimate contact within their geopoliti- cal context revealed these photographs’ imbrication within colonial divisions of space and the racialised hierarchies at the foundation of the colonial exhibition and indeed of the Dan- ish imperial project at large.

Bulkiness of goods and the gravity of international trade: Differential impact of trade barriers

This study investigates how the trade elasticity to trade barriers, or the lack thereof, varies with the bulkiness of goods, measured as the value-to-weight ratio (V/W ratio). The empirical analysis presented herein offers compelling evidence that lighter goods, characterized by higher V/W ratios, demonstrate reduced trade elasticity to distance, contiguity, and colonial relationships but heightened trade sensitivity to language. These findings emphasize the importance of accounting for the variations in V/W ratios when applying gravity models and reveal noteworthy heterogeneity in trade elasticity at the country and trade-pair levels.

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.

“We are protectors, not protestors”: global impacts of extractivism on human–nature bonds

This article analyzes the global impacts of extractivism on human–nature bonds. To do so, we rely on socio-ecological conflict data from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. Over 1800 cases involving resistance to the destruction of nature, cultures, cosmologies, worldviews, ancestral origins, and sacred places are analyzed using log-linear regression compared to 1600 cases that do not report such loss. The impact is especially visible when mineral ores, plantation products, and crude oil are extracted. The results indicate that affected groups are Indigenous peoples, farmers, peasants, pastoralists, and religious groups. In conflict outcomes, 79% of cases with refusal of compensation indicate impacts on human–nature bonds. Furthermore, in those cases where assassinations of activists occurred, 68% have observed impacts on human–nature bonds. Protecting human–nature bonds is a critical component for achieving social, economic, and environmental sustainability and justice against extractivism embedded in colonial relations playing against such bonds and environmental protectors.

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.

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.

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.