Colonial State Research Articles

Perempuan di Bawah Terik Mentari: Jugun Ianfu pada Masa Pendudukan Jepang di Indonesia 1942-1945

This study aims to analyze when the Japanese controlled Indonesia around 1942-1945 by using indigenous women to serve as Jugun Ianfu. The research method used in this research is the historical method. The results of this study there are two factors that cause the process of fairness in the application of Jugun Ianfu in Indonesia. The first factor of Japanese Women's Culture at that time being a Jugun Ianfu (satisfied woman) was considered a noble thing because at that time all elements in Japan had to contribute to the victory of the Greater Asia War. Japan changed the names of indigenous women who became Jugun Ianfu to the names of Japanese people so as not to violate the culture or norms that existed in Indonesia. The law of war allowed the colonial state to take advantage of everything in the colonized country, therefore Japan took advantage by recruiting indigenous women, especially girls to become Jugun Ianfu.

The Three Movements in the Management of Lands and Natural Resources in Ghana: From the Crown Lands Bill of 1897 to the Land Act of 2020

This paper examines the three movements that characterize the ownership and management of lands and natural resources in Ghana since the start of British colonial rule. First, we explore the different stratagems employed by the colonial State in its attempt to introduce the failed Crown Lands Bill that sought to give it control over the locals' lands. Next, we turn the spotlight on the state-centric approach to ownership of lands and natural resources adopted by the post-independent State, particularizing the reasons for the new approach. Finally, we discuss the defining features of the current movement, whose seeds were sown at the close of the second movement but only germinated properly in 1992 with the birth of the Fourth Republic. The paper argues that an appreciation of the different shades that undergird these movements is a crucial step towards understanding the current land tenure system and creating the future we hope for as far as the ownership and management of lands and natural resources in Ghana are concerned.

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND FOR THE DESIGN OF GENERAL AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN UKRAINE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND PARADIGM CHANGE

This article presents a discussion of historical context and paradigm change in Ukraine’s educational systems design and functioning. The purpose of this article is simply to alert the reader to foundational issues in education that tend to be under-examined in the post-Soviet space. The hope is that the article will stimulate further discussion by the Ukrainian audience, as this audience may consider relevant to specific conditions in Ukraine. These themes follow from Ukraine’s transformation away from colonial status to national independence and to general processes of social modernization. The intention is to stimulate thought about themes that may have been under-examined concerning secondary and tertiary education in independent Ukraine. The article highlights the cultural, sociological, and organizational complexity of educational reform. The paper emphasizes that educational institutions need to be recognized as quintessentially human organizations, that are not easily amenable to elitist or market management methods. A prominent, though not exclusive, role should be accorded to teachers and faculty, as the main “custodians” of education. Ultimately, educational reform requires corresponding changes to the basic culture and values of any given country.

Coerced labour and colonial governance in nineteenth and twentieth century Indonesia

ABSTRACT This article discusses the different uses of mandatory labour services, or corvée labour, in nineteenth and twentieth century Indonesia. While slave labour, coerced cultivation and other forms of involuntary colonial labour have been elaborately studied, these much more pervasive and diverse types of mandatory services have not yet received the attention they deserve. The article argues that in Indonesia corvée labour became foundational to the exercise of modern colonial governance and the organization of the colonial state and its fiscal capacity, so foundational, in fact, that it impeded much of the aspirations of colonial civil servants to replace coerced services with monetary taxes. Studying corvée, it shows, elucidates otherwise hidden strategies and practices of the organization of colonial statecraft and governance. As such, corvée labour played a pivotal role in how colonialism unfolded and was experienced.

From subjects to subversives: Chinese migrants and the evolution of the French colonial surveillance regime in Sài Gòn-Chợ Lớn, 1874-1930

ABSTRACT In 1874, the French colonial state introduced an extensive regime of ethnic surveillance in the port cities of Sài Gòn-Chợ Lớn. This pioneering system in Vietnam relied on an innovative anthropometric science to target Chinese migrants, whose mobile networks posed ongoing concerns for the imperial authority. This article explores the strategies employed by Chinese migrants to navigate the enforced ethnic classifications and regulations imposed by the colonial administration, exploiting the uncertain boundaries between subjects, foreigners, and citizens. It argues that Chinese subversions emerged through a dynamic interplay with the evolving French bureaucratic practices, shaped by the coexistence of two overlapping imperial systems: a decentralized Chinese empire and a French colonial state aiming to consolidate its rule in Cochinchina. The article reveals that French colonial surveillance was not a one-sided, rigid process of panoptic imperial dominance, but rather a complex landscape characterized by negotiated coexistence, mutual collaborations, and acts of resistance.

Oaxacalifornia: Indigenous transnational spaces as Grassroots Cosmopolitanism

Paradoxically both immigration and indigeneity are common conditions for exclusion from full citizenship in contemporary settler nation-states. Marginalized populations such as immigrants and Indigenous groups, resist the homogenizing rules dictated by dominant notions of culture and citizenship deployed by settler colonial states, entailing often hegemonic practices of control from institutions, such as the school and media. This essay discusses the creation of a transborder space between Mexico and the US named “Oaxacalifornia”. This “deterritorial” space was named and is maintained by Mexican Indigenous migrants from the state of Oaxaca who spend their daily lives interacting through communicative and civic practices of resurgence and solidarity. These practices enable the interaction with multiple locations and groups of people, fostering grassroots cosmopolitanism, or a worldly engagement challenging the oppressive forces of globalization, such as the state, the dominant cultural spheres, and the market; and the creation of spaces of diversity, resurgence, and solidarity.

The Rise of Modern Angolan Parties – UNITA and a Failed Growth Model

During the 1960’s the extension of the capitalist mode of production fastened the disintegration of the Angolan “traditional society”. Angola’s high-rate growth was made possible because huge oil and diamond rents were taxed and reinvested locally. With these “development polices” which the colonial State expected would support the fading branches of agro-industry and stabilize the political status quo, there was a shift of the main social contradiction. It was no longer a “central” versus “tributary” cleavage but rather labour-capital one within “modern society”. Ideologically, although transitional languages expressed by “racial” or cultural phenotypes were still in use, there was now room for different political standings. The nationalist movements, which started as small dissent fractions within the “central society“ were therefore forced to change their tactics in order to encompass the support of rising classes and their social mobility aspirations. This paper focuses on UNITA, whose operational circumstances (guerrilla-based operations inside Central Angola) made it easier to fit into the moving social landscape. Some evidences of UNITA ideological stand and of its 1974-1975 electoral behaviour (a period when the guerrilla movements were facing metamorphose into political parties) show that the factor “ethnicity”, widely used as a key variable of African politics, needs reviewing, at least in this particular time in Angola.

Perceiving law without colonialism: Revisiting courts and constitutionalism in South Asia

AbstractThis article argues that the colonial government in India was shaped by changes in property law, race relations and other institutional interests that accompanied the political and economic restructuring of the colonial state. Therefore, the development of constitutionalism was the outcome of an interplay between institutional and professional interests and larger socio-economic and political forces. Against the backdrop of empire, constitutionalism in British India was defined by a specific form of allocation of powers between the executive (which also exercised legislative powers) and the high courts. The structure that developed as a result was a strong executive government, particularly in its exercise of power in local districts with formal judicial scrutiny introduced after 1861. The relationship between the executive and the judiciary in localities generated a series of conflicts and tensions, which were exacerbated by the expansion of the bureaucracy, the legal profession and gradual inclusion of Indians in the upper strata of governance. Taken together, these factors led to the development of a hybrid model of separation of powers in the Indian subcontinent, which seems to have stood the test of time in post-colonial countries of South Asia despite political elites having invested considerable resources on constitutional reform.

Timor Zone: Slave Trading Network from the Traditional Era to the Late Nineteenth-Century Dutch Colonial State

This article examines the continuity and changes of the Timorese slave trade network from the traditional era to the late nineteenth-century Dutch colonial state. Archival records, newspapers, and other literature were used extensively to reconstruct the map of the Timorese slave trading. Grasping the dynamics of change and trade networks of Timor, there were two proposed research questions: First, how did the Timorese slave trading network experience continuity and change from the traditional period until the late nineteenth-century Dutch colonial state? Second, to what extent does the need for labour in the global and Southeast Asian context play in shaping and catalyzing the expansion of the Timorese slave network? Timor and its surroundings were deemed slave enclaves (peripheries) with several trading centres. Traditionally, slave trade routes formed from Timor to Java and Malacca. In addition, it was intended for Dili and Macau during the Portuguese era. During the VOC era, Batavia and Banda were the busiest routes of the Timorese slave trade. Networking was increasingly across-the-board, along with the need for labour to meet the demands of the global market. Henceforward, during the Dutch East Indies, the slave trading network continued expanding to Maurits, Réunion, Macau, Mozambique, and Mombasa and several years after the post-prohibition of slavery, leaving Ende Bay as the only centre of the slavery trade.

Competing visions of ‘the people’ in Australia: First Nations and the state

In 2020 the Australian High Court decided the case of Love v. Commonwealth; Thoms v. Commonwealth, a claim of constitutional belonging by two Aboriginal men. The Court was fractured in its reasoning and conclusion, a majority deciding that ‘Aboriginal Australians’ cannot be aliens. The case sits within a longer and ongoing story regarding the interaction between First Nations peoples and the Australian settler colonial state. The reasoning of the Love/Thoms case reveals two contrasting visions of the constitutional identity of ‘the people’ – one being a plural and diverse conception potentially capable of accommodating a distinct identity of First Nations peoples, the other being a unified conception dominated by formal equality and democratic participation. A study of the Love/Thoms case in its context also speaks to broader questions of constitutional identity. First, that constitutional identity is constructed through the interaction of multiple actors. It is through an ongoing dialogic between constitutional actors that constitutional identity evolves over time. Second, that there is a relationship between the identity of ‘the people’ and of their Constitution. A study of the construction of the constitutional identity of ‘the people’ in this case reveals principal characteristics of the Australian state’s constitutionalism: going to institutional and substantive questions regarding the respective roles of the people and the Courts, equality and sovereignty.

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Sport for Development and Decolonization in a Settler Colonial State: Physical Culture in the Lives of Indigenous Peoples Incarcerated in Canadian Prisons

This article considers if sport, broadly defined, can be constructed as a decolonizing practice for Indigenous Peoples incarcerated in Canadian prisons. Situating our analysis within transformative and decolonizing approaches to sport for development, we bring together disparate literatures—on settler colonialism and Indigenous incarceration, decolonization and Indigenous resurgence, and sport and incarceration—to critically analyze possibilities and limitations of sport as a vehicle for decolonization in an inherently colonial institution. Recognizing the structural constraints to such a process, we also critique the settler colonial state and criminal justice system in which many Indigenous Peoples are enmeshed. The article contributes to sport for development’s ongoing engagement with issues of decolonization and criminal justice.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins

This weighty and important book charts the bespattered history of British imperial violence, from the colonial small wars of the Victorian era to the brutal counterinsurgencies in the age of decolonization. Elkins focuses on moments of dramatic bloodletting rather than on more quotidian forms of political and economic exploitation or the discursive “violence” of words. Her extensive secondary source reading and archival research—including consultation of 10,300 files of recently discovered documents at London’s secretive Hanslope facility—highlights flashpoints of brutality like the Amritsar Massacre and the “Black and Tan” terror in Ireland. She also treats other, lesser-known episodes, like the repression of the Zaghloul protests in Egypt (1919).According to Elkins, violence in the British Empire became worse over time; her narrative is replete with disturbing descriptions of detention, torture, and rape, as perpetrated with broken bottles, guns, sticks, and knives. It reached its crescendo with the British campaigns in postwar Malaya, and, above all, in Kenya, where Britain tortured Mau Mau suspects in one of world history’s “largest archipelagos of detention” (557). Along the way, Elkins deftly navigates a global web of inter-imperial connections, as colonial agents like Orde Wingate and Gerald Templar moved from one theater of violence to the next, honing and transmitting the lessons and tactics of repression. Rogue “men on the spot” often committed atrocities, but imperial violence resulted from more than a few “bad apples” (however much spokesmen like Winston Churchill and Enoch Powell tried, strategically, to scapegoat certain figures and thus prolong imperial rule).Central to Elkins’ argument is that colonial crimes resulted from larger cultural, political, and legal structures institutionalized by Whitehall, Downing Street, and colonial administrations that claimed despotic powers unthinkable at home. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the British Empire embodied the tensions of liberal imperialism, which rested on what Elkins terms a “legalized lawlessness.” Even as Britons celebrated the rule of law, democratic reform, and an apparently benign, though racially infused civilizing mission, the “moral effect” of bombs and barbed wire, and of castrations and chemical weapons, sustained British power. In the process, the colonial state provided systematic cover to its agents on the ground through martial law and emergency declarations, along with censorship and spineless commissions of inquiry aimed at deflection rather than uncovering gruesome realities. Elkins’ command of this legal history is impressive.Elkins suggests that Britons’ remarkable ignorance of such imperial atrocities has abetted their post-Brexit fantasies of a reborn “global Britain.” The violence, however, was self-defeating; atrocities only fortified anti-colonial resistance. Those who “experienced the empire as brown and black subjects”—George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Mohandas K. Gandhi, to whom Elkins gives voice—“saw but shades of difference between fascism and imperialism” (297). For them, as for Elkins, the liberal dressing of “partnerships,” “progress,” and “development” failed to conceal an “all-too-familiar iron fist” behind a “velvet glove” (28).Elkins is right to differentiate imperial Britain from Nazi Germany, where aggression was naked and race was immutable. But Legacy of Violence offers a powerful corrective to apologetic versions of the past (which Elkins charts in a historiographical analysis of imperial history), while filling in gaps left by “Operation Legacy,” a state-sponsored program to destroy compromising official documents. Elkins’ 875 pages of meticulous research is a monumental indictment of empire. In its light, her recent expert testimony to the British High Court supporting reparations for Kenyan victims of torture is by no means surprising.The British Empire is no more; Britain lost superpower status following World War II and Bretton Woods. A sustained economic analysis of the declining pound sterling provides context for Britain’s shifting place in the world. Furthermore, intelligence failures and military blunders permitted colonial subjects to seize the rights and freedoms promised but never granted. Yet the age of empire remains: In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States (to whom Kipling addressed his “White Man’s Burden”) practiced a familiar repertoire of torture, secrecy, and “hearts and minds” rhetoric—a genealogy Elkins might have done more to explore.1 Meanwhile, Russia, with its terror bombing, imperial hubris, and sham referenda in Ukraine, pursues its own far cruder version of “legalized lawlessness.” A broader embrace of comparative and transnational history would thus offer more global insight into the legacies of imperial violence that shape the world today.

De-Democratization and the Paradox of State Fragility: Can Nigeria’s Democracy Survive?

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the discourse of De-democratization and the paradox of State fragility with special attention to Nigeria. While employing content analytical methods and structural-functionalism theory, the paper argued that Nigerian democracy is bedeviled with enormity of challenges ranging from hollow electoral process, economic conundrum, inequality and marginalization, corruption, ethnic chauvinism among others, which has weakened the country’s democratization effort. Even though the country has existed for a century, it has failed to imbibe the democratic ethos. The discourse critically ventured into proffering possible ways that could ensure the survivability of Nigeria’s democracy with a post – colonial state formation

카멜 다우드의 『뫼르소, 살인사건』

This study examines the novel Meursault Investigation by Algerian author Kamel Daoud, focusing on the language and identity of multicultural subjects. Meursault Investigation reinterprets Albert Camus' classic French novel “The Stranger” from the perspective of an unknown Algerian man called “Arab” who was killed by the main character Meursault. The novel deals with the tools of colonialism, identity and oppression in Algeria during the French occupation. Daoud argues that French, imposed on colonial Algerians, has become a tool of oppression, and that Algerians must regain their language in order to claim their cultural and ethnic identity. It is also a strong criticism of French colonialism and its continued influence on Algeria, and raises important questions about language and identity related to other post- colonial societies as well as Algeria.
 Algeria's historical background, which had been under long colonial rule, also had a profound influence on literature, resulting in a triple structure of the literary expression language of Arabic, French, and Berber. Under French colonial rule, writers had no choice of language due to the implementation of French language assimilation policies. French was a forced language and a language of oppression. So why did Kamel Daoud choose French, the language of the enemy, to write his work in 2014, 70 years after Kamel Daoud's Stranger was published? Daoud has two reasons for choosing French, the language of the enemy, as an expression tool for literary works. First, it is to restore the name of ‘Arab’ (‘Moussa’) that was not even given a name under colonial rule. This means the restoration of national identity. Second, after his brother's death, he had to represent the mother's voice, who did not possess the ruler's language, and his eyes were always separated from the mother's delusion and protected himself. This is reminiscent of Algeria, which remains under French influence, and means separation and independence from it. For Dowd, French, the language of the colonial state, is the language of recovery, the language of independence, the language of creation and order, and the language of subversion that summons past situations and events.
 In Daoud's work, the unknown “Arab” and “Harun” are multicultural subjects of the times. Multiculturalism has be- come a downgraded expression of our society for strangers and migrants. Rather than accepting diversity that is distinct from mainstream Koreans, we evaluate them from the perspective of discrimination and exclusion. Why should they be called “multicultural” that excludes personal identity, including their own ethnicity, historicality, and cultural diversity? Since the situation of “Arabians” and “Moussa” in Kamel Daoud's work resembles the existence of multicultural subjects coexisting in our time, we would like to examine their language and identity, diagnose the present of multicultural sub- jects, and predict the future.

Academic-community solidarities in land occupation as an Indigenous claim to health: culturally centered solidarity through voice infrastructures

In this work, we explore the role of land in Indigenous theorizing about health, embodied in a land occupation that resisted a climate-adaptive development project imposed on the community from the top down by the local government. The proposed development project of building a stop bank on the Oroua River sought to alienate Māori from the remnants of the land. Embedded in and emerging from a culture-centered academic-community-activist partnership, an advisory group of Māori community members om the “margins of the margins” came together to participate in the occupation of the land to claim it as the basis for securing their health. This study describes the occupation and the role of our academic-activist intervention in it, theorizing land occupation as the root of decolonizing health emerging from Indigenous struggles for sovereignty (Tino rangatiratanga). The community advisory group members brought together in a culture-centered intervention, collaborated in partnership with the academic team, generated video narratives that resisted and dismantled the communicative inversions produced by the settler colonial state to perpetuate its extractive interests and produced communicative resources that supported the land occupation led by the broader Whānau. This study concludes by arguing that the culture-centered approach offers a meta-theory for decolonizing health communication by building voice infrastructures that support Indigenous land struggles.

Indigenous Anti/Deportation: Contesting Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Belonging in Canada and Australia

This article focuses on attempts by settler colonial states to deport Indigenous non-citizens. The concept of “Indigenous anti/deportation” is introduced to capture both the inseparability of deportation from its contestation, as well as the unique stakes involved in contesting the imminent deportation of members of Indigenous communities. Comparing cases in Canada and Australia, Indigenous anti/deportation highlights fundamentally divergent claims of sovereignty, the assertion of Indigenous citizenship orders, and a transformation of how belonging is understood in contexts of settler colonial occupation. This article concludes by considering the implications of cases of Indigenous anti/deportation for future struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and for solidarity-building between migrants and Indigenous peoples.

African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers, and Rebel Forces by Emizet F. Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering

It is difficult to overstate the significance of understanding interstate military interventions in Africa, given interventions’ prevalence and the continent's demographic, economic, geopolitical, and security importance. In their theoretically and empirically rich African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers, and Rebel Forces, Kisangani and Pickering present an ambitious and groundbreaking work focusing on the distinct nature of military interventions in Africa. In African Interventions, the authors conceptualize interstate military interventions as moving national troops or forces into another country to achieve various objectives. Other types of state support extended to a government or rebel group, such as providing funding or equipment and covert support, are excluded from this conceptualization. The concentration on interstate military interventions also excludes actions taken by intergovernmental organizations, although the authors occasionally side note some intergovernmental organization actions by the African Union, the European Union, and the United Nations within the broader narrative. Theoretically, the authors uniquely combine classic approaches to international relations with more recent civil war and intervention literature. The Westphalian understanding of sovereignty and border fixity damaged postcolonial African states in many ways. Starting from this historical reality, the authors lay out three theories that shape the causes of intervention in Africa. First, they apply classic diversionary theories of war to military intervention. They argue that superpowers, European colonial states, and African states are equally predisposed to using military intervention when they suffer from economic and political unrest. Border fixity renders military interventions a low-cost distraction for the domestic audience because it almost removes the existential threat a state may pose to another state.

Representing Freetown: Photographs, maps and postcards in the urban cartography of colonial Sierra Leone

This article traces the development of the colonial cartography of Freetown, Sierra Leone across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiography of colonial cartography has centred the surveyor and the map in the capture and control of land. This article, instead, describes colonial cartography in the accretion of a variety of forms of spatial representation created by diverse intermediaries in the colonial project. The chronology begins with the cartographic anxiety of two Colonial Office circulars in 1869 and 1871. Following this emergence of a nascent cartographic governmentality, three mappings of Freetown over a forty-year period, by an itinerant West African photographer, John Parkes Decker, a Wesleyan missionary, John Thomas Frederick Halligey, and a Freetonian photographer-entrepreneur, Alphonso Lisk-Carew, are examined. Visual analysis of the photographs, maps and postcards that were the products of these respective mapping projects shows the ideologies and ambivalences that undergirded these representations of the city. At once, following the processes through which this visual material did work for the colonial state, this article shows how the cartographic governance of a segregating colonial Freetown was produced in the entanglements of geographic knowledges.

Institutionalization of agricultural education in the nineteenth century colonial India: its imperatives and models

The industrializing nations in the nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of the dominion of new knowledge which was formally produced within institutional sites such as universities, laboratories, academic societies, colleges, museums and many more. These institutional forms were instrumental in the production and dissemination of this knowledge. This new knowledge form not only generated new technologies for modern industries, but informed conventional forms of agricultural practices, transforming it from subsistence forms of agricultural production into cash cropping, shifting from the use of organic manure to synthetic fertilizers and from mass selection to plant breeding. The scientific development of agriculture and the dissemination of new agricultural practices paved the way for the institutionalization of agricultural education. The history of this process in the colonies was inflected by colonial rule, as the ignorance of local agricultural practices conflicted with colonial interests of the maximization of profit through agriculture. The present paper commences with an overview of scientific agriculture and agricultural education in the western world, followed by relationship of colonial state with Indian agriculture and its imperative for introducing scientific agriculture in India.