Decolonization Research Articles

The Comintern and the National and Colonial Question: the Roots of Soviet Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Racism Reconsidered

Abstract With Russia’s escalation in Ukraine, many long-standing positions and relationships have become much more complicated. Many nations in the Global South have elected to remain neutral to avoid damaging their long-standing relations with Russia, which they rely on for political or economic stability. The Russian government has instrumentalized this history of Russian and Soviet support for anti-imperialism to buoy its own relations with the Global South. This support has its roots in the Comintern period when the Communist International promoted anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and self-determination of nations. These efforts, in turn, helped develop the image of the Soviet Union as an anti-imperial bulwark, while also providing an alternate path in which many nations in the Global South found inspiration following the Second World War. This thought piece reconsiders the history of the Comintern to ask fresh questions about its role in anti-imperial and anti-racist movements. In doing so, it calls for a greater attention to the limitations of the Soviet regime during the interwar period, and a reconsideration of the imperial actions of the Soviet Union as relates to this history. It also explores how the history of the Comintern and the complicated history of Soviet support for global decolonization in the interwar period remains relevant to contextualizing present-day reactions to Russian aggression in Ukraine and why, despite the correctives of the post-Cold War period, historians now need to ensure further complexities in this history are not overlooked in the instrumentalization of this history promoted by Russia following February 2022.

Singularities of Timor-Leste’s Process of Self-Determination (1974–2002)

Abstract The self-determination of Timor-Leste presents singular features in contexts of Portuguese decolonization and global politics. It spans three periods: Portugal’s territorial reconfiguration after the Carnation Revolution; re-colonization under a major international player in global decolonization; and direct involvement of the United Nations in final phases leading to independence. It distinctively combines struggle for self-determination with a plight for broad human rights. A transnational multitude of actors, from colonial and neo-colonial powers to the UN and leading regional and world powers, blended state diplomacy with “citizens diplomacy” arising from the mobilization of civil society and the impact of international public opinion.

Abstract B035: A compendium of syngeneic, transplantable pediatric high-grade glioma models reveals subtype-specific therapeutic vulnerabilities

Abstract Pediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGGs) are lethal, incurable brain tumors frequently driven by clonal mutations in histone genes. They often harbor a range of additional genetic alterations that correlate with different ages, anatomical locations, and tumor subtypes. We developed models representing 16 pHGG subtypes driven by different combinations of alterations targeted to specific brain regions. Tumors developed with varying latencies and cell lines derived from these models engrafted in syngeneic, immunocompetent mice with high penetrance. Targeted drug screening revealed unexpected selective vulnerabilities. Moreover, H3.3K27M tumors with PIK3CA, NF1 and FGFR1 mutations were more invasive and harbored distinct additional phenotypes, such as exophytic spread, cranial nerve invasion and spinal dissemination. Collectively, these models reveal that different partner alterations produce distinct effects on pHGG cellular composition, latency, invasiveness, and treatment sensitivity. Citation Format: Michael McNicholas, Antonella De Cola, Zahedeh Bashardanesh, Amelia Foss, Cameron Lloyd, Steven Hebert, Damien Faury, Augusto Faria Andrade, Nada Jabado, Claudia Kleinman, Manav Pathania. A compendium of syngeneic, transplantable pediatric high-grade glioma models reveals subtype-specific therapeutic vulnerabilities [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on Brain Cancer; 2023 Oct 19-22; Minneapolis, Minnesota. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(5 Suppl_1):Abstract nr B035.

Oncoguía de cáncer de colon 2023

Colon cancer is the third leading cause of cancer in Mexico and the world. In Mexico, it is commonly diagnosed in early and locally advanced stages. The main risk factor is lifestyle. Specialists from Instituto Nacional de Cancerología developed Oncoguía de cáncer de colon 2023 [Colon Cancer Guidelines 2023] through consensus work, based on their experience and analysis of the most recent evidence. Herein, risk factors, screening, diagnostic elements (clinical and histological), staging, and treatment (surgery as the cornerstone) are presented in early disease, locally advanced, oligometastatic scenarios, and after conversion therapy. Discussion and multidisciplinary management in decision - making for adjuvant treatment are emphasized.

Radical Left Culture and Heritage, the Politics of Preservation and Memorialisation, and the Promise of the Metaverse

Radical left culture and heritage—understood as incarnations of leftist artefacts and praxis both past and present—have taken risks in challenging hegemonic machinations often when it is unpopular to do so. To the ire of hegemons, leftist projects across the globe have marshalled places, spaces, and technologies into sites of empowerment and struggle utilising ‘small’ and ‘big’ acts of resistance and critical interventions to champion social justice—sometimes successfully, and at other times, less so. However, the preservation of projects’ artefacts, praxis, and memory work has been anything but straightforward, owing primarily to institutional politics and infrastructural and resourcing issues. Taking The Freedom Archives (FA) as a case study, this article explores how FA is preserving the distinctive political education programme that underpinned the iconic liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau that kickstarted the seismic, global decolonisation project in the late 1950s. The article argues that FA could substantially enhance the preservation and memorialisation of that programme in the Metaverse—if this materialises as a fully open, interoperable, and highly immersive space (1) unfettered by hegemonic regulation, and (2) characterised by ‘strategic witnessing’, ‘radical recordkeeping’, and user agency. In doing so, FA would serve as an exemplar for leftist projects globally.

Using the Colonizers’ Own Weapons: The Politics of Equality, Freedom, and Integration in Advocacy Against American Indian Termination

Beginning in the early 1950s, the United States Congress enacted a program of “termination” of American Indian tribes. By eliminating the special relationship between tribes and the federal government, termination aimed at the full assimilation of American Indians into U.S. society. Government proponents advocated for termination using the language of equal rights, freedom, and integration. Previous scholarship has shown that anti-termination advocates, by contrast, appealed to the internationalist Cold War language of development, self-governance, and global decolonization to resist termination. These same leaders also invoked the civil rights language of termination’s proponents, however. Their arguments illustrated how the federal government misconstrued and misapplied the concepts of equality and freedom in relation to federal Indian policy; in other words, they used the colonizers’ own weapons against them. Not only is this analysis an important missing piece in historical scholarship on anti-termination advocacy, but it also challenges the supposed opposition between tribal sovereignty and civil rights struggles and emphasizes the historical coexistence of multiple competing interpretations of American freedom and equality.

The Collective Workshopping of Our Emerging Global Citizenship in Transcultural Fusion Dance (TcFD)

Transcultural Fusion Dance (TcFD) is a global, hybrid genre that fuses dance traditions of North Africa and the Arab World with Hip Hop and Electronica. Starting in the 1990’s, TcFD participants utilized the genre to enact their enthusiasm for intercultural exchange, visual cultural mashup, and embodied exploration of global citizenship. The momentum shifted after being confronted with decolonization calls from BIPOC communities in the U.S.A., and is now collectively building ethical practices and interdisciplinary contextualization that also offers a critique of contemporary dance education for its sluggish awakening to decolonization. The author details the historical events that instigated a global decolonization conversation of TcFD practices, conventions, and language, and the unfolding evolution of Fair-Trade Cultural Exchange practices.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems in South Africa and Australia: transforming doctoral education

While there is a great deal of support for the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) into higher education, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to move beyond tokenism. Intensive dialogue and robust conceptual outlooks are required. In this paper, this international team of South African and Australian scholars engage in a transcultural and transdisciplinary dialogue in order to chart how discourses and debates about IKS are understood in the different historical and cultural contexts of South Africa and Australia. They combine the theoretical approaches of de Sousa Santos (2014; 2018a and b) about epistemic justice with the theories of Odora Hoppers (2021), Visvanathan (2009), and First Nations Australian scholars Williams, Bunda, Claxton, and McKinnon (2018) about an Indigenous knowledges global decolonisation praxis framework. This dialogue is deliberately jarring and polyvocal because of our desire to go beyond tokenism. The South African team have chosen to apply Bacchi’s (2009) approach of problem formulation and policy as change proposal to discourses about IKS in South African policy documents. The Australian First Nations team have demonstrated how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems work through the power of stories. Purposely adopting a polyvocal, multimodal approach, the Australian section includes ethnographic policy analysis and narratives that illustrate how IKS might operate in higher education.

Learning from Dar es Salaam: Harvard’s “Project Tanganyika” and a Nodal Perspective on Decolonization’s Itineraries

Abstract: This article traces the history of Harvard’s “Project Tanganyika” and its encounter with Dar es Salaam’s burgeoning community of Southern African political exiles. An unsung predecessor to Kennedy’s Peace Corps, Project Tanganyika began in 1961 amidst a Harvard campus reckoning with issues of race, civil rights and global decolonization. Sending groups of mostly white undergraduates to Dar es Salaam as volunteer teachers, the Project would become uncannily central to the city’s emerging fame as a haven for leftwing exiles and fellow-travelers. For many Project volunteers and liberation movement leaders, the initiative was mutually generative, even as it resonated in more ambivalent ways for rank-and-file cadres. In both its generative capacity and its limitations, Project Tanganyika’s trajectory provides a glimpse of the junction of African decolonization and US civil rights in a manner inflected by race, class, and mobility.

Cinematic cultures of descent: the other sides of the mountaineering story

ABSTRACT This essay introduces the descent as a critical vantage point that broadens the mountain film genre and reconsiders modernist debates with an eye towards cinema’s socio-ecological substance. I analyze three films—Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand (2008), Nils Gaup’s Ofelaš (1987), and Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice (2012)—for how they highlight social connectivity and environmental sustainability in their accounts of national tragedy, Indigenous legend, and eco-catastrophe. Central to this inquiry are the multiperspectival and self-reflective qualities of cinema and the ways in which its immersive qualities dovetail into cinematic world-building and global decolonization. By bringing media ecology together with postcolonial scholarship on alpinist control and film historical reflections on descent, I argue that cinematic cultures of descent reveal the hidden stakes of alpinism and challenge established ideas of the perception of self and Other in modern mountaineering. This, in turn, prompts fresh registers of thinking mountains and mountaineering in ways that invite cultural renegotiations of gender roles, power, and individualism among mountaineers. Ultimately, it highlights the special role film plays in facilitating a change of perspective, thus affecting behavior in the human and non-human world.

Shining a Spotlight on Photochemistry

Shining a Spotlight on Photochemistry

ChemSystemsChem – On the Up and Up

<i>ChemSystemsChem</i> – On the Up and Up

Open for All at ChemElectroChem

Open for All at <i>ChemElectroChem</i>

Pan‐Africanism in the Pacific: Race and the international construction of West Papuan identity

AbstractThis paper examines the discourse of racial difference in the arena of global decolonization, examining the case of the Indonesian territory which is today known as Papua and until 1962 was a Dutch colony. Papuans formed a ‘nation‐of‐intent’ around the idea of ‘race’ and racial difference, initially the invention of colonial anthropologists and explorers. Papuan nationalists seized on the colonial power's declaration of racial difference, declaring themselves ‘the negroids of the Pacific’ and locating themselves within the wave of African decolonization. The paper discusses the way Papuan non‐state diplomats deployed ideas of race to claim a new Pan‐African identity, far from Africa. I draw on Papuan nationalist publications, United Nations and government documents, and oral testimonies to discuss how diplomatic imperatives led to the formation of a Papuan nationalist identity partly within the territory and partly in exile. Finally, I consider how the Papuan diaspora has continued to foster this nation‐of‐intent from exile since Indonesia’s annexation of West Papua in the 1960s.

Dar es Salaam on the Frontline: Red and Black Internationalisms

ABSTRACTThis article highlights Tanzania’s role in global decolonisation by combining personal stories rooted in everyday life with political and pedagogical accounts of experiments in African socialism. The Dar es Salaam school of scholars and activists developed into an epicentre of productive and fraught debates that continue to offer us lessons today. By paying close attention to the stories these thinkers tell, and by situating them in the context of both political events and quotidian experiences, we can further uncover what Fanon called the “grandeur and weakness” of anti-colonial praxis. Gendering these syntheses of red and black internationalisms also contributes a perspective rooted in a more radical democratic politics, productively extending this decolonial genealogy into our present conjuncture.

Old or new territory? Perspectives On Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging

This article aims to question the concepts of diversity and inclusion by reflecting on the historical political traditions that have enabled the emergence of the practice in different societal contexts. This contribution situates diversity and inclusion in its origins from rights-based theories and practices such as global decolonization processes, the U.S. civil rights movement, critical race theory, and intersectionality. It then uses an autoethnographic methodology coupled with Yuval-Davis’ framework of ‘belonging’ to reflect on the authors’ experiences of doing PhDs in a global higher education programme. The article aims to provide both theoretical and autoethnographic insights into reflecting on the politics of identity within diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIB). By using the authors’ diverse experiences as a valuable source of data, the article aims to reassert agency and complexity in diversity practice.

The May 1967 massacre in Guadeloupe

On 26 May 1967, French police opened fire on striking workers in Pointeà-Pitre, Guadeloupe, sparking a major uprising across the city. According to officials at the time, eight Guadeloupeans were killed during the unrest and many more were injured. However, a state cover-up means we may never know the true death toll. The French government blamed the violence on a clandestine independence movement (GONG) and tried nineteen activists before the French court of state security for threatening the territorial integrity of the French Republic. Fifty years later, the massacre has received little acknowledgement outside Guadeloupe. This paper will argue that a clearer understanding of the May 1967 massacre and its legacy demonstrates that Guadeloupe is not an anomaly, disconnected from twentieth-century decolonization. Instead, this event highlights the failures of nationalist movements in Guadeloupe and draws links to other struggles for self-determination in the Caribbean and Algeria, situating Guadeloupe within the wider narrative of global decolonization.

Modeling total predation to avoid perverse outcomes from cat control in a data-poor island ecosystem.

Data hungry, complex ecosystem models are often used to predict the consequences of threatened species management, including perverse outcomes. Unfortunately, this approach is impractical in many systems, which have insufficient data to parameterize ecosystem interactions or reliably calibrate or validate such models. Here we demonstrate a different approach, using a minimum realistic model to guide decisions in data- and resource-scarce systems. We illustrate our approach with a case-study in an invaded ecosystem from Christmas Island, Australia, where there are concerns that cat eradication to protect native species, including the red-tailed tropicbird, could release meso-predation by invasive rats. We use biophysical constraints (metabolic demand) and observable parameters (e.g. prey preferences) to assess the combined cat and rat abundances which would threaten the tropicbird population. We find that the population of tropicbirds cannot be sustained if predated by 1607 rats (95% credible interval (CI) [103, 5910]) in the absence of cats, or 21 cats (95% CI [2, 82]) in the absence of rats. For every cat removed from the island, the bird's net population growth rate improves, provided that the rats do not increase by more than 77 individuals (95% CI [30, 174]). Thus, in this context, one cat is equivalent to 30-174 rats. Our methods are especially useful for on-the-ground predator control in the absence of knowledge of predator-predator interactions, to assess whether 1) the current abundance of predators threatens the prey population of interest, 2) managing one predator species alone is sufficient to protect the prey species given potential release of another predator, and 3) control of multiple predator species is needed to meet the conservation goal. Our approach demonstrates how to use limited information for maximum value in data-poor systems, by shifting the focus from predicting future trajectories, to identifying conditions which threaten the conservation goal. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Afro-Asia as method: Bandung, the production of postcolonial space, and the cruel optimism of the 1960s

ABSTRACT This article provides a conceptual intervention regarding how postcolonial space was reimagined in the aftermath of global decolonization during the mid-twentieth century. It argues that political imagination operates not only temporally by rethinking pasts, presents, and futures, but it equally functions spatially by reconsidering normative geographies such as the continent and the nation-state. This article examines in particular how “Afro-Asia” as a space was invoked and generated in the wake of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, by African newspapers and periodicals. Assisted by the popularity and growing mythology of the Bandung meeting, the term “Afro-Asia” evolved in the years after 1955 as shorthand for collectively referencing the countries that participated at the summit to becoming a wider point of orientation for countries that sought to participate in a broader intercontinental endeavor. This larger inclusion combined with the failure to hold a “second Bandung“ in 1965 contributed to the eventual decline of “Afro-Asia” as a new territorial space. Nonetheless, the legacy of “Afro-Asia” as a spatial idea for readdressing political, historical, and cultural geographies can still be found in recent work in Indian Ocean studies and China-Africa relations.

Siliconomes as an incidental finding in an 18F-FDG PET/CT study at follow-up of colon cancer: [[es]]Siliconomas como hallazgo incidental en un estudio 18F-FDG PET/TC en el seguimiento de cáncer de colon

Siliconomes as an incidental finding in an 18F-FDG PET/CT study at follow-up of colon cancer: [[es]]Siliconomas como hallazgo incidental en un estudio 18F-FDG PET/TC en el seguimiento de cáncer de colon