Colonial Legacy Research Articles

Whose city? colonial histories, urban governance, and the contestation of space in Kuala Lumpur

ABSTRACT Cities are shaped by historical power structures that persist in governance, spatial organization, and socio-economic hierarchies. In postcolonial cities like Kuala Lumpur, colonial legacies continue to reinforce exclusionary policies and spatial inequalities, limiting inclusive urban growth. While existing scholarship explores urban transformations and ethnic contestations, few studies critically assess how colonial governance, ethno-spatial hierarchies, and socio-political structures collectively sustain urban exclusion. This study examines the enduring influence of British colonial governance on Kuala Lumpur’s contemporary urban development, governance failures, and socio-spatial inequalities. Using a mixed-methods approach, it investigates the disconnect between urban policies and residents’ lived experiences. Findings reveal that centralized governance, displacement-driven redevelopment, and affirmative action policies often reproduce, rather than redress, urban inequalities. Addressing these postcolonial urban challenges requires more than policy reforms – it necessitates a fundamental re-examination of entrenched governance models and a shift toward inclusive, community-driven urban planning.

Exploring the Place of 4ir in Preventing and Addressing Ethnoreligious Conflict in Nigeria

The ethnoreligious crises confronting Nigeria have made efforts of the government to the nation yield no or little results. Religious fanatics, who have been destroying lives and property, compound this problem. This article explores how 4IR technologies can prevent and address ethnoreligious conflict in Nigeria. The article shows that the violence is caused by the post-colonial state's inability to protect and improve the lives of its citizens without using ethnic and religious resources, power imbalances, and colonial legacies. However, integrating 4IR technologies into ethnoreligious conflict prevention and mitigation offers the government and stakeholders the chance to enhance early warning of emerging violence and prevention. Blockchain technology, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence can assist the government and stakeholders to predict upheavals by monitoring sociopolitical developments. Considering this, we should establish a specialised centre that focuses on early warning and response and employs analytical methods to identify emerging violence before crises worsen. This will assist the government and stakeholders in addressing public complaints efficiently. More specifically, there is a need to partner with local and national civil society organisations and academic institutions to ensure that different perspectives inform responses while improving the government's and stakeholders' sociopolitical understanding.

Perception and Visibility of the State: The Ramayan of the Maranao: Rethinking Aquapelagos in the Philippines’ Sulu Sea

This study contends that the Maranao people’s induction into the Tausug community of the Sulu aquapelago in the Philippines – an induction supervised by the colonial state – exemplifies a case of dialectical insularity or aquapelagicity in the production of a unique islandic identity that evolves through the deconstruction of Ramayan legends within templates of Darangen mythology. While numerous studies explore the role of myths and cultural narratives in reshaping and reinterpreting the identities of Muslim Filipinos, there is a notable scarcity of research specifically addressing how the Maranao community articulates its desired aquapelagic identity, particularly in the context of the ‘piratical’ movements and global commerce from the 16th to 18th centuries. Employing an interdisciplinary critical methodology, the study investigates how these reimagined myths provide affective sustenance for the Maranao’s imagined community, despite their, arguably, limited awareness of the Ramayan’s Indic, Hindu, and Puranic origins. The Maranao’s distinctive focus on Ravan (who is otherwise typically viewed as the Ramayan’s anti-hero in mainstream Indian interpretations) serves as a prominent index of their political praxis characterised by a unique affective dimension in their identity within Filipino cultures, the Malay Archipelago, and the larger Southeast Asian legacy of the Ramayan. This affective – or what I view as an aquapelagic – reinterpretation of the Ramayan within Maranao culture parallels the Tausug’s self-representation, characterised by ‘piratical’ assertions of their ‘Muslimness’ and their political stance on the Sabah dispute. This occurs within a decolonial framework that unveils the identity of the archipelago as an aquapelago, encompassing the marginal voices that shape its emancipatory future. Eventually, this constitutes a resistance to cultural and psychological erasure by colonial legacies – a resistance that influences the ongoing discourse of preserving unique political identities in the Malay archipelago and the wider Southeast Asian region.

Can Ambivalent Heritage Embody a Nation? The Meaning‐Making of Japanese Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Taiwan

ABSTRACTThis study explores how state and nonstate actors endorsed and utilised heritage from the Japanese colonial era to redevelop the cultural discourse supporting Taiwanese nationalism. Grounded in the methodological approach to social constructionism, this study examines how these actors created and recreated the meanings of ‘ambivalent’ heritage places to embody Taiwan as one ‘imagined community’. The results suggest that the state invented and reinvented the meaning of colonial‐era heritage to be associated with the political discourse of multiculturalism, social evolution and political modernisation, reinforcing its legitimacy. Following and even transcending the official narrative, nonstate actors elicited a meaning of the colonial‐era heritage as intertextually associated with rituals, happy memories, everyday environment and individual experiences, revealing who served as the nationalists reconstructing the ‘national’ culture in a social context.

Crisis by Design: Emergency Powers and Colonial Legality in Puerto Rico. By Jose Atiles. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.

<i>Crisis by Design: Emergency Powers and Colonial Legality in Puerto Rico</i>. By Jose Atiles. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.

Hindutopia: Indian Mythological Fiction Writing and Representations of India and Hinduism

Since the beginning of the 21st century, mythological fiction has grown immensely in quantity and influence in the English-language Indian literary market. Several authors became famous publishing literary adaptations of myths, particularly the epics. The most successful (Anand Neelakantan, Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Pattanaik) have published fiction and nonfiction works in which they have focused on representations of India and Hinduism. This paper analyses and systematises representations of mostly their nonfiction discourses through critical discourse analysis. Despite differences in content, style and political ideology, these authors fit a discourse centred on a Hindu worldview which I call Hindutopia. According to this idea in which India and Hinduism are abstracted from spatiotemporal nuance, the nation-state is said to owe its positive distinctive traits due to the influence of Hinduism. Such traits are opposed to their counterparts, which are associated with other nation-states and worldviews, mainly the West and Abrahamic religions. However, while rejecting colonial and global legacies, the retellers often borrow from them by recreating them as “traditional” Indian elements.

EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POOR GOVERNANCE AND SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICTS IN AFRICA

The nexus between poor governance and sub-national conflicts in Africa is a critical issue that undermines stability and development across the continent. Poor governance, characterized by corruption, weak institutions, and inequitable resource distribution, often acts as a catalyst for localized conflicts. These conflicts, driven by ethnic, political, or regional grievances, have broader implications for national and regional stability. This paper explores the root causes of poor governance, including the colonial legacy, corruption, weak institutions, and exclusionary politics, and examines their role in fueling sub-national conflicts. Case studies from Nigeria’s Niger Delta, Sudan’s Darfur, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kivu region provide evidence of how governance deficits exacerbate localized tensions. The paper also outlines the socio-economic, political, and regional consequences of these conflicts, including displacement, economic stagnation, and erosion of state legitimacy. To address these challenges, the paper proposes policy recommendations focusing on strengthening governance structures, promoting inclusivity, ensuring equitable resource distribution, and enhancing conflict resolution mechanisms. These reforms are crucial for preventing further escalation of conflicts and fostering long-term stability. By improving governance, African nations can unlock their potential for sustainable development and peaceful coexistence.

Unsettling Dominant Narratives in Knowledge Production Through Decolonial Resilience: The Zimbabwean Case

Despite common knowledge that higher education in Zimbabwe has erased indigenous knowledge production and is grappling with the legacy of colonialism, like much of Africa, very few studies, if any, have reflected on and discussed how lecturers can dismantle the coloniality of knowledge production through decolonial resilience. This conceptual article uses the case of Zimbabwe and deploys the decolonial lens to interrogate how higher education lecturers can decolonise knowledge production and navigate the trajectory of injustices and systematic inequalities to validate African thought systems. Using documents and extant literature from the public domain, the article responds to two questions that underpin this study: how have colonial legacies shaped knowledge production in higher education in Zimbabwe, and how can lecturers unsettle the dominant narratives on the production of knowledge through decolonial resilience? Despite existing evidence, findings replicate that Western dominance has superseded indigenous knowledge production and cultural practices, and lecturers have not firmly renounced colonial adversity to validate the African knowledge production system. The study argues for decentring African perspectives and experiences in knowledge production to prioritise cultural relevance and epistemic justice. Given these findings, the study recommends employing decolonial resilience to transform higher education and promote knowledge recovery. By exploring how higher education lecturers, as agents, can turn a new leaf in knowledge production, the study contributes to a broader conversation on the decolonisation of knowledge production in higher education in Zimbabwe and beyond.

Traversing Distances and Differences: Developing the African Women’s Playwright Network

In 2015, playwright, director and screenwriter from Cape Town, South Africa, Amy Jephta and I set up the African Women’s Playwright Network (AWPN) via a mobile app to traverse literal, conceptual and historic distances to enable artists, researchers, educators, programmers and publishers from various parts of Africa and its diasporas to connect. In this article, I will trace how and why this network was set up, while reflecting on what we need to think about when creating online and in-person spaces for artists and academics to explore difficult questions across cultural lines in postcolonial contexts. These questions include how we consider colonial legacies that continue to impact this kind of contemporary cross-cultural work, and how we shifted the network from discourse on creativity to what Aristea Fotopolou terms ‘doing feminism and being feminist’ (2016:5), as lived and performed behaviours.

Negotiating Modern Identity

Much of the problems associated with contentious identities in contemporary India can be traced to British colonial ethnographic constructs and categories which tended to rigidly fix identities which had been much more fluid in pre-colonial times. The colonial legacy continued in post-colonial India, impelling castes and communities to negotiate and renegotiate their identities and constitutional positions. One such community is the Lambada of Telangana. Historically a pastoral community involved in cattle breeding and caravan trade, they were designated as ‘criminal tribes’ under colonial rule. After Independence, they were recategorized in the Constitution under different denominations in different regions. Thus, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, the Lambadas of the Telangana region were categorized as ‘De-notified Tribe’ whereas their counterpart in the Andhra region were given the status of ‘Scheduled Tribe’ (ST). The Lambadas of Telangana launched a movement to demand that they should also be listed as STs on the premise that one community cannot be categorized differently in the same state, and they succeeded in being listed in the ST list in 1976. In this fight, many traditions came into circulation, including alternate histories and stories related to their origin and migration. Based on an ethno-historical approach, this paper explores these claims and counter claims of the Lambadas.

Two views of Anglophone Southeast Asia: The Heinemann Writing in Asia series and Skoob Pacifica

This article surveys two important early publishers of writing from Southeast Asia with a regional reach and presents a case for understanding transnational connections based on publishing and writerly networks. Founded by Leon Comber in 1966, the Heinemann Writing Asia series emerged amidst a decolonizing Southeast Asia, publishing authors from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Besides being an important publication outlet for local writers without access to metropolitan publishing houses, the series arguably provided a regional outlet for works that fall outside the political rhetoric of national consolidation, while canonizing others from established literary traditions. The second half of the paper examines Skoob Pacifica, a London-based publishing imprint active between 1992 and 1994, paying specific attention to the two anthologies titled S. E. Asia Writes Back! and The Pen is Mightier than the Sword. The press was the first to position Southeast Asian writers and the region in opposition to the imperial metropole, in line with the rise of postcolonial studies in the Anglo-American academy. Significantly, Skoob Pacifica mirrors the earlier linguistic and geographical formation of the Heinemann series as a reflection of colonial linguistic legacies. By examining the affordances and limitations of Anglophone Southeast Asia through a materialist lens in the broader context of post independence and the Cold War, this essay makes a methodological case for understanding the region as a literary unit through its publishing networks.

The Role of Ethnicity in Post-Conflict Peace Building: A Case Study of Rwanda, Bosnia and Sri Lanka

This paper examines the role of ethnicity in post-conflict peacebuilding, focusing on Rwanda as a primary case study and drawing comparisons with Bosnia and Sri Lanka. It explores how ethnic divisions, often rooted in colonial legacies, have shaped conflict dynamics and influenced recovery processes. The study delves into Rwanda's post-genocide strategies, including institutional reforms, justice mechanisms, economic reconstruction, and reconciliation programs, highlighting both successes and challenges. The research contrasts Rwanda's approach to the institutionalized ethnic divisions in Bosnia and the majoritarian policies in Sri Lanka, offering insights into the complexities of balancing ethnic identities in peacebuilding. Key lessons emphasize the importance of inclusive governance, equitable resource distribution, grassroots reconciliation, and the integration of justice and economic development in fostering long-term peace. The findings contribute to understanding how ethnic dynamics can either hinder or promote stability in divided societies.

Toward a theorization of ideal type bureaucratic regimes: A comparative perspective from India and Pakistan

Previous studies on bureaucracy have enhanced our comprehension of bureaucracies’ roles and impacts in the policy process. However, a gap exists in the public administration literature regarding the conceptualization of bureaucracy through the lens of “Bureaucratic Regimes.” To address this gap, this article theorizes the concept of a “bureaucratic regime” and categorizes it into six distinct ideal types: Enabling, Inhibiting, Semi-effective, Ineffective, Effective, and Kleptocratic. This classification is based on an analysis of critical factors, such as the historical legacy of colonialism, administrative traditions, political cultures, economic development, social norms, tenure security, ideational influences, welfare spending, and policy outcomes, all contributing to the formation of bureaucratic regimes. By examining the Indian Administrative Service and the Pakistan Administrative Service, this study asserts that these services exhibit characteristics of a “Kleptocratic Bureaucratic Regime.” This regime is characterized by the extensive privileges enjoyed by its officers, resulting in substantial public expenditure but subpar policy outcomes. The study highlights the significance of viewing bureaucratic regimes as valuable conceptual tools for comparative analysis and policy evaluation. Consequently, it contributes not only to public administration theory but also holds implications for practical policymaking.

Embodied Coloniality

This comprehensive study examines the lived experiences of Muslim immigrant women in Norway, focusing mainly on the colonial wounds as a manifestation of the enduring impact of coloniality on daily lives. The research illuminates the profound influence of colonial legacies on social structures, cultural norms, and power dynamics through meticulous examination and analysis of in-depth interviews. The participants’ narratives, including Amal, Ayse, and Zahra, provide crucial insights into the challenges of marginalization, dehumanization, and the struggle to forge a coherent sense of self within a society shaped by colonial structures. This study underscores the normalization of dehumanization and sheds light on the constraints imposed by the majority society, resulting in feelings of non-relationality, suffocation, survival, resignation, and a loss of futurity. By addressing the intersection of coloniality, racism, and the lived experiences of Muslim minority women, this research offers valuable contributions to the academic discourse on decolonial feminist studies of affect, providing a nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics at play in contemporary Norway.

Decolonizing academic identities in postcolonial higher education: A collaborative framework for Africa and the Caribbean

This conceptual paper critically examines the persistent influence of colonial structures on higher education in the Caribbean and Africa, particularly in shaping academic identities that remain tethered to Eurocentric knowledge systems. The paper argues that while there have been efforts to decolonize curricula, these attempts are often limited by entrenched Western frameworks that sustain the marginalization of indigenous epistemologies. The paper proposes a collaborative framework that enables Caribbean and African academics to reconstruct their professional identities by actively integrating indigenous knowledge into academic curricula, research, and pedagogical practices. Drawing on some decolonial theorists such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the framework underscores linguistic and cultural reclamation as essential processes in redefining academic roles. Cross-regional partnerships, professional development programs, and curriculum reforms are posited as essential mechanisms to foster epistemological diversity, offering academic pathways to authentic engagement with local cultural contexts. The study advocates for institutional restructuring that challenges colonial legacies, advances inclusive leadership, and supports decolonial practices as a means of transforming higher education. This study contributes to scholarship by providing an analytical framework for decolonizing academic identities, and fostering an inclusive and contextually relevant academic environment that addresses the intellectual needs of postcolonial societies.

Ex nihilo urbanization in Nigeria: Colonial legacies, privatization, and foreign actors

ABSTRACT Over the past 2 decades, Nigeria has become a hotspot for the creation of new cities, with a dozen currently underway. While new cities in Nigeria are promoted by their developers as necessary for addressing the urban challenges plaguing cities, including overcrowding, housing deficits, a lack of amenities, and poor transportation infrastructure, we suggest that new cities in Nigeria are products of neoliberal urban policies and that they prioritize luxury and exclusivity. The current new city boom in Nigeria tracks with the global proliferation of projects of similar scale and ambition, but our research highlights that building ex nihilo new cities has a long history in Nigeria dating back to British colonialism. This paper identifies 39 ex nihilo urban mega-developments carried out in Nigeria since the British colonial era and examines their strategic locations and rationales, the key actors involved, and the urban practices guiding their creation in three distinct eras—colonial, post-independence, and contemporary—in order to understand the continuities and differences in new city development over time.

Reimagining Futures--Decolonial Praxis in Higher Education

Several significant global social movements, including Rhodes Must Fall in the UK, Fees Must Fall in South Africa, Black Lives Matter in the US, and Why is My Curriculum White? in the UK, challenged the traditions and assumptions of modernization, colonialism, and imperialism within the existing education system. Therefore, the issue of decolonization in higher education deserves much attention. By means of literature analysis, this article explored how higher educational institutions can rethink their practices to be more inclusive and equitable by challenging dominant narratives and promoting decolonial methodologies in teaching, curriculum and research. Finally, three reflections are presented: (1) In some regions, decolonization refers to the formal end of colonial rule, while in others, it involves ongoing struggles to dismantle the legacies of colonialism, including economic dependency, cultural erasure, and social inequality; (2) How higher education institutions are engaging with decolonization; (3) Lack of support for marginalized scholars. The authors hope that through the discussion in this article, we can gain a deeper understanding of decolonial praxis in higher education.

Fraud as Legitimate Retribution for Colonial Injustice: Neutralization Techniques in Interviews with Police and Online Romance Fraud Offenders

ABSTRACT This qualitative research examines the phenomenon of online romance fraud, exploring it from contrasting perspectives. The study engaged two distinct groups of participants: (1) fraudsters actively involved in online romance scams (commonly referred to as “Sakawa Boys”) and (2) police officers with experience in investigating and policing internet crimes. We explore the usefulness of neutralization techniques in interpreting data within the cultural context of individuals’ subjective experiences. Thematic analysis of data reveals that both offenders and police officers employ certain neutralization techniques, such as denial of responsibility, condemnation of the condemners, and appeals to higher loyalties, to justify their conduct. In particular, online romance offenders invoke higher loyalties, rationalizing their actions as reparative justice for colonial exploitation and framing their fraud as a means of reclaiming wealth unjustly taken during colonial rule. The findings suggest that participants perceive the enduring legacy of colonialism as a key factor driving the production of cybercrime. This research contributes to the scant body of direct testimonies from romance fraud offenders, which are significantly rarer than those from police officers, providing valuable insights into this global phenomenon. Methodologically and theoretically, this research contributes to understanding the global phenomenon of scammers targeting individuals worldwide.

Dark Humour and Invasive Species Storytelling in the Age of Extinction

ABSTRACT This essay explores how humour, specifically dark humour, performs an affective politics of opacity in Australian comedies that invokes parody, absurdity and laughter to address the eco-social challenges of invasive species, including rabbits, brumbies, cane toads and red fire ants. The incongruity between jocular feelings and the gravity of extinction highlights humour’s ambivalent potential for violence and subversion. Through an analysis of cartoons and documentaries that bridge conservation science and the Australian cultural imagination, we identify three dimensions of environmental dark humour: (1) it questions human exceptionalism by foregrounding ambiguity, nonhuman agency and assemblage thinking beyond rational control; (2) it performs a cultural diagnosis of colonial legacies, including eco-nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric, hegemonic White masculinity, and regional and cultural stereotypes; (3) it allows a cathartic release of affective dissent and taboo feelings by subverting culturally normative emotional attachments to invasive animals and mainstream environmentalism. By considering humour as a crucial technique for survival and ambiguity, we argue for its potential to inspire self-reflective, multispecies and decolonial modes of storytelling that can ethically account for human and nonhuman otherness in the age of extinction.

Not Merely a Tourist Site: Jamaica Kincaid’s Evocation of Antigua in A Small Place

Jamaica Kincaid in her book A Small Place (1981) describes Antigua as a holiday destination. As she revisits her homeland after a long period, she adopts a postcolonial perspective in viewing the island’s contemporary socio-political system. Though the British colonizers and slave-traders have left, the colonial legacy persists with their heirs' continual arrival to the island as tourists. Meanwhile, Kincaid notes that the majority of Antiguans, who were descendants of former slaves, remain subjugated. The writer argues that the histories of slavery and colonialism are hindrances to Antigua’s formation of its identity as an independent and self-reliant state. This paper studies Kincaid’s narration from the perspective of a solo female traveller travelling back to her native land as a tourist. By doing so, it will examine the difficulties she confronts during her travel that affect her narrative. Spectrum, Volume 18, June 2023: 31-39