Politics Of Decolonization Research Articles

Non‐Status Citizenship and the Paradoxes of Immigration Regimes in a Sanctuary City

AbstractNon‐status people face a socio‐legal precariousness that contradicts the promises of an inclusive city. Marking Toronto's tenth anniversary of its “sanctuary city” policy, our research assesses the progress and potential of social planning and municipalist agendas to support irregularised residents. Drawing from interviews with service providers, city officials, and non‐status citizens in Toronto, we propose a decolonial politics of urban citizenship recognition we call “non‐status citizenship”. This concept addresses specific paradoxes related to irregularisation, access, jurisdiction, and regularisation. By framing our discussion around these paradoxes, we highlight the discomfort and transformative potential of non‐status citizenship for immigration regimes in sanctuary cities. We argue that recognising non‐status citizenship goes beyond notions of urban citizenship to claim formal recognition and security, which resolves the four paradoxes theoretically, politically, and practically. We also emphasise the role of cities in expanding service delivery and calling out the failure of planning across levels of government.

Constructing decolonisation: the Greenland case and the birth of integration as decolonisation in the United Nations, 1946–1954

How did it become possible for Denmark to integrate Greenland into the colonial metropole during anti-colonial post-Second World War multilateral diplomacy on decolonisation? Scholarship on the evolution of international society generally equates post-war political decolonisation with the universalisation of sovereign independence. This leaves unaddressed that a quarter of colonial territories did not emerge as sovereign states in post-war political decolonisation. Through multi-archival research, this articles starts to address this conundrum by tracing the emergence of integration into the colonial metropole as a route to political decolonisation in early multilateral diplomacy within the United Nations and how this option was first applied to Greenland. Entering the diplomatic engine room, I demonstrate the generative impact of Danish diplomatic practices and the constitutive importance of a discourse of Danish colonial exceptionalism to explain the legal emergence of decolonisation as integration by 1952 and Denmark’s ability to employ this option in the United Nations by 1954. The implications of the paper for scholarship on the evolution of international society go beyond uncovering the emergence of integration as a legal option in political decolonisation. Through its attention to everyday discursive negotiation and diplomatic practice, the article nuances extant scholarship by demonstrating that early post-war multilateral diplomacy was less a quick propagation of universal sovereignty than a contentious, ongoing, negotiation over the meaning and application of self-determination.

Between feminism and partisanship: the rise and decline of the women’s movement in Belize, 1975–1993

ABSTRACT This paper examines the historical trajectory of the women’s movement in Belize, focusing on a critical period (1975–1993). We draw upon original sources from archival research coupled with interviews with Belizean women to interpret the rise and decline of the women’s movement. The movement in Belize emerged in the late 1970s and peaked during the 1980s. At the height of the movement, female-led NGOs organized women across Belize with the goal of empowering women to better their communities and living conditions. Yet the outcomes of the movement dissipated in the 1990s. We interpret the vicissitudes of the movement against the backdrop of divisions generated during the years surrounding political independence (achieved in 1981). As Belize’s struggle for independence from British colonialism reached its denouement in 1979–1981, the concerns of Belizean women came into public consciousness shaped by the U.N. Decade for Women, Cold War politics, and the politics of decolonization. These sparked a women’s movement in the 1980s, albeit in a fashion that could not be sustained into the 1990s, an era of NGOs, neoliberalism, and clientelism.

What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence

What do apologies apologize for? More precisely, what do the apologies regularly pronounced by states for some atrocity or other actually accomplish? This question animates my article. State apologies became an integral element of global political culture in the early 21st century. These politics of regret are reshaping Canadian national culture, most pronouncedly with the apologies for the Indian Residential School System ( CBC News 2008a; McIntyre 2017) and the Komagata Maru ( CBC News 2008b; Trudeau 2016). While Public Inquiries and Royal Commissions have long served as state responses to political mobilization, deployment of the machinery of regret has fast become the predictable response to accusations of atrocities, including genocide, enslavement and racial violence. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas on violence, colonial in the case of Fanon (1961), law in that of Benjamin (1996), I examine the apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples and South-Asian diasporic communities by the Canadian state. Locating these pronouncements in the histories of violence they index, I demonstrate how such apologies function as techniques of violence that advance settler power structures and narratives of nationhood. My argument here is that apologies are themselves acts of violence which rework histories of brutalization to meet the political destabilizations of the present. Apologies thus reorganize the racial violence of settler societies, drawing sections of subjugated populations into waging this violence and, in the process, derail resurgent politics of decolonization, abolitionism and anti-racism.

Gaza: A decolonial geography

AbstractThis commentary addresses three objectives: (1) to situate and contextualise the ongoing military assault on Gaza within longer colonial histories in Palestine; (2) to collate resources that can equip geographers—specialist and non‐specialist, academic and non‐academic—with resources to build decolonial politics on Palestine–Israel; and (3) to contribute to discussions on what we, as geographers, can do to support Palestinian calls for liberation. These objectives are informed by a strong conviction that now is not a time for equivocation or silence. Palestinians, both in Palestine and in exile, need robust support and solidarity. This commentary offers one example of the form this support and solidarity can take in the context of academia. It does so by calling forth our discipline's plural and deep commitment to justice and thoroughgoing critique of the deleterious power structures and colonial legacies that have brought us to this current moment of crisis in Palestine.

Hận: The Haunt of Home, Vietnamese Refugee Melancholia, and the Challenges to Asian American Critiques

Abstract: Based on writings of first-generation Vietnamese refugees, this article explores hận (a deep hatred and resentment, or a haunting anguish) through the lens of melancholia to uncover the convergence and divergence of Vietnamese refugee politics and Asian American politics. I argue that hận exposes the double forces and geographies of violence (by/in both the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the United States) that produce the constraints that refugee free wills are not just pushing against, but are also bound by, resulting in the divergence between first-generation Vietnamese refugee politics and Asian American anti-imperialism and decolonization politics.

Taking Political Determinants of Planetary Health Seriously: Expanding from P4 to P5 Medicine.

Predictive, Personalized, Preventive, and Participatory (P4) Medicine is embedded in the precision medicine conceptual framework to achieve the overarching goal of "the right drug, for the right patient, at the right dose, and at the right time." Science cultures and political determinants of health have normative and instrumental impacts on P4 medicine. Yet, since the age of Enlightenment in the 17th century, science and economics have been disarticulated from politics along the lines of classical liberalism, and with an ahistorical approach that continues into the 21st century. The consequence of this liberal disarticulation is that science is falsely and narrowly understood as an invariably technocratic and objective field. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is clearer that political determinants of health are the causes-of-causes for disease and health. I propose that we need P5 medicine with a fifth P, political determinants of planetary health. The new "P" can engage not only with instrumental aspects of P4 medicine research and clinical implementation but also with the structural factors that are an integral part of the politics of the P4 medicine. For example, the living legacies of colonialism contribute to the unequal relationships in trade, labor, provision, and production of materials among nation-states and between the Global South and the Global North and shape the class struggles in contemporary society, science, and medicine. A decolonial politics of care in which the political determinants of planetary health are taken seriously is therefore crucial and relevant to building a robust, ethical, responsible, and just P5 medicine in the 21st century.

Fugitive Ecologies

This paper seeks to refine scholarly thinking regarding invasive species and decolonial politics in plantation ecologies by following bamboo’s contradictory relationships to various parties on the island of Jamaica. Planters imported bamboo to Jamaica for its remarkable propensity to grow, a quality that soon let it loose on the island’s hinterlands. There, bamboo allied with a people whose flight mirrored its own: Maroons, or fugitive African and Indigenous Taino people who built autonomous communities in the island’s interior. Lately, bamboo is on the move again, precipitating an ecological “invasion” in the eyes of the island’s conservationists and an opportunity for green growth from the perspective of its business interests. These parties, though differing in many ways, both approach bamboo through an idiom of mastery with roots in the plantation and colonial forestry. Maroons, on the other hand, model a creative openness to more-than-human encounters, building relationships to bamboo that are both quotidian and sacred, salutary and trying, but which point toward Maroon autonomy. I offer the concept of fugitive ecologies to attune scholars to these patchy geographies of partial freedom Maroons build with this “invasive” collaborator at the plantation’s edges. Whereas existing paradigms within the environmental humanities tend to focus on species-level classification, fugitive ecologies allow us to see how plants and animals—native, invasive, or otherwise—can “become with” Black freedom struggles.

Revivalism and Decoloniality: The Paradox of Modernization without Westernization in the Political Theology of Israr Ahmad

This article explores the contribution of modern Muslim revivalism to Muslims’ political decolonization, and the paradoxical role the West plays in that process. On the one hand, revivalism rejects the founding principles of liberal political theory, and on the other hand, it readily adopts the salient structures and mechanisms of the modern polity with a view to Islamize them, all the while insisting on the Muslims’ need to de-Westernize. Toward revealing the hitherto neglected dimensions of revivalism, my analysis adopts an unconventional route by subjecting revivalism to a semiotic analysis in conversation with the archetypal theories of Mircea Eliade and Carl G. Jung. The analysis unveils the universal psychological structures of revival, and their specific Muslim symbolization. I conclude (a) that depth psychology makes modern Muslim revival inevitable, which will only grow stronger and gain wider appeal while the Muslims continue to suffer decline; (b) that among the different forms of Muslim revival, revivalism ventures the farthest in decolonizing Muslim political imagination; (c) that the revivalist imagination makes their espoused caliphate imperative for the purpose of ritual participation in Islam’s sacred origins; and (d) that a critical reconstruction and evolution of revivalism holds out the promise of a greater contribution to Muslim decolonization. For my analysis, I largely turn to the Pakistani political theologian Israr Ahmad (d. 2010), whose ideas have been disseminated widely across the Muslim world, yet who has not received the requisite academic scrutiny. Moreover, intra-revivalist critique of revivalism has been a neglected aspect in the study of revival, and its careful scrutiny should become a topic of investigation in its own right. In that regard, Ahmad offers a most important critique of earlier revival efforts and their entanglement with certain aspects of coloniality.

Struggles for the defence of territories and decolonial politics in Southern Chile

ABSTRACT This article explores the emergence of decolonial political subjectivities in the struggle for the defence of territories and against extractivism in Greater Concepción, Chile. Drawing on a dialogue between decolonial and feminist scholarship, Latin American political ecology, and the praxis of Chilean socioenvironmental movements, we argue that the struggles for the defence of territories in Abya Yala cannot be understood through the lens of modern citizenship, as they are embracing territorialized, racialised, and feminized struggles that challenge the ontological and epistemological foundations of capitalist coloniality. This contribution is informed by participatory action research, militant ethnography, and a commitment to ‘sentipensar’ the defence of Mother Earth. Our findings suggest that the feminization of the struggle, embracing of ancestral ontologies and cosmologies, and decolonization of knowledge production are three features currently shaping decolonial political subjectivities in southern Chile, opening radical possibilities of transformation.

Decolonial Post-Tribal Interpretation: Proto-Tribal Socio-Economic Contestation in 3 Reigns 12:24p-t

This article reflects on the socio-economic and tribal dimensions of both 3 Reigns 12:24p-t and the post-1994 South African transition. Mahmood Mamdani's recent book, Neither Settler nor Native, provides an analysis of political decolonisation in post-apartheid South Africa, in which he identifies two areas of failure within the significant gains made during South Africa' s transition from apartheid to democracy-socio-economic justice and tribalisation. These two areas are the unfinished business of our substantive decolonisation of the political. In this article, I use Mamdani' s analysis as an exegetical dialogue partner, probing the socioeconomic and tribal dimensions of 3 Reigns 12:24p-t and identifying this text as a proto-tribal text which documents the emergence of tribal economics. Methodologically, this article establishes a to-and-fro tripolar movement between the contemporary South African context and the biblical text.

‘Compliments from the Housewives’: Contesting White Public Space in Late-Colonial Nairobi

AbstractThis article examines the racial politics of decolonization in late-colonial Nairobi in the decade before independence through the unique space of the colonial bus using archival letters from a group of European women who called themselves ‘The Housewives’. In letters to Nairobi's mayor and the Kenya Bus Service (KBS), the Housewives argued against a newly proposed transportation policy that would make all seating on the colonial buses the same price, doing away with the first-class section. The letters reveal that African bus riders, particularly Muslim women riders, were centrally important in this crucial time in Kenya's urban history. With Nairobi still under a ‘State of Emergency’ as military operations against the Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) were coming to an end, these letters show colonial buses as battlegrounds during the final years of British colonial rule in Kenya with extremely porous social borders and transportation vehicles serving as rich sites of urban life.

Lateral colonialism: exploring modalities of engagement in decolonial politics from the periphery

This article contributes to an understanding of how the world outside the Global North is complicit in the visibility politics that render spaces of harm relevant or irrelevant to the reproduction of racism. Extending insights from decolonial theorising, we examine the colonial matrix that produces ongoing legacies of violence and racism through the case of Cyprus. As a peripheral location, Cyprus has been invisible to this story yet had a role in the distribution and mitigation of colonial violence through the institution of what we call lateral colonialism. Through this concept, we explore how peoples otherwise situated and outside the purview of these violences (non-colonisers and non-Blacks) were also enveloped and complicit in them. The case of Cypriots in Africa helps delineate three modalities of this involvement: governmental, entrepreneurial and religious. Lateral colonialism, we argue, is indispensable in linking decolonial possibilities to a global political agenda. The paper re-scripts Africa into Cypriot histories and Cyprus-qua-periphery into the decolonial narrative. In this double sense, lateral colonialism excavates connections that have been forgottern and obscured.

Cultural diplomacy, artistic network, and the politics of decolonization between Taiwan and the Philippines in the Cold War era

ABSTRACT During the Cold War, cultural engagements frequently occurred between Taiwan and the Philippines due to their military and geopolitical alliance in East Asia. This essay explores this cultural linkage at both the diplomatic and individual levels by examining the politics and aesthetics of the art exhibitions both countries participated in as well as the intellectual encounters among individual artists. The First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, a postwar art event held in the Philippines, demonstrated Taiwan’s cultural diplomacy in the Free World; it also highlighted the different figurations of colonial modernities and the emerging national identities developed in East and Southeast Asia in the postcolonial era. While the cultural linkage between Taiwan and the Philippines was a product of the geo-military strategy in the Cold War era, the translocal friendships and the artistic networks were actively maintained by the individual artists in the late Cold War years, after the Taiwan–Philippines diplomatic relation ended. This intra-regional network created an alternative trajectory of knowledge circulation that allowed Philippine leftist nationalist writings to be published in Taiwan in the latter’s martial law era. Furthermore, it provides a comparative perspective on the political discourses and artistic practices of decolonial initiatives in Taiwan and the Philippines.

Decolonial Politics: State, Statelessness, and Coexistence in Peace

ABSTRACT Due to the colonial continuities encoded in postcolonial nation-states, formal decolonisation reproduced new dominations rather than peaceful intergroup coexistence. Reflecting on the ‘how’ of decolonial politics, I argue that self-determination beyond the nation-state and spatiotemporally embedded decolonial imaginations are the undecomposable components of decolonial politics. I exemplify the failures of the nation-state through Southern (Iraqi) Kurdistan and illustrate Western (Rojava-Syrian) Kurdistan as a possible example of stateless decolonial coexistence, despite major geopolitical and socio-historical stalemates. The argument contributes to peace studies in International Relations by rethinking inter-group coexistence at the intersection of violent geopolitics and decolonial imaginations.

Reclaiming care: refusal, nullification, and decolonial politics

Reclaiming care: refusal, nullification, and decolonial politics

Epistemic silences in settler‐colonial infrastructure governance literature

AbstractThe existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing “governance gaps” commonly based on fractured and opaque neoliberal planning and delivery processes, privatisation and financialisation issues, and inequitable distribution and undemocratic decision‐making processes. These gaps represent a deeply troubling erosion of infrastructure’s capacity to serve public interests or confront crises of climate injustice. However, the literature rarely confronts the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure or acknowledges ongoing permutations of settler‐coloniality, implicating infrastructural framings of land, development, property, ownership, and decision‐making power. This paper reflects on the current state of infrastructure governance literature about ongoing settler‐colonial legacies in urban planning and development. Explaining some of the ways unceded Indigenous land has been exploited to facilitate settler state infrastructure development in major Australian cities, we then draw a line to the complicities of contemporary infrastructure governance. This foundation is considered using a systematic method to review infrastructure governance literature and reveal stark gaps in engagement with settler‐coloniality and the politics of decolonisation. In light of these silences, we reflect on disciplinary responsibilities to redress research practices and suggest two reflexive approaches centred on to truth‐telling and deep listening.

The “Airlift” Generation, Economic Aspiration, and Secondary School Education in Kenya, 1940-1960

AbstractThis article argues that the “airlift” language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the world—even though it was colonial education intended to inculcate in them British cultures and mores. The students took this education seriously because they knew it would help improve their economic status as well as that of their families. These elite students were not necessarily concerned with the politics of decolonization or the nation-state, as most studies of colonial elites at the end of empire have tended to claim. They were interested in uplifting their economic status. This uplifting was in and of itself a political act—even though it was not politically motivated.

Cultural Decolonization

Abstract The swift rise of a new guard of cultural thinkers from the margins of the Arab world during the 1970s amounts to one of the most striking yet forgotten episodes in postcolonial Arab thought. Coming primarily from Morocco, these intellectuals and activists rejected a long-seated assumption prevalent among the ranks of Arab nationalists according to which one must disown their past traditions in order to become modern. The advent of cultural thinkers posed a grave challenge to this cherished evaluation, calling into question the agenda of political decolonization that Arab nationalists had propounded. How did the new intellectual guard of cultural thinkers come to assume such intellectual power? And what change did they make in the intellectual field and Arab conversation in general? Exploring these questions, this article establishes a definitive distinction between categories of postcolonial actors that were originally clumped together. It demonstrates that the voices shaping the new world of the Arab peoples are increasingly skeptical of political decolonization of the Arab nationalists and more in sync with Moroccan cultural thinkers who take pride in their cultural repertoire and traditions.

"I wish i were my / self – mexican": Tom Raworth and Mexico

This article is the first analysis of the importance of Mexico for the postwar neo-avant-garde British poet Tom Raworth (1938–2017). Focusing on his poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it traces the centrality of Mexico, Latin America, and Spanish to Raworth's work, beginning with connections forged in the internationalist intellectual milieu at the University of Essex in 1967 and concluding with his brief residence in Mexico City in the summer of 1973. Drawing on extensive new archival material, it centers on Raworth's friendship and correspondence with the Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco (1939–2014). The article demonstrates how these exchanges gave political impetus to Raworth's experiments with the institutional forms of language-learning and how Raworth's critical engagement with Nahuatl in 1968 enabled the temporary reconciliation of linguistic experiment with decolonial politics through a critique of state violence and imperial time. Lastly, it argues that Raworth's interrogation of writing itself in the early 1970s was articulated through the "Mexican" tropes of the mirror and the mask, which provided Mesoamerican analogues for his concern with linguistic instability and the limits of expressive selfhood.