Ice geographies: The colonial politics of race and Indigeneity in the Arctic By Jen RoseSmith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 304 pp.

ABSTRACT This paper excavates the spatial politics of Moroccan settler colonialism in Western Sahara between 1975 and 2010. Taking the 2010 Gdeim Izik protest, as a starting point, the paper maps Morocco’s spatial strategies of conquest in Laâyoune and Western Sahara. The Moroccan government refashioned Western Sahara as part of ‘Greater Morocco’ to be pursued through what Samia Henni terms the architecture of counterrevolution, the production, destruction, and reorganization of built forms to consolidate control. I detail these spatial transformations across three phases: (1) closing the frontier of Greater Morocco (1975–1991), infrastructure for the elimination of the Native in Laâyoune (1991–2003), and refashioning assertions of sovereignty (2003–2010). By accounting for the Moroccan government’s counterrevolutionary spatial practices in Laâyoune and wider Western Sahara, this paper invites further inquiry into the how both urban space and the built environment serve as resources for analyzing settler colonialism in and beyond Western Sahara.

ABSTRACT Drawing upon the book Birds of Passage: Henrietta Clive's travels in South India 1798–1801, a compilation of travel accounts Henrietta Clive penned during her journey in the Southern part of India, this study explores the socio-political and historical background of her travel during the late eighteenth century. The study highlights the turbulent background of the fall of Tipu Sultan as perceived and documented by a female traveller whose loyalties lie solely with the empire. The paper argues that for a female traveller like Clive, upholding English domesticity in a colonised setting proved profoundly political. Furthermore, the study concludes that Clive upheld a subservient self-fashioning shaped by her class, education and ideology, which unquestioningly extended her subject position as a facilitator of the imperial agenda by representing the authority of the colonial masters even in private spheres.

<i>Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic.</i> By Jen Rose Smith

Jim Tully's “Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond” provides an exemplar account of the modes of theoretical and dialogical engagement required for recovering non-Western thinkers and provincializing Western political thought. I argue that Tully's approach helps explain the provincialism of anticolonial political theory in matters of political economy even while it substantively fails to follow its own dictates. By provincialism I mean the lack of sustained attention to Third World Marxist thinkers and their critique of capitalist political economy, despite their centrality in the anticolonial tradition. To explain this oversight, I argue that post-Cold War Anglo-American political theory narrowed the engagements with anticolonial thinkers because of its own detachment from a critical political economy. This, I argue, diminished the ability of anticolonial political theory to place capitalist accumulation through the expropriation of nature and labor as central to the politics of colonialism and the unjust world that ensued after decolonization.

This commentary builds on Mikko Joronen's concept of malevolent weathering – the deliberate production of atmospheric conditions that pollute to enable spatial appropriation. The commentary positions malevolent weathering within broader debates on landscapes and airscapes of malevolence in Palestine. It then expands the purchase of malevolent weathering to a broader set of ordinary, yet impactful weathering, floating across diverse geopolitical contexts. It argues that Joronen's perspective, binding the colonial politics of terra with those of atmos , opens critical research avenues into more ordinary weathering that envelops contentious urban politics, major geopolitical shifts, and political mobilisation.

ABSTRACT Despite growing scholarship on epistemologies, not enough attention has been paid to decolonizing the building of knowledge in Global South communities. In this essay, I present critical reflections on working in qualitative research to co-create knowledge with my community. I bring attention to power hierarchies and how they can be reproduced in the process of knowledge production. I argue that scholars need to intimately understand the social, political, cultural and historical context of marginalized communities if they are to co-create knowledge that truly represents these communities while safeguarding the dignity of interlocutors. I highlight the importance of engaging interlocutors with an ethic of care, navigating language politics and grounding knowledge production in the values of community-engaged scholarship. Using Ghana as the focus, I outline practical epistemological strategies on how to navigate local (cultural) norms, bring nuance to the sampling process, while understanding the complexities of language politics in the field. I present practical tools on how qualitative research can be designed, paying attention to preserving the dignity and supporting the self-determination of marginalized communities.

The Aceh War (1873-1903) was one of the most critical and protracted armed conflicts in the history of Dutch colonialism in the Indonesian archipelago. This article aims to examine the background of the Aceh War through a thematic approach to three key aspects: colonial political expansion, the influence of Islamic ideology, and community participation, as manifested in the "People's War" (Perang Semesta). The study employs a descriptive qualitative approach grounded in a review of secondary sources, including historical books, academic papers, and digital archives. The findings show that the conflict was fueled not just by Dutch colonial ambition following the 1871 Sumatra Treaty, but also by jihad discourse bolstered through religious writing like The Hikayat Perang Sabil and collective social opposition. This research highlights the importance of an interdisciplinary approach in understanding local resistance as a multifaceted manifestation of political, cultural, and spiritual conflict.

The intersection of Shakespeare and critical race studies has become increasingly visible in recent years, due in part to critiques of now-mainstream “historical” approaches that inadvertently reinforce Shakespeare’s historical status as a tool for racial and colonial oppression. However, this body of work has yet to account for the role of property relations - a capitalist construct upheld by liberal formations of the subject - in structuring conversations about the politics of anti-colonial Shakespearean appropriation. This article addresses that gap by examining Arthur L. Little Jr.’s term “white property” as a phrase that signals common ground between divisive colonial politics and entrenched assumptions about to whom Shakespeare “belongs.” Specifically, I look at two plays from the recently published Bard in the Borderlands anthology (ed. Gillen, Santos, and Vomero Santos; ACMRS Press, 2023) to detect how English-Spanish bilingualism plays a critical role in delineating cultural and other forms of property as matters of contestatory ownership between discrete communities on the U.S.-Mexico border. I argue that these linguistic contests reveal dominant concepts of theft and counter-theft that not only govern relationships within the plays, but reveal the unconscious investments of U.S. Anglo audiences steeped in Shakespeare as “white property.” In conclusion this article, by closely examining theft and property as ideas central to anti-colonial Borderlands appropriation, offers a new lens on scholarly conversations about trans-cultural Shakespeare production.

This review concentrates on the fiscal practices of settler colonial states and societies such as Canada and the United States. Synthesizing critical interdisciplinary literature, I characterize how the fiscal forwards settler political goals of civilization, dispossession, and possession of Indigenous people, nations, and territory. Emphasizing the sociality and material power effects of fiscal colonialism demonstrates how practices like taxation have been administered historically and contemporarily around imperatives of settler authorities and against Indigenous nationhood. Organized around the knowledge politics of fiscal colonialism, the review foregrounds how fiscal discourses, techniques, and knowledge forms are integral to understanding settler colonial legal and political framing of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, this literature analyzes how public finance is structured and constituted by racist economic hierarchies, political ideologies, and property regimes that inscribe anti-Indigenous imperatives into law, state repertoires, and social practices.

In this work, based on specific factual material, the relationship between the state and religion in Kazakhstan in the period from the beginning of the XX to the beginning of the XXI centuries is studied and described. The main stages of the development of these relations were identified: the period when our country was part of the Russian Empire with its colonial political and economic system; the Soviet period, with its radical measures to secularize society and harsh anti-religious policies.; the period since the beginning of Kazakhstan's national independence, the revival of religious life and the formation of a new model of state-confessional relations. Based on a comparative analysis, the most important features and peculiarities of each of these stages are identified, their impact on social processes, and the forms of relationship between official authorities and religion that developed during these periods are compared. The prerequisites and causes of the most important and significant changes in the religious policy of the official authorities in the analyzed periods and their consequences are revealed. Based on the results of a consistent presentation of the material on the problem under study, a description is given of the peculiarities of the relationship between the state and religion in Kazakhstan at the present stage, which traces the desire of the authorities to ensure the rights and freedoms of believers and religious organizations, combining the principles of secularism with support for traditional religions and ensuring a balance between freedom of conscience and national security.

&lt;p&gt;This article is a book review of &lt;em data-start="425" data-end="501"&gt;Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race &amp; Indigeneity in the Arctic&lt;/em&gt; by Jen Rose Smith, published by Duke University Press in 2025 (ISBN: 978-1-4780-3177-2). The review, authored by Jacqueline Stagner, summarises the main themes of the book, including the relationships between glaciers, race, indigeneity, and colonial politics in the Arctic. The text outlines how the work engages with history, science, Indigenous knowledge, and climate change.&lt;/p&gt;

ABSTRACT This paper examines the politics of the 1849 anti-convict movement that emerged in the British Cape Colony in southern Africa in response to the designation of the colony as a penal settlement and the impending arrival of three hundred British convicts on board the ship Neptune. It argues that anti-convict political agitation was a form of popular xenophobia, in which foreignness was assigned to ‘convicts’ rather than to a specific national, ethnic, or racial origin. Within this popular xenophobia, Cape colonists invoked frames of reference that encompassed their local, racialised politics of colonial expansion as well as knowledge of a wider imperial world, particularly Ireland. In the Cape’s xenophobic mobilisation, we see how local and global frames of reference were melded and politicised as the settler public sought to constitute itself against perceived threats of ‘outsiders’, including convicted felons and Africans. The ‘convict crisis’ exposes multiple scales of historical and political context, which simultaneously localise the meaning of colonialism and globalise the patterns of knowledge that informed colonial politics. This history underscores local and political variations of colonial relationships, rather than systemic and institutional modes of colonialism, through interrogating how Cape colonists envisioned, rationalised, and acted on their ‘colonial project.’

Despite its contribution to Mozambique’s colonial economy and to the urban development of Lourenço Marques (contemporary Maputo), tourism remains a marginal theme in the historiography. Bridging this gap, this article aims to map tourism’s pivotal role in shaping regional dynamics and racial politics in the decolonisation era. It invites an exploration of colonial tourism as a regional system of leisure mobility taking shape across white-ruled settler colonial states in southern Africa. A regional lens is important not only because white South Africans and Southern Rhodesians accounted for the majority of the tourist economy in Mozambique, but also because tourist economies and practices were fundamentally entangled with the racial politics of settler colonialism and decolonisation. By examining the white tourist trade and a much more elusive strand of black leisure mobility, the article shows that tourist encounters politicised the everlasting question of colonial racism in Lourenço Marques.

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. disproportionately harmed Indigenous peoples and brought long-standing calls for increased data collection and data accuracy about systemic issues in Indian Country to national attention. Advocates believe data can help support Indigenous people and address past harms. However, we explore two consequences that arise from data inclusion within the context of Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the U.S. colonial state. First, we assert that data demands often lack direct collaboration with Indigenous nations and agencies, resulting in data inclusion that reifies and legitimates exploitative U.S. colonial structures of power and domination. Second, the articulation of Indigenous life using statistical data analyses risks solidifying the racialization and categorization of Indigenous people in ways that obviate their political authority and self-determination by rendering them as populations rather than polities. We conclude by offering two Indigenous-led examples of data collection and data communication that refuse Indigenous erasure and advance Indigenous futures. These represent an invitation for future scholarship to actively consider the multiple ways data can be used and refused in efforts to end U.S. colonial domination, especially given that data has long been used to pathologize and criminalize Indigenous peoples.

Abstract The fragmentation in Malacca’s urban space largely stems from historical planning issues, initially driven more by external pressures than developmental guidance. Based on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) theory, space syntax, topological modeling and Spatial Design Network Analysis (sDNA) methods, this study compares the spatial characteristics of Malacca during the Dutch period and the early years of Malaysian independence and analyzes the process by which the urban fabric was shaped and its relationship to the geopolitical context. The early compact and matrix street network of Malacca was designed to protect against risk. The change in economic and political focus was reflected in a linear shift in urban centrality from inland to port. The transition in spatial depth from “constrained” to “free” reflected a shift in urban structure from “intensive” to “diffuse”. The results of the analysis of the sDNA and topological models in terms of urban centrality converge and reveal that Malacca already had a tendency towards polycentric development in 1958 and that the old network centers of 1764 still play a partial role. The study is consistent with the hypothesis that the main drivers of urban development in early Malacca were external pressures and were influenced by its colonial political and economic reconstruction. This study attempts to explain how spatial configurations responded to external risks, but the correspondence between certain historical events and the urban fabric remains unclear due to the scarcity of historical data.

Abstract This paper considers the practical application of the metaphor of “good boundaries” for working towards better interspecies relationships and multispecies cultures. Engaged philosophical methods are employed in the context of the author’s family farm with attentiveness towards both multispecies and colonial politics. The analysis centers interspecies relational dynamics across a spectrum of liminal forms of life on “the property,” in the “homestead,” and under the guise of “stewardship.” The paper concludes that the metaphor of good boundaries helps to generate better multispecies entanglements by (i) growing our capacity for ecological thinking, (ii) directing our attention to moral failure, and, at times, (iii) disrupting anthropocentric colonial ideologies and practices.

Story collection—the practice of generating art or research by gathering participant narratives and combining them into a single product—is a popular method used by socially engaged artists and art education researchers. This ethnographic case study germinated with the examination of a story collection artwork executed at a gallery in a co-governed Indigenous–settler community in northern Canada. It expanded to consider how both my ethnographic methods and social practice art enact extractive, settler colonial approaches to knowledge. Working from Indigenous studies scholarship, particularly Sean Glen Coulthard (Yellowknife Dene), I show how repeated misrecognition of what Indigenous (and even settler) residents valued contributed to a local phenomenon of storytelling fatigue. This is a form of exhaustion brought on by excessive requests from outsiders to contribute to a project or artwork. These findings signal the need for artists, galleries, educators, and researchers to scrutinize how their undertakings are informed by the settler colonial politics of recognition.

Provenance research on cultural artefacts and ancestral remains housed in European museums often focuses on the circulation networks shaped by colonial relationships, and examines how collections were acquired and interpreted by museological institutions through biased colonial perspectives (O'Hanlon and Welsch 2001; Cochrane and Quanchi 2011; Turner 2016; 2020). While such criteria are necessary, they present challenges with regard to perspectives from Indigenous communities entering museological discourses. This paper utilises autobiographical approaches to position Indigenous methodologies on an equal footing with conventional provenance research practices. Informed by the authors' visits to museum collections and provenance research conducted with Chamorro objects and human ancestral remains in Germany and Spain, as well as research conducted in the Mariana Islands, our approach to provenance research does not simply remain in the archive, but draws from living communities. Through the authors' varied positionalities, we critically reflect on our own networks and personal trajectories; these led us to advocate for the ethical care and reactivation of cultural objects and human ancestral remains that have become museum collections, primarily through the hands of European collectors and museum institutions. The article ultimately challenges traditional approaches to provenance research by asserting Indigenous decolonial methodologies as the centre of the research (Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Viernes 2015; Melonche et al. 2021). The outcomes of this research demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge and relationships to cultural belongings can powerfully reactivate a specific set of ethics and responsibilities, while challenging the colonial politics of European museums: ones that are often reproduced through conventional provenance research.

ABSTRACT While critical heritage studies have emphasised the need to decolonise heritage practices, the legacy of colonial-era heritage-making remains largely underexplored. This article examines the early proclamations of five rock art sites as National Monuments in Namibia during the 1950s. Through an analysis of the historical and political dynamics, alongside the involvement of leading archaeologists with colonial administrations, this study uncovers the intricate relationship between rock art heritage-making and colonial politics. For the first time, drawing on extensive archival research, it traces the emergence of Namibia’s first heritage body, the Historical Monuments Commission, and examines how rock art was instrumentalised within colonial frameworks – the appropriation of precoloniality. By revisiting this critical period, this article offers a nuanced perspective on the tensions between colonial heritage-making and contemporary decolonial efforts.