This study addresses the mental health needs of refugees and migrants in the Netherlands, highlighting the urgent public health challenges they face. Unique psychosocial hurdles, exacerbated by cultural dislocation, language barriers and systemic inequalities, hinder their access to quality mental healthcare. This study explores how coloniality intersects with mental healthcare access, using a decolonial framework to challenge stereotypes and assumptions that marginalize migrant voices. Through semi-structured interviews with migrants and language service providers, this research reveals the complexities of navigating the mental healthcare system. Findings reveal that temporality, professionalism and language barriers are key issues in migrants’ mental healthcare journeys. We advocate for systemic changes that prioritize migrant perspectives. Ultimately, this study aims to inform policy and practice to enhance mental health services for migrant populations in the Netherlands and contribute to the broader dialogue on decolonization in mental health.

Appeals to “decolonize” now range widely, from decolonizing the university to decolonizing Russia. This article poses the question of what work the concept of decolonization can and cannot do. It underscores how much can be learned about how decolonization came about if one explores the different goals that activists sought in their time. It suggests that if instead of looking for a colonial “legacy,” we explore historical trajectories of colonization and decolonization, we can reveal how political, economic, and social structures in both ex-colonies and ex-metropoles were shaped and reshaped over time. Finally, it brings into conversation with the literature on the decolonization of the empires of Western European states more recent scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union, pointing to different forms of imperial rule and imperial collapse and also to the possibility of “reimperialization,” of reconstituting empire in new contexts.

This essay makes the case that law in most of Africa has, since colonial times, been used as a framework of domination and imperialism. This has always been through repugnancy/supremacy clauses, which were predicated on the highly problematic assumption that European ways of knowing were superior to the African ones. This essay also demonstrates that, sadly, these clauses are still on the statute books of many African countries and continue to haunt the protection through law of Africa’s precious and unique tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The essay also shows that another way through whichthe development of African heritage was arrested through law was by criminalizing traditional Indigenous practices, which European imperial powers did not fully understand in terms of ontology. It is also argued that the same problems bedeviling the legal protection of African cultural heritage at the domestic level haunt this protection, even at the regional level(s). African regional courts continue to sadly apply alien notions of law to the exclusion of majority Africans. International law, being state-centric, has not been applied in the African context to revolutionarily protect African heritage. Where it has done so, it has been failed by the states or has been generally limited by its problematic colonial foundations. Finally, it is agued that African states need to de-elitesize, de-Westernize and decolonize the law if it is to effectively protect cultural heritage and property and make meaning to the ordinary African. This is urgent and imperative from a cultural, security and geopolitical vantagepoint.

This paper examines the fissures within recent decolonial debates, arguing for the privileging of alternative narratives from formerly colonized groups and a shift away from centring colonialism. It calls for the recognition of decolonial struggles whose histories run deep and the need to link the struggles with indigeneity, its poetics of relations, and connectedness. Therefore, decoloniality requires thinking and doing and paying attention to social and economic well-being of hitherto marginalized indigenous communities, while giving due recognition to their poetics of relationality, reciprocity, and conviviality. Drawing on the example of #RhodesMust Fall movement in South Africa, it raises difficult questions around ownership, agency, while pointing to cracks that this contemporary movement surfaced, in spite of its claim to decoloniality.

This article critically examines the major shortcomings in multi-country security investments in East Africa during the war on terror. It argues that these investments have not only failed to adequately recognise African contexts but also falls short of recognising the agency of local communities in counterterrorism efforts. Drawing on critical terrorism and security studies, as well as excerpts from interviews with practitioners in Kenya, the article identifies gaps in the prevailing approach that treats Africa as a unitary entity and critiques the notion of universality of knowledge ingrained in these interventions. By taking a decolonial perspective, the article challenges some prevailing constructions about Africa, linked to the war on terror, as the source of this notion of universality of knowledge. By highlighting the connection of counterterrorism strategies to coloniality and the systemic exclusion of subaltern voices, the discussion suggests that a more contextually informed approach is a precursor to envisioning Africa positioned beyond the war on terror.

Based freely on the writings of Hoseyn Qoli Khān Nuri, Persia's first ambassador to the United States (1888–1889), Haji Washington (1982) was Ali Hatami's first feature film following the Islamic Revolution. This article explores Hatami's departure from historical record in light of his aesthetic and political appropriation of Nuri's image as a failure. Viewing the film through a methodology that recasts failure as decolonial praxis beyond post/colonial mastery, I argue that Haji's embrace of failure, and his ultimate adoption of relationality as a mode of worldliness, constitute a “decolonial aesthetics of failure” with broad implications for both the world of the narrative and the moment of the film's production in postrevolutionary Iran.

The traditional drafting and subsequent implementation of international refugee law have been criticised for relying on a male-centric understanding of persecution. Whilst this framework has recently shifted to include a more gender-sensitive interpretation, I argue that this introduction of gender within refugee status determination has traditionally relied on narratives infused with gendered and racialised stereotypes. In particular, it relies on a ‘white saviour’ colonial narrative that perceives refugee women as vulnerable victims in need of saving. Drawing on a decolonial and critical epistemological analysis that includes both a race and gender dimension, I unpack the epistemic violence and hidden colonial legacies in the representation of refugee women in case-law. Ultimately, this article concludes with a call for reframing the legal narrative around refugee women by approaching them as political actors rather than oppressed and vulnerable subjects.

This article critically engages with the discipline of African musics in the academy. It examines the process of curriculum transformation of the African music section at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town since 2005 as an emergent curriculum model for an integrated approach to the teaching of African musics at universities. The adoption of this curriculum predated the 2015–2016 fervent calls in South Africa to decolonise the university, which necessitates an approach to teaching African musics not rooted in its colonial past. As is known, the study and research of African musics in the academy partly stemmed from the efforts of European (and later US) researchers who often received support through the British colonial administration and much of their output seemed to be focused on convincing their peers about the virtues of ‘African music’ and the study thereof. Despite this history, there is evidence to support the fact that in most African universities, the music departments are far more interested in teaching Western art music and its virtues. In recognition of the calls by students for radical changes to the curricula in South African universities, the article seeks to answer the question ‘how do we consider ongoing changes to the knowledge both received and produced in this field?’

The comparative analysis of three “contested truths” around COVID-19 in East Africa demonstrates that knowledge is a product of knotted, uneven, and disputed epistemological practices tied to structures of power. Lee, Meek, and Katumusiime examine: (1) the construction of a pan-African skepticism of COVID-19 that drew on anti-imperialist discourses; (2) social media posts through which Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated steam inhalation as an alternative therapeutic for COVID-19; and (3) the resistance by many Ugandans to complying with public health measures such as lockdowns. “Contested truths” is used as an analytical framework to center the specificity and situatedness of truth-making in East Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic.