In 1959 and 1960, Cameroonian women nationalists visited the People’s Republic of China. These members of the Union démocratique des femmes camerounaises (UDEFEC) practiced what I term a “diplomacy of intimacy,” which highlighted the effects of colonialism on their bodies, fertility, and intimate relationships to create a shared affective experience of anticolonial solidarity with their Chinese counterparts. Expanding the definition of “diplomat” to reflect how diplomacy functioned in the decolonizing world reveals that women played a much larger role than previously understood. These women diplomats remained largely invisible to the Western powers and to the postcolonial Cameroonian government, but Chinese sources provide a valuable vantage point on their diplomacy. By drawing on sources from Cameroon, China, France, and the UK, I demonstrate that during decolonization African nationalist women represented their parties on the world stage, exercising far more diplomatic power than appears in histories of decolonization focused on the West.

The article analyses archival materials from the drafting of the UN Marriage Convention (1962) between 1949 and 1962. This Convention is usually understood as a human- and women’s rights Convention. The article expands this understanding by showing that the Convention was produced through a collaboration between the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and the Trusteeship Council, Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories, and metropolitan administrators of former colonies, then having the status of dependent territories. The treaty-makers focused exclusively on marriages in the dependencies but were in great doubt about the form and amount of force in these marriages. They, accordingly, were unsure how to measure such force. Nevertheless, they proceeded with the drafting, as their visions of free marriage and emancipated women were bolstered by their commitment to the ongoing economic transformation accompanying decolonization of the territories. The article shows how human rights of marriage thus emerged from ideas about economic development convoluted with ideas about marriages and women; and articulates this history’s theoretical implications for the rights’ applicability today. It also expands our understanding of international women’s rights as regulatory models, and of the post-colonial political economy of international law.

A change frequently encounters opposition from analytical minds prior to being embraced. This paper discusses the complex biological, psychological and social causes of criminal tendencies and their neurological triggers. The endocrine system, notably cortisol, changes behaviour and cognitive functions, which might lead to criminal tendencies when exposed to prolonged stress and adverse socio-economic conditions. The paper discusses the legal framework under Section 84 of the Indian Penal Code, presently Section 22 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS). The authors contend that Indian criminal law failed to decolonize when the BNS preserved the same idea of “unsoundness of mind” without much alteration. The study examines issues in defining “unsoundness of mind” and how the accused bears the burden of proof. The authors also support diminished responsibility as a legal defence in accordance with international precedents and emphasize that legislative adjustments must embrace scientific developments. The article emphasizes rehabilitation and community-based therapy over punishment, citing the Mental Health Care Act, 2017, for neurologically impaired offenders. It suggests cognitive–behavioural therapy, education and vocational training for young offenders. The findings of this research suggest that a neuroscientific-informed legal system can improve justice, public safety and offender reintegration by prioritizing rehabilitation over punishment.

This article tries to explain the flourishing of geopolitical alternatives to the nation-state form and foreign policies organized around giant militarized power blocs during the two decades after World War II. The first section presents these new approaches to organizing the world. The first set of alternatives consisted of ideas and practices of the federation and the amalgamation of states into larger political units. These included Senghor’s vision of a postcolonial federation in which France and its former colonies would be equals; Nkrumah’s vision of a United States of Africa; and various short-lived amalgamations of states, including the Mali Federation and the United Arab Republic. These new geopolitical alternatives also included nonalignment, which originated with Jawaharlal Nehru of India and culminated with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia but also encompassed Ireland between 1957 and 1961 and France in the early Fifth Republic. One of the distinctive features of this conjuncture is that these experiments were not limited to the global peripheries, colonies, and recently decolonized states, but also characterized certain nonhegemonic European core countries. The second section examines a set of four factors in this period that created an opportunity structure or space of possibilities for geopolitical experimentation: (1) late colonialism; (2) the Cold War; (3) the character of decolonization; and (4) the United Nations. The coexistence of these factors opened spaces of maneuver and autonomy for a flourishing of geopolitical imaginaries. The final section discusses possible reasons for the end of this period of experimentation.

A museum should be a place where cultures, dialogue, and social relations are enhanced. Given the renewed public interest in the topic, the author poses the question: Is there a need and a possibility to decolonize ethnographic museums? Should we have common and shared practices? In an attempt to eliminate colonial vestiges in museums, an analysis of literature and practices leads the author to analyze five European ethnographic museums in order to understand their merits and shortcomings. The subjectivity of these institutions and the diversity with which colonization can be presented makes the proposal of a single generalized solution not preferable. An objective analysis, based on actions and variables, drives the author to determine, however, that in order to revitalize museum practices, there is a need to create a sharable framework. The design of minimum standards can help museums set clear and measurable goals to achieve a higher level of decolonization.

This article studies the aftermath of the Second World and decolonization (1945–1960) in the Indo-Burmese highlands, challenging predominant notions of state-building. Using the ‘Zomia’ heuristic, it argues how trans-border Naga tribal communities residing in so-called ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ between British India’s Assam province and Burma neither entirely resisted states, nor attracted uniform state interest. This dual refusal of states and social actors reveals negotiated sovereignty practices, using violence. The article illustrates the Naga tribes’ agency in negotiating with colonial and post-colonial states by using mimetic discourses of primitive violence, represented by headhunting. Violence served as a significant means of communication between communities and state agents, amounting to shifting cultural and territorial boundaries. Such practices selectively securitized colonial frontiers that became international borders post-decolonization. Gradually, violence and the desire for development invited state extension here. The article reveals that uneven state-building and developmental exclusions by bordering created conditions for violence to emerge. It engages scholarship on ‘Blank Spaces’ to analyse the varying sovereignty arrangements that produced ‘checkered’ zones. It highlights the relationship between spatial history and violence to explain the persistence of coercive development and demands for more borders and states today across highland Asia. It uncovers the embeddedness of violence in creating and challenging developmental and democratic exclusions in post-colonial nation-building projects. The analysis complicates imperial legacies of producing territorial enclosures within democracies, allowing exceptional violence to occur. More broadly, it complicates contemporary geopolitical cartographic contests and stakes of state-possession, using historical methods with approaches from anthropology and political geography.

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 paper examines how, in politically polarized contexts, people reconstruct the biographies of contested memorialized figures to challenge or reproduce dualistic metanarratives of national history. We analyze two sites of recent controversy in Scotland and Lithuania which have been engaged in struggles over how to memorialize individuals who, at various points in their lives, engaged in acts of both anti-imperial resistance and collaboration in those same empires’ systems of oppression. Their moral liminality—a term we employ to refer to the transgression of moral categories—blurs the boundaries between perpetrators and victims of imperial violence, calling into question binary frameworks underpinning broader national narratives. Based on a comparative media analysis of debates over the legacies of David Livingstone and Jonas Noreika, we find that though some people in both Scotland and Lithuania have embraced these figures’ moral liminality, others have, instead, suppressed aspects of their biographies to uphold traditional distinctions between national “heroes” and foreign “villains.” We argue that such moral binaries are either blurred or reproduced through the manipulation of three aspects of liminal figures’ biographical records: their agency, motives, and social impact.

We trace the formation of the Kadehine, a Mauritanian cultural and political movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a focus on aspects of the “political underground” central to the movement’s strategies and organizing principles. As an anthropological history of the Kadehine, we focus on the organizing perspective afforded by its sources (largely interviews and movement literature). These sources emphasize the importance of clandestinity, as well as the influence of New Left ideas. We then develop a concept, “political underground,” describing the importance of clandestinity and its relationship to the radical politics of its time.

Population growth was a pivotal issue in the United Nations during its first decades. The global population was growing steeply, and most of this growth took place in the formerly colonized states. Population trends were framed as an aspect of development and became object of extensive international activities, outside the UN and within. The paper explores the population discourse of those years with a focus on the UN and on the relationship with international law. It traces, firstly, the UN documents engaging directly with population growth and aiming to influence national population policies. Secondly, the paper suggests that the framing of population growth as problem of development stressed its causal role for poverty and food insecurity. The struggles for a New International Economic Order coincided with the international focus on population growth, partly with competing interpretations of reasons for global economic inequality. Thirdly, the paper suggests that the activities within the UN played a central role in shaping the discourse. While the activities of governments and private organizations were significant, it was through the authority of the UN that the development-population-nexus achieved such dominance.

There has been increasing attention both at national and international level to demands of reparations for historic injustices—colonialism, enslavement and the transatlantic chattel slave trade—and the role and relevance of international law in this context. A routinely identified legal obstacle to reparation demands is the doctrine of intertemporal law, which is generally interpreted to require past acts to be considered in the light of the law contemporary with them. This interpretation of the intertemporal doctrine has been contested more recently in international legal scholarship and practice, which both seek to instill an increased sense of ambiguity into the laws of the past, but crucially, this Article shows, these efforts do not extend this ambiguity to the doctrine of intertemporal law itself. This Article takes a closer look at the intertemporal doctrine and interrogates these varying interpretations. It analyses both conventional and critical international legal scholarship on the intertemporal doctrine in the context of reparation claims for historic injustices and contrasts them to the scholarly reception of the intertemporal doctrine in the past and selected cases from the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), arguing that whilst an often–unquestioned static understanding of intertemporality prevails, more dynamic interpretations of the doctrine also exist. By building on these legal arguments that enshrine a less static relationship between past and present laws within the discipline of international law—including ICJ decisions, judges’ dissenting opinions, states’ arguments, and critical legal scholarship—the Article defends a potentially emancipatory interpretive approach to the doctrine that could reframe it so as to support, rather than hinder, reparation claims for historic injustices in international law.