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.

Deliberative processes are an antidote to despair about the inadequacies of politics-as-usual, but the “deliberative wave” (OECD 2021) of these initiatives around the globe has the potential, in some contexts, to be the latest face of colonization. In Aotearoa New Zealand, one project has worked since 2019 to design a climate assembly that enacts Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840) obligations to honour Māori political authority. This article outlines the project's three innovations to the citizens’ assembly design that centre Māori forms of governance and reflect Māori deliberative protocols, and highlights three important distinctions to how a group of tangata Tiriti (people of the Treaty) has worked in partnership with tangata whenua (people of the land). Each feature has been vital to becoming Te Tiriti-led despite a context of ongoing colonization, with this place-based assembly having major implications for deliberation theory and practice worldwide.

African contemporary choreographers increasingly delink from Eurocentric performance conventions and work toward establishing local conditions of production and consumption by performing in public spaces. Although the labor undertaken to shift power asymmetries does not always result in structural changes, their art may be considered decolonial creative expression. Based on ethnographic research at the third and fourth editions (2022 and 2023) of Fatou Cissé’s street performance festival, La ville en mouv’ment (The City in Movement), in Dakar, Senegal, the author argues that decolonial potentiality extends beyond the precarious economic conditions to encapsulate the artists’ return to public space and futurist aesthetics.

This article critically engages with the Canadian framing of settler colonial/decolonial politics in terms of guilt and innocence. I argue that centring innocence, even as something to be snatched away from settlers, as with the theorization of settler moves to innocence, can corrupt the practice of moral responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that the desire for and expectation of innocence, in the face of structural injustices such as settler colonialism, are illusionary and that complicity is widespread. In contrast, I follow Iris Marion Young's focus on political responsibility, but I argue that public collective actions need not be as centred as she suggests. Given the nature of settler colonialism and of coloniality, I argue for the acknowledgment of the political significance of daily individual acts and for the cultivation of dispositions that disrupt unjust structures, such as a disposition to transgress.

The Taiwan Government follows the policy of active aging to prevent frailty. However, the current services lack cultural safety toward the Indigenous peoples and would benefit from a broader perspective on what active aging may entail. In this research, we study local perceptions of active aging among older Indigenous Tayal taking part in a local day club. The study identifies two formal activities that foster active aging: (a) information meetings about health and illness and (b) physical activities. In addition, two informal activities highlighted by the participants themselves were identified as necessary for promoting healthy and active aging: Cisan and Malahang. While Cisan means “social care,” Malahang means “interrelational care practices.” In conclusion, we argue for the relevance of listening to Indigenous older adults’ voices to develop long-term care services adapted to their cultural values, linguistic competence, and cosmology.

Although national self-determination emerged as an international legal norm with the formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, its implementation continued to be resisted by European colonial powers for decades after. This raises the following question: how was European colonial rule challenged at the UN? This article contends that existing accounts of decolonization have not fully theorized the processes through which colonialism was contested at the UN. It fills this gap by demonstrating the critical role of argumentation, narrativization and discursive struggles through deploying the crucial “Question of Algeria” that was debated between 1955 and 1961. It demonstrates that the Algerian question yielded two opposing discourses—an anticolonial internationalist discourse and a metrocentric civilizational discourse—with both drawing on distinct ideas about human rights and development. The analysis explains the eventual triumph of the former as states increasingly rallied behind the Algerian cause.

One of the leading features of colonialism is the imposition on a given territory and people a framework for what constitutes authority that renders pre-existing governing practices and legal orders unrecognizable as features of legitimate law and governance. Understood in this way, colonialism renders Indigenous law and governing practices invisible. As a result, decolonization requires changing how authority is apprehended and not only how it is distributed. This article compares two frameworks of authority in relation to the conflict on Wet'suwet’en territory: liberal postcolonial statism and relational pluralism. It shows how each framework provides a distinct lens through which to understand the pertinent features of political authority but argues that relational pluralism presents a better account of how to reconceive political authority in the context of real-world conflict.

Archaeologists have long been called on to use geophysical techniques to locate unmarked graves in both archaeological and forensic contexts. Although these techniques—primarily ground-penetrating radar (GPR)—have demonstrated efficacy in this application, there are fewer examples of studies driven by Indigenous community needs. In North America, the location of ancestors and burial grounds is a priority for most Indigenous communities. We argue that when these Indigenous voices are equitably included in research design, the practice of remote sensing changes and more meaningful collaborations ensue. Drawing on Indigenous archaeology and heart-centered practices, we argue that remote-sensing survey methodologies, and the subsequent narratives produced, need to change. These approaches change both researchers’ and Indigenous communities’ relationships to the work and allow for the inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) in interpretation. In this article, we discuss this underexplored research trajectory, explain how it relates to modern GPR surveys for unmarked graves, and present the results from a survey conducted at the request of the Chipewyan Prairie First Nation. Although local in nature, we discuss potential benefits and challenges of Indigenous remote sensing collaborations, and we engage larger conversations happening in Indigenous communities around the ways these methods can contribute to reconciliation and decolonization.

This article, grounded within the argument that liberal citizenship and recognition-based approaches to decolonization are inappropriate responses to Indigenous calls to decolonize, proposes an alternative approach premised on re-evaluating non-Indigenous understandings of invitation, belonging and rights within the Canadian settler state. I suggest that non-Indigenous peoples consider themselves “foreigners” in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands and that, as colonial denizens, non-Indigenous Canadians take up an ethos that encourages them to re-evaluate their lives and relations with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands and the settler state. Such re-evaluations would encourage settlers to question the sovereignty of the state and their daily relations, as well as encourage them to place responsibilities to others above inwardly focused rights. I contend that identifying and acting upon such an ethos can provide a way through which non-Indigenous peoples can appropriately and seriously meet Indigenous peoples’ calls for change.

Nationalism in the modern world began in European metropoles but spread throughout the world system in the form of anticolonial nationalism. While many studies have explored the former, this essay systematically examines the latter. Based upon an original database of 124 cases, we test multiple theories that might account for the origins and spread of anticolonial nationalism. We adjudicate between cultural-cognitive approaches emphasizing the discursive bases for national imaginings on the one hand and, on the other, theories that emphasize political-economic dynamics and elite conflict. Our time-series regression analysis suggests that while cultural-cognitive approaches best account for the initial wave of anticolonial nationalism, from 1700 to 1878, theories stressing political-economic dynamics and elite conflict explain anticolonial nationalism in the later wave, from 1879 to 1990. The analysis suggests that theories of nationalism need to be attentive to the historical specificity of their claims.

Indigenous scholars and leaders have long been interested in reducing the role of the Canadian state in their political, economic, and social lives. This paper explores the extent to which digital currencies, such as Bitcoin or MazaCoin, might be used to facilitate Indigenous self-determination, political autonomy, and economic prosperity. Based on our review of the literature, we argue that cryptocurrencies demonstrate some potential for advancing these goals but that there are a number of potential roadblocks as well. Future research should investigate how Indigenous communities might use digital currencies and other related technologies to further their political, economic, and social goals.

This article traces some of the ways in which Australian law in the post-Mabo era has functioned to discursively historicize Indigenous Australia, that is, to construct Indigenous Australia as a historical relic. I argue that despite law’s continual historicization of Indigenous Australia, there have nonetheless been “moments of decolonization,” as there have been since the colonization of Australia began, in which Indigenous Australia asserts its contemporary presence in opposition to and outside of colonial Australia. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of place and space and three examples, I argue that in these moments, Indigenous activists do not only resist the ongoing project that is settler Australia, they also create an elsewhere to it.

In this paper, I argue that Indian Residential School (IRS) litigation, and the emphasis on “cultural loss” or genocide, threatened to expose the illegitimacy of Canada’s claim to sovereignty and the settler collective’s occupancy of Indigenous lands today. When settler illegitimacy is brought into view, settler collectives typically respond with violence. In IRS case law, this violence consists of the dehumanization of the Indigenous collective as property. I trace this violence on the part of Canada (government and law) in Blackwater v Plint (1996–2005). I suggest that Canada’s “disturbing defence strategy” in Blackwater likely contributed to Canada’s signing of the 2006–2007 IRS settlement agreement that brought Baxter v Canada to a close. I conclude that settler illegitimacy, genocide, and law’s racialized violence in the present ought to trouble the settler collective’s vision of both decolonization and the role of settler law in decolonization.

This article advocates for the inclusion of intercultural dispute-resolution principles in Canadian courts to resolve conflicts between Indigenous communities and the Canadian state. These principles include judges' opening themselves up to discomfort, emotion, and unsettling in listening to Indigenous testimonies; facilitating ongoing processes for negotiation; and engaging the moral imagination to make court procedures more culturally appropriate for Indigenous testimonies. The author argues that by implementing these principles, courts can contribute to the creation of more respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.