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1. China's Colonial Boarding Schools in Tibet

Author:
Lhadon Tethong, Freya Putt, Jia Luo, Tenzin Dorjee, and Andy Nathan
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
Chinese government policies are forcing three out of every four Tibetan students into a vast network of colonial boarding schools, separating children as young as four from their parents. According to a recent report by Tibet Action Institute, the schools are a cornerstone of Xi Jinping’s campaign to supplant Tibetan identity with a homogenous Chinese identity in order to neutralize potential resistance to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. The report, “Separated From Their Families, Hidden From the World: China’s Vast System of Colonial Boarding Schools Inside Tibet,” finds that an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 Tibetan students aged six to 18, as well as an unknown number of four and five-year olds, are in these state-run schools. This panel will discuss how the schools function as sites for remolding children into Chinese nationals loyal to the CCP.
Topic:
Education, Culture, Children, Colonialism, and Boarding Schools
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Tibet

2. Mobility and Empire in Japanese History

Author:
David Ambaras, Martin Dusinberre, Takahiro Yamamoto, Youjia Li, and Paul Kreitman
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
This panel will gather four scholars engaged in ongoing research on the history of mobility (and immobility) within and beyond the borders of Imperial Japan. Takahiro Yamamoto (University of Heidelberg) will present on “Identification documents and human mobility in the Japanese empire,” exploring how foreign diplomatic pressure and the need to surveil the mobility of colonial populations influenced the Japanese government’s border control policy. Martin Dusinberre (University of Zurich) will present a paper titled "The Archiving of Japanese Mobility in late-nineteenth century Queensland", analysing the history of Japanese migration to Australia under British colonial rule. Youjia Li (Harvard University) will focus on the role of human locomotive power in Japan's formal empire in her paper "The Unexpected Network: Push-car Railways and the Change of Local Mobility in Colonial Taiwan" . David Ambaras (North Carolina State University) will serve as discussant.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Migration, Border Control, History, Colonialism, Empire, and Mobility
Political Geography:
Japan and Asia

3. Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach

Author:
Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch, Zachariah Mampilly, Diana S. Kim, Parisa Vaziri, Denis Regnier, Sean Jacobs, Wendell Marsh, Stephen J. King, Eric Hahonou, Paul A. Silverstein, Afifa Ltifi, Zeyad el Nabolsy, Bayan Abubakr, Yasmin Moll, Zachary Mondesire, Abdourahmane Seck, Amelie Le Renard, Sumayya Kassamali, Noori Lori, Nathaniel Mathews, Sabria Al-Thawr, Gokh Amin Alshaif, Deniz Duruiz, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Efrat Yerday, Noah Salomon, and Ann McDougall
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
In February 2020, the editors of this volume organized a POMEPS workshop that explored the origins of the disciplinary divide between the study of Africa and the Middle East, examining issues that span both regions (i.e., cross-border conflict, Islamist politics, social movements and national identity, and Gulf interventionism.) In February 2021, we convened another workshop, sponsored by POMEPS and the newly-founded Program on African Social Research (PASR, pronounced Pasiri) centered on racial formations and racialization across the two regions. Both workshops centered around the need for a genuinely transregional scholarship, one which rejects artificial divisions between ostensibly autonomous regions while also taking seriously the distinctive historical trajectories and local configurations of power which define national and subregional specificities. The workshop brought together nearly two dozen scholars from across multiple disciplines to explore the historical and contemporary politics of racial formation across Africa and the Middle East.
Topic:
Islam, Race, War, Immigration, Law, Slavery, Judaism, Colonialism, Borders, Identity, and Amazigh
Political Geography:
Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Middle East, Asia, South Africa, Yemen, Palestine, North Africa, Egypt, Madagascar, Tunisia, Oman, and Gulf Nations

4. Kanak Mukherjee (1921-2005): Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle

Author:
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Abstract:
The twentieth century was marked by national liberation struggles that emerged in Africa and Asia, as well as in Latin America where neo-colonial structures had subordinated the formally independent countries. The achievements of the Russian Revolution in 1917 inspired the peasantry and the working class across the Global South. The fight for equality and liberation under the leadership of working people are ongoing in the anti-imperialist struggles of our time. Women, in a myriad of ways, powerfully shaped and continue to shape all of these struggles. In the Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we will present the stories of women in struggle who contributed not only to the wider arena of politics, but who also pioneered the establishment of women’s organisations, opening up paths of feminist resistance and struggle throughout the twentieth century. Praxis, as a knowledge of theory and of organisational methods of struggle as they change and respond to history, gives sustenance to ongoing struggles to face oppression. As militants, we study the diverse organisational methods of these women not only to better understand their political contributions, but also to inspire us as we build the organisations necessary for our fight against oppression and exploitation today. In this second study, we discuss the life and legacy of Kanak Mukherjee, a fighter for the people and people’s struggles who was born in undivided Bengal, India, in 1921. The rich trajectory of her activism teaches us about the history of women organising in local, national, and international struggles that linked women’s rights to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles throughout the twentieth century. In Mukherjee’s own words: ‘We cannot see the question of women’s rights in isolation. The roots of women’s subjugation and the discriminations against them lie in class exploitation’.
Topic:
Education, Imperialism, Colonialism, Feminism, Biography, and Gender
Political Geography:
India and Asia

5. The Farmers’ Revolt in India

Author:
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Abstract:
Despite India’s achievement of a certain level of self-sufficiency in food production over the decades, the chronic agrarian crisis, often manifested in the suicides of farmers, persists. This dossier traces the causes of this crisis, which go back to the days of British colonial rule and to the choices made by the Indian state at various points since independence.
Topic:
Agriculture, Food, Food Security, Colonialism, and Farming
Political Geography:
India and Asia

6. Dawn: Marxism and National Liberation

Author:
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Abstract:
Dossier no. 37 is an invitation to a dialogue, a conversation about the entangled tradition of Marxism and national liberation – a tradition that emerges out of the October Revolution and that deepens its roots in the anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is an introduction to a wide-ranging conversation that includes many different revolutionary movements, mostly rooted in the continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Topic:
Socialism/Marxism, Colonialism, Revolution, Liberalization, and Anti-Colonialism
Political Geography:
Africa, Asia, South America, Latin America, and North America

7. Domein Verklaring: Colonial Legal Legacies and Community Access to Land in Indonesia

Author:
Jeffrey Neilson
Publication Date:
11-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Abstract:
In 1870, the Dutch colonial government established the principle of domein verklaring (free state domain) in its East Indies colony when it enacted agrarian laws to promote private investment. The now-independent Indonesian nation is still trying to resolve the principle’s implications for community access to land, which threaten the long-term sustainability of livelihoods across the country. Further legal recognition of pre-existing customary rights over land is required to prevent exacerbating the marginalization of rural community interests.
Topic:
Agriculture, Civil Society, History, Law, Colonialism, and Land
Political Geography:
Indonesia, Asia, and Southeast Asia

8. European Turkey and European Morocco: Two Identity Construction cases in the path to the EEC membership

Author:
Volkan Ipek and Selin Turkes-Kilic
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Turkish Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
Institution:
Sakarya University (SAU)
Abstract:
This article analyzes Morocco’s and Turkey’s full membership application processes to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1987 from an identity perspective. The construction of both Morocco’s and Turkey’s European-ness are explored alongside aspects of postcolonial and modernization theories rooted in the poststructuralist approach by taking official discourses of the political leaders in the two states at the time of application into account. In the conventional narratives of the establishment of their modern states, Morocco perceived Europe as its other due to the history of European colonialism, whereas Turkey perceived Europe as its other considering it a threat to its national unity prior to the establishment of the Republic in 1923. In spite of this, two states tried to add European-ness into their national identities through their application to the EEC in 1987. In this way, Morocco and Turkey aimed at demonstrating not why European but how much European they were. In Morocco’s case, an obligation for demonstrating one’s European- ness is explained through the lens of postcolonial theory, and in Turkey’s case, the modernization paradigm is applied. Departing from these theoretical standpoints, the study focuses on official European-ness discourses by Moroccan and Turkish leaders, which had taken place as dynamic processes. In this respect, the article unravels how Europe and European-ness that was once regarded as the other by Turkey and Morocco were tried to be included into Moroccan and Turkish national identities on the path to become a full member to the EEC.
Topic:
Post Colonialism, Regional Cooperation, Colonialism, Modernization, Economic Cooperation, and European Economic Community
Political Geography:
Africa, Europe, Turkey, Asia, and Morocco

9. GOING TO PENTECOST An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism

Author:
Annelin Eriksen, Roy Llera Blanes, and Michelle MacCarthy
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Book
Institution:
Berghahn Books
Abstract:
Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.
Topic:
Post Colonialism, Religion, Economy, and Colonialism
Political Geography:
Africa, Asia, Australia, Angola, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea

10. Nationalism and development in Asia

Author:
Prasenjit Duara
Publication Date:
08-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
This paper identifies historic patterns in the dialectic between nationalism and development across various East, South, and Southeast Asian nations. Nationalism as the rationale for development is used by regimes to achieve high levels of growth, but also generates exclusivism and hostilities, often in order to integrate a political core. Popular nationalism has also dialectically reshaped the goals and patterns of development during the post-Second World War period. The region is divided into zones shaped by twentieth-century historical and geo-political conditions. Colonial and Cold War conditions were as important as internal political and ethnic circumstances. Turning points in the dialectical relationship were common within a region. More recently, a common transregional pattern has emerged with neoliberal globalization being accompanied by exclusivist nationalism.
Topic:
Development, Nationalism, War, History, and Colonialism
Political Geography:
Asia