What’s Next for the Aid & Development Sector?

Post-colonialism has not brought to an end the perpetuation of colonial power structures and suppression. The ex-colonized countries still suffer from many forms of colonialism. In Manipur, a state located in the northeastern corner of India within the monsoonal tropics, complex political and cultural issues such as insurgencies, militarization and problems of Hinduization interweave through the post-colonial scenario. The rise of insurgencies after Manipur’s merger to the Indian Union in 1949, have resulted in armed conflicts within the state and have brought situations of turmoil and suffering to the people. Prior to British colonization, Hinduization had already begun in the 15th century and the ‘cultural insurgents’ of Manipur to this day consider it a lasting imperialist force which tries to subjugate and suppress the Indigenous culture and religion of the people of Manipur. In these circumstances, theatre, which is the closest medium to the people, evolved as a decolonizing agent by proposing self-determination and peace building. Hence, by taking the account of Manipur and its Indigenous Meitei theatre form of Shumang Kumhei, this paper attempts to discuss the power and purpose of theatre in situations where political, religious and cultural suppression still operate and colonial structures still function, now in neocolonial forms.

Neoliberal rural development patterns have restructured rural areas by reinforcing (neo)colonial power relations, oligopolistic value-chains and monotheistic notions of knowledge and development. This paper critically examines the narrative of organic agriculture as a transformative food policy , evaluating internationally acclaimed organic agrarian policies within a post-growth framework. The analysis demonstrates that top-down policy development and asymmetrical multistakeholder dialogue frequently reinforce (neo)colonial power dynamics and provoke renewed resistance among rural populations. Through an analysis of three case studies in the Global South (Sikkim, India; Ndiob, Senegal; and Kauswagan, the Philippines), this study demonstrates that top-down sustainable interventions often result in further deregulation of agricultural contexts as they create new opportunities for growth and capital accumulation.

In the intersection between postcolonial literature and folklore, there is an exploration of identity, memory, and resistance. Folklore, with its oral traditions, rituals, and cultural expressions, is not only a repository of communal knowledge but also a medium for preserving cultural identities. In postcolonial literature, these narratives are often revisited to critique colonial histories, question hegemonic structures, and reclaim indigenous voices. This intersection allows us to explore how colonial and postcolonial realities (One example of this postcolonial reality is the colonial power structure seen in the form of Senanayak and his exploitation of the tribes) shape and reinterpret folk traditions. Themes such as gender, caste, ecological wisdom, and subaltern resistance emerge prominently, highlighting how folklore bridges the past with contemporary struggles for identity and justice. The integration of folklore into postcolonial texts not only subverts colonial erasures but also fosters a renewed appreciation of the socio-political relevance of folk narratives in a globalized, digitized world. This paper shall underscore the potential of folklore in enriching postcolonial discourse, reshaping cultural memory, and advocating for social and ecological sustainability. This paper shall try to explore how Indian postcolonial literature incorporates folklore to subvert colonial narratives, reclaim indigenous identities, and resist socio-political injustices. Through detailed analyses of texts such as Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Mahasweta Devi’s short stories, and Kamala Das’s poetry, this paper shall examine the interplay between oral traditions, cultural memory, and identity. Additionally, it will also investigate how folklore in postcolonial literature provides ecological wisdom, redefines gender roles, and navigates the challenges of modernization. By demonstrating the dynamism of folklore in preserving and reinterpreting heritage, the paper shall highlight its relevance in addressing contemporary cultural and ecological crises.

Bringing together research and practice, this paper presents the tests carried out to evaluate environmental impacts of a proposal for urban development in Buenos Aires. The building forms, according to present codes, result in free-standing slabs, clearly differing from the existing low-rise residential area and street frontages, typical of most Latin-American cities. A large metropolis with a population of over 10 million inhabitants, Buenos Aires has many features in common with other cities in the region founded by the Spanish colonial power and laid out with the orthogonal grid. The development of an urban sector, promoted by the Buenos Aires Municipal Government for private initiative and currently under public discussion, replaces an urban motorway project from the period of military rule. This specific case study is used to test techniques and tools for application in current and future proposals and demonstrates implementation for sustainability in the urban design and planning process. The example focuses on the environmental impacts of the built form in the context of urban transformation to provide valuable information during project development or when planning codes and building regulations are modified. It also demonstrates the importance of experimental and decision-making supportive techniques for designers, developers and planners.

The legal systems of most African countries are a legacy of past European colonial powers, which at independence stayed largely intact, protecting private property rights and land tenure inequalities. The former British colonies covered a larger combined land area than any other colonial power, and this article applies a legal history approach to land law “genealogies” in four of them: Nigeria (West Africa), South Africa, Kenya (East Africa), and Zambia (Central Africa). The three professions most involved with land (law, surveying, and planning) were part of colonial power structures, associated with violent evictions, the “dual mandate” separating private property rights from African land tenure, and separate governance arrangements for urban areas that contributed to unplanned peri-urban settlements.

In the context of the First Opium War (1839-42), this paper discusses the complex interplay between military identities and colonial power structures in Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire (2015). Using the personal and cultural changes of the characters in the colonial military apparatus, Ghosh explores how British colonial authority influenced and undermined traditional social orders and identities of Indian soldiers, or sepoys. It focuses on characters like Kesri Singh and reveals changing loyalties, cultural dislocation, and challenges of being a sepoy in an ambiguous role, being both coloniser and colonised

This research paper examines Sonia Kamal's Unmarriageable (2019) as a postcolonial narrative that oscillates between 'assimilation' and 'resistance,' ultimately producing a mimicry of colonial literary form. Homi K. Bhabha's concept of 'mimicry' helps analyse the tendencies of mimicry and a desire for assimilation in Kamal's narrative. Bill Ashcroft's concept of 'writing back' explains how postcolonial writers use literature to reclaim their cultural identity, rewrite history, and counter the dominant Eurocentric perspective. The research contends that while writing back, instead of creating a narrative rooted in Indigenous culture, Kamal's work reflects a propensity to replicate her colonial predecessors' literary forms and structures. This form of mimicry serves as a tool to resist in a postcolonial context through literary re-appropriation. This study critically examines how Unmarriageable (2019) serves as a site of cultural negotiation, where the desire for acceptance (assimilation) within the global literary world results in a significant mimicry of English literary traditions. The study examines whether such mimicry undermines the potential for authentic expression and merely reflects the influence of colonial power structures in shaping postcolonial literature, or whether, as the analysis suggests, mimicry can be valued as a meaningful reimagining and a form of resistance that offers a rich perspective on postcolonial identity by reinterpreting the plot of Pride and Prejudice (1813), a novel rooted in colonial representation. Keywords: assimilation; resistance; writing back; mimicry; Bhabha DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2026-3201-15

This article examines Sahar Khalifeh’s novel Wild Thorns through the perspective of temporal disruptions as a means of decolonial resistance. Khalifeh’s text, situated in the Israeli-occupied West Bank post-1967 war, critiques colonial structures that constrain Palestinian existence and autonomy. This analysis employs Walter Mignolo’s concept of border thinking, María Lugones’ colonial/modern gender framework, and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity to demonstrate how Wild Thorns utilizes narrative techniques such as fractured chronology, shifting perspectives, and deliberate omissions to generate temporal disjunctions and counteract the colonization of Palestinian time. The novel’s refusal to follow linear narrative progression becomes a prerequisite for decolonial resistance, allowing characters to reclaim temporal sovereignty despite the occupation’s attempts to regulate Palestinian temporality. This article examines how everyday activities and minute details in the novel disrupt the colonizer’s fantasy of a static, pre-colonial time, revealing how Khalifeh’s text creates alternative temporal frameworks that allow for Palestinian agency and resistance. This study contributes to decolonial literary theory by demonstrating how temporal ruptures in fiction can challenge colonial power structures and open up possibilities for alternative futures.

Sensing and knowing Country in deeply colonised southeastern Australia is affected by persistent undermining, in both physical and metaphorical forms, by individuals, organisations and structures. Physical undermining occurs when extractive regimes, such as mining, damage Country while metaphorical undermining can play out when Indigenous knowledges are not centred when engaging with Country. Ngayirr Ngurambang: Sacred Country near Mudgee, Wiradjuri Country, an art exhibition led by Wiradjuri curator Aleshia Lonsdale, aimed to invite people to experience, engage with and awaken to these challenges. The exhibition brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from regional places, to reflect on, and build, sensibilities and knowledges of one part of this Country: The Drip, Goulburn River National Park. The physical undermining of this treasured women's water place comes from encroaching coal mines in the region while a form of metaphorical undermining arises in persistent settler colonial structures and processes. By drawing together insights from the curator, artists and participants of the exhibition, through interviews and qualitative surveys, this paper argues that artmaking and receiving can push against colonial hegemonic structures and enable different sensing and relational onto-epistemologies that are based in respect.

The term ‘Post-colonial identity and discourse’ is the cultural, social and political web that prevails in societies following the end of the colonial rule. This interconnected terminology also negotiates colonial structure of knowledge production and representation seeking to decentre Eurocentric perspectives and amplify marginalized voices. This paper seeks to achieve the objective of fostering alternative visions of self-determination, sovereignty, and solidarity among formerly colonized peoples by employing Foucauldian analysis on Kamila Shamsie's novel, "A God in Every Stone." Drawing upon the works of Michel Foucault (2016) and through a close reading of key characters and events, this analysis elucidates how colonial power structures and systems of knowledge production intersect in the novel to shape individual and collective identities. The present study is qualitative in nature. The data has been collected through the close reading technique of the A God in Every Stone. Moreover the findings of the study suggest that the elements of power and resistance are present in the novel and further the researcher has found different dimensions of Foucault’s power, i.e., Sovereign power and disciplinary power through the dialogues of the characters as mentioned in the novel. The upcoming researchers can compare different literary works based on the presence of element of power and resistance. They can further compare different dimensions of power in the same literary text in the years to come.

Truth and authority are key concepts in settler colonial knowledge systems that inform Aboriginal health policy: ‘truth’ about policy ‘problems’ and authority in who can determine policy solutions. The growing...

Recent scholarship on the need to decolonize refugee research, and migration research more generally, points to the urgency of challenging ongoing colonial power structures inherent in such research. Increased involvement of scholars with lived experience is one way to challenge and remake unequal and colonial power relations. Through discussions with researchers of forced migration, we aimed to explore the challenges, barriers, and supports related to involvement in such research, and to identify how research practices and structures could be improved to increase and facilitate the involvement of scholars with refugee backgrounds. In this field reflection, we highlight key points and suggestions for better research practice that emerged from these discussions. In doing so, we are endeavouring to contribute to the important ongoing conversation about ethics and decolonizing research. We build on existing ethical guidelines by opening up some of the complexities of ethical practice and offering concrete actions that can be taken to work through these.

This study examines the negotiation of identity and female resistance in the short story Mawar di Kanal Macan by Iksaka Banu, focusing on the dual oppression faced by women in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Using a descriptive-analytical method and a postcolonial feminist approach, the research explores how colonial and patriarchal power structures shape women's identities and incite resistance. Drawing on theories of identity, subalternity, and hybridity, the analysis investigates how women in subaltern positions negotiate their identities within dominant power structures. Furthermore, it examines how hybridity and intersectionality create spaces for resistance through both subtle and overt actions. The findings reveal that the main character, Adelheid Ewald, navigates complex identity negotiations due to the intersecting influences of colonial and patriarchal dominance, with resistance manifesting in legal and symbolic forms. These insights contribute to postcolonial feminist discourse in Indonesia, offering a deeper understanding of how women assert their agency despite operating within layered systems of oppression. The study suggests further exploration of other literary works that engage similar themes to expand discussions on identity and resistance in postcolonial societies.

Alongside the incorporation of moral and ethical philosophy into geographical thought (see our linked Oxford Bibliographies article Geography and Ethics), there runs a parallel and equally important set of debates focused on how geographers might enact and inhabit ethical practices through their work. These concerns have had a major influence on the development of geographical research methodologies, while opening up significant new terrain for ethical reflection about the conditions under which geographical knowledges and subjectivities are produced, and the intellectual and material spaces through which they circulate. Foundational in this regard has been the considerable influence that Feminist Ethics have had on showing that ways of knowing the world are necessarily produced through differently situated and embodied positions in the world. Resonating across subsequent developments, including significant steps toward a long-overdue reckoning with colonial and imperial power structures, these strands of Ethics in Emerging Geographies have advanced understanding of the intersecting forms of social difference that shape our ethics, politics, and pursuit of justice, as well as the motivations, perspectives, and experiences that inform notions about what it might mean to be a critical geographer in the contemporary academy. Recent developments also include challenging established distinctions between “researcher” and “researched” through calls for participatory ethics, and contemplating how research both with and by children, Indigenous societies, or marginalized groups might recast ethical approaches and procedures. Geographers, particularly those working with notions of embodiment, emotions, and affect, have experimented with new understandings of ethics beyond traditional forms of moral philosophy and the normative. These various waves of ethical praxis have increasingly challenged, recast, and fragmented established modes of doing geography, often by asserting non-Western intellectual visions of the world and engaging with posthuman philosophies in ways that recenter perspectives from the Global South and in the context of the Anthropocene. At the same time, a whole raft of critical questioning and discussion has sought to unsettle the everyday Ethics of Geographical Practice: concerning, for example, geographical writing, publishing, and citational cultures; the conduct of teaching, learning, and education; and notions of collegiality, care, and collective endeavor. Much of this work has called into question the motivations for scholarship and the very purpose of the academy itself. Nonetheless, such important provocations seem to have resulted in a stronger sense of what really matters and what is ultimately at stake in our everyday geographical practice. We would like to thank the generous response from an anonymous reviewer, whose constructive and encouraging feedback helped finalize this bibliography.

Following its formation in 2013, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has evolved into an important social and political movement. However, the organization’s efforts to oppose racial inequality and police brutality through protest routinely have been met with a violent response by law enforcement, including the employment of various “less-lethal” weapons. This article aims to explore and analyze the ways in which tear gas has been used to discipline BLM protesters between 2014 and 2020. Drawing upon themes of race, empire, identity, war, and biopower as they coalesce within metropolitan protest sites, this article argues that colonial logics, power structures, and hierarchies inform the deployment of tear gas on BLM protesters today. While the eras of slavery and Jim Crow may have formally ended, their legacies and exclusionary structures continue to influence the way movements for Black advancement are suppressed using tear gas.