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1 – 10 of over 4000
Book part
Publication date: 4 October 2023

Hamid H. Kazeroony

Chapter 2 offers examples of colonial and neocolonial working throughout history. This chapter defines and provides an overview of colonialism’s development and its economic and…

Abstract

Chapter 2 offers examples of colonial and neocolonial working throughout history. This chapter defines and provides an overview of colonialism’s development and its economic and administrative roots. This chapter is intended to contextualize colonialism rather than explain its complete history.

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Decoloniality Praxis: The Logic and Ontology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-951-4

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Article
Publication date: 12 June 2023

Mehdi Boussebaa

The purpose of this paper is to encourage scholars of international business (IB) to engage with the “decolonizing the university” project and reflect on what decolonizing might…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to encourage scholars of international business (IB) to engage with the “decolonizing the university” project and reflect on what decolonizing might mean for IB research and education. The paper also argues that it is particularly important for IB scholars to join the decolonizing project given that the field’s main object of study – the multinational enterprise – has been central to colonialism.

Design/methodology/approach

An essay style is adopted to introduce the decolonizing project to IB and to explain why and how this scholarly field might benefit from engaging with it. As part of that, the paper calls upon IB scholars to work on decolonizing the field and to do so by not only interrogating its knowledge claims but also broadening the scope of its research so it can address the theme of neo-colonialism.

Findings

The paper reveals the conspicuous absence of IB scholars from the decolonizing project and situates such absence within a long-standing indifference within IB to the issue of colonialism.

Social implications

In learning about and engaging with the decolonizing project, IB scholars will be able to not only enrich IB theory and education but also help to tackle one of the grand challenges facing the modern world society, namely, social inequality and injustice rooted in colonialism.

Originality/value

It is hoped that this paper will stimulate reflection on IB’s absence from the decolonizing project and assist scholars in developing an understanding of the project’s rationale and underlying literature. It is also hoped that the paper will open dialogue within IB about how this field might be decolonized and help scholars engage meaningfully with other disciplines as they do so.

Details

Critical Perspectives on International Business, vol. 19 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-2043

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Article
Publication date: 17 October 2019

David Boucher

The purpose of this paper is to show, with reference to the writings of important decolonization theorists and liberationists, how Nazism in Europe and the establishment of the UN…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to show, with reference to the writings of important decolonization theorists and liberationists, how Nazism in Europe and the establishment of the UN had a significant impetus in awakening the sense of injustice in colonised peoples in Africa and the Lesser Antilles. Colonized peoples were denied human rights through a process of dehumanization, which involved seizing “native” histories and representing them as backward, depraved and savage, awaiting the arrival of European civilization. Marxism, further supported this narrative by denying that “primitive” peoples had histories, and being unable to account for race and racism because of its emphasis on class. Colonization evolved, not into decolonization, but neo-colonialism because of the complicity of “native” bourgeois elites.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology combines historical narrative with theoretical insight from the point of view of the colonised, such as Fanon, Cabral, Mimmi, Ceasare, Nkrumah, etc. It is hermeneutic in its methodology.

Findings

Peoples of the Lesser Antilles and Africans were dehumanized; denied human rights; and dehistoricized. Prominent liberation theorists develop these themes and reject elements of Marxism in order to reflect the unique experiences of the colonised. Colonization gets under the skin of the colonised and persists in contemporary societies. Colonization was replaced by neo-colonialism, not decolonization.

Research limitations/implications

The implications are to bring to the fore the importance of colonialism in relation to western practises of anti-Fascism and the promotion of human rights, while perpetrating Fascist modes of behaviour and denying human rights in colonised countries. Far from being simply an historical phenomenon the insidious implications persist.

Social implications

The demonstration of how deep the roots of colonialism go, and how difficult the task of decolonization has become as a consequence of systematic western “penetration”.

Originality/value

It looks at colonialism and its widespread injustices through the activists who suffered at the hands of a system of rule based exploitation and dehumanization effected not only by seizing their land, but also their history language and culture, ensuring that decolonization became transformed into neo-colonialism.

Details

International Journal of Social Economics, vol. 46 no. 11
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0306-8293

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 19 September 2022

Christian Fuchs

This chapter reflects on calls for and processes of the de-colonisation of academia and the study of media, communication and the digital. It asks: what does it mean to…

Abstract

This chapter reflects on calls for and processes of the de-colonisation of academia and the study of media, communication and the digital. It asks: what does it mean to de-colonise academia and the study of media, communication and the digital? How can academia be transformed in progressive ways? This essay takes a Radical Humanist and Political Economy perspective on de-colonisation, which means that it is interested in how capitalism, power and material aspects of academia such as resources, money, infrastructures, time, space, working conditions and social relations of production shape the possibilities and realities of research and teaching. This essay stresses the importance of defining (neo-)colonialism as foundation of debates about de-colonisation and engages with theoretical foundations and definitions of (neo-)colonisation. It identifies how material forces and political economy shape and negatively impede on the university and academic knowledge production. It provides perspectives for concrete steps that can and should be taken for overcoming the capitalist and colonised university and creating the public interest and commons-oriented university and academic system.

Abstract

Details

Duty to Revolt
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-316-4

Book part
Publication date: 4 December 2009

George Steinmetz

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational…

Abstract

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational text in this regard was Michel Leiris' Phantom Africa (L'Afrique fantôme; Leiris, 1934), which described an African ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule as a form of colonial plunder. Leiris criticized anthropologists' focus on the most isolated, rural, and traditional cultures, which could more easily be described as untouched by European influences, and he saw this as a way of disavowing the very existence of colonialism. In 1950, Leiris challenged Europeans' ability even to understand the colonized, writing that “ethnography is closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers like it or not. In general they work in the colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent on their country of origin, and even if they receive no direct support from the local representatives of their government, they are tolerated by them and more or less identified, by the people they study, as agents of the administration” (Leiris, 1950, p. 358). Similar ideas were discussed by French social scientists throughout the 1950s. Maxime Rodinson argued in the Année sociologique that “colonial conditions make even the most technically sophisticated sociological research singularly unsatisfying, from the standpoint of the desiderata of a scientific sociology” (Rodinson, 1955, p. 373). In a rejoinder to Leiris, Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged in Work and Workers in Algeria (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie) that “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system,” but he insisted that the “problems of science” needed to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience” (2003, pp. 13–14). Since Bourdieu had been involved in a study of an incredibly violent redistribution of Algerians by the French colonial army at the height of the anticolonial revolutionary war, he had good reason to be sensitive to Leiris' criticisms (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). Rodinson called Bourdieu's critique of Leiris' thesis “excellent’ (1965, p. 360), but Bourdieu later revised his views, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order” (1990, p. 3). At the 1974 colloquium that gave rise to a book on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Le mal de voir, Bourdieu called for an analysis of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science (1993a, p. 51). A parallel discussion took place in American anthropology somewhat later, during the 1960s. At the 1965 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Marshall Sahlins criticized the “enlistment of scholars” in “cold war projects such as Camelot” as “servants of power in a gendarmerie relationship to the Third World.” This constituted a “sycophantic relation to the state unbefitting science or citizenship” (Sahlins, 1967, pp. 72, 76). Sahlins underscored the connections between “scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo” and called attention to the language of contagion and disease in the documents of “Project Camelot,” adding that “waiting on call is the doctor, the US Army, fully prepared for its self-appointed ‘important mission in the positive and constructive aspects of nation-building’” a mission accompanied by “insurgency prophylaxis” (1967, pp. 77–78). At the end of the decade, Current Anthropology published a series of articles on anthropologists’ “social responsibilities,” and Human Organization published a symposium entitled “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences.” British anthropologists followed suit, as evidenced by Talal Asad's 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. During the 1980s, authors such as Gothsch (1983) began to address the question of German anthropology's involvement in colonialism. The most recent revival of this discussion was in response to the Pentagon's deployment of “embedded anthropologists” in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” in the AAA asked “researchers to sign an online pledge not to work with the military,” arguing that they “are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives … However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards” (“Embedded Anthropologists” 2007).3 Other disciplines, notably geography, economics, area studies, and political science, have also started to examine the involvement of their fields with empire.4

Details

Political Power and Social Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-667-0

Book part
Publication date: 4 October 2023

Hamid H. Kazeroony

This chapter reviews the nuances of colonialism, exploring the role of Arab expansion, the inter-African slave trade system, the Christianity position on slavery, similar slavery…

Abstract

This chapter reviews the nuances of colonialism, exploring the role of Arab expansion, the inter-African slave trade system, the Christianity position on slavery, similar slavery systems in Asia and Europe, and the impact of colonization after 1400. Using the historical examples of African colonization and its growth into international trade through time, I will examine the scars of colonialism.

Details

Decoloniality Praxis: The Logic and Ontology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-951-4

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 22 June 2020

Jurgen Poesche

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of requirements for firms’ codes of conduct when addressing homophobia in the context of continued colonialism and…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of requirements for firms’ codes of conduct when addressing homophobia in the context of continued colonialism and coloniality.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is a literature study.

Findings

First, occidental firms’ codes of conduct are shown to endanger indigenous homosexual individuals by endangering the protection offered by their indigenous ethics and society. Second, it is shown that tackling homophobia in firms’ codes of conduct on the foundation of occidental ethics forces homosexual individuals to conform to occidental homosexual identities in a world of a multitude of indigenous and hybrid homosexualities and identities render firms’ codes of conduct expressions of continued colonialism and coloniality. Third, a sole reliance on occidental conceptualizations of homophobia is shown to potentially camouflage unethical nationalistic and xenophobic intents.

Research limitations/implications

Additional research is needed on the dynamics of coexisting multiple indigenous homosexual identities, and reliable ways to determine the substance of indigenous homosexual identities need to be developed in the context of continued colonialism and coloniality.

Practical implications

Firms need to be cognizant of conflicting identities, hybrid identities and changing identities over time while avoiding to use purported protection against homophobia as a camouflage for nationalistic and xenophobic purposes.

Social implications

The paper ways to address the protection against homophobia in firms' codes of conduct in the context of continued colonialism and coloniality.

Originality/value

This paper closes a gap in the literature by considering firms’ codes of conduct as favouring homophobia as a result of continued colonialism and coloniality.

Details

International Journal of Law and Management, vol. 62 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1754-243X

Keywords

Abstract

Details

Organizing Disaster
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78560-685-4

Book part
Publication date: 30 September 2021

Heidi Nicholls

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and…

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it presents an interpretive analysis of state, military, and academic discursive strategies. The US empire-state attempts to construct colonial narratives of race and sovereignty that rehistoricize the history of Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples. In order to make claims to sovereignty, settler-colonists construct narratives that build upon false claims to superiority, advancement, and discovery. Colonial resignification is a process by which signs and symbols of Indigenous communities are conscripted into the myths of empire that maintain such sovereign claims. Yet, for this reason, colonial resignification can be undone through reclaiming such signs and symbols from their use within colonial metanarratives. In this case, efforts toward decolonial resignification enacted alternative metanarratives of peoples' relationships to place. This “flip side” of the synecdoche is a process that unravels the ties that bind layered myths by providing new answers to questions that underpin settler colonial sovereignty.

Details

Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-219-6

Keywords

1 – 10 of over 4000