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Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

This study aims to investigate how the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Chinese outward foreign direct investments (FDI) impact the Belt and Road countries (BRCs). It draws on postcolonial theory to investigate the (geo)political objectives behind the financial and economic means.

In line with the nature of postcolonial studies, the study applies a discourse analysis integrating it with empirical data on indebtedness and trade.

This study finds that FDI and the BRI, as a development project, need to be considered a double-edged sword for the receiving countries. The authors provide evidence that China has instrumentalized financial and economic means to gain political influence and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Moreover, investments into sensitive sectors (e.g. energy, infrastructure), combined with the BRCs’ inability to pay back loans, could eventually lead to China gaining control of these assets.

The study investigates the financial and economic means that are instrumentalized to gain political influence while not considering flows of technology and know-how. It also limits itself to the study of FDI coming from one specific country, i.e. China. Therefore, no comparison and evaluation are made of FDI from other countries, such as the USA or European countries.

By revealing noncommercial objectives and geopolitical ambitions that China pursues through the BRI, the authors derive policy implications for the BRCs, third countries and China.

The study contributes to postcolonial theory and neocolonialism by investigating how China uses financial and economic means to achieve noncommercial objectives and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Additionally, the authors enhance the understanding of FDI by highlighting more subtle aspects of the complex and contextual nature of FDI as a social phenomenon, which have been overlooked thus far. The authors challenge the predominant positive framing of FDI and provide a counterpoint to the way FDI is often coined.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral education. Pandemics throughout history have generated new educational theories and practices, accelerated some trends and signalled the abrupt end of others. The unpredictable effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have particularly impacted upon First Nations and transcultural communities and People of Colour throughout the globe. A second significant recent global trend that occurred at the height of the pandemic was the reignited #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) protest campaign. This campaign drew attention to the vast inequities faced by black, transcultural (migrant, refugee, culturally diverse and international) and Indigenous peoples and triggered rapid action in higher education institutions against racism and unconscious bias.

This conceptual paper draws upon postcolonial/decolonial theory to demonstrate how the COVID pandemic and #BLM movement prompts us to revitalise doctoral education.

These two issues have created renewed urgency around the need to decolonise higher education and a desire to transform the “business-as-usual” geopolitical power dynamics that continue to privilege Northern knowledge over culturally diverse knowledge systems from First Nations and transcultural contexts. A key site where special opportunities exist to effect this transformation lies in doctoral education. Doctoral education is a significant location of new knowledge creation and the development of the world’s future researchers.

Applying post/decolonial theory enables one to rethink how doctoral education should be changed to work towards greater decolonisation.

This study applies Santos’ ideas about “the sociologies of emergence” in the global South to think about how doctoral education should be reconstructed as a liberated zone of decolonisation and epistemic justice.

In the 21st century, placing higher education institutions in the global world has become the norm. Therefore, many higher education institutions in Ghana and across the globe have set out to internationalise or become world-class universities as part of their strategic ambitions. Thus, finding ways to become visible on a global scale and transcend beyond the countries in which they operate has become of major interest to most universities. The authors of this chapter were curious to determine how universities adopt imported organisational templates as a strategic ambition. One should not assume that the semblance of such imported concepts is mere institutional isomorphism stemming from internationalisation and globalisation. The study employed semi-structured interviews and institutional documents as data collection tools among ten (10) university actors in a flagship university in Ghana. The study used postcolonial theory to critically examine the drivers and current practices embedded in dominant hegemonic global discourses, such as internationalisation. The findings revealed that the drivers and reforms underpinning university internationalisation ambition are framed within economic rationalities, producing human capital, self-marketisation to promote visibility, and a quest for global competition couched within global neoliberal ideology. The study recommends the need for university actors to (re)focus and (re)evaluate university internationalisation discourse to ensure a balance between local relevance and global forces.

The psychological foundations of consumers’ reasons for product choices are analyzed in the field of marketing. The purpose of this research is to identify the implicit reasons for white meat consumption in the UK and Turkey.

In the scope of the means-end chain theory, in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals, and the reasons for consumers’ product preferences were revealed by moving from concrete to abstract.

It has been determined that the white meat consumption of Muslims in the UK is primarily shaped by their religious approach. In Turkey, on the contrary, both consumption patterns and reasons for preference are changing. It has been found that white meat consumption is associated with values such as security needs, satisfaction with life, self-fulfillment and happiness.

This research has contributed to the marketing literature by examining consumers’ implicit consumption reasons for white meat in the context of religion and culture.

Marketing strategies should focus on building trust in halal certification, particularly in the UK. Brands should associate their promotion strategies with feelings of security and happiness, which are associated in the minds of consumers.

This study is a new study in terms of revealing the connotations of consumers about consuming chicken and fish and showing the implicit needs that the brands can emotionally associate with.

This article explores the use of informal socio-cultural practices to mitigate formal institutional voids in a qualitative study of informal self-employment in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Informal socio-cultural values and practices such as ubuntu and indaba were observed to be making meaningful contribution to business and lives. Development of formal institutions as a consequence was not observed though. The article proposes that economic development efforts might best serve communities in sub-Saharan Africa by facilitating institutional development that converges with local socio-culturally informed practices rather than focus on attempts to absorb informal work into a homogenously understood formal institutional system.

In this chapter, Mousumi De presents the principles and implications of CRT in the context of Asian and Asian American experiences including the perspective, features, strategies, and new directions on how to facilitate the preparation of teacher candidates and work with all teachers to understand the complexity of the Asian and Asian American identity, their racialized experiences, and their sociohistorical, transnational contexts that continue to influence their lived experiences. This chapter highlights the important issues and challenges facing Asians and Asian Americans that have been camouflaged by their stereotypical treatment as model minorities. It also shares the work of many scholars on approaches for promoting diversity and inclusion, such as implementing anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and inclusive history curricula, cultural citizenship education, teaching for social justice, and culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching for addressing the marginalization of Asians and Asian Americans.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.