This chapter focuses on the memory of migrant passages at the French–Italian Alpine border. Building on an abolitionist perspective, it contends that for understanding current solidarity movements, it is crucial to trace the genealogy of migrant struggles and mobilisations in their support. It deals with archives of migration and shows how these are formed by scattered and partial traces. It reconstructs the genealogy of the different migrants who crossed the border and how they were classified: Italians who fled the country for political reasons or to find a job in France in the aftermath of World War II; Eastern Europeans in the 1950s and 1960s; and, most recently, people from countries in the Middle East and Africa.

India may not yet be leading global science, but it is clear that scientific advancement in India has been pulling and pushing global science in various ways that force attention. Following an overview of Indian’s science structure, this chapter focuses on two critical events. Central to India’s Bt crops saga is the question ‘who is “worthy” of being heard’. One striking character of the Bt crops disputes was that there was no readily-available categorical term to distinguish the pro- and anti-GM camps, for they were both formed by a coalition of government institutions, scientists, civil groups and industries and both evoked a post-colonial rhetoric and the necessity for ‘good science’. Conventional ways of designing and delivering regulations can easily be trapped in a self-referential ‘bureaucratic amplification of credibility’ which has limited ability to speak, let alone respond to diverse risk preferences. Meanwhile central to the global controversies stirred up by Indian experimental stem cell therapies was the question ‘who could do science’. Geeta Shroff captured Western attention perhaps partly because she presented an enigma about who could ‘afford’ to be defiant to conventional scientific communities – communities she didn’t align herself with but whom she impacted nonetheless. For governance to be effective, it has to stay relevant to the subject it aims to govern. This chapter argues that the legitimacy and authority of the global governance of science is becoming ever more dependent on its perceived fairness and inclusivity of diverse groups of practitioners.

This chapter deals with some of the registers of colonial amnesia that compose the Parisian landscapes. In response to the politics of selective memory, or what I propose to call the ‘world heritage regime’, I map a transcontinental approach to urban planning. My analysis links Frantz Fanon’s and Françoise Vergès’ decolonial and feminist critiques of the racialisation of the city with Reinhart Koselleck’s critique of war memorials, which suggests that no national memory can be neutral. Thereby, I seek to recontextualise the category of heritage in its colonial/modern history and to resituate the places of global significance (heritage sites) within a transcontinental cartography. For this aim, I engage in a reconstruction of the history of Paris through its entanglements with the colonies first during the world exposition of 1889, and secondly in the planning of the banlieues and the cities of Algiers and Rabat. In the conclusion, Paris’s urban history is intertwined with French colonial history to situate the banlieues as a monument of (post)colonial legacy and decolonial memory. This reconstruction of the history of the city through its historical and geographic margins contribute to the countermapping of the systematic exclusion of racial violence from national and global history, which I identify as a decisive analytical tool for decolonial thought and, more specifically, for a critical decolonial critique of urban planning.

This chapter reflects on strategies for decolonising the post(real)socialist city in the present and future. Inspired by the demands of postcolonial and decolonial urban initiatives, we trace three sites of remembrance in Cottbus, Germany. Highlighting the complex ways of how (real)socialist modernity was involved in the reproduction of the ‘coloniality of power’, we uncover different processes of social hierarchisation and classification that have shaped the urban context. At the same time, we reflect on the critical potential that (real)socialism offered against colonial orders and relations. We conceptualise the different facets of modernity/coloniality in the urban post(real)socialist space as urban ‘imperial difference’. Uncovering urban sites of remembrance that reflect the colonial legacy of (real)socialism in their meaning for the transformed society of Germany today, however, means making explicit the profound processes of racial hierarchisation and exclusion in the city.

In what other registries and imaginaries might we locate cities along the northern Mediterranean shores that are now thought of as European? This chapter looks at Barcelona and Salonika as Europeanised but not necessarily European cities. In examining their historically diverse urban centres, contact points of migration patterns and more recently sites of migrant settlement, we try to provide insight into different approaches to migrant claims to and contestations of both the cityscapes and their embedded memories. Eurocentric readings and makings of these cities have flattened out or erased their not-so-European urban and social fabric. Situated in decolonial de-linking and divesting from the ways in which these cities are moulded and modelled in Eurocentric epistemologies and imaginaries, this chapter looks at migrant and queer of colour politics and historicity that circumvent the pressure and strengthening of ethnic, racial, national, and post-national European mythologies by identifying with the city and its neighbourhoods while producing multicentred and intersectional narratives and spaces of belonging, becoming that de-Europeanise urban space.

This final chapter brings together the themes and cases visited in the book and asks what a de-colonised global governance may look like. The book ends with an invitation to ponder the question ‘what global science will have been?’ This future anterior framing was first proposed by the feminist scholar Tani Barlow. This linguistic construct draws attention to the fact that the anticipated future is embedded in the present (or that a present scenario was embedded in the past). More than at any time in world history, the sciences, especially the life sciences, are shaped by the confluence of private pursuits, national ambition and transnational assemblages. Thus to ask the question ‘what global science will have been?’ is to draw attention to current power struggles and resource imbalances that both stimulate and confine emerging sciences. On the basis of previous chapters, the authors collect their final thoughts on how a decolonised governance of the life sciences can be achieved through reflections on topics of time, place and people.