Under the influence of a rapidly warming climate, abrupt changes have been observed along the coast of Greenland. This commentary is based on a Japanese research project initiated in 2012, in which we examined the recent changes in the coastal environment and their impacts on human society in Qaanaaq, a village in northwestern Greenland. Initially, our research sought to quantify the mass loss of glaciers and its interaction with the ocean in the Qaanaaq region. Over the course of the project in collaboration with local communities, we soon realised that the changes in glaciers and the ocean directly impacted the ~600 residents of Qaanaaq. We observed natural disasters triggered by climate change. Environmental changes are also important for local economy and industry because loss of sea ice may lead to growth in transportation, tourism and mineral resource exploration. In order to share the results of our study with the Qaanaaq community, and to gain understanding of local and traditional knowledge, we organised an annual meeting in the village every summer since 2016. Our experience demonstrates the critical importance of performing a long-term multidisciplinary study, including participation of the local communities to understand the changing environment, and to contribute to a sustainable future in Qaanaaq.

The (re)occupation of hillforts was a distinctive feature of post-Roman Europe in the fifth to seventh centuries ad. In western and northern Britain, hillforts are interpreted as power centres associated with militarized elites, but research has paid less attention to their landscape context, hence we know little about the factors that influenced their siting and how this facilitated elite power. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide opportunities for landscape research, but are constrained by limitations of source data and the difficulty of defining appropriate parameters for analysis. This article presents a new methodology that combines data processing and analytical functions in GIS with techniques and principles drawn from ‘traditional’ landscape archaeology. A case study, focused on Dinas Powys, suggests that the strategic siting of this hillfort facilitated control over the landscape and has wider implications for our understanding of patterns of power in post-Roman Britain.

This article uses the copper mining town Tsumeb to examine urban infrastructure, ethnicity, and African political solidarities in apartheid Namibia. To translate apartheid to Namibia, South Africa re-planned Namibian towns to reinforce colonial divisions between two classes of African laborers: mostly Ovambo migrant laborers from northern Namibia and Angola and, secondly, ethnically diverse laborers from the zone of colonial settlement and investment, the Police Zone. Housing and infrastructure were key to this social engineering project, serving as a conduit for official and company ideas about ‘Ovambo’ and Police Zone laborers. Yet Africans’ uses of infrastructure and ethnic discourses challenged, and provoked debates about the boundaries of urban social and political belonging. Between the 1971–2 general strike of northern contract workers and the 1987 strike against the multinational Tsumeb Corporation Limited, which involved northern contract workers and community members, Africans built a political community that challenged both company and colonial state.

This article excavates the imperial origins behind the recent turn towards digital biometrics in Kenya. It also tells the story of an important moment of race-making in the years after the Second World War. Though Kenya may be considered a frontier market for today's biometrics industry, fingerprinting was first introduced in the early twentieth century. By 1920, the Kenyan colonial government had dictated that African men who left their reserves be fingerprinted and issued an identity card (known colloquially as a kipande). In the late 1940s, after decades of African protest, the colonial government replaced the kipande with a universal system of registration via fingerprinting. This legislative move was accompanied by protests from members of the white settler community. Ironically, the effort to deracialize Kenya's identification regime only further normalized the use of biometrics, but also failed to fully undermine associations between white male exceptionalism and exemption from fingerprinting.

The article studies the contexts in which the idea of a separation of the Casamance from the rest of Senegal arose during the process of decolonization. The idea was an outgrowth of colonial representations forged since the end of the nineteenth century. It was first formulated by the French authorities in secret discussions with the representatives of the Casamance in the context of the 1958 referendum. It was taken over by local political leaders who saw it as a possible answer to the debates over representation that arose in the post-war process of democratization, and later by proponents of political mobilization at the sub-regional level after independence. By examining this little-known moment of possibility, the article shows that the claims of the current armed independence movement are in fact part of a longer, more ambivalent history in which a separatist imaginary of the Casamance took shape.