Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Tbilisi has become one of the key destinations of post-2022 Russian emigration. Unlike in many other host societies, this arrival has been met in Georgia with pronounced public resistance, articulated through the language of occupation and anti-imperial refusal. Slogans such as “Russians go home” and references to a “third occupation” translate everyday Russian visibility – language use, spatial clustering, and lifestyle practices – into a historically saturated interpretive framework. This article examines how and why such interpretations have emerged in Tbilisi, and why hostility is frequently directed even at self-identified “good Russians” who oppose the war and the Russian regime. Empirically, the article draws on a mixed-method research design combining long-term ethnographic and digital observation with 30 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 with young, urban, pro-European Georgians in Tbilisi. Rather than analysing migrants’ intentions or political self-identifications, the study centres the perspectives of the host society and the conditions through which Russian presence is interpreted. Analytically, it adopts a decolonial/postcolonial perspective and mobilises the concept of coloniality to distinguish between historical empire and the persistence of linguistic, cultural, and epistemic hierarchies after its formal end. The findings demonstrate this dynamic.

Literature on European migration management often locates the emergence of restrictive and hostile migration control in the late twentieth century. While critical scholarship has documented the harms produced by these developments, migration governance is frequently approached through linear narratives of policy development that treat current measures as historically novel and detached from colonial pasts, leaving race, racialization, and coloniality marginal. This article challenges this racial and colonial aphasia by advancing rehistoricization as both a methodological and analytical intervention. It argues that the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum is best understood not as the outcome of a progressive policy trajectory, but of a longer European history of colonial governance that has structured mobility through racialized exclusion, emergency rule, and delegated control. Focusing on the Crisis Regulation and the International Partnerships Pillar, the article rehistoricizes emergency governance and border externalization, tracing their genealogies to colonial practices of exception, containment, and indirect rule. By embedding the Pact within the longue durée of European colonial power, the article shows how measures presented as policy innovation reproduce imperial modalities of governing unwanted mobility, offering a historically grounded framework for understanding EU migration governance as a site of racialized continuity rather than technocratic novelty.

This essay explains how Junot Díaz’s stories show the lasting impact of colonialism and dictatorship on everyday life, especially for immigrants and their children living between cultures. I argue that struggles over belonging, love, and identity are shaped by history and power even when characters do not name those forces directly. I interpret Junot Díaz’s fiction as an account of “the other side”: a peripheral perspective produced by migration, racialization, and the enduring afterlife of colonial violence. Dominican and U.S. histories, especially dictatorship, imperial entanglements, and postindustrial economic restructuring, shape the motives, relationships, and moral horizons of Díaz’s characters. Methodologically, the essay combines close reading with interdisciplinary framing: using diaspora theory to parse displacement, decolonial theory (via the concept of coloniality) to track the persistence of power/knowledge hierarchies, and comparative literary analysis to set Díaz alongside Gloria Anzaldúa and Rudolfo Anaya. Díaz’s “third place,” language, and genre play (fabulism, fantasy/science fiction) render colonial history as lived structure. Díaz shows how coloniality distorts intimacy, masculinity, and community through both material constraint and epistemic domination, and that “decolonial love” names a fragile but real form of resistance and healing. I conclude that colonialism is first a material enterprise whose cultural residues persist, and that reading the “carnality of knowledge” in Díaz clarifies how agency can emerge, even in exile, as a world-making practice.

This article uses Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, as a case study to interpret how coloniality structured Black Protestant institution-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Washington, who was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia sometime around 1858 or 1859, was quite literally reared on a plantation, and spent most of his public career trying to work “up from slavery,” as the title of his autobiography confirms. In the “afterlife of the plantation” (to borrow Jarvis McInnis’ term), his Protestant social respectability, Protestant work ethic, and Protestant institution largely recapitulated the plantation system in his embrace of agriculturalism, industrialism, and in his political and ethical commitments to gendered normative order and Black sexual Victorianism. This article sifts through these entanglements to interpret their meanings for the study of Black religion in and beyond historically Black institutional contexts.

In this essay, “Writing Gone Wao,” I begin by reiterating my own sense of the book’s (Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, Duke UP, 2022) priorities. I then turn to the probing and generous responses by Glenda Carpio, Mónica González García, Gerald Torres, Marina De Chiara, and Ato Quayson to my work. I conclude by examining Díaz’s recent writings published after my book appeared, including his complex, erudite Substack series “StoryWorlds with Junot Díaz,” and his short story, “The Ghosts of Gloria Lara” (The New Yorker, 2023), where he explores dramatic issues of decolonial love and the political unconscious.

Who is recognised within the concept of ‘European Society’, and, more importantly, who or what remains unseen? This article critically examines European Society through a decolonial lens, arguing that EU law is detached from the lived and diverse realities of European Society. Drawing on the work of sociologist Manuela Boatcă, the authors propose a decolonial approach that excavates coloniality of power, knowledge and, especially, belonging within EU law to reimagine European Society. Analysing cases in migration and the rule of law, the article reveals how EU law perpetuates hierarchical structures of inclusion and exclusion, and invisibilises the liminal—often deploying “Western” norms, values, and lifestyles as gatekeeping tools, especially in post-colonial contexts. At the heart of this argument is the necessity to move beyond Eurocentric assumptions of universality, neutrality, and totality in legal scholarship, instead embracing plurality of perspective, creolisation, and reflexivity. The authors contend that European Society should not be treated as a rigid legal construct but rather as a dynamic and inclusive one that amplifies marginalised voices, acknowledges and accounts for the liminal, and critically examines the law’s inherent limitations. Ultimately, the article calls for a radical reimagining of European Society through its decolonisation—one that confronts historical injustices, disrupts entrenched power structures, and steers EU law toward a more just, equitable, accountable and reconstructive future.

Vitriolic disputes over trans identity and decolonisation have made university campuses into the battlegrounds of the culture wars. Yet the connections between these controversies and the epistemic function of the academy remain underexamined. In this article, I argue that the structures of oppression and privilege that activists seek to dismantle are sustained by the disciplinarity of the academy. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s radical critique of Western humanism, I show how the entrenched division between the sciences and the humanities upholds a biocentric conception of truth that underwrites “Man,” the mode of life that colonises the concept of the human. The article outlines Wynter’s theory of sociogenesis to interrogate the role of the disciplines in repressing awareness of the sociocultural constitution of modes of life, arguing that this denial of discursive construction sustains the hegemony of Man while foreclosing trans liberation. What follows, I suggest, is that the academy’s culture wars crises cannot be resolved through diversity policies. Instead, I call for a transformation of disciplinarity that untethers the academy from the epistemological commitments of Man. Only by eschewing positivism and universalism can institutions of higher education break with the coloniality of gender and contribute to reimagining the human.

Cultural heritage rests on imaginings of a shared humanity transcending national dividing lines. However, cultural heritage sites are frequently targeted in war. In this article I show that the politics of cultural protection is marked by tensions and contestations. A key argument is that the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict is a militarised practice that is informed by notions of protection that are broadly western-centred and masculinised. Therefore, I suggest that they are insensitive to the gendered and colonial power relations that undergird the protection of cultural property. Informed by critical heritage studies, cosmopolitanism, and feminist IR scholarship, I elucidate the claims of this article through a feminist narrative analysis of protection. I identify what is said and what is silenced in heritage protection narratives. First, I focus on the wider storytelling that surrounds heritage protection, unpacking the ethical, gendered, and colonial assumptions employed. Second, I turn to the narration of military protection in the UNESCO military manual, attending to its ethical underpinnings, protection logics, and privileging of distinctively western military knowledge. I conclude by calling for a more nuanced approach to cultural protection.

This study addresses the mental health needs of refugees and migrants in the Netherlands, highlighting the urgent public health challenges they face. Unique psychosocial hurdles, exacerbated by cultural dislocation, language barriers and systemic inequalities, hinder their access to quality mental healthcare. This study explores how coloniality intersects with mental healthcare access, using a decolonial framework to challenge stereotypes and assumptions that marginalize migrant voices. Through semi-structured interviews with migrants and language service providers, this research reveals the complexities of navigating the mental healthcare system. Findings reveal that temporality, professionalism and language barriers are key issues in migrants’ mental healthcare journeys. We advocate for systemic changes that prioritize migrant perspectives. Ultimately, this study aims to inform policy and practice to enhance mental health services for migrant populations in the Netherlands and contribute to the broader dialogue on decolonization in mental health.

Recently, former colonial powers in the Global North have begun addressing their colonial pasts through their foreign policies. Some of these states pursue a feminist foreign policy (FFP). However, to date, only one FFP makes explicit mention of colonial legacies: that of Germany, adopted in 2021. How does German FFP discourse address this and what political work does this do? Contributing to critiques of coloniality in FFP, we analyze the discursive representation of Germany’s colonial past in foreign policy texts since 2021. Drawing on the socio-critical concepts theater of reconciliation by Max Czollek and remembrance superiority by Mohamed Amjahid, we find that the discourse powerfully establishes gendered notions of caring, responsible, and reflexive German statehood. This organizes how Germany’s engagement with its colonial past is told and which forms of engagement with former colonies are rendered intelligible. We argue that German FFP erases colonial structures that permeate German foreign policy and reproduces coloniality through discursive representations.

This article explores India’s ‘long wars’ – the counter-insurgency campaigns the state imposed on recalcitrant populations and territories. Existing critical debates have focused on colonial and imperial counter-insurgency waged by developed Western states and empires. Yet these powers hardly command a monopoly on how these are fought, rationalised, or imagined. Indian counter-insurgency campaigns are a key case in point. The aftermath of British colonial rule led to a revivification of rather than an end to counter-insurgency. Indian counter-insurgency thinking betrays similar logics of differentiation to those of the British. However, an engagement with Indian counter-insurgency archives reveals that the political economy of (post-)colonial rule results in its own particular sets of inclusions and exclusions. We tease out these tensions and anxieties that underpin India counter-insurgency by exploring how India’s long wars in its north-eastern states have been rationalised and explained away among Indian counter-insurgents, namely through references to ‘diversity’ and ‘democracy’. Such references index a politics premised on a disavowal of violence, which represents a weapon of war. This disavowal, narrated through exceptionalist claims, manifests itself through distinct modalities with their own tensions and even contradictions, leading to India’s own complicated relationships with notions and practices of coloniality.