Remapping Sovereignty examines how activist-thinkers from Indigenous societies in North America recast the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty over the course of the twentieth century. While political theorists have criticized sovereignty as the dominant paradigm of political authority, alternatives to sovereignty remain elusive. Recasting these debates, Temin argues that activists-intellectuals in the long Red Power movement of the twentieth century engaged in complex acts of contesting and remapping the logic of sovereignty. If logics of Westphalian sovereignty revolve around “the normative centrality and perceived necessity of the claim to final and ultimate authority over a bounded space” (6) then central to its institutional practice is a refusal of the webs of relationality and interdependence on the land and human and non-human others. Rather than upholding these sovereign logics, Indigenous claims to self-determination, Temin shows, are premised not the assertion of territorial control but on the cultivation of reciprocal relations of care for the earth. Creating alternatives to both the institutions of the sovereign-state and the very conceptual framework of sovereignty entails dismantling and repairing the structural hierarchies and conceptual frameworks that stem from the constitutive disavowal of these relationalities embedded in both the concept and practice of state sovereignty.

Political theory has, until recently, exhibited a telling lack of interest in Indigenous thinkers and ideas. Remapping Sovereignty is an impressive history of twentieth-century political thought that follows recent efforts to correct this tendency. Remapping Sovereignty’s unique strength lies in its focus on individual Indigenous political theorists. Temin presents these figures as sophisticated, systematic thinkers with specific, context-motivated agendas and stakes animating the ideas they articulated. Remapping Sovereignty balances careful historicism with an edifying showcase of how twentieth-century Indigenous political thinkers’ situated ideas continue to offer generally valuable contributions to contemporary political theory. Temin’s textual expositions and the historical context he provides for the conceptual lineage he reconstructs will, hopefully, push readers to exercise and demand more precision when invoking the still sometimes vague category of “Indigenous political theory.”

This wonderful book is deeply researched, conceptually clarifying, and beautifully written. When read together, its chapters produce a powerful image of the alternative political possibilities outlined by North American Indigenous writers including Zitkala-Ša, Ella Deloria, Vine Deloria Jr., George Manuel, Lee Maracle, and Howard Adams. Temin has done his intellectual work well: I came to the book with extensive knowledge of some of the figures it covers, and little knowledge of others, and came away able to think much more deeply about all involved. This is a first-rate scholarly effort.

This article examines anti-colonialism and Third World solidarities in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. It does so through a study of the Black Liberation Front (BLF), a Black Power group formed in London in 1971. The BLF saw themselves as part of a global Third World solidarity, and, as activists in Britain, identified their location as ‘inside the belly of the monster’. They understood racism and colonialism as global phenomena, and offered material support to anti-colonial movements across the world, especially in Africa. The prevailing historiography of Black activism in post-war Britain foregrounds domestic anti-racism. Based on a reading of the BLF’s publications, alongside subsequent memoirs by and interviews with former BLF members, this article argues for Black activism in Britain to be viewed through a more global lens. Moreover, it shows how a deeper understanding of transnational anti-colonialism reconfigures our understanding of the domestic politics of race. Historians of decolonization must attend to how twentieth-century geographies of race and migration created the conditions for solidarities that do not fit within a metropole–colony binary.

In alignment with the vision for the future of the European Union (EU) put forth by the European Green Deal in 2020, and EU efforts to tackle global deforestation and forest degradation, the EU Deforestation-Free Products Regulation (EUDR) was adopted in June 2023. The EUDR is designed specifically as a unilateral, yet transnational, intervention to limit access to the EU market or the exports from the EU of seven key forest-risk commodities whenever they are linked with deforestation, forest degradation, or illegality. Drawing on decolonial and critical food systems scholarship, this article critically examines the EU’s position in combating global deforestation and forest degradation by positioning the EUDR in historically shaped and unequally constructed agri-food chains. Whereas the EU’s plan to decrease deforestation and forest degradation linked with its substantive consumption of products from the global south is an innovative step from the point of view of transnational governance of environmental degradation, we find that the historical amnesia, the emphasis on global trade, and the push for ‘green value chains’ fail to address the root causes of deforestation. Moreover, we contend that the EU legislator overlooked the potential of using transnational governance to rethink agri-food systems, including by promoting re-regionalization in the name of food sovereignty and the right to food.

As the first foreign policy issue Nigeria debated, the controversy around France’s nuclear tests, conducted in Algeria during the War of Independence there, allowed Lagos to rehearse its envisioned African role even before formal independence in October 1960. Nigerian opposition to France eventually culminated in the expulsion of the French ambassador on 5 January 1961, after the third French atomic test in the Algerian Sahara. This seemingly straightforward anti-colonial and anti-nuclear act was in fact largely driven by inter-African dynamics, particularly Nigeria’s complicated relationship with Ghana. By reconstructing this episode, the article demonstrates how international affairs uniquely crystallized interactions between domestic and regional politics in decolonizing states. This in turn encourages us to look beyond the paradigms of the Cold War and decolonization when writing the Global South into world history.

This article considers the responses of the Indian Workers’ Association (Great Britain) (IWA) to food scarcities in India during the late 1960s. It reveals Maoist optics informed IWA critiques, departing from coexistent appraisals articulated in leftist circles in India. In doing so, the article demonstrates the relevance of worldviews, idioms, and paradigms emanating from global conjunctures beyond places of origin among diaspora. IWA luminaries were embedded in revolutionary anti-colonial networks shaped by decolonization and the global Cold War, and bestowed substance upon Maoism in these contexts. Ultimately, this informed IWA perceptions of causes and solutions to the food ‘crisis’: in their characterizations of reliance on external aid as indicative of post-1947 India’s semi-colonial status; in portrayals of Soviet ‘social imperialism’ in India during the Sino-Soviet split; or in demands for radical land reform based on a selective rendering of the Chinese model, which downplayed the consequences of the ‘Great Leap Forward’.

The wheels of decolonization and reparatory justice in Africa are slow. Each gain is fundamentally instrumental, resolute and instructive. In its judgment in John Ssempebwa v Kampala Capital City Authority, the High Court of Uganda resisted the applicants' compelling attempt to constitutionalize reparation for colonial legacies but exercised judicial activism in obliging the authorities to proactively embrace reparatory justice approaches. Names of public infrastructure especially in a capital city are symbols of a nation; they should promote positive memory and sustainable futures. The succinct ruling avoided spatial politics and the historical sensibilities that characterized colonialism such as the construct of racial superiority that negated the rights of African Ugandans. This omission undervalues the ruling at a time when multisectoral efforts such as legislating reparatory justice are required to advance Africa’s reparations agenda. Reparation and decolonization of public memory by Africans for Africans in Africa is critical amidst ongoing global efforts.

In this article I discuss the issue of place in the creation of decolonised historiography and argue that the location from where a historian produces historiography matters in terms of both conceptual and ideological influences as well as in regards to material circumstances. Making use of a case-study on the UNESCO General History of Africa Project (1964-1998), I bring postcolonial critique on the conceptual nature of academic history writing into conversation with a study of the scholarly practice of the UNESCO project to show that conceptual critique has its limits if it does not take material circumstances into consideration. Political decolonisation in Africa was connected to history writing, thereby blending conceptual and material considerations. Secondly, I look at some of the discussions that were ongoing within the UNESCO project to show that the historians working on it discussed these issues amongst themselves and were aware of critique levelled against them. In doing so I argue that decolonisation of knowledge production as a result of becoming politically independent is a multivarious and ongoing process which has to take into account all these different elements.