This article examines the intellectual formation of Johannes Schütte, Superior General of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) and a central figure in the drafting of Ad Gentes Divinitus, the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 decree on mission. Drawing on Schütte’s missionary writings and SVD archival materials, this article argues that his decade in China – which ended in imprisonment and expulsion by Communist authorities in the early 1950s – decisively shaped his vision of Catholic reform. Branded an agent of Western imperialism, Schütte came to recognize what he called “grains of truth” in Communist critiques of the missionary enterprise, pushing him to reassess the structural weaknesses of foreign-controlled mission work. The article further situates Schütte’s career within the broader history of decolonization: China’s revolutionary expulsion of missionaries functioned much like formal independence movements elsewhere, accelerating institutional and theological change within the Church. By insisting that the Church take root in local cultures rather than reproduce Western forms, Ad Gentes turned the lessons of missionary failure into a new ecclesiological program. In tracing Schütte’s trajectory, the article contributes to three areas of scholarship: the long history of decolonization, the relationship between Cold War anti-Communism and Catholic reform, and the role of China in the global history of twentieth-century Christianity.

At stake in the Gaza genocide is the world itself. To grasp just how “worldly” the stakes are, all we need to do is face the single most distinct feature of this genocide: its prosecution as a genocide necessary for the global order at all costs—even at the cost of the order itself. In its insistence on the genocide, the west has cannibalized the very institutions it had used to shape the world. How, then, do we explain the radical necessity of genocide here? Here, I argue that we need to come to terms with how, since the 1970s at least, Zionism has co-constituted the object we call western civilization. And it has done so primarily by operating as a geopolitical and ideological impasse to decolonization. Zionism is the west’s postcolonial alibi, deferring any reckoning with the west’s colonial history and enduring racial regimes. But the genocide at once reaffirms and destabilizes Zionism’s vocation. Intersecting with the irreversible decline of US empire, the genocide appears as the death knell for an entire age, accelerating the effective unraveling of the international order that stands in for the world, and potentially heralding a kind of unworlding.

After the conquest of Samarkand by Russian forces in 1868, a sacred relic, the reputed Quran of Uthman, was removed from the Khoja Ahrar madrassa and taken to the Imperial Library in St Petersburg. Following the October 1917 revolution, successive Muslim organizations successfully petitioned for the Quran’s ‘return’, representing a remarkably early case of formerly colonized peoples reclaiming cultural property taken under imperial duress on the principle of decolonization. The highly politicized and publicized debates contesting this Quran’s rightful ownership and the history of its multiple ‘repatriations’—from Petrograd to Ufa to Turkestan and from mosque to museum to anti-religious exhibition—illustrate the competing claims to spiritual, ethno-national, scholarly, and ideological authority leveraged by various actors in the first decade of Soviet power, amidst visions of transnational anti-imperial revolution in the ‘East’. As Soviet rule solidified in 1926–27, the Quran was concealed from view domestically while increasingly being deployed in diplomacy abroad.

This article argues that the India League’s 1942–47 anticolonial campaign for a Constituent Assembly for India played a constitutive role in Indian independence. It examines the Constituent Assembly not as an institution that followed the decision to offer India independence but as an anticolonial idea that helped produce it. A necessary part of this was the dissolution of the ‘minority veto’ placed on Indian constitutional progress, mainly by the Conservative Party. It traces the transmission of the Constituent Assembly idea through the India League’s transnational networks until it became a Congress demand in India and a Labour Party initiative in Britain, leading to the Cripps Mission and the policy of the 1945 Labour government. In doing so this article challenges the historiography of geopolitical decolonization by finding Indian independence to be the product of an anticolonial campaign that operated through solidarity and elective affinities with the global left. This was contested by both the Conservative Party and the Muslim League, and the article also examines how Muslim League opposition to being ‘minoritized’ within the Constituent Assembly contributed to the Partition of India.

Many academics assert a link between the principles that ought to determine the selection of teaching material in higher education and the principles that ought to govern a just society. This article considers five models of this relationship: (1) Identification, in which good syllabus design is part of social justice; (2) Isomorphism, in which a good syllabus takes the same form as a just society; (3) Instrumentalism, in which a good syllabus is a means for achieving social justice; (4) Isolationism, which seeks to protect syllabus design from undue social influence; (5) Interdependence, in which the quality of a syllabus and the justice of a society depend on each other in a variety of complex ways. I conclude that Interdependence incorporates the most important insights of the other four models while avoiding their individual limitations.

This article introduces theories of populism and empty signifiers to Canadian Indigenous studies. Canadian populist politics may serve to marginalize Indigenous actors and lead them to feel misrepresented within related social movements. These movements commonly develop empty signifiers, which are vague terms that mean different things to different political actors, but help to unite a “people.” Indigenous resistance movements can make strategic use of empty signifiers to build populist or non-populist social movements that challenge colonial institutions. I argue that any such movement would require careful strategizing between Indigenous and other social movements to ensure that Indigenous priorities are not marginalized.

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.