Since its inception in 1831, the French Foreign Legion, a specialised unit within the ranks of the French military, has played a prominent role in the wars of both colonisation and decolonisation. This article seeks to trace the origins, development and eventual decline of an Italian and international ‘Legionary issue’ regarding the recruitment and employment of Italian volunteers in a foreign military force deployed in the French decolonisation war in Indochina. Through the examination of archival sources as well as autobiographical narratives by Italian legionnaires, this study offers a novel perspective on the interplay between Italy’s political, economic and sociocultural trends, the enlistment of Italian volunteers into the French Foreign Legion, and the evolution of Italo-French relations in the postwar period.

In the words of Eric Lewis, “approaching Afrological musics from the theoretical perspective of a Western aesthetic…yields not only a lack of understanding…but can have pernicious political and social results.” In this paper, I demonstrate the relevance of this statement to the British Music classroom. In Part One, I outline the current state of the UK’s Model Music Curriculum and seek to identify its underlying ideology. Part Two offers a survey of how the universal understanding of music as a series of autonomous products generates a prescribed set of criteria for musical evaluation. By ascribing idiosyncratically European notions to our evaluation of music on a universal scale, we are left with an incomplete understanding and appreciation of music not conceived according to this ideology. Looking to the future, Part Three suggests how we might approach music in a fair and germane way via a transfer of emphasis from the musical product to the people involved in the musical process. I name this an outside-in approach to music, and consider it a universally applicable and fruitful mode of musical analysis—people are, after all, the common denominator for music-making. By beginning with the social and cultural conditions in which musicians create, students are equipped with a multiplicity of lenses through which they can better appreciate the value and beauty of musical cultures both near and far.

A desire to preserve its ontological security was crucial in France’s decision to leave Algeria. France neither militarily lost the Algerian War (1954–62), nor were the financial costs of war too burdensome to bear. Instead, the contradictions between two narrative strands of France’s sense of self – liberal-democratic universalism and white European ethnonationalism – came unravelled, sparking a crisis of ontological security. These two narrative strands were rewoven together around the decision to leave Algeria, which saved France from facing a true reckoning about its sense of self and the dynamics of colonialism that had pushed France to create a racial hierarchy that contradicted French republican values. Algeria shows that ontological security can be preserved by using narrative strands to create the impression of stability amid profound changes. Additionally, in critical situations during periods of great global political change, shedding certain role-identities (such as being a colonial power) can help states recover ontological security. France’s pivot away from its colonial empire under President Charles de Gaulle is an example of such a transition away from a specific role-identity that was narrated in such a way that it actually – and paradoxically – projected stability.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been shaped by advocacy from states in the Global South. How should the impacts of this advocacy be understood? This paper argues that whilst Global South and rising-power engagement has shaped R2P, it has not unpicked elements of coloniality that remain embedded in the norm. In placing greater emphasis on state responsibilities to protect over international responsibilities, rising-power advocacy embeds further in R2P a colonial concept of the state which has been mobilised to ward off criticism of the state’s colonial projects in its own peripheries. Moreover, the entrenchment of a colonial concept of the state at the heart of R2P reinforces a diagnosis according to which atrocity crimes occur due to failures within the state in which atrocity takes place. This diagnosis erases the role coloniality plays in the internationalised production of atrocity crimes, whilst also framing outsider states as potential saviours, thereby reproducing colonial saviourisms in R2P. Whilst R2P may be a dewesternised norm, it has thus not been decolonised.

Postwar decolonisation in the global South sparked a range of political imaginaries and experiments in postcolonial governance. Among the most prominent and least understood of the roads not ultimately taken was that of federation. The federal model seemed to offer something to almost everyone—Cold War hegemons, metropolitan officials, anticolonial nationalists, ‘pan-’ racial visionaries—and a dozen such unions were proposed or attempted after 1945. Yet almost none lasted even a decade before shrinking or collapsing. Their demise, despite occurring at the height of the Cold War, had little or nothing to do with that conflict. Rather, the concurrent rise and fall of two such unions—the West Indies Federation and Malaysia—demonstrates that they succumbed to a number of fatal flaws, above all one that connects this decolonisation story to the long territorial-imperial era preceding it: the centrifugal force of the ethnopolitical identities embedded within them.

Imagine being in a university that functions in a place-based culturally regenerative way. In this concept paper, the authors bring together theory, practice, and experience, in the service of transforming universities towards place-based cultural regeneration. At present, Australian universities operate using an economic philosophy of neoliberal corporatism characterised by hierarchical management strategies, competitive tendencies, patriarchal values, and discourse characterised by bifurcation or binary thinking. These features illustrate a worldview that is entangled with the meta crises of our times such as climate change, species loss, hatred/intolerance, and unfathomable violence. The authors consider ways of moving towards a place-based, Indigenous-informed, practical, relational way of learning, being and knowing differently. The paper tentatively assembles a local, place-based culturally regenerative worldview based on living, vibrant, responsive places that embrace people who collaborate with Country – in the Indigenous sense of deep relationality. Within this worldview, the authors propose collaborative ways of governing, teaching, learning, and leading that is necessary for place-based cultural regeneration. In conclusion, the authors outline a pathway towards universities as places of regenerative cultures, which prioritise the nurturing of learning to live and work beyond the current societal paralysis on the road to collapse.

This article uses the postwar trial of Fascist Italy’s most prominent general, Rodolfo Graziani, to examine issues of transitional justice and the formation of popular memory of Italian Fascism and colonialism after 1945. During the Fascist ventennio, the regime constructed Graziani as the nation’s colonial ‘hero’ despite his leading role in genocidal measures during Fascist Italy’s colonial wars in North and East Africa. His position as minister of defence in Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Salò Republic in 1943–5, however, threatened his heroic reputation as he worked with Nazi commanders and became responsible for atrocities against Italian civilians. After the Second World War, Graziani was tried for Nazi collaborationism at the Supreme Court in 1948, but his colonial conduct was left unquestioned. Unlike in the Nuremberg Trials in post-Nazi Germany, few Italians were tried for war crimes after 1945. This historical inquiry analyses the legal proceedings, transnational representation and outcome of Rodolfo Graziani’s 1948 trial as an emblematic case study to explore de-fascistisation and decolonialisation initiatives and their limitations in post-Fascist postcolonial Italy.

This paper examines the development of the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies (IAS), arguing that the landscape of decolonial epistemology is more complex than is often assumed. Drawing on new archival documents it maps out the different landscape of ideas regarding its decolonial origins — phase one (1948–50), phase two (1954–61), and phase three (1960–63) — not only to elucidate problems of defining what decolonial work should entail but also as a historical study of how people associated with the IAS contributed to defining and activating a decolonial project. It shows Nkrumah’s specific instrumentality to its emergence through an African-centred or “Afroepistemic” approach to African Studies. It also highlights how the decolonial imperative was shaped by different historical moments.

A change is more often than not faced with resistance from thinking minds before it is welcomed. This paper emphasizes the urgent need to scrutinize the proposed changes to the age-old Indian Penal Code to be brought about by the enactment of the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS). It critically evaluates every such new change to resolve all doubts and apprehensions, in delving particularly into the inspection of the BNS, in a theoretical study comparing with the Indian Penal Code. The paper discusses the “legislative intent and colonial continuities”, “anti-democratic tendencies” and “general critiques” addressing the debates over “patriarchal biases, problems laden within a false promise to marriage in the BNS, linguistic imperialist connotations, and the ambiguities over punishments”. This paper aims to evaluate the premise for an overhaul of the existing penal code and to identify and correspond substantial changes suggested in the new act in light of a promised wave of decolonization.

There is a growing body of literature calling for the decolonisation of International Relations (IR) theory. This literature, which includes perspectives from the Global South, Indigenous, and feminist approaches, has explained how the colonial thought and White supremacy of early IR scholars like Wilson, Reinsch, and Schmitt shaped the contemporary field and is still reflected in mainstream understandings of core concepts like peace, sovereignty, and security. The need to decolonise IR is well established, but the way to do so is not always clear. This paper explores how engaging with the global politics of Afro-Caribbean Rebel Music serves the decolonisation effort. We can understand Rebel Music as a form of knowledge that emerged in dialogue with, and continues to reproduce ideas embedded in, global and anti-colonial Black approaches to IR theory. Textually and sonically, Rebel Music critiques the nation-state as the primary agent of peace, security, and identity, imagines a transnational Black identity, and is one of the primary forms in which we can hear the voice of the marginalised communicate their understanding of world politics. Engaging with Rebel Music is thus one avenue to decolonising contemporary IR.

The study of the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium is a dynamic and exciting field, in which scholarship, especially from within the Indian Ocean region itself, is expanding rapidly. It is experiencing a period of major, but not necessarily disruptive, change, to its core questions, terminology and periodisation. This article offers an overview of the study of Roman trade with the Western Indian Ocean (sometimes termed ‘Indo-Roman studies’) from the early 2000s to the present. It examines key developments in the field, including the changing scope of analysis in terms of period, region and evidence; the impact in the field of an increasingly global focus and efforts to decolonise a subject historically deeply rooted in colonial processes; and specifically the effort to provincialise or decentre Rome in historical narratives. It then suggests directions in which the field appears to be developing and makes tentative suggestions for future work.

Although calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have become more prominent, the endeavour becomes infinitely more complex when searching for concrete approaches to decolonise IR knowledge production. We posit that decolonising IR, a global counter-hegemonic political project to dismantle and transform dominant knowledge production practices, must be enacted according to context-specific particularities. Contexts shape practices of epistemological decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced – and must be challenged and dismantled – differently in different sites. Yet although acknowledged as important, contexts are understudied and under-theorised. This raises several questions: how do contexts matter to IR knowledge production, in what ways, and with what effects? This article disaggregates six contexts in IR knowledge production – material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal – and explores how they impact academic practices. We bring together hitherto-disparate insights into the role of contexts in knowledge production from Global IR, Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, illustrating them with empirical evidence from 30 interviews with IR scholars across a variety of countries and academic institutions. We argue that an interrogation of the inequalities produced through these contexts brings us closer towards developing concrete tools to dismantle entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge production.