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This week we ask: what are the wider impacts and legacies of colonialism, and how can we go about resisting them?

By JOEL LEE

Review of Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth Century South Asia, by Divya Cherian

In 1957, when the Treaty of Rome was signed and founded what later became the European Union (EU), four out of six of the original Member States were colonial powers. An important methodological question for EU law research is how this historical fact has affected the development of EU law. I argue that answering the question of how Europe's centuries long history of colonialism has shaped EU law is not just a historical exercise but also a starting point for an examination of EU law of today.

Colonized by Spain, the US, and Japan, the Philippines has a long history of discourses imposed on its own traditions, including the ones related to gender identity and fluidity.

I had an odd intellectual experience recently. A US high school student wrote to me as part of an assignment, asking for my thoughts on Brave New World, and its current relevance. I replied talking about the role of "Our Ford", and Gramsci's contemporary concept of Fordism. That got me thinking about post-Fordism, and then […]

In a ruling that is important beyond Kenya, the Kenyan High Court has delivered a milestone judgment. By striking down a provision of the Kenyan Criminal Code on subversion, the Court takes a significant step towards further doing away with the colonial legacy in the Kenyan legal system. The judgment exemplifies how judges in postcolonial contexts interpret the law against the backdrop of the country's history.

Nor are slavery and or colonialism the cause(s) of current wealth. Now, if you want the detailed calculations there's a source:Slavery and colonialism did not make Britain rich, and may even have made the nation poorer, a new study has found.The riches of the slave trade were concentrated in a few families while the nation footed the bill for extra military and administrative spending, according to a book by Kristian Niemietz at the Institute of Economic Affairs."Profits earned from overseas engagement were large enough to make some individuals very rich, but they were not large enough to seriously affect macroeconomic aggregates like Britain's investment rate and capital formation," he said.Mr Niemietz argued that that the slave trade had little overall impact on the economy or the country's ability to industrialise.The Full Monty is available here.It's also possible to approach this with some simple logic. Everywhere had slavery. Many places had colonies. Only some places got rich. There's therefore - obviously and clearly - something else which caused the getting rich. It's certainly possible to say that the other thing was that societal change which led to the profits of slavery and or colonialism (to the extent that were those were large enough, if that's what someone wants to try and argue) being effectively used to produce an Industrial Revolution made the difference. But that then is to insist that it was the societal change, not the slavery nor colonialism, which made the difference. For example, the Arab slave trade lasted longer than the Atlantic by many centuries, was larger in volume and human misery. The Arab colonisation process covered all of North Africa, large non-Arab areas of the Middle East and reached up into Spain for centuries. Yet near no modern Arab nation is or has become rich in the absence of fossil fuel deposits. It's not the slavery or the colonies that produced an industrial revolution nor modern wealth. QED.

In Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown, Laurie Parsons spotlights the injustice of global climate politics and policy which enable the Global North to outsource carbon production and waste disposal to the Global South. Emphasising the cost to developing nations who bear the severest effects of climate breakdown, Parsons makes a convincing case for radical … Continued

Heike Becker writes about what has been going on in Germany since 7 October last year. She contextualises the German government's unconditional support of Israel's conduct in Gaza and astonishing efforts by government and civil society associations to silence critics of Israel's actions. Becker points out the deafening silence in mainstream German politics and society about the thousands of children, women, and men who have been killed.
The post Learning nothing from history: Germany, genocide, and colonialism in the time of Gaza appeared first on ROAPE.

"Ringing in your ears can cause total shutdown in under two years" but a pill can make tinnitus disappear.

Good news for democracy from Poland? It appears that in the recent general elections, the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS), won most seats but not enough to allow it to form a coalition. Donald Tusk's Civic Coalition has a better chance of forming a coalition, which might put an end to PiS' eight years of rule. This, prima facie, seems like a victory of democracy over populism. While this is certainly true, in this post we wish to flag certain warning signs that this possible democratic rotation is not the end of the struggle for democracy but merely the beginning of this process. This is because even when populists are voted out of office, their legacy - at least partially - persists.

This is my 5,277th and final blog post. This blog has been tremendous fun, but I've found that I am consistently choosing to spend my time and energy doing other things.I actually chose today of all days because I wondered whether the day after a huge election would change my mind. There are interesting stories: the effects of Venezuelan socialism, the vote in Miami, the impact on Latin America, and any number of others. But it really didn't. I am doing other stuff, even administrative, like trying to figure out how to give students an international experience in the Covid-19 era. I will still write, of course, but I also want to find new outlets. All of this is true for my podcast as well, which was a cool experience but one I've found myself thinking about less and less.Anyway, it's been over 14 years. I started as a pretty new Associate Professor. Back then, the big debate was whether to blog as an untenured professor. That was a long time ago.Thanks for reading, and I'll see you around. Subscribe in a reader

The environment is not a silent victim in Russia's war against Ukraine; the long-term threats for the people of Ukraine are already visible. The environmental dimension of the war has been documented from early on. In this respect, the war is a model for future military conflicts. President Zelenskyy emphasized in his peace plan that green reconstruction is an essential element for a just and sustainable future. Green reconstruction, as every reconstruction, needs international support and local engagement. In this blog post, we identify the conditions that must be met to ensure that local groups are empowered and new international dependencies are avoided.
Author information





Patrick Flamm



Dr. Patrick Flamm ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am PRIF im Programmbereich "Internationale Sicherheit". Seine Forschung konzentriert sich auf das Verhältnis zwischen Umwelt, Frieden und Sicherheit im "Anthropozän" sowie auf polare Geopolitik. // Dr Patrick Flamm is a Senior Researcher at PRIF in the research department "International Security". His research focuses on the relationship between the environment, peace and security in the "Anthropocene" as well as on polar geopolitics.

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Der Beitrag A Green Recovery for Ukraine: How to Avoid the Trap of Green Colonialism? erschien zuerst auf PRIF BLOG.

Introduction: Are Human Rights Universal? The concept of human rights predates the current system, which was established in 1945 with the creation of the United Nations (Mende, 2019). "Universal human rights theory holds that human rights apply to everyone simply by virtue of their being human" (Nasr, 2016), but cultural relativism maintains that these rights … Continued

 In 2019, I wrote about an article in the New York Times "1619 Project," which drew on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016:   "Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites." The paper was based on a survey of medical students and residents that gave them hypothetical cases and asked them to rate how much pain they thought the patient would be feeling and what treatment they would recommend for the pain (narcotics vs. something weaker).*  According to the Times "when asked to imagine how much pain white or black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents insisted that black people felt less pain."  Actually, the ratings were almost identical--the mean for black cases was 7.622 on a scale of 0-10, and the mean for whites was 7.626--so the description in the Times story was completely wrong.  Basically what the study found was that the number of false beliefs was associated with racial bias, but at the average level of false believes there was no bias in either direction. Last year I saw another Times story that referred to the paper as "an often-cited study," and I checked and found it had about 1400 citations, according to Google Scholar.  After the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, I ran across another article that mentioned it (I forget where that appeared), which led me to check the citation count again.  It was up to almost 2000, and is now over 2,000.   That's a lot:  it ranks 6th out of the couple of thousand papers published in PNAS in 2016.  Presumably the 1619 project story helped to bring attention to it, but it was already doing well before then:  it had 25 citations in 2016, then 54, 103, and 152 in 2017-9.  I was interested in seeing how well the academic literature did in describing the findings of the paper.   Google Scholar lists citing articles roughly in order of the citations that they have, so I started from the top and picked the first 20 with over 100 citations (a couple of books were listed, but I limited myself to journal articles).  One of the citations could be called incidental:  "Contemporary, 'mainstream' epidemiology's technocratic focus on individual-level biological and behavioral risk factors"Four of them were accurate, in my judgment:  "a recent study showed that half of medical students and residents in their sample held biased beliefs such as 'Black people's skin is thicker than White people's skin,' assessed Black mock patients' pain as lower than White mock patients, and subsequently made less accurate treatment recommendations for Black compared to White mock patients.""medical students who endorsed the false beliefs that Black patients had longer nerve endings and thicker skin than White patients also rated Black patients as feeling less pain and offered less accurate treatment recommendations in mock medical cases." "in a 2016 study to assess racial attitudes, half of White medical students and residents held unfounded beliefs about intrinsic biologic differences between Black people and White people. These false beliefs were associated with assessments of Black patients' pain as being less severe than that of White patients and with less appropriate treatment decisions for Black patients.""and a substantial number of medical students and trainees hold false beliefs about racial differences."Four were partly accurate:   "Implicit bias among clinicians and other healthcare workers can . . . contribute to . . . lower quality of care received . . . .""document false beliefs among medical students and residents regarding race-based biological differences in pain tolerance that resulted in racial differences in treatment." "minorities . . . are less likely to have their pain appropriately diagnosed and effectively treated due to structural constraints, racialized stereotypes, and false beliefs regarding genetic differences on the part of health care providers." "contemporary examples of anti-Black racism in healthcare in North America include racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations between White and Black patients based on false beliefs about biological differences"These correctly say that the study found evidence that views about biological differences were associated with differences in pain assessment and treatment, but fall short because they either imply that the study involved treatment of real cases or that it found differences in average levels of pain assessment.  Ten were inaccurate--I don't mean that the statements are necessarily false, but the study provided no support for them:"Racist beliefs among some providers that African Americans have unusually higher tolerance for pain . . .  may also have reduced opioid prescribing to African Americans relative to whites." "false assumptions about Black-White physiologic differences in pain tolerance" "Black patients have been subjected to racially stratified diagnoses resulting in the denial of pain medication, based on the belief that they withstand pain better than other demarcated groups." "Currently, Black patients also are less likely to receive . . . adequate doses of pain and cancer medication" "A substantial literature in psychology has documented physicians' differential perceptions of Black patients in terms of . . . pain tolerance." "there are known racial and socioeconomic biases in how a patient's pain is perceived by observers" "Black patients are less likely to receive . . . accurate diagnoses (e.g., pain assessments)" "Demographic factors associated with chronic pain and its undertreatment include . . . being an African American or other underrepresented minority . . . ." "The backdrop for such discussions includes systemic and pervasive racial biases in the US healthcare system, including lack of insurance and a lesser quality of care for non-white, rural, and low-income populations" "perceptions of suffering are shaped by various factors such as the victim's race"The most common mistakes were citing it as evidence of racial differences in pain assessments or in prescription of pain medication (rather than recommendations for hypothetical cases).And one cited this study while describing a completely different one:  "Black mothers in the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York have worse outcomes than white, Hispanic, and Asian mothers in the poorest ones, …. likely due to societal bias that impacts Black women."I don't know what's typical, but more than 50% inaccurate citations is disturbing.   Another striking thing was that I didn't find any efforts to replicate the study.  It had an obvious limitation:  the sample was just students and residents at one medical school.  So it would be natural to try to replicate it at other medical schools, or among practicing physicians.  You could also go beyond straight replication, and do things like consider other hypothetical cases (e. g., ones that were more ambiguous), or the possibility of interactions between race and other factors like gender.  The data were from an online survey, so replicating it would be cheap and easy--I could see giving it as a project for a master's student or even an undergraduate.  Of course, I can't say that there are no published replications, but I made enough effort to be confident that there aren't many.  Is that because of a lack of attempts, or because attempts haven't found anything, so they haven't been published?***There was also a survey of Mechanical Turk participants, but that doesn't get much attention.  **The evidence in the original study was weak--there's a good chance that it's just a combination of random variation and what Andrew Gelman calls "researcher degrees of freedom."