The research team, led by Daniel E. Stewart and colleagues, registered their protocol in advance and followed PRISMA guidelines for scoping reviews. They searched Embase, EBSCO Global Health, Medline and Scopus, supplemented by grey literature searches and citation chasing from seven foundational papers. Because ‘decolonising global health’ is not indexed as a standardised term, the team adapted their search strategy to capture a broad vocabulary including colonialism, racism, epistemic injustice, transnational partnerships and intersectionality. Two rounds of searching, in September 2022 and December 2024, ensured the synthesis reflected the most recent scholarship.

The results reveal a striking asymmetry in who is doing the talking. Of the 129 included papers, 95 were commentary or opinion pieces rather than empirical research. Authors were affiliated with institutions in 56 countries, but the United States (53 authors), the United Kingdom (30) and Canada (17) dominated. Forty per cent of papers were produced by a single author based in a high-income country, compared with just six per cent by a single author based in a low- or middle-income country. Even in collaborations spanning both settings, 69 per cent of HIC-LMIC co-authored papers had a first author based in a high-income country, a hierarchy that shapes whose perspective frames the argument.

Definitional confusion emerged as a central finding. The literature broadly agrees that decolonising global health means acknowledging the field’s colonial roots, challenging power asymmetries in its architecture, removing supremacy from spaces of practice, and grounding education in anti-colonial perspectives. Yet the term itself is contested. Some authors warn against its ‘buzzwordification’, noting that decolonisation carries underdetermined and contested meanings. Others question whether the framework is the right tool at all: one analysis argues it risks undermining confidence in scientific knowledge, accentuating international antagonisms, and discounting progress already achieved. An alternative proposal from researchers in Rwanda suggests that ‘elimination of a white supremacy mindset’ better captures the core problem of assumed racial superiority.

The historical analysis underpinning the review is unflinching. Colonial health developed from European colonial ventures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when unfamiliar disease environments were treated as threats to imperial missions. By the late 1800s, malaria was considered the largest obstacle to colonisation, and treatments were developed primarily to protect colonial administrators and the labour forces they exploited. Indigenous forms of understanding were devalued and replaced by technocratic experts with little concern for local socioeconomic realities. The reviewers note that even The Lancet was born, at least in part, as an instrument to advance British imperial objectives, and that these colonial practices have been codified into modern states, economic systems and international institutions that continue to reinforce bias.

Why does this legacy matter now? The reviewers identify two catalysts for the recent proliferation of literature: the Black Lives Matter movement, which raised global awareness of social justice across professions, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed stark inequities in access to vaccines, personal protective equipment and treatments, alongside power imbalances in international research partnerships. The colonial inheritance also persists in clinical practice itself: the default patient in medical education is often assumed to be a white male, and white European biochemical and visual norms used universally can increase the risk of misdiagnosis across diverse populations.

From the synthesis, four overlapping approaches to action emerge. The first addresses epistemic injustice, the systematic exclusion of local expertise and the dismissal of local knowledge production as illegitimate. Recommendations include re-legitimising indigenous knowledge, diversifying journal editorial boards, ensuring equity in data collection and ownership, and including representative participants in clinical trials so that low- and middle-income settings are not dependent on guidelines derived elsewhere. The second concerns partnership working. Empirical studies in the review consistently document that despite commitments to equity, resource control and decision-making authority remain concentrated in high-income institutions throughout the project lifecycle. The principle of ‘no research about us, without us’, adopted by a community engagement programme spanning Brazil, Ethiopia and Sri Lanka, is held up as a model, alongside calls for funding that flows directly to institutions in the Global South rather than through ‘feudal intermediaries’.

The third approach targets governance. Authors argue for restructuring the political economy of global health, beginning with debt cancellation and non-earmarked budget support, fairer allocation of resources, and stronger accountability from donors. Workforce reforms feature prominently, including ending the ‘brain drain’ of health workers from poorer countries and changing where global health education physically takes place. The fourth approach is individual: practitioners are urged to reflect on their own colonial conditioning, question institutional practices, and speak out, with the caveat that reflection must be matched by peer dialogue and collective action rather than remaining a private exercise.

Barriers to implementation are formidable. The review highlights the psychological legacy of colonial education, which instilled a sense of inferiority that must be actively dismantled. It notes the persistent undervaluing of science produced in low- and middle-income countries, and the argument that meaningful decolonisation may require transforming the global political economy itself, challenging concepts of ‘aid’ and ‘sustainability’ that obscure ongoing economic oppression. Most strikingly, not one of the 129 included papers reported the results of an implemented decolonial intervention. The reviewers suggest this reflects a structural tension: the changes called for depend on the very global health institutions that the literature identifies as part of the problem.

The authors are candid about their own positionality, acknowledging that they write primarily from high-income institutional perspectives and relied exclusively on English-language sources, a limitation that likely excluded distinct decolonial discourses in Spanish, French, Portuguese and indigenous languages. Their proposed next steps are correspondingly pragmatic: re-engineer academic quality assurance frameworks to reflect plural epistemic viewpoints, prioritise research and leadership opportunities for actors from the Global South, embed explicit assessments of power asymmetries in partnership evaluations, direct financial flows to LMIC-led collaborations, and develop contextually valid metrics for tracking institutional performance. They point to models such as the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s ‘New Public Health Order for Africa’ as evidence that centring local priorities can be operationalised without Western-defined terminology. Whether the field can move from a movement of commentary to one of accountable, evaluated change, the review concludes, will determine whether global health finally delivers on its foundational commitment to equity and justice.

Subject of Research: A scoping review of definitions, colonial legacies and reform pathways in the decolonising global health movement

Article Title: Contemporary accounts and future directions for decolonising global health: A scoping review

Article References: Stewart, D. E., Amsalu, T., Fairfoot, E., Keen, D., Keenan, J., Butcher, F., Miles, K., & Razavi, A. (2026). Contemporary accounts and future directions for decolonising global health: A scoping review. Public Health in Practice, 12, Article 100874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100874

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100874

Keywords: decolonising global health, global health equity, epistemic injustice, colonialism, scoping review, health partnerships, global health governance, research funding, LMIC authors, COVID-19 inequities, medical education, public health

The story begins with the appointment of Maximilian Daublebsky von Sterneck as commander of the Austrian Imperial and Royal Navy in 1883, which opened a new era in which commercial and scientific endeavors became official tasks of the war fleet. The Navy institutionalized its cooperation with the Natural History Museum Vienna, whose curators wrote collecting instructions and, as the study describes them, veritable wish lists for the ships. Because hiring scientists for the voyages was too expensive, crew members with demonstrated interest and talent were tasked with collecting, and it usually fell to the ship’s physician, who possessed basic knowledge of natural sciences and physical anthropology. Through this arrangement, even Austria-Hungary, a power with little colonial success of its own, thoroughly exploited the colonial travel and trading networks built by its neighbors Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Two corvettes anchor the study: the S.M.S. Frundsberg, which sailed to East Africa in 1884 and 1885, and the S.M.S. Saida, which traveled to South America and circumnavigated Africa in 1886 and 1887. These armed vessels, crewed by 209 and 318 men respectively, were centerpieces of power and knowledge during their voyages, bringing back botanical, zoological and mineralogical objects as well as ethnographica and human remains. Aboard the Frundsberg, physician Emmerich Billitzer received written instructions from Josef Szombathy, head of the museum’s anthropology department, to collect human remains from hospitals, prisons, execution sites and private collections, with geographic origin and ethnic affiliation recorded as precisely as possible so the remains could represent local racial types for later racial studies. The instructions emphasized quantity: if more crania and bones were present than could be taken, the best-preserved crania were to be preferred, even if fleshy parts still clung to the bone.

The archival record allows the researchers to reconstruct the collecting days almost hour by hour. On 30 November 1884, one day after the Frundsberg reached Bagamoyo in today’s Tanzania, Billitzer exhumed the remains of a person who had decayed for roughly three to four months in a palm grove, still not fully skeletonized, with a string of beads on the left lower arm and a ring, objects now held by the Weltmuseum Wien. A missionary of the Holy Ghost Fathers led him to the site. Because Nyamwezi porters, who dominated the caravan trade between the interior and the coast, camped near the mission in Bagamoyo, and because several East African societies used sacred groves as burial places, the authors conclude the palm grove was very likely a burial site from which Billitzer exhumed the remains. Later that day he collected a second calvarium and a third cranium lying freely accessible on the shore. Three years later, ship physician Stefan Paulay, who had traveled to Vienna for collecting training before his mission, gathered sixteen crania from the bushes of Bagamoyo in the same area, strengthening the suspicion that a grave site first plundered by Billitzer was revisited by Paulay. Paulay also exhumed four allegedly Sakalava crania from graves on an island near Nosy Be in Madagascar and plundered the burial goods, a collection Szombathy valued at 280 guilders.

To read violence directly from the bones, the researchers applied a non-invasive bioarchaeological framework that distinguishes three forms of harm. Interpersonal violence is assessed through healed, healing and unhealed trauma. Structural violence, following the concept introduced by Johan Galtung, refers to the systemic denial of access to essential resources by social hierarchies, colonialism among them, and is sought in non-specific physiological stress markers such as cribra orbitalia, porotic hyperostosis, caries and signs of inflammation, which correlate with malnutrition, anemia and poor health. Epistemic violence describes knowledge produced by science that harms the Other through its interpretation, and its markers include the ways crania were transformed into objects: ink inscriptions of provenance, year and collector written directly on the bone, pencil landmark points for craniometric measurements, mustard seeds used to gauge cranial volume, preservative coats, and screws attaching mandibles to calvaria.

The osteological results are sobering in their ambiguity. Of the 22 inventory numbers still present in the collection, most individuals were young adults, and 13 were estimated as female. No perimortem trauma was detected, and only two cases of possible antemortem trauma emerged: a healed depression fracture on the right frontal bone of one individual and a healed or actively perforating blunt force wound on the frontal bone of another, both of which might indicate interpersonal violence but could also be accidental. Notably, this reassessment overturned earlier findings: a 2010 analysis had attributed perimortem trauma to six individuals, including one suspected trepanation and two cases of post-mortem disarticulation, all of which were reclassified as pathological origins or non-metric traits. The frequency of severe pathological markers also proved lower than previously recorded, underscoring how observer-dependent macroscopic estimation can be.

The taphonomic assessment, entirely absent from earlier research, revealed the museum’s own fingerprints. Of 101 recorded alterations, the majority were caused by curators, followed by written applications and environmental changes. The most common alteration was ink notes applied to the bone surface, mostly the left parietal, while preservative coats and paper notes in the boxes followed. Seven identical notes document when an individual was removed from and returned to the depot, proving that crania were displayed in the department’s permanent exhibition between 1977 and 1997, an educational display organized around a hierarchical racial characterization of humanity that was finally closed and re-evaluated in the late 1990s after a major public debate. One cranium showed such pronounced weathering, together with the absence of a mandible and non-pathological porosities, that the authors suggest it had tumbled across an abrasive surface such as sand for a long period, a phenomenon known as a tumbleweed cranium.

The study also confronts the ethical weight of multiple, sometimes contradictory datasets. Sex and age-at-death estimations exist in three sources: the museum’s inventory catalogue, the first scientific description by Viennese physician Augustin Weisbach in 1889, and the 2010 thesis, and the new analysis produced considerable differences from some of these. Because such estimations are not absolute facts but adjustments to predefined categories shaped by Western ways of thinking, the authors argue they must be handled within what Zuckerman and colleagues have called relational ethics for bioarchaeology, which stresses the second layer of agency human remains acquire through the individual stories told by their data. The authors acknowledge that their own work may itself represent a form of epistemic violence and therefore chose not to publish images of the remains, and they openly invite representatives of the Nyamwezi and Sakalava communities into the conversation, since no local affiliated communities were involved in the research.

Ultimately, the study demonstrates that markers of violence can be found at both the collecting and the curating stages of a collection’s life, even if the osteological record offers only non-specific clues, while the archival record describes circumstances of structural violence with striking clarity. Numbering the individuals, the authors note, removed them from their individual presence and made them objects of knowledge, a transition from human persons to specimens that the training voyages of the Kriegsmarine exemplify. Although Austria may not have acted as a colonial power in the conventional sense, its collecting enterprises made it a clear beneficiary of the global colonial situation, and the continued existence of such osteological collections perpetuates colonial and racial stereotypes even when restitutions occur. Acknowledging the circumstances that created and named these collections, the researchers conclude, is essential for making informed decisions about future collection management, particularly because the remains remain valuable scientific resources for reconstructing the lives and histories of past populations.

Subject of Research: Colonial-era violence in the formation and curation of an osteological museum collection from Tanzania and Madagascar

Article Title: Ships and Bones: Violence contributing to and consisting in osteological museum collections

Article References: Schattke, C., Wolf, D., Berner, M., & Eggers, S. (2026). Ships and Bones: Violence contributing to and consisting in osteological museum collections. Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 127, 85-94. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.182645

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.182645

Keywords: osteology, bioarchaeology, colonialism, human remains, museum collections, Austro-Hungarian Navy, Tanzania, Madagascar, structural violence, epistemic violence, provenance research, provenance

The technical architecture of the strategy is central to the critique. Under its second pillar, which aims to make the United States stronger, so-called recipient countries are expected to meet co-financing targets, absorb procurement risk, and share health data without the option to negotiate terms, timelines, or any guarantee of reciprocity. The authors argue that these bilateral agreements, negotiated from a position of fiscal desperation, extend American oversight deep into national health systems. In the case of Nigeria, where a five-year agreement was announced by the US State Department, funding is explicitly tied to compliance with US priorities, a linkage the authors attribute in part to domestic electoral politics within the United States.

One of the most contested features of the Nigeria agreement is its shift toward faith-based health service delivery. The authors acknowledge that faith and spirituality can play meaningful roles in health and wellbeing, but they warn that prioritizing faith-based organizations aligned with US foreign policy, combined with domestic shifts toward religious exclusion in American policy, risks aggravating existing social tensions. They describe this fusion of religious dominance with governance structures as a colonial tactic, one that reshapes both healthcare delivery and the scope of permissible care. Secular and rights-based health services, along with the workers who provide them, face severe restriction under this model.

The consequences for vulnerable populations are a particular focus of the analysis. The authors argue that the narrowing of service provision falls hardest on LGBTQ+ individuals and women seeking life-saving reproductive care, building on what they characterize as a broader US assault on global reproductive rights. Sexual and reproductive health services are expected to contract significantly, with moralized framings producing greater stigma and self-exclusion among people who need these services. From a mental health perspective, the authors warn that leaving communities without discreet and affirming care heightens the risk of anxiety and depression, embedding structural psychological harm directly into the design of the strategy rather than treating such effects as incidental.

Perhaps the most explicitly transactional element documented in the article concerns strategic resources. In Zambia, the United States threatened to withhold health financing unless it was granted preferential access to critical minerals used in renewable energy and technology, including copper, cobalt, and lithium. Zambia ultimately pushed back, insisting that any health deal must be uncoupled from minerals access, and the authors cite this rejection, alongside a Kenyan high court ruling against the strategy, as evidence that countries are increasingly willing to contest the terms of cooperation and assert control over their priorities, resources, and data.

Yet the authors argue that the most valuable resource being extracted under the strategy is largely invisible: health data. Under the third pillar, intended to make the United States more prosperous, recipient countries are expected to supply surveillance data and biological specimens while procuring American health products and innovations. Health data is a national asset with direct implications for health sovereignty, and the authors contend that under these conditions the countries providing it are unlikely to hold intellectual property, shape research agendas, or reliably access the resulting products. Instead, their health systems become structurally oriented around US supply chains, undermining the very self-reliance the strategy claims to pursue.

The routine capture of health data also carries grave ethical and wellbeing implications, according to the analysis. Patients may lose confidence in, and awareness of, where, how, and by whom their data will be stored, processed, and used. This uncertainty is especially corrosive for individuals seeking care for stigmatized concerns such as mental, sexual, and reproductive health, where perceived confidentiality is crucial to building the trust required for people to seek care without fear of social judgment or discrimination. The authors argue that this extractive model is fundamentally incompatible with the long-term care systems needed to address physical and mental health, because transactional arrangements create dependencies that leave communities exposed to any shift in the demands or conditions attached to them.

Beyond its immediate effects, the strategy is described as setting a dangerous precedent for an already fragile global health governance system. By signaling that health assistance need not be presented as a global public good, the authors write, the approach lowers the bar for what counts as global health at all and marks an unabashed return to structural extractivism. They argue that the field depends on stable, locally driven, and context-specific systems rather than arrangements that shift with geopolitical interests, and that the familiar rhetoric of solidarity and soft diplomacy will not suffice to manage powerful actors operating under this new logic. If the strategy signals a broader turn toward openly transactional arrangements, they contend, global health reform must include counter-arrangements that treat the negotiation of power within global governance as a central design factor.

The authors point to historical and contemporary models of resistance and self-determination. They draw lessons from the anti-colonial, pan-regional movements that spread across the Global South in the twentieth century, whose legacy persists in institutions such as the African Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. They argue that reform proposals must deliver health sovereignty and subsidiarity-based models of governance, enabling countries to mobilize domestic resources for health, strengthen their own contributions to national health budgets, develop regional manufacturing capacity, and build health infrastructure and regional institutions as a more reliable and sustainable layer of support than bilateral dependence on a single donor.

Ultimately, the article frames the stakes in stark terms. Achieving health sovereignty and dismantling colonial models of health governance, the authors argue, is about ensuring that every person, regardless of where they live, has the freedom and the capacity to access the health care they need. Only then, they conclude, can lives and livelihoods be protected from becoming geopolitical bargaining chips. As countries such as Kenya and Zambia demonstrate that the terms of these agreements are not beyond challenge, the debate over the America First Global Health Strategy is likely to shape the future of global health cooperation for years to come, testing whether the international community can rebuild a system grounded in equity or whether transactional extraction becomes the new normal.

Subject of Research: The impact of the America First Global Health Strategy on global health governance, health sovereignty, and mental health in recipient countries

Article Title: Unvarnished colonialism: America first is setting a dangerous precedent

Article References: Jaspal, A., Rahman-Shepherd, A., Aluquin, D., Evaborhene, N. A., & Bandara, S. (2026). Unvarnished colonialism: America first is setting a dangerous precedent. PLOS Mental Health, 3(10), e0000745. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000745

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000745

Keywords: global health, America First Global Health Strategy, health sovereignty, colonialism, health data extraction, US foreign policy, Nigeria, Zambia, reproductive rights, mental health, development assistance, global governance

The conceptual shift at the heart of the review is deceptively simple but far-reaching. Most research on deprivation, from early town surveys such as Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 study of poverty to contemporary multidimensional indices developed by Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos, has focused on measuring the extent of poverty: how many people are poor, how deep their deprivation runs, and which dimensions of life it touches. Majumdar argues that for tribal India this approach misses the essential point. The more urgent question is not how much poverty exists but how it is produced and governed. Understanding tribal poverty, the review contends, requires attention to the unequal distribution of resources, risks, institutional authority and political voice.

The historical roots of this argument reach back to colonial rule. The review traces how the British colonial state dispossessed tribal communities of land, forests and customary rights while simultaneously imposing bureaucratic control, administrative classifications and the criminalisation of resistance. Scholars cited in the review, including historians such as Bhangya Bhukya and Ramachandra Guha, have documented how colonial agrarian and forestry policies enclosed land and forests that tribal communities had long used and governed. In central India, colonial agriculture and forest legislation transformed common resources into state property, and in regions such as the jangalmahal of West Bengal, imperial forest management directly undermined tribal livelihoods. Resistance to these enclosures was met with criminalisation, establishing what the review describes as enduring structures of marginalisation.

Crucially, the review argues that these colonial logics did not end with independence. Postcolonial development and welfare regimes, in Majumdar’s analysis, show continuity as well as transformation. Inclusion can co-exist with exclusion, and development with dispossession. The very categories through which the state administers tribal communities, including the Scheduled Tribe designation and the label of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, carry colonial afterlives. Recent scholarship on the politics of tribalisation in eastern India suggests that state categories created for governance continue to shape identity, entitlement and political struggle long after the contexts that produced them have disappeared. Welfare, in this reading, is never politically neutral: it names its beneficiaries, defines their needs and disciplines their behaviour.

The review then turns to regional experiences to demonstrate that these processes assume differentiated forms across India’s tribal heartlands. In mineral-rich states such as Jharkhand and Odisha, extraction and displacement dominate the picture. Research on development-induced displacement shows that tribal populations have borne a disproportionate share of the costs of mining, dams and industrialisation, losing land and livelihoods while gaining little of the resulting prosperity. Studies of uranium mining at Jadugoda in Jharkhand, co-authored by Majumdar, document the health risks and environmental injustice that accompany such extraction. In Odisha, mining-induced displacement has repeatedly provoked tribal resistance, illustrating how the politics of development is contested on the ground.

Elsewhere, the pathways into marginality run through unequal access to livelihood resources rather than outright displacement. In central India’s tribal belt, scholars have documented the slow erosion of access to land, forests and common resources, a process that converts communities from relatively self-provisioning producers into precarious labourers. In the north-east, questions of land, agriculture and livelihood among Scheduled Tribes intersect with distinctive institutional arrangements, including the Sixth Schedule areas of Meghalaya, where research on the Khasi Hills shows that tribal representation in local land governance shapes outcomes in ways that differ markedly from mainland India. Environmental vulnerability compounds these inequalities: forest-dependent communities face the double burden of restricted access to the resources they once controlled and heightened exposure to ecological degradation.

The review also assembles evidence on the human costs of these political processes, particularly in health and education. Studies of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in Odisha reveal high rates of malnutrition and anaemia, elevated stillbirth and neonatal mortality compared with the general population, and a heavy burden of diseases such as tuberculosis. Health surveys across tribal India document persistent barriers to healthcare access, while research on mental health literacy shows how stigma and weak service provision interact to suppress help-seeking. In education, systematic reviews of girls from Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups identify layered barriers ranging from poverty and distance to language and discrimination. These outcomes, the review insists, should not be read as cultural deficits but as downstream effects of unequal institutional authority and political voice.

What gives the review its analytical coherence is the insistence that these varied pathways are interconnected. Extraction in one region, resource erosion in another, and health and educational exclusion everywhere are not separate problems requiring separate technical fixes. They are, in the article’s framing, distinct expressions of a single underlying dynamic: the reproduction of tribal marginality through political and institutional processes. This dynamic explains a paradox that has long puzzled observers of Indian development, namely how welfare expansion and dispossession can advance simultaneously. When poverty is understood as politically produced, it becomes clear that programmes can deliver benefits to the poor while the structures that generate poverty remain untouched, or are even reinforced by the same administrative apparatus.

The implications for policy are significant. If tribal poverty were primarily a problem of developmental deficit, the solution would be more programmes, better targeting and improved delivery. But if poverty is produced through the unequal distribution of resources, risks, institutional authority and political voice, then effective responses must address those distributions directly. That means strengthening genuine tribal participation in decisions about land, forests and extraction, recognising customary rights rather than merely cataloguing them, and treating tribal communities as political actors rather than passive beneficiaries. It also means scrutinising how welfare itself governs, asking whose categories define vulnerability and whose voices shape the design of interventions. Comparative work by Majumdar on indigenous welfare policies in Taiwan and India suggests that such questions travel across borders, wherever states administer indigenous populations.

The review ultimately offers a broader lesson about the study of poverty everywhere, not only in India. Global scholarship on the politics of poverty governance has increasingly recognised that naming the poor, measuring them and designing programmes for them are themselves exercises of power. Majumdar’s contribution is to apply this insight systematically to India’s tribal communities, connecting colonial history to contemporary welfare and showing how the archive of dispossession continues to structure the present. For a country that has made remarkable progress in reducing measured poverty, the persistence of acute deprivation among its indigenous populations is a standing challenge to triumphalist narratives. The answer, this research suggests, lies not in better statistics but in a more honest account of power: who holds it, how it is exercised, and why the institutions that claim to uplift the marginalised so often reproduce their marginality.

Subject of Research: The political and institutional production of tribal poverty and marginality in India

Article Title: Power, politics and tribal poverty in India

Article References: Majumdar, K. (2026). Power, politics and tribal poverty in India. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01790-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01790-1

Keywords: tribal poverty, Adivasis, India, colonialism, dispossession, governance, welfare policy, land rights, displacement, Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, social inequality, indigenous justice

The research team set out to examine how imperialism is portrayed in open educational resources, commonly known as OERs, which are freely accessible teaching materials that teachers download, adapt, and distribute. Because these materials are often produced by trusted names such as PBS or C3 Teachers, educators frequently adopt them with limited scrutiny. Yonas described the typical scenario: a high school teacher planning three or four different courses needs to cover imperialism in an upcoming unit, searches Google for preexisting resources, and downloads whatever appears credible. With little time for deep vetting, teachers may assume that a recognizable institutional name guarantees quality. The study tested that assumption by systematically analyzing 46 sets of commonly used OERs designed for middle and high school social studies instruction.

The results were unambiguous. According to the study, 85.7 percent of the primary sources included in these materials were recorded by colonizers, with very few sources contributed by colonized peoples themselves. The authors wrote that OERs overwhelmingly privilege pro-imperial perspectives, frequently favor Eurocentric narratives, and minimize colonial voices. In doing so, the researchers argue, these materials normalize imperial conquest and perpetuate what they describe as systemic silences, gaps in the historical record that render the experiences and resistance of colonized populations nearly invisible. For a field that has spent decades working to diversify its sources and narratives, the prevalence of one-sided materials in widely used digital resources represents a significant setback.

Beyond the imbalance in sources, the study documented the prevalence of what the researchers call a balance sheet approach to teaching imperialism. In this framework, students are asked to weigh the pros and cons of colonization, essentially debating whether imperial expansion produced net benefits or harms. The researchers found that this approach was not uniform across platforms. They analyzed four: OER Project, PBS, DIG, and C3 Teachers. None of the DIG resources employed a balance sheet approach, while OER Project and PBS used it relatively infrequently. Every single C3 Teachers resource examined, however, included one. The variation suggests that platform-level editorial decisions, rather than isolated lesson design choices, may drive how imperialism is framed for students.

The specific questions embedded in these balance sheet exercises illustrate the researchers’ concerns. Examples included asking students whether Hawai’i should be sovereign, whether American expansion abroad was justified, and requiring students to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the French occupation of Vietnam. Jackson argued that such questions are inappropriate on multiple levels. They invite high school students to debate whether people have a right to exist freely or whether colonizing another nation can be justified, placing fundamental matters of human rights and self-determination on the table as subjects of casual classroom debate. He noted that this framing invites moralizing and shallow, uncomplex thought rather than rigorous historical reasoning, and that it treats sovereignty as an open question rather than an established principle.

The researchers also emphasized that the balance sheet approach is academically inappropriate because it diverges from how professional historians actually work. Historians do not, as a matter of practice, weigh the supposed benefits of imperial conquest against its costs, and recent scholarship is extremely critical of pedagogical frameworks that do so. Furthermore, the approach reduces history to hypotheticals: it is impossible to determine how life in colonized regions would have unfolded had imperialism never occurred, so asking students to calculate what colonization contributed becomes an exercise in counterfactual speculation rather than evidence-based analysis. The authors contend that this method misrepresents both the discipline of history and the moral reality of empire.

Not every resource examined drew the researchers’ criticism. Yonas highlighted the OER Project as a positive example, noting that it does a strong job of providing lessons that include sources from a range of perspectives and of asking questions appropriate for students, such as how colonized peoples resisted imperial rule. The researchers argue that elevating materials of this kind serves two purposes. First, it steers practicing teachers toward resources that handle difficult topics with balance and rigor. Second, it offers a model that can be incorporated into pre-service teacher preparation, training future educators to identify the shortcomings in the materials they encounter before those materials ever reach a classroom.

The study fills a notable gap in the research literature. Although open educational resources have become a fixture of modern classrooms, little research has been conducted on their actual content, the sources they draw upon, or their overall quality. Yonas has previously studied how states mandate the teaching of difficult topics such as genocide and how early-career teachers approach such subjects, and she argues that understanding the materials themselves is a critical piece of the puzzle. Without systematic evaluation, schools and districts cannot know whether the free resources they approve or the websites their teachers frequent meet the standards of accuracy and inclusivity that educators and families expect.

The broader implications extend well beyond the topic of imperialism. As the economics of education push schools toward digital and open materials, the mechanisms that once guaranteed a baseline of quality, such as editorial review at established textbook publishers, are being bypassed. The Kansas study demonstrates that even resources bearing the names of respected institutions can embed problematic framings and skewed source selections. The researchers hope their work will encourage schools, teachers, and teacher educators to scrutinize online materials more carefully, to favor resources that include colonized perspectives and historically sound questions, and ultimately to ensure that all students have access to high-quality, reliable materials when learning about the most difficult topics in human history.

Subject of Research: How open educational resources portray imperialism in middle and high school social studies

Article Title: Study finds online educational resources present imperialism in positive light, put students in inappropriate discussions

Article References: Study finds online educational resources present imperialism in positive light, put students in inappropriate discussions. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: imperialism, open educational resources, social studies education, curriculum, colonialism, balance sheet approach, University of Kansas, teaching materials, history education, OER Project, PBS, C3 Teachers

The study is grounded in two theoretical frameworks that together explain why resistance flared so fiercely in this particular region. The first is center-periphery theory, which describes how political and economic power concentrates in a dominant region while other areas remain marginalized and dependent. From the mid-eighteenth century, Calcutta served as the administrative and commercial heart of British Bengal, attracting railways, industries, schools, and cultural institutions. East Bengal, despite its fertile rice, indigo, and jute lands, remained an extraction zone: raw materials flowed out to feed the mills and export houses near Calcutta, while employment, education, and political influence stayed firmly in the center. The jute mills that generated enormous profits for British and Bengali elites were all located near the colonial capital, never in the districts where the crop was actually grown.

This structural imbalance was compounded by social and educational disparities. The bhadralok elite of Calcutta dominated administration, literature, and nationalist politics, while the largely rural and Muslim-majority population of East Bengal was frequently portrayed as backward and excluded from decision-making. Students who wanted higher education often had to travel to Calcutta. The only moment when East Bengal gained administrative importance came with the 1905 Partition of Bengal, when Dhaka briefly became the capital of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. Calcutta’s elites, fearing a loss of control, pressured the government into overturning the partition in 1911, and East Bengal’s peripheral status was restored. The researchers argue that this accumulated resentment left a durable consciousness of inequality, one that echoed decades later when East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh, confronted a new dominant center in West Pakistan.

The second framework, frustration-aggression theory, explains the psychological mechanism linking deprivation to violence. According to this model, when groups perceive that their political, social, and economic expectations are systematically blocked, frustration converts into anger and, ultimately, aggressive action. In colonial East Bengal, revolutionaries were denied political rights, economic opportunity, and social freedoms, and constitutional politics repeatedly failed to deliver change. The result was a turn toward direct action: raids on police stations, plundering of government treasuries, and sudden assaults on colonial officials. The study documents how this logic played out year by year, beginning with attempted robberies in Rangpur and Dhaka districts in 1906 and escalating through the following decade.

The quantitative record assembled by the researchers is striking. In June 1908, revolutionaries carried out one of the largest operations of the period, a raid on the Nawabganj police station in Dacca district, attributed to Pulin Das, head of the Anushilan Samiti. Four people were killed, several were injured, one revolutionary died, and roughly 25,867 rupees were looted. By 1909, rebels were extracting the largest sums from Dhaka, Faridpur, and Tippera, including 34,000 rupees from Rajendrapur and 27,827 rupees from Manikganj. Those captured faced penalties ranging from rigorous imprisonment to exile and death. The colonial state responded with a wave of repressive legislation: the Prevention of Sedition Meetings Act of 1907, the Newspapers Act of 1908, and the India Press Act of 1910, alongside deportations under Regulation III of 1818. In November 1908, nine prominent leaders of East Bengal, including Aswini Kumar Dutta and Pulin Behari Das, were arrested.

Yet repression alone cannot explain why East Bengal sustained resistance so effectively, and this is where the study’s analysis of geography and infrastructure becomes compelling. The region’s extensive river systems, wetlands, forests, and dispersed rural settlements made continuous colonial surveillance both difficult and expensive. Rivers and waterways allowed revolutionaries, weapons, and confidential information to move between districts with far less scrutiny than road transport would have permitted. Forests and remote villages provided secure locations for secret meetings, political training, and refuge. Rather than viewing these landscapes as mere backdrops, the researchers treat them as strategic assets that enabled decentralized operations and limited the effectiveness of British intelligence.

Colonial infrastructure itself became an unwitting ally of the revolutionaries. Railways, telegraph lines, and river transport were built to serve imperial extraction and military mobility, not rural development, and the resulting administrative gap between commercial centers and the countryside left large areas under-policed and under-governed. The colonial state relied heavily on local intermediaries for revenue collection and order, an indirect system that often failed to ensure real control. Organizations such as the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar exploited these weaknesses, using village networks and informal communication channels to recruit members, circulate political literature, and coordinate operations beyond the reach of colonial authorities. Ironically, the very railways designed to move jute and troops also moved activists, arms, and pamphlets across district lines.

The paradox of colonial education emerges as a central theme. Official census and gazetteer records show that male literacy in Dacca reached 19.1 percent in 1901, well above the Bengal average of 10.4 percent, and the expansion of colleges and entrance schools created a broad institutional base for an educated service class. Teachers, pleaders, clerks, students, and journalists formed a stratum whose aspirations were tied to the colonial state, yet whose advancement was blocked by racial discrimination and exclusion from higher authority. The Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883 exposed the racial foundations of imperial governance and shattered educated Indians’ faith in British liberal pretensions. When the 1905 partition sharpened debates over representation and regional identity, sections of this educated middle class abandoned moderate constitutionalism and supplied recruits, organizers, and ideological energy to underground societies such as the Dacca Anushilan Samiti.

Cultural and religious networks provided the connective tissue that bound these elements together. Schools, temples, madrasas, community festivals, and local associations, all beyond effective colonial control, became informal arenas for political discussion. Folk songs, devotional music, storytelling, and local theatre carried moral critiques of oppression in forms accessible to largely illiterate rural audiences, while vernacular pamphlets and underground presses spread nationalist messages in Bengali. Reform movements such as the Brahmo Samaj and the Faraizi Movement, though not revolutionary organizations themselves, cultivated disciplined networks of socially conscious individuals and fostered critical engagement with colonial authority. Revolutionary writers also revived the memory of figures like Titumir, Sitaram Ray, and Siraj-ud-Daulah, presenting resistance to foreign domination as part of Bengal’s own historical tradition rather than an imported ideology.

The movement was also shaped by global currents. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 demonstrated that an Asian power could defeat a European one, while the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the Young Turk Movement, Irish nationalism, and the Russian Revolutions supplied organizational models and ideological confidence. The First World War exposed Britain’s vulnerabilities and intensified economic hardship in India, which revolutionaries read as evidence that colonial rule was neither permanent nor invincible. Vernacular newspapers connected local readers to these international struggles, embedding East Bengal’s uprising within a wider transnational network of anti-imperial thought. The study’s authors acknowledge limitations, including incomplete statistical records and the underexplored roles of women and lesser-known activists, but their central conclusion stands: East Bengal’s revolutionary fervor grew from the interaction of marginalization, geography, frustrated education, and cultural solidarity, and any account of India’s freedom struggle that ignores the periphery misses half the story.

Subject of Research: The role of educational governance, socioeconomic structures, and geography in shaping revolutionary anti-colonial activities in East Bengal, 1906–1917

Article Title: The role of educational governance and socioeconomic structures in shaping revolutionary activities in East Bengal

Article References: Akter, S., Zayed, N. M., Islam, K. M. A., Ani, N. A., Bipasha, M. S., Nitsenko, V., & Pustovar, V. (2026). The role of educational governance and socioeconomic structures in shaping revolutionary activities in East Bengal. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00604-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00604-2

Keywords: East Bengal, colonialism, revolutionary nationalism, Anushilan Samiti, Jugantar, center-periphery theory, colonial education, Partition of Bengal, Dhaka, anti-colonial resistance, frustration-aggression theory, British India

The research distinguishes carefully between individual prejudice and structural racism, drawing on work by psychologists and sociologists who have mapped how discrimination becomes embedded in institutions. Individual prejudice typically occurs face to face, through microaggressions, hate speech or overt hostility. Structural racism, by contrast, is a web of interconnected elements embedded in legislation, policies and institutional practices that perpetually disadvantage racial minorities, even when individuals working within those systems hold no personal racist beliefs. The study cites evidence that structural racism manifests notoriously in housing, employment and the justice system, and it argues that supremacist attitudes also hide behind distancing strategies such as claims of color-blindness, whereby many white people detach themselves from responsibility and avoid discussing racism altogether. Philosopher Charles Mills describes this as a self-shielding tactic, in which pretending not to know functions as a channel that dismisses the oppressive realities of white supremacism.

Recent survey data underscore the scale of the gap between perception and reality. A 2025 Pew Research Centre survey of more than 5,000 respondents in the United States found that optimism about racial reform, which stood at 52 percent of US adults after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, had dwindled to 27 percent by 2025. Among Black respondents, 67 percent believed that meaningful reform remained a pipe dream. Ironically, 58 percent of white Americans believed racial equality had been restored. The study also points to a Gallup finding that 64 percent of US citizens consider racism against Black people to be widespread, and to research by the German Centre for Integration and Migration, which found in 2022 that 90 percent of respondents in Germany believed racism existed there. United Nations expert reports on the United Kingdom have concluded that discrimination against people of African descent is structural, institutional and systemic, while the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has reported that four out of ten Black people in Europe are stopped by police allegedly because of their skin color.

Central to the study is a genealogy of how racial ideology has adapted across economic eras, from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, imperialism and contemporary neoliberal globalization. Race, the author emphasizes, has no biological cogency: humans share roughly 99 percent of their DNA, and modern scholarship treats racial categories as political inventions created to grant power to white people and legitimize the subjugation of people of color. Racial hierarchies emerged historically around the fifteenth century and gained momentum alongside the transatlantic slave trade, colonial expansion and capitalist accumulation. The study documents how religion, culture, pseudo-science and economics were each mobilized to justify racial classification, from cherry-picked Christian doctrines that framed Black people as a cursed race, to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to distortions of Darwinian evolution that recast imperial domination as ‘survival of the fittest.’ Legal instruments such as the Jim Crow laws and South Africa’s apartheid pass laws then entrenched segregation long after slavery’s formal abolition.

One of the study’s most detailed case studies concerns education and academic publishing, arenas the author describes as supposed champions of open inquiry that have themselves been captured by supremacist gatekeeping. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration proclaims that education shall strengthen respect for human rights and promote tolerance and friendship among racial groups, yet the study argues that Western curricula continue to elevate whiteness at the expense of other races, teaching slavery and colonialism in sanitized versions while concealing colonial atrocities such as German genocide in Namibia and British torture of Kenyan freedom fighters. In publishing, the author describes subtle gatekeeping coded in routine rejection reasons, including demands to tone down criticism of imperialism, reduce word counts that would otherwise cut off criticism, or conform to Western-prescribed methodology. Empirical studies corroborate the pattern: research on geoscience found that only about 30 percent of papers on African topics were written by African authors, while studies during the COVID-19 pandemic and in global oncology documented persistent under-representation of sub-Saharan African authorship.

The study links these knowledge hierarchies to global capitalism, arguing that supremacism sustains a Western hegemonic system in which might is treated as right. Through trade ploys described as colonial-based commodity racism, including control of plants and seeds, and through raced markets, capitalism is said to manufacture poverty in the Global South while marginalizing it in economic relations. The author invokes Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, in which radical disparities in wealth distribution are purposely reproduced as small doses of death in the daily lives of subaltern populations. Trade frameworks such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act are criticized for tying market access to US-defined benchmarks of liberal governance, and the funding dependence of African institutions, with the African Union receiving nearly 70 percent of its operational funding from Europe, is presented as a mechanism of quiet capture that erodes institutional independence.

International human rights law offers little shelter from these dynamics, the study finds, because laws enacted in good faith are subverted by institutional practice. The United Kingdom’s Equality Act 2010 and the Treaty of Lisbon, which made the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union legally binding, are cited as milestone legislation that nonetheless coexists with pervasive, well-documented racism. The now-defunct Rwanda Asylum Plan, struck down by four separate courts as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations, is presented as an example of how governments persist with policies widely denounced as racist even after legal defeat. The paradox, the author argues, is devastating for the credibility of universal rights: it seems implausible that universal rights can be attained in environments that condone supremacism, prejudice and racial stereotyping, and many in the Global South consequently view the human rights agenda as an extension of disguised colonialism.

The study also engages critically with psychological theories of racism’s origins, including Frances Welsing’s Cress theory of color-confrontation, which posits that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation in a world where most people are non-white. The author reviews objections from scholars such as Bernard De Montellano, who found the albinism claim scientifically baseless, and from critics who argue the theory distracts from the political economy of racism, exemplified by historian Barbara Fields’s warning that slavery’s chief business was the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco rather than white supremacy. The study concludes that the real drivers of supremacism are historical capitalist economic factors, profit accumulation through cheap labor and the fear of losing unearned imperial and neocolonial privileges, rather than genetics.

Resistance, the study insists, must come from both sides of the racial divide, because complicity sustains the system. Philosopher Iris Marion Young’s social connection model holds that people are responsible for structural discrimination by virtue of participating in the institutions they condemn, through employment, volunteering or funding. The author cites Steve Biko’s call for Black people to reclaim agency and Nelson Mandela’s reminder that no one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, since racism is a taught behavior. At the same time, the study argues that white complicity persists through color-blindness, white fragility and tokenism, the perfunctory hiring of minority members to create a false impression of inclusiveness while denying them real influence over policy. Emerging counter-currents, including South-South cooperation through BRICS and the decolonial drive toward delinking from the colonial matrix, are flagged as signs that the cycle of coloniality may be nearing its end.

The study’s conclusion is blunt: universal human rights and global justice cannot be attained when certain groups believe themselves above the structures of international governance, and the greatest threat to international peace and security may not be armed conflict but white supremacism itself, which fuels conflict through capitalism’s profit-maximizing contempt for African lives. Unless there is a proactive policy shift, the author warns, polarization between the West and Africa will deepen, making sustainable global security harder to achieve. Invoking an African proverb that when you shoot a zebra in the black stripe, the white stripe dies too, the study frames racism as a self-defeating scheme in a world where all human beings are enmeshed in the same social fabric, sharing 99 percent of their DNA and, by the terms of every major human rights covenant, the same equal and inalienable rights.

Subject of Research: How white supremacism undermines the universal human rights agenda through structural racism and global capitalism

Article Title: How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda

Article References: Simuziya, N. J. (2026). How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Keywords: white supremacy, human rights, UN Charter, structural racism, capitalism, Global South, colonialism, academic publishing, racial discrimination, institutional racism, necropolitics, decoloniality