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Museums are complex, intersectional informal learning spaces that are situated in a distinctive positionality of power, social trust, and colonialism. For many people, they serve as community spaces that empower the imagination and connect intergenerational learning, while simultaneously functioning as prestigious institutions for research and scholarship. Yet, for Black, Indigenous and Communities of Color, museums equate to pain. Museums are everlasting monuments that replicate colonial erasure and violence through their exhibitions, educational content, and through their curatorial, stewardship, and collecting practices. In thinking about these nuanced paradigms, it is essential we critically interrogate how museums can responsibly move forward while being held accountable for past and current colonial harm without being performative. My goal is to reflect on this complex dichotomy through physical and digital initiatives to underscore how museum's anti-colonial and decolonial practices can decenter Euro-American historiography in an educational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2016, students at Jesus College, Cambridge voted unanimously to repatriate to Nigeria a bronze cockerel looted during the violent British expedition into Benin City in 1897. The college, however, decided to temporarily relocate Okukor to the University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This article outlines the discussions that occurred during this process, exploring how the Museum was positioned as a safe space in which uncomfortable colonial legacies, including institutionalized racism and cultural patrimony rights, could be debated. We explore how a stated commitment to postcolonial dialogue ultimately worked to circumvent a call for postcolonial action. Drawing on Ann Stoler's and Elizabeth Edwards's discussions of colonial aphasia, this article argues that anthropology museums risk enabling such circumvention despite confronting their own institutional colonial legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asia is still politically and diplomatically divided while increasingly becoming integrated economically. East Asian states, excluding Japan, share a common experience in that they were deprived of their sovereignty, in part or as a whole, by Western or Japanese colonial powers. The experience still defines current international relations among East Asian countries, raising the issue of justice in international law. International lawyers, however, have been, in general, reluctant to talk about justice in international law. Before the 19th century, international law was dominated by naturalism or natural law doctrine. The international community was composed of European states, excluding non‐Christian and non‐European states. From the early 19th century to the end of World War II, international law was dominated by these states' will. International law had developed various principles to facilitate Western powers' colonial occupations and in the 19th century, international law was a tool for Western colonialism and imperialism. After World War II, international law almost abolished the divide between European and non‐European, Christian and non‐Christian, and civilized and non‐civilized states. Colonization is not allowed anymore and many parts of the world that had belonged to former colonies in Africa and Asia became independent states. Further, human rights are no longer considered internal affairs of a state. Asia met with Western powers when positivism was prevalent. The relationship between China and neighboring countries, such as Korea, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Ryukyu Islands, had been maintained by a tributary system until the mid‐19th century. The China‐centered tributary system, maintained for centuries in East Asia, was replaced, however, by a capitulation system from the mid‐19th century. East Asian states concluded many unequal treaties with Western powers and East Asian people might have been confused by the paradox of the principle of equality among sovereign states and the unequal nature of the treaties that were forced against them. Efforts to recover sovereignty and to decolonize after World War II in East Asia seem to be far from satisfactory. Japan has never recognized its legal responsibility from colonialism. Even with the conclusion of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, many territorial issues still remain unresolved in East Asia. The Peace Treaty did not settle various colonialism‐related claims between Japan and neighboring countries, failing to render an effective remedy for past human rights violations. Thomas Franck argues that a rule's legitimacy enhances its compliance. Steven R. Ratner argues that international law rules would be deemed just if they were to (i) advance international peace, and (ii) respect basic human rights. If the international community is really a legal community where states are bound by rights and duties, it should be naturally based on justice. The legacy of past colonialism in East Asia that might hinder global peace and respect for human rights should be addressed in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sovereign Pacific island states attract little attention from the great powers. They achieved independence peacefully, mostly from the United Kingdom, and have generally maintained functional democratic societies. Nonetheless, some Pacific states have struggled with the political, institutional and economic legacy of colonization. Tensions between indigenous norms and practices and the expectations of a transposed Western model of society have led to crises. This paper focuses on two Pacific Island states, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. The collapse of the state in the Solomons at the turn of this century, and repeated military coups in Fiji, are due in part to the failure of British-derived institutions to be fully accepted. In both these countries, indigenous people have proposed reforms of these inherited models. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the recent rewriting of these two countries' constitutions has maintained the fundamentals of the Westminster system, and a government by Westernized indigenous élites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the 50 years between 1940 and 1990, the countries of eastern Africa were embroiled in a range of debilitating and destructive conflicts, starting with the wars of independence, but then incorporating rebellion, secession and local insurrection as the Cold War replaced colonialism. The articles gathered here illustrate how significant, widespread and dramatic this violence was. In these years, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state, and it was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. Why was it that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the 50 years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency? This article focuses on these turbulent decades, exploring the principal conflicts in six key countries – Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]