Drawing on over three decades of experience as a Pakistani artist – from learning how to use Adobe at the National College of Arts in Lahore in 1993, to teaching it in the United States today – the author introduces the term ‘software colonialism’ to analyse how Adobe Creative Suite functions as a mechanism of digital colonialism in Global South art education. She argues that Adobe operates through three mechanisms paralleling historical colonial structures: epistemological imposition (embedding western workflows, colour systems and assumptions about individual authorship as universal standards), economic extraction (subscription models costing nearly two months of the median Pakistani household income annually) and gatekeeping access (replacing colonial English-language requirements with software requirements that function identically). Just as the British Raj required English proficiency for advancement, contemporary creative industries require Adobe proficiency. And Pakistani educators enforce this monopoly because they have internalised the logic that what the West requires is what students need. The framework extends to artificial intelligence, where AI tools integrated into Adobe products intensify these colonial dynamics. The author concludes by proposing decolonial digital pedagogy strategies.
This article examines the politics of the Labour government’s immigration clampdown, locating them as a partial response to racist riots which swept Britain in the summer of 2024. It explores how debates around immigration and the ‘white working class’ played out among Labour politicians in the north-east of England, using the towns of Hartlepool and Middlesbrough as case studies. It is argued that the Labour Party’s self-image as an anti-racist party is dependent on its strategic disavowal of more structural and institutional forms of racism, and that this, alongside its espousal of increasingly extreme rhetoric on immigration, can be understood as a feature of ‘labourism’, a political formation that plays a continuing role in the reproduction of racial capitalism in Britain. The racial regime maintained by the current Labour government is made to resonate with voters at a local level to sustain its efficacy, and it is sometimes at a local level that the finer points of Labour’s anti-immigration agenda are both contested and refined. Using critical discourse analysis to examine the social media output of Labour parliamentarians and councillors in the aftermath of the riots, the article provides evidence of how the labourist tradition can accommodate very different responses to such events, ranging from a nativist left-wing populism on one hand, to a left-populist anti-racism on the other.
This article reconsiders C.L.R. James and Claudia Jones as theorists of totality whose work exposed foundational limits within mid-twentieth-century Marxism, liberal anti-colonialism and metropolitan feminism. Rather than treating race, class and gender as analytically separable or politically sequential problems, James and Jones insisted that capitalism, empire and heteropatriarchy form an integrated system whose contradictions can only be confronted through unified analysis and struggle. Reading them in dialectical relation, the article develops what we term the totality problem, that is, the persistent difficulty of accommodating such integrated critique within dominant traditions of political thought. Situating their work initially within the Caribbean experience and tracing its subsequent movement, marginalisation and partial incorporation during the second half of the twentieth century, the piece argues that James and Jones offer a method for analysing domination and imagining decolonial humanism beyond the limits of liberal universalism.
India's legal framework for sex work occupies a persistent paradox: sex work itself is not illegal, yet the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA, 1986) criminalises virtually every activity that sustains it. This article argues that this paradox is not legislative inconsistency but structural logic - one that reproduces, in postcolonial form, the colonial dispensation of moral surveillance and spatial exclusion. Drawing on Agamben's concept of the sovereign ban, it contends that the ITPA produces sex workers as Homo Sacer: included within the legal order through their systematic exclusion from its protections. A qualitative survey of fifty sex workers across five urban sites in North India - Delhi NCR, Chandigarh and Zirakpur (Punjab), Baddi (Himachal Pradesh) and Noida (Uttar Pradesh) - found that 52 per cent entered sex work voluntarily, 82 per cent had experienced police harassment and 76 per cent did not perceive themselves as victims. These findings challenge the victim/criminal binary embedded in both the ITPA and the abolitionist feminist discourse that sustains it. The article critiques the Indian feminist mainstream's construction of sex workers as trafficking victims, traces continuities between colonial suppression legislation and the contemporary legal framework, and calls for decriminalisation, labour recognition and sex worker-centred policymaking.
This article unpacks the Metropolitan Police’s current aim to rebrand itself as an ‘anti-racist organisation’ via its London Race Action Plan , published following Louise Casey’s review into its toxic institutional culture. The author argues that this move reflects a broader neoliberal drive to recast the machinery of structural racism as anti-racist and to create public doubt over what constitutes anti-racism, amid a ‘post-race’ mythology in profound crisis. He shows that a cultural tug-of-war over anti-racism, coupled with Casey’s liberal framing of modern policing as public service, have prompted the Metropolitan Police to advance claims of impartiality by committing to ‘anti-racist service’ provision. With its vision of a police force that ‘represents’, ‘respects’, ‘involves’ and ‘protects’ black communities, the London Race Action Plan marks its ‘anti-racist’ ambition. This removal of anti-racism from its community-based radical foundations puts the onus on grassroots movements to reclaim anti-racism as a transformative endeavour.
This commentary by the organisers of the ongoing People's Tribunal on Police Killings (PTPK), which held its first hearings in London on 5-6 April 2025, describes key features of the background to and hearings of the PTPK. Despite an estimated 3,000 police violence related deaths in the UK, no criminal conviction of officers has ever followed an inquest, and the judicial system has acted to contain the struggles of the families of those killed by police. The PTPK provided a space for families to tell their narratives in an unfiltered way, and verbatim testimonies are included here. The authors are aware that these testimonies might well not accord with evidence presented at inquests and rulings by inquests and the Crown Prosecution Service. But the shared patterns of systemic treatment by the state as well as collective resistance needed to be documented. These testimonies were interventions of what Fero and Hutnyk term obstinate memory - which functions simultaneously as qualitative data, research method and political praxis. Families testified to decades of betrayal by coroners, prosecutors, complaints bodies and lawyers who maintain a fiction of accountability. The very language of deaths in custody is, it is argued, a deliberate state strategy of erasure. Instead, the PTPK proposes the term police killings; to name them as such is to challenge power. The collection of testimonies, expert witness evidence and panel judgments underpin a series of class actions that the PTPK is undertaking. Further tribunals are planned on state killings in prison, secure medical units and during immigration control.
Genocide is commonly approached as an exceptional crime defined by episodes of mass killing, yet such understandings remain inadequate for grasping how colonial modernity organises the systematic destruction of collective existence. Dominant approaches to genocide have historically been shaped by Eurocentric legalism and Holocaust-centred paradigms, which have constrained analysis to questions of intent and eventfulness. As a result, they have struggled to apprehend forms of violence that unfold through racialised governance, infrastructure, and the gradual erosion of the conditions that sustain collective life over time, particularly in settler-colonial contexts. The article advances the concept of 'infrastructures of existence' to capture the material, social, symbolic and political systems through which racialised populations reproduce themselves across generations. From this perspective, genocide is understood as a cumulative process that operates through coordinated assaults on these infrastructures rather than solely through direct killing. Four interrelated vectors are identified: ontological denial, through which racialised groups are positioned outside the moral boundaries of humanity; reproductive destruction, which undermines intergenerational continuity; epistemic erasure, which targets knowledge systems and testimonial authority; and necropolitical domination, which governs racialised populations through managed unlivability. The argument is developed through an analysis of Gaza, approached as a paradigmatic site of contemporary colonial violence. The genocide since October 2023 is situated within a longue dur & eacute;e of settler-colonial harm that Palestinians describe as an ongoing Nakba, which aims at the systematic dismantling of collective existence.
The author takes issue with the switch within the UK's National Health Service (NHS) from a framework of equality (based on its founding principle of universality) to that of equity (based on a supposed responsiveness to specific needs). It is precisely because people's lives are structured by unequal exposure to risk, exploitation and harm that universal provision is necessary. Equality, properly understood, does not deny difference; it protects against hierarchy. He argues that the move to equity, far from being progressive in recognising difference, is actually based in neo liberalism's domination of a market in which scarcity has to be managed, hence hierarchies established. Equity justifies differential access by framing it as fairness, instead of questioning why there is less to distribute. Racial equity metrics capture relative change rather than absolute improvement, allowing disparities between groups to narrow even as overall conditions deteriorate. Proportionality, on which equity is based, means sorting 'populations', and race, even if not intentioned, becomes an explanatory factor rather than a social marker. The task is not, argues the author, to refine inequality more humanely, but to reclaim equality as a universal social right and to confront the conditions that have deepened social injustices, which clearly affect health.
Has decolonisation, as an analytical concept and political horizon, reached a dead-end? Some argue the term has been so overused - and misused - that it has lost meaning and should be confined to the era of formal empire. Yet, abandoning it obscures the endurance of imperialist, colonial and settler-colonial structures and forfeits a theoretical apparatus vital for confronting them. This article argues that decolonisation remains analytically and normatively indispensable, provided its meanings and political horizons are clarified. The authors map how scholars and movements have variously understood the concept, identifying different modalities of decolonisation that, by privileging certain elements over others, blunt its radical potential and even cover for reactionary agendas. Against this backdrop, the article recovers a militant and revolutionary modality: mid-twentieth-century Marxist-inspired projects that transcended the limits of juridical and economistic decolonisation, grappled critically with epistemic decolonisation, and reimagined anti-colonial political communities and futures. The authors term this revolutionary approach worldly Marxism and suggest it can revitalise contemporary theories and practices of decolonisation.
In the first year of his second term in 2025, President Trump systematically reshaped the United States' immigration system through a series of executive orders (EOs) and proclamations. This article argues that these EOs and their subsequent policies should not be simply understood as exceptional authoritarian tools in extraordinary political times in the United States. Instead, these seemingly disparate measures reflect historical continuity when examined within the broader context of the country's violent and exclusionary racial politics and anti-immigrant past. As such, the article argues that President Trump's EOs, proclamations and their corresponding policies are serving as routine technologies of racial statecraft - embedding Great Replacement (GRT) ideology within the administrative machinery of the US such that it is no longer a cultural conspiracy or fringe ideology. Through legitimising state practice and explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions, these measures are serving as administrative rationality. Using a genealogical reading of policies derived from the current EOs on immigration, the article concludes with the implications for the future of multiracial citizenship and belonging in the United States.
This article examines migrant agricultural labour in southern Italy as a concentrated site of contemporary extractive capitalism. Focusing on the 2011 strike of migrant workers in Nard & ograve; (Apulia) and the subsequent Sabr trial, it argues that labour exploitation in European agriculture is not a marginal deviation or the result of criminal excess, but a structurally organised regime sustained through migration control, labour flexibilisation and territorial governance. Situating the case within the framework of racial capitalism and state-mediated extraction, the article conceptualises Europe as a space of internal frontiers, where incorporation into production is systematically coupled with precarious legal and political membership. The Nard & ograve; strike exposed the racialised foundations of agricultural production, while the Sabr trial translated structural exploitation into individualised criminal responsibility. Together, they illuminate the dialectic between conflict and legality through which extractive labour regimes are both challenged and stabilised. By foregrounding the legal and institutional production of vulnerability, the article contributes to a critical understanding of how democratic legality coexists with, and mediates, extractive accumulation in contemporary Europe.
This article examines 126 cases where people were charged with criminal offences in relation to the summer 2024 riots in England. Among other dynamics, it looks at examples where people were charged for their involvement in the riots, and also in reaction to them, including those who chose to protect asylum seekers, BME communities and their institutions. It reveals how dominant, politically established anti-asylum-seeker and anti-migrant narratives were echoed in the violence and how, in some cases, criminal justice agencies followed politicians' lead by downplaying the racist context of the riots and framing them as 'thuggery', thereby decontextualising what took place. It asks whether what happened in the courts echoed a dominant thesis of cumulative extremism, and shows how the crackdown on the riots swept up many vulnerable people from across different backgrounds.
This article argues that the panic over the 'great replacement' of White populations in Europe, North America and Oceania needs to be understood in the context of demography as a science rooted in English and French settler-colonial projects. From William Petty to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Robert Malthus, major formulations of populationism have been animated by the settler frontier and its double-sided promise of replenishment (for some) and annihilation (for others). 'Excess' populations have always been defined by their structural distance from Whiteness. Replacement theorists operate in this tradition. In a classic instance of anticipatory counter-revolution, they reassert a world-spanning hierarchy by imagining its dissolution. The supposed threat that racialised groups present to the imperial core therefore justifies their ongoing domination and virtually unlimited violence against them. Such weaponised pessimism reminds us that settler-colonial triumphalism has long been accompanied by deep anxiety about the prospect of defeat, incompletion and retribution. Only a careful assessment of demography as a science of global racial stratification can explain the enduring power of the idea of populations competing to the death in a zero-sum war for planetary space.
