Search Results (71)

Recent scholarship on twentieth century West African architecture examines the intersections of decolonisation, nation formation, and development aid. While this shift highlights a transnational body of architects, the role of indigenous actors and building professionals remain under-researched. Using the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) as a case study, this paper analyses how architecture reflects Nigeria’s transition from a colonial entity to an independent state. It employs a transnational and multi-institutional archival research approach. Government, academic and architectural archives in Nigeria, the UK and the USA were examined. Non-institutional sources like newspapers and biographical accounts of students and building professionals were also analysed. The research reveals that the Eastern Nigerian political class envisioned UNN’s architecture as a nationalist and utilitarian alternative to the elitist and expensive colonial University College Ibadan (1948). The university was designed in three stages by the British firm James Cubitt & Partners; Nigerian contractors like Eastern General Contractors; and American architects through technical assistance. The stages illustrate how the architecture of universities and state projects in early independence Nigeria were impacted by decolonisation, nation-building and development aid. Furthermore, the research introduces local figures—Nigerian political elites and contractors—who are often overlooked in commonly used architectural records. Full article

International student mobility (ISM) is one of the most important and widespread features of international higher education today. One factor affecting ISM is the range and increase in scholarship providers, of which the China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship, is among the most influential and impactful globally. While many existing studies have focused on the national economic motivations of scholarship programmes, the research presented in our paper adopts a broader perspective, emphasising some of the organisational and political complexities in scholarship policy implementation. We use and build upon a framework that explains how scholarship policy is implemented. In it, scholarship organisations are mapped alongside the students as scholarship recipients as well as the universities as policy actors. The principal aim of this paper is to map out the roles and relationships of different actors in the implementation of scholarship policies, showing the importance of multi-level governance and stakeholder collaboration. The findings show that CSC scholarship policy involves multiple interconnected actors whose roles and relationships can be systematically identified through policy documents. By extending the framework, this study identifies not only scholarship organisations, universities, and sponsored students, but also local education departments and employers as important actors in the policy process. The analysis further shows that CSC scholarship policies have evolved over time, with changes in priorities, requirements, and selection criteria reflecting broader national development strategies. Given that fact that the complex structures and workings of the CSC are still little understood and under-researched in anglophone literature, our analysis provides practical insights as well as additional guidance for promoting effective, inclusive, and sustainable transnational higher education. The discussions offer valuable insights for policymakers and institutions committed to enhancing international scholarship programmes and global higher education capacity building. Full article

Imperial and colonial history has mostly been founded on the tradition of writing biographies of great men, and more rarely, great women. These lean inherently towards the aggrandizement or hagiography of individuals who, particularly in the early decades of life, may deserve no such attention. Yet for postcolonial and decolonial progression, the unattractive necessity of revising the lives of such influential individuals remains. We cannot now change or eliminate the archive’s overwhelming propensity to amplify (and thereby value and embolden) elite voices and experiences, but we can turn down the volume by placing key episodes firmly within an individual’s relevant or entire life experience, by reading the other less explicit motives for travel or collecting and by focusing on silent absences rather than noisy presences. Sara E. Johnson’s 2023 book ‘Encyclopédie Noire: The making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s intellectual world’, is presented as a ‘communal biography’ of one such great imperialist, by intentionally, and sometimes creatively, adding in the actors, voices and narratives missing from the sources and archives of European colonial history. In trying to methodologically undermine how imperial biography has traditionally sidestepped complicity or guilt, Johnson attempted to paint a more complete picture of the societies, enslaved or not, in which such elite men operated. Landscape history and architectural history play important roles in such essential revisionism because they can add provocatively spatial dimensions to colonial lives and experiences. As people are profoundly affected by the environment(s) in which they operate, particularly at key tipping points in their lives, spatial and environmental analysis can undermine traditional biography by focusing on where key life decisions were made, leading to a broader cognizance of why they were made. An individual’s spatial position, whether resident or absentee, at home or abroad, with family or without, reveals nuances in mentality that traditional analysis can miss. Taking the life and letters of Pierce Butler, Irishman, US Senator, signatory of the US constitution and the owner of a substantial estate of land and enslaved people in Georgia, as a case study, this article argues for the creative reimagining of biography as a fundamental postcolonial corrective to colonial and imperial history. Butler’s transnational identity, sometimes Irish, sometimes not, collapses any neat mapping of a grand national narrative onto one man’s life. The extraordinary level of detail provided by the correspondence also demands a more conventional or traditional history, one focused on individual identity, motive and relationships, that cannot be effectively discounted because of a landscape or architectural focus. Full article

How did exchanges between the architecture, engineering, and construction sectors of postcolonial states challenge dominant patterns of North–South technology transfer, and actively begin to construct the substantive scaffolding of an alternative international order? This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding South–South exchange as a distinct spatial practice in postcolonial architectural history, recovering previously unexplored patterns of circulation—construction technologies, professional expertise, contracting capacity—that connected allegedly peripheral geographies spanning from Southeast Asia and Africa to the Caribbean and Southeast Europe. It draws on Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, Anna Tsing’s theorization of ‘friction’, and Édouard Glissant’s ‘archipelagic thinking’ to develop three analytical movements: Geometries, Powers, and Archipelagic Relations. Together these map the lateral circulation of expertise, technology, and labor among postcolonial nations operating outside the North-South and East–West axes around which twentieth-century architectural history has largely been organized. The paper argues that the prevailing diffusionist model resembles a two-body gravitational system that forecloses the possibility of lateral force, and treats South–South exchanges instead as orbital anomalies, persistent deviations from predicted paths that reveal an unseen distributed gravitational field. Rather than organizing around a metropolitan vertex, this field constitutes what computational geometry calls an ‘unstructured mesh’: contingent, uncentered, and variable in its local density. The mesh’s topology traces across a range of exchanges drawn from the forthcoming edited volume South–South: Non-Alignment and Cooperation in the Construction of the Global South, which brings together contributions from a dozen scholars of postcolonial architecture. The case studies include triangulations in which prefabrication technology traveled between Yugoslavia, Cuba, and Angola, and professional expertise looped between India, Africa and Europe. The motivational fields and frictions that drove and transformed each exchange are examined in turn. The article culminates in a reading of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Afro-Asian Housing Organisation (AAHO) through Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity—the right of postcolonial actors to participate in exchange without becoming fully legible to Cold War systems that demanded every alignment be declared. By challenging prevailing narratives that position the ‘Global South’ primarily as recipient rather than generator of innovation, the article contributes to a decolonial architectural historiography that shows how the political project of Non-Alignment was substantively materialized in the production of the built environment. Recovering these alternate forms of architectural flow demands a South–South historiographical orientation as a corrective to the field’s persistent centeredness, and offers historical insight no less relevant today for rethinking the potential, and the challenges, of contemporary transnational cooperation. Full article

Research on migration and digital media has expanded, yet empirical knowledge about how digital network communication structures public interaction in post-migration contexts remains limited. In particular, little is known about the communicative arenas in which interaction becomes visible, the actors who gain interpretive authority, and the recurring issues and narratives that stabilize meaning. This article addresses these gaps by examining Afghanistan-linked digital publics in Germany. Eight semi-structured interviews with key informants and a qualitative content analysis of selected TikTok accounts revealed that short-video platforms can function as central arenas of attention, where repeatedly recognized communicators become orientation points for audiences through sustained interaction. Communication stabilizes around recurring issues and narratives such as migration procedures, institutional encounters, Afghanistan-related political developments, and community conflicts, which connect everyday experiences in the country of residence to political, social, and cultural debates about Afghanistan—thereby bridging local and transnational references within shared communication networks. These environments function simultaneously as spaces of practical guidance, social orientation, and public dispute. Building on these insights, the article proposes a multidimensional model of digital diaspora communication that links communicative arenas, actors, and issues and narratives. Full article

This review develops a configurational account of the relationship between religion and transnationalism by addressing a specific analytical limitation in the existing literature: its tendency to oscillate between substantializing religious traditions as already constituted entities that move across borders and segmenting transnational religion into disconnected domains such as networks, migrant communities, diasporic identities, institutions, political mobilization, digital mediation, social support, or pilgrimage. While these approaches have generated substantial empirical insight, they leave undertheorized the relational formation through which religious authority, practice, identity, material circulation, symbolic boundary-making, institutional organization, and mediated presence are assembled and made socially effective across multiple scales. To clarify this problem, the review reconstructs scholarship on religion and transnationalism through five major thematic domains: transnational religious networks, religious identity in transnational contexts, religion as a catalyst of transnationalism, the embedding of religion in transnational social practices, and distinctive forms of transnational religion. This reconstruction shows that transnational religious phenomena are inadequately understood as the spatial extension of pre-given traditions, as residual expressions of ethnicity or migration, or as discrete networks, movements, institutions, or diasporic communities. They are better grasped as historically contingent and relationally ordered formations whose temporary coherence is produced through the interaction of actors, authorities, practices, discourses, infrastructures, legal-regulatory environments, memories, obligations, and material flows. Building on the concept of social configuration, the review therefore proposes transnational religious configurations as a more precise unit of analysis for studying how the religious and the transnational are mutually constituted rather than externally connected. It defines such configurations as historically specific formations in which religious categories, institutions, practices, authorities, material resources, symbolic boundaries, and cross-border conditions of possibility are articulated across local, national, transnational, and global scales. The review operationalizes this approach through three analytical levels—conditions of possibility, construction and characteristics, and social realities and consequences—and illustrates its explanatory purchase by examining a new phenomenon within the contemporary transnational revival of Shi‘i Islam. Full article

Contemporary studies of religious modernity tend to view faith systems as static traditions that resist secularization. Although it has recently been acknowledged that local religions may be resilient, scholars often overlook the internal creativity of action that enables such faiths to actively navigate secular constraints. To address this gap, this study investigates a shamanistic folk religion, the Moed faith, to answer a critical question: How can a marginalized religious system innovate to survive within a strict secular order without compromising its spiritual principles? This paper proposes Performative Adaptation as a mechanism of religious creativity by combining historical analysis and ethnographic data through the lens of Actor-Network Theory. It argues that the Moed faith reassembles itself as a dynamic ritual-art continuum rather than remaining a fixed entity. The findings reveal that practitioners actively separate ritual form from function, transforming sacred exorcism chants into the secular performing art of Modlaenz to secure Intangible Cultural Heritage status. Furthermore, this adaptation fosters a transnational Pan-Tai spiritual community, turning rigid geopolitical borders into zones of cultural contact. Ultimately, this research challenges the view of religion as merely a repository of tradition, demonstrating that faith systems can actively engage in institutional innovation and identity construction. Full article

This article offers a comprehensive theorization of stiob as a historically sedimented, culturally specific, yet increasingly globalized modality of ironic discourse whose logic of deadpan overidentification has migrated from late-Soviet conceptualist counterculture into twenty-first-century political communication. Revisiting the folkloric, carnivalesque, and double-voiced foundations of stiob, this study situates the phenomenon within the longue durée of Russian humor, holy foolishness (юрoдствo), and the grotesque tradition described by Dmitry Likhachev, Aleksandr Panchenko, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Sergei Averintsev. The argument proceeds to demonstrate how contemporary political actors—most prominently Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—have appropriated stiob and its adjacent practices (holy foolishness, trolling, strategic sacrilege, and carnivalesque inversion) as powerful rhetorical instruments capable of destabilizing discursive norms, undermining institutional authority, and creating a semi-permanent state of “infernal laughter.” Drawing on examples from political speech, social media, public performance, and mediatized spectacle, the article contends that both Trump and Putin deploy a repertoire of ironic aggression, misdirection, double-voiced innuendo, and taboo-breaking parody that weaponizes cultural archetypes of the jester, trickster, and holy fool. This mode of communication, simultaneously theatrical and destructive, produces a new form of political carnivalesque in which hierarchical orders are inverted, outrage is instrumentalized, and the distinction between sincerity and mockery collapses. Ultimately, this article argues that stiob, trolling, and holy foolishness now constitute a transnational discursive formation reshaping public culture in the twenty-first century. Full article

Municipal leadership has become increasingly central to addressing global challenges such as war-related displacement, migration governance, and climate change, reflecting a broader shift toward polycentric and networked forms of multilateralism. This study examines how cities have expanded their international roles over the past decade, responding to governance gaps with pragmatic, people-centred action. Using a qualitative, theory-informed comparative case study design, it draws on three original case studies grounded in direct practitioner experience: European municipal cooperation supporting Ukraine during war; city engagement in shaping the Global Compact for Migration; and municipal leadership in advancing climate action and the emerging climate mobility agenda. Across these cases, the analysis identifies consistent patterns of multi-scalar municipal agency, including decentralized humanitarian action, norm-setting in international negotiations, and innovations in multilevel climate governance. Cities leverage transnational networks—such as the Mayors Migration Council and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group—to amplify political influence, exchange solutions, and secure resources, even as fiscal pressures and political polarization increasingly constrain local capacity. It concludes that cities are becoming important actors in shaping global governance, yet their effectiveness depends on institutionalized representation, enhanced fiscal autonomy, and stronger protections for local leaders. Embedding municipalities more fully within evolving multilateral architectures can better align global commitments with local implementation and improve the resilience and legitimacy of international policy coordination. Full article

The transformation of religious authority in the digital age is shaped by the interactions between human actors, digital media and algorithmic systems. This study uses digital ethnography to examine how religious authority is constructed and negotiated on digital platforms used by Muslims in Indonesia and globally. This study focuses on seven authoritative figures in the digital Islamic landscape, representing different spectra of authority, from traditional pesantren in Indonesia to transnational apologetics and urban liberalism. The findings reveal patterns of authority delegation in which digital platforms replace human roles in da’wah and Islamic institutions. Religious authority is formed through articulative work that connects the Sunnah, intermediaries (religious scholars), and congregations. Public search data show that digital spaces function as a medium of distribution, where religious authority is shaped by audience responses, message repetition, symbolic affiliation, and the dynamics of debate. This study highlights the role of algorithmic culture and authority representation aesthetics in mediating religious authority in the digital age. Algorithms shape exposure and reach audiences, and representational aesthetics are crucial for disseminating religious content. The study concludes that clerical authority in the digital era results from technocultural mediation, in which the cleric becomes both a figure and representation calculated by machines and validated by the audience’s participation. Full article

The recognition of a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right has reshaped global human rights discourse, yet its operationalisation remains uneven. This article examines how the African human rights system which is uniquely grounded in collective rights, has reframed environmental protection as a constitutive element of development, sovereignty, and justice. Through doctrinal and case-law analysis, it traces the evolution from the African Commission’s foundational jurisprudence in SERAC, which extended state duties to the regulation of private and transnational corporate actors, to the African Court’s landmark judgment in LIDHO v. Côte d’Ivoire. The study demonstrates how the Court transforms the aspirational ‘greening’ of human rights into binding obligations by articulating a robust duty of vigilance and linking environmental harm to violations of the rights to life, health, and development. It further shows that LIDHO inaugurates a post-sovereign model of shared and polycentric responsibility, in which state accountability encompasses corporate conduct within their jurisdiction and, potentially, beyond it. The article concludes that the African Charter’s collective framework offers an implicit regional model of ecological justice, one capable of addressing extractive asymmetries and informing emerging climate-related obligations across the continent. Full article

As a sustainability-oriented mode of education, cross-border digital education has distinct advantages, including a low carbon footprint associated with decreased student and staff commute times and expanded accessibility for disadvantaged learners. However, the intrinsic mechanisms by which globally mobile talent, including international students and transnational professionals, utilize their global skills and networks to create sustainable EdTech entrepreneurial initiatives need further investigation. Based on dynamic capability theory and resource orchestration logic, this study examines how human and social capital shape entrepreneurial engagement through resource integration capability (RIC) via PLS-SEM analysis of data collected from 318 transnationally mobile actors. The study finds that neither form of capital has a direct association on entrepreneurial entry; instead, both are associated with entrepreneurial entry indirectly through RIC, allowing mobile talent to combine and allocate knowledge, networks, and digital technologies across institutional and cultural boundaries. The study examines how cross-border EdTech entrepreneurship works towards creating inclusive and equitable quality education, as well as global partnerships, through scalable, adaptable, and low-carbon educational services, while meeting objectives 4 and 17 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This study reveals the transformation process centered around RIC, highlighting the need to create innovative ecosystems that transition from talent attraction to talent empowerment. The findings underline the importance of RIC in translating global mobility into sustainable digital education solutions. Full article

Evangelical churches increasingly engage in transnational partnerships that shape spiritual identity and moral belonging across borders. This study investigates how such partnerships function not simply as organizational strategies but as lived spatial practices grounded in faith. Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of interviews with Canadian and Mexican participants in a long-term church-planting relationship, the article explores how theological commitments, emotional ties, and embodied rituals generate spatial meaning. Participants framed their engagement not through institutional goals, but through metaphors of family, covenant, and companionship, suggesting a grassroots geopolitics rooted in care, hospitality, and spiritual presence. The findings reveal that space is produced not only through ideology or policy, but through practices like shared meals, cross-cultural mentorship, and prayerful presence—acts that reconfigure belonging along theological and affective lines. The article introduces the concept of religeopolitics to describe this phenomenon, arguing that evangelical actors are not merely influenced by global geopolitics but actively create alternative spatial imaginaries through faith. Foregrounding religious subjectivity in spatial production, this article advances scholarship on lived religion and critical geopolitics, highlighting how spiritual communities shape geopolitical belonging through theological imagination, relational duration, and embodied moral practice. Full article

Redemption, as a response to guilt and a path toward self-realization, is a fundamental theme in human narratives. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini poignantly explores this theme through the protagonist’s moral conflict, internal struggle, and eventual journey toward atonement. While prior studies have predominantly examined the novel through psychological and literary lenses, this paper adopts a linguistic perspective by applying van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network Model within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). It investigates how discourse constructs and negotiates guilt, moral responsibility, and redemption through social actor representation, role allocation, and inclusion/exclusion strategies across Amir’s narration, inner monologue, and dialogue. The analysis reveals that linguistic techniques such as association, passivation, and categorization play a pivotal role in shaping the protagonist’s moral transformation. By foregrounding the role of discourse in constructing ethical identity, this study offers a novel contribution to both literary linguistics and trauma narratives. It also adds to global scholarly conversations on how language mediates reconciliation and recovery in postcolonial and transnational fiction. Full article

Environmental crime has been increasingly recognised as transnational organised crime, but efforts to build a coherent and effective international response are still in development and under threat from shifts in the funding landscape. This mixed methods study addresses the role of one significant group of actors in environmental crime enforcement, which are non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who gather intelligence that can be shared with law enforcement and regulatory agencies. The study compares their intelligence practices to findings from traditional intelligence sectors, with a focus upon criminal justice and policing. The research generated quantitative and qualitative data from NGO practitioners, which is integrated to discern three overarching themes inherent in these NGOs’ intelligence practices: the implementation of formal intelligence practices is still underway in the sector; there remains a need to improve cooperation to break down silos between agencies and NGOs, which requires an improvement in trust between these entities; the operating environment provides both opportunities and challenges to the abilities of the NGOs to deliver impact. The study concludes by positing that the characteristics of NGOs mean that this situation constitutes ‘green intelligence’, contextualising intelligence theory and highlighting areas in which agencies can further combat environmental crime. Full article