menuGender and Politics Reimagined
5
Whose Knowledge Matters: Subjugation and the hegemony of whiteness in international development
This is a chapter about knowledge of gender and development theory and praxis. More specifically, it is about whose knowledge is privileged, whose knowledge is not privileged and why that matters. This, of course, is part of challenging ongoing systems of colonisation, known as coloniality.
Papua New Guinean women have had to endure a colonialism that devalued them based on gender and race, and which at the same time empowered their men beyond what was permissible before colonisation (Dickson-Waiko 2008, 2010, 2013). Now in the era of developmentalism, as the United Nations prods countries towards greater gender equality, one could rejoice in the greater focus of international development on gender equality. But what does this mean for Papua New Guinean women? What changes are possible if the coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge that underpinned colonialism persist through developmentalism?
To begin to answer these questions, we must start with an understanding of decolonisation and decoloniality. I then look across the works of two Papua New Guinean scholar-activists, Dr Anne Dickson-Waiko and Dr Orovu Sepoe, excavating key ideas on the coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge. The invisibility or (wilful) ignorance of feminist or women-centred thought from Papua New Guinean women is a symptom and a cause of the dominant epistemic frame in gender theory in international development that contributes to multiple harms. I end by outlining key principles to mitigate those harms and work towards epistemic justice.
Majority world
Before I explicate some thoughts on decolonisation, I will introduce key vocabulary that I employ as part of my activism and in my scholarly work. Like photojournalist Shahidul Alam (2008), who has advocated for the use of ‘majority world since the 1990s’, since 2014, I have used ‘Majority World’ in place of ‘developing’ and ‘minority world’ in place of ‘developed’. The difference in capitalisation is a deliberate gesture to emphasise magnitude.
The Majority World is both a global demographic and a sociological majority.1 The global population in July 2021 was estimated by the United Nations to be 7.9 billion, the majority of whom live in countries classified as in need of some form of development. Among this vast population are shared ethics, ontology and epistemology based very broadly on relationality and holism in contrast to the individualism and reductivism of the minority world—an understanding shared by decolonial theorists from Aníbal Quijano in 1992 (pp. 18–19) to Boaventura de Sousa Santos in 2013 (pp. 188–206).
I acknowledge that many of the following concepts are contested, nonetheless, I deliberately use the terms ‘whiteness’, ‘West’, ‘Global North’, ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘minority world’ interchangeably to demonstrate the hierarchies of modernity/coloniality. Furthermore, although there simply is no way to describe in opposing binaries the diversity and complexity of humanity and human social organisation, I employ the opposing binary of Majority World/minority world since this is based on the fact of a demographic and sociological global majority, unlike other binaries such as developed/developing, which are arbitrary indicators useful to maintain the dominance and control embedded in the modernity/coloniality matrix that I unpack further below.
The use of Majority World brings into relief the inequities and injustices of a global demographic majority continuing to be subjugated in various ways by a global demographic minority. This understanding gives shape to the various demands for decolonisation that are sweeping the planet.
Decolonisation
I understand that this chapter is to appear in a section in this book that speaks to decolonisation. Decolonisation is fast becoming a buzzword. Tuck and Yang (2012) remind us that it is not a metaphor. Decolonisation speaks to the transformation of all kinds of power relationships: social, geopolitical, economic, and so on. It can never be a performative act and it will always be an uncomfortable space as those holding power seek to protect and maintain their privilege even as the subaltern pushes back. I call these performative acts ‘thin decolonisation’ and I use ‘thick decolonisation’ to refer to transformative practices (Lawrence forthcoming).
I admit to my own discomfort in possibly being complicit in thin decolonisation by contributing to a book that is framed through decolonisation when this text is produced by an institution that is located on unceded land. To speak of decolonisation in the face of this fact, to merely acknowledge that the land is unceded, is to use decolonisation as a metaphor since an aspect of decolonisation is to return what was stolen by the coloniser. Land. Sovereignty. Self-determination. The right to practise on one’s own land one’s own ways of being, knowing and ethics. Metaphorical uses of decolonisation do not address these issues or offer meaningful redress for the significant violence and harms of colonisation and coloniality—a term coined by Aníbal Quijano (1992, 1999) to refer to ongoing practices of domination through various technologies of power, some of which I address below.
Although decolonisation has a spectrum of meanings depending on location, self-determination is central to it. Self-determination has conventionally been thought of as political independence, but this juridical sovereignty is of little value if people do not also have epistemic, economic, social and cultural self-determination. Epistemic self-determination follows from epistemic decolonisation—another phrase coined by Quijano (1992: 19). In his groundbreaking critique of modernity as being inseparable from practices and processes of coloniality, Quijano argued that power is enacted through epistemic processes.2 Within modernity, that means that all other ways of knowing, conceptualisation and representation have been subjugated and subordinated to a Eurocentric epistemological perspective (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2002). This coloniality of knowledge fuels contemporary demands for decolonisation in the international development sector. At the heart of these demands is the desire for epistemic self-determination: the freedom for individuals and collectives to know, conceptualise and re/present themselves and their worlds free of subjugation.
Within international development, Indigenisation is one strategy through which self-determination—and therefore decolonisation—can be progressed. For instance, Papua New Guinea is populated by people Indigenous to the island of New Guinea, who have been there for millennia. Much of the landmass of Papua New Guinea is still under customary governance. Sovereignty and the return of stolen land, therefore, are not the issues in decolonisation. Rather, it continues to be how to Indigenise development in a manner that enables epistemic, economic, social and cultural self-determination. I define Indigenisation not as a process of translation but as a nonlinear social process undertaken by people Indigenous to that context, which involves identifying, adapting and adopting what is useful from the new and introduced, and building on what already exists. The process can be both organic and systematic. Inextricably linked to Indigenisation is cultural fluency.
I define cultural fluency as the highest level of contextual knowledge. Just as linguistically a native speaker is the expert in their language, the cultural native possesses the highest level of cultural knowledge. A foreigner living in a Majority-World country for a few years does not qualify as culturally fluent, just as an immigrant in a white settler society needs years of lived experience and language education to become at least culturally competent in the host culture. Because so much cultural knowledge is not transmitted orally, even foreigners who study cultures that are not their own can never attain the highest levels of cultural fluency by virtue of not having been present through the formative years of childhood and adolescence.
Returning to decolonisation, despite independence arising from political decolonisation, true self-determination remains an issue because the global order and its governance structures have emerged from colonisation. These structures, whether the World Trade Organization, the World Bank or the UN Security Council, privilege a particular world view—one that is for the most part steeped in whiteness. The structures themselves are rigid and unchanging; witness, for example, the permanent members of the UN Security Council or the leadership of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which, though rotating, is drawn from the United States or the European Union.
This global power order to a large extent (but not entirely) no longer explicitly colonises. Instead, it pursues integration into the structures of a global governance system. Sundhya Pahuja (2011) writes of how in the heady early days of achieving independence from the colonisers, many newly formed states dared to imagine a more equitable world but found themselves instead confronted by the reality of colonial powers refusing to relinquish control of global trade and financial flows.3 Integration of the formerly colonised into these inequitable systems has often meant subjugation within a particular hierarchy underpinned by whiteness.
Whiteness is used by critical race theorists to mean practices and processes that produce and sustain white people’s dominance, privilege and supposed superiority (Mills 1997; Sullivan 2006). Central to whiteness, and thus, central to upholding the superiority of whiteness, is the idea that the only valid and valued knowledge is that produced by white people or the processes and practices of whiteness.
To summarise, the existing global governance system was designed by colonial powers and is thus underpinned by whiteness. It is a global order built on coloniality through various technologies of power such as the coloniality of race, the coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo 2009; Quijano 2007a, 2007b; Grosfoguel 2002; Lugones 2008). I expand on these technologies of power in the next section. Suffice to say here that the coloniality of knowledge is central to enabling the privilege and maintaining the superiority of whiteness and white people. Thus, for example, we have a global economic system that continues to favour wealth extraction from the Majority World for the primary benefit of the white minority world, in which the latter’s consumption of planetary resources far exceeds that of the billions of bodies in the Majority World. In this context of ongoing coloniality in a supposedly postcolonial world, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) has written that we, the peoples of the Majority World, know we are still being colonised.
What, then, is decolonisation when, as mentioned earlier, our different histories and geopolitics position us to fight for different outcomes? Perhaps it is easier to define first what it is not or cannot be. Decolonisation can never be defined by the coloniser since to do so is to continue to colonise. Second, at its broadest reach, beyond a mere critique of power, decolonisation as framed by the theorists of decoloniality is a process of continuously understanding how people with different world views can share this planet equitably and peacefully.4
If decolonisation represents a spectrum of practices, processes and outcomes, decoloniality occupies the very thick core of decolonisation spiralling outwards. Decoloniality seeks to transform power relations by addressing root causes. Decoloniality is relational thinking that recognises the complexity of human social life—what Mignolo (2011) calls the pluriverse—nestled within and influenced by an even more complex natural world. For me, decolonial practice is a process of building understanding, a cycle of learning and unlearning. It is not a means of subjugating different world views and different ethical, political, legal and epistemic systems into a single paradigm that replaces one hierarchy with another, albeit with different dominant parties. For Pasifika peoples, it is a continued process of Indigenisation. Just as Pasifika peoples have successfully Indigenised Christianity, so, too, can we successfully Indigenise other introduced ways of being and knowing—should we choose to.
Let me return to where I started in this section.
Land.
Land is my starting point because colonisation involved usurping land and was often accompanied by a loss of authority that many Majority-World women had previously enjoyed.5 Later in this chapter I draw on the works of Papua New Guinean scholars Anne Dickson-Waiko and Orovu Sepoe to analyse that loss of authority and its implications.
Land is my starting point because theorising as a person from the Majority World—more specifically, as a Pasifika person—is to acknowledge that land and belonging to the land are central to Indigenous Oceanic societies, whether matricentric or otherwise. In the Suau language of the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, eanua is the land and associated relationships to which I belong. Since Milne Bay is a maritime province, the relationship to the ocean is also embedded within one’s eanua, such that eanua is one’s country, encompassing relationships of both land and ocean.6 Whether or not the relationship to ocean is embedded in other Pasifika languages, it is the case that many of our different languages have cognates that attest to the importance of the relationship to land, to country:7 in the Motu language of the Central Province of Papua New Guinea, the word is hanua; in Fiji and Vanuatu, it is vanua; in te reo Māori, it is whenua; in Samoa, it is fanua; in Tongan, fonua; and in Hawai’i, it is honua.
Eanua and the Majority World are part of my epistemic frame.
I mention matricentricity as part of emplacing myself; I am a woman from a society that organises and functions through matrilineal descent, which is about bodies of land as much as it is about bodies of people. It is not just about emplacing myself to make visible to others the influences on my being and thinking; it is also acknowledging that, as a Papua New Guinean from a matricentric society that includes matrilocal residence,8 I am deeply rooted in the land of my ancestors.
I mention this because as feminists have long known—at least since Donna Haraway’s (1988) seminal paper—all knowledge generated by individuals is partial (Harding 1993; Longino 1993; On 1993; Alcoff and Potter 1993b; Dalmiya and Alcoff 1993) and influenced by individual histories, geographies, bodies and geopolitics. The knowledge that I share in this chapter is informed by my experience of being shaped by and belonging to a community in which girls, boys, men and women are equally valued as necessary members of a balanced society.9 I grew up knowing of, if not directly, my female kin who had scaled the Owen Stanley Range in the 1700s, purchased land in the 1800s to establish matrilines, travelled the world (Australia, India, England, Ireland) in the mid-1900s, been the first to be accepted into Australian universities in the 1960s, the first female journalist, and so on. Gender was not a barrier for these Milne Bay women.10
Yet, in the 2022 PNG elections in which women won only two of the 118 seats, their gender continued to be a monumental barrier. Why? Why is it that Milne Bay women are unsuccessful in national politics when in their matricentric communities these women are explicitly valued? My curiosity is not just as a woman from Papua New Guinea. I also work in international development, currently as director of systemic change and partnerships for a feminist international NGO located in the minority world.11 My curiosity is thus both personal and professional.
To answer this question, I start by exploring the coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge—two technologies of power articulated through the theoretical lens of the modernity/coloniality matrix. To situate this theoretical framing, I then read across the works of Papua New Guinean scholars Anne Dickson-Waiko and Orovu Sepoe.
Technologies of power: The coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge
The theories of modernity, coloniality and decoloniality explain that there is an underside to modernity. The successes of European modernity gained through the scientific and technological progress that began with the European Age of Enlightenment have been made possible only through the violence that was enacted on others through expropriation, enslavement and colonisation (Quijano 1992, 1999; Mignolo 1995, 1998). It is a violence that remains hidden yet continues to be enacted through various technologies of power, including: the coloniality of race (Quijano 1995), which speaks to intentional actions to entrench white men at the top of a race hierarchy followed by white women, with black women occupying the lowest rung; the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007, 2008) or the oppositional binary gender norms of whiteness; and the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano 1992, 1999; Mignolo 1995, 1998, 1999, 2009),12 which, underpinned by the coloniality of race and the coloniality of gender, privileges knowledge produced through a lens of whiteness—primarily knowledge produced by white men and secondarily knowledge produced by white women.
Let me illustrate the coloniality of knowledge and gender with an anecdote.
Some time ago I came across an online news item about an Australian volunteer in the PNG Highlands. Alas, I did not keep a copy. However, according to the article, the volunteer was teaching the women from the Highlands agricultural skills. Now the Highlands of Papua New Guinea is an area in which agriculture has been practised continuously for the past 10,000 years. Indeed, the Kuk Early Agricultural Site (or the Kuk Swamp in the Wahgi Valley) has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for its extant evidence of cultivation. According to archaeologists: ‘Multidisciplinary investigations at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea show that agriculture arose independently in New Guinea by at least 6950 to 6440 calibrated years before the present’ (Denham et al. 2003).13 The evidence also reveals systems of drainage to enhance cultivation and to address the challenges of feeding growing populations (Bellwood 2017: 36).
Given this evidence of millennia of agricultural practices in the Highlands, what, I wondered, could this white (according to the accompanying photograph) Australian woman teach Papua New Guinean Highlanders about agriculture? As it transpired, according to the article, she demonstrated how to cultivate tomatoes and lettuce—foods that are not part of the daily diet and would presumably have been grown to sell. Nonetheless, the knowledge that was shared hardly rates alongside the technological and technical complexities that the ancestors of the Highlanders negotiated and mastered and the knowledge that was then passed down the generations to the present day—complexities that included both cultivation and domestication.14
This anecdote is a manifestation of an ongoing practice of injustice that excludes and/or devalues knowledges held and produced by particular groups of people and which contributes to and maintains the colonial hierarchies of knowledge that are embedded in the modernity/coloniality matrix. It is a twofold problem of gendered epistemic injustice highlighted by feminists (Alcoff and Potter 1993a) and the epistemic racism made visible by decolonial scholars and activists (Grosfoguel 2002, 2007). The embedded assumption is that the knowledge held by a white woman must be superior to that held by black women.
Furthermore, this coloniality of knowledge, acutely inflected by both race and gender, is deeply embedded in the international development sector in which I work.15 The coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge are two technologies of power that are used to continue to subjugate Majority-World peoples.
PNG feminist theory: Anne Dickson-Waiko and Orovu Sepoe
The peoples of Papua New Guinea have undergone tremendous social change over the past century and a half. The first missionary landed on Papuan shores in the 1870s and Papua was shortly after annexed by the British before becoming an Australian protectorate in 1901 on Australia’s Federation. New Guinea, which had been annexed by the Germans in 1884, also became a protectorate of Australia, in 1906. Independence came in 1975 but the promise of self-determination has been fleeting.
Without excusing the corruption, nepotism and bad governance, the challenge of development and providing services to Papua New Guineans has been exacerbated by a quadrupling of the population in the period since independence, numbering 9.3 million in 2022 (UNFPA 2024). On the positive side, the 800-odd different linguistic groups and associated cultures by and large live together peacefully with high levels of intermarriage between peoples of coastal and island provinces.
However, Papua New Guinean women have had to endure a colonialism that devalued them based on gender and race, and which at the same time empowered their men beyond what was permissible before colonisation (Dickson-Waiko 2008, 2010, 2013). Now in the era of developmentalism, as the United Nations prods countries towards greater gender equality, one could rejoice in the greater focus of international development on gender equality. But what does this mean for Papua New Guinean women? What changes are possible if the coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge that underpinned colonialism persist through developmentalism?
The women on whose work I draw here do not necessarily identify as feminists but their work in scholarship and activism is firmly rooted in challenging gendered power structures to enable the greater participation of their countrywomen in the political and economic spheres of modernity.
Dr Anne Dickson-Waiko
The late Dr Anne Dickson-Waiko left a treasure of papers concerned with the position of women in Papua New Guinea. Like many Papua New Guinean women, Dickson-Waiko did not call herself a feminist. Nonetheless, the critique she offers of patriarchy and of the gendered relationship between the PNG state and its citizens could be claimed as feminist—more specifically, a decolonial feminist critique. I define a decolonial feminist not merely by geopolitical and cultural location, but also as one whose ethical framework explicitly recognises that all cultures have both positive and negative gender norms (Lawrence, forthcoming). A decolonial feminist understands that the global order of modernity operates through various technologies of power, including the coloniality of gender, the coloniality of race and a corresponding racialised and gendered epistemic hierarchy. A decolonial feminist also understands and practices the principles of decoloniality—principles that are embedded in the writings of decolonial scholars and the praxis of activists (Lawrence, forthcoming).
One of the decolonial principles in Dickson-Waiko’s work is the application of BOTH/AND logic. This is the logic of accepting that two opposing situations can and do coexist in the same space–time continuum in lieu of a logic that insists on one OR the other of a polarising oppositionality. The way it plays out in her work is through the recognition of the existence of both positive and negative gender norms across Papua New Guinea. This stance contrasts with non-decolonial feminists, who, out of ignorance or to justify requests for funding or for some other reason, focus exclusively on the harmful norms that serve to position them as saviours of victims. This stance is as harmful as the negative norms to which they object. It is harmful because focusing only on the negative creates the potential for the wholesale demonisation of cultures.16 Furthermore, the singular focus on the negative generates resistance among both men and women to this one-sided portrayal of what it means to be Papua New Guinean.17 This makes the work of enacting systemic change towards gender equality more difficult than a balanced approach that recognises that all cultures possess harmful gender norms just as all cultures also possess norms that are life-enhancing.
Dickson-Waiko’s positionality as a Papua New Guinean scholar enabled her access to multiple sources of data and information: recorded data, oral histories and, as importantly, experiential knowledge. This experiential knowledge stemming from cultural fluency puts Dickson-Waiko and other Indigenous scholars in a much stronger position in understanding context than researchers, policymakers and program designers and implementers who do not have that fluency. Triangulating these sources enabled Dickson-Waiko to identify what I see as the recurrent theme across her writing: that the colonial and postcolonial structures of government and governance have been harmful to the rights of the women of Papua New Guinea (Dickson-Waiko 2001, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013). Indeed, both structures have consistently stripped women of the freedoms—including economic independence—that they enjoyed before the arrival of whiteness.
Papua New Guinean women always had productive and reproductive roles that were valued in their communities. The separation of the domestic and public spheres by missionisation and colonisation—continuing today under developmentalism—is one of the critical factors through which Papua New Guinean women have become devalued under modernity. From the onset of colonisation to the creation of an independent state, men were the ones who were favoured to participate in the public spaces (Dickson-Waiko 2001, 2003). Dickson-Waiko argues that due to the history of colonialism in Papua New Guinea, which from the outset engaged men in roles away from their villages, men have entered the state as citizens and as both individual and relational beings. Women, however, because of their absence from colonial interactions and transactions, are relational beings only, not individuals with rights in the way men have been constructed. This mirrors the way the minority world, through whiteness, has historically constructed gender relations. The relational identity is not valued: the outputs and outcomes of relational labour, though necessary for social wellbeing and cohesion, are still not counted as part of gross domestic product (GDP).
As with other Pasifika women working towards the development of their countries, and as is common among decolonial feminists, Dickson-Waiko’s work did not stop at critique. She identified promising pathways of change, the most significant of which was leveraging existing church women’s groups to strengthen a fledgling women’s rights movement (Dickson-Waiko 2003). Notwithstanding the church’s initial historical role in the construction of a predominantly individualised personhood, Dickson-Waiko posited that the church had also become a path for women to participate in the public sphere of community politics. She writes:
What is perhaps not widely known is that the catalyst for women’s activism right across the Pacific region has been provided by church women’s organizations. A combination of religion and feminism—an unlikely marriage in the eyes of many modern ‘Western’ feminists—remains buried under the label ‘Church Women’s Fellowships’ and is kept inconspicuous by the image the women project. (Dickson-Waiko 2003: 99)
Moreover, development workers and scholars marginalise church women because their agendas do not mirror feminists’ expectations (Dickson-Waiko 2003: 115). For Dickson-Waiko, women are the missing rib in PNG politics and government, and church women’s groups are the missing rib in feminist understandings of Pacific women.
Dr Orovu Sepoe
Dr Orovu Sepoe, also a PNG scholar of gender, like Dickson-Waiko, suggests that strengthening the women’s movement in Papua New Guinea is necessary for increasing women’s political participation. Sepoe makes a similar argument for community women’s groups—groups that might include church women’s groups but might also coalesce around matters other than religion. She argues that community women’s groups are a means through which women exercise decision-making and political power:
Conventional studies of the political tend to maintain a dichotomy between institutional and community politics … The dichotomy also extends to development practice so much so that women’s organizations are predominantly perceived as ‘just women’s groupings’. The dichotomy serves to marginalise issues concerning women, and the agendas and activities of women organising. (Sepoe 2000: vii)
Sepoe’s experiential knowledge coupled with her research led her to a similar understanding to Dickson-Waiko of gender roles in precolonial Papua New Guinea, how these have changed and the impact on women. Her insights include that ‘[s]ettled, subsistence agriculture has been, and remains the mainstay of household economic activity’ (Sepoe 2000: 2). Women continue to play a significant role in this as they did in the past. Triangulating experiential knowledge with anthropological literature, she surmises that in precolonial times:
Women’s and men’s roles were separate and different but these roles were of mutual value, contributing to the total wellbeing of their respective community. The checks and balances of these pre-colonial societies ensured that both men’s and women’s designated roles served the interests of the community as a whole. The separate roles of women and men did not necessarily correspond with a devaluing of their place and status in society, since they had their specific spheres of influence. (Sepoe 2000: 3)
The balance of these separate and different roles of mutual value was upended by both Christianisation and colonisation, but in different ways. Both introduced the idea of opposition: the oppositional gender roles of whiteness and the opposition of public and domestic necessary to uphold the oppositional gender roles. But there are significant differences in the approaches used by missionaries and colonisers.
Christianity has been Indigenised to the extent that it is part of the identity of most Pasifika peoples today. This adoption was made possible largely by what Sepoe (2000: 6) refers to as the missionary practice of ‘evangelism through localisation’. As I, too, have written about the Kwato people of the mission of the same name, the extent of the uptake of Christianity relied on two things: first, that Christian values of communality echoed extant values of relationality; and second, it was locals who drew on their kinship and trade networks to exponentially multiply congregations of believers (Lawrence 2018). The process of ‘localisation’ resulted in Indigenisation. As stated earlier, I define Indigenisation not as a process of translation; rather, it is a process of building on what already exists. In this context, it is building on values and ways of being that already existed. Importantly, during this period, men and boys were not lured away from their villages in the same way that colonial administrations and economies centred men in growing towns and on plantations. In the mission at Kwato Island, local men and women worked together to grow the mission and, in this matricentric region, Indigenous women in the mission were also teachers, plantation managers and preachers.
Outside the mission, however, and across the two territories of Papua and New Guinea, men dominated the colonial administration even in the last decades of colonial rule. Sepoe writes:
In 1963 … there were 6000 officers in the public service, of whom only 16 were women. In the private sector, women comprised only 3% out of a total 57,200 employees. On the eve of self-government, in 1971, of a total paid workforce of 132,632, only 12% were women. (2000: 9)
With such a bias in favour of men’s representation and participation, ‘[t]he emerging formal and informal structures and processes privileged men more than women’ (Sepoe 2000: 11). Furthermore, she argues it is not just economic structures and processes that are gendered, so, too, is male bias embedded in political structures and processes (Sepoe 2000: 22), and whiteness, modernity and coloniality devalue women’s work in relation to men’s because ‘development assistance and interventions often exclude the work that women perform’ (p. 24). Sepoe is also concerned that a focus on women’s representation is at the expense of women’s participation in decision-making.
What can we determine about the coloniality of knowledge vis-a-vis the scholarship of Dickson-Waiko and Sepoe and the anecdote about agriculture that preceded this section? We know from feminist scholars that within whiteness gender has been a factor in the validity of knowledge claims (Alcoff and Potter 1993a). And we know from decolonial scholars (Mignolo 2002) that the coloniality of race is the racial hierarchy that inflects the coloniality of knowledge such that knowledge produced by white men and white women is knowledge that is valued. But, according to the logic of whiteness, knowledge produced by black women is an oxymoronic phrase since black women and their contributions are so devalued in these hierarchies of race and gender. It is, therefore, unsurprising, in the context of this racialised knowledge hierarchy, that a white woman should pronounce that she is teaching agriculture to black women who, along with their ancestors, have been practising for some 6,000 years the very thing said to be taught! And it explains why Dickson-Waiko’s and Sepoe’s feminist analyses are not prominent in the theory, discourse and praxis of international development actors working on gender in Papua New Guinea. They do not belong to the dominant epistemic frame.
The dominant epistemic frame and its role in subjugation in international development
That the discourse and praxis of aid and international development are an expression of neocolonialism is accepted by scholars and activists of the Majority World (Escobar 1992, 1995), including the Pacific (Hau’ofa 1994, 2008; Duituturga 2017; Lagi 2017; Va’ai 2017). Indeed, ‘aid’ is a contentious word. The theories of modernity, coloniality and decoloniality make very visible the ongoing harms of coloniality even after the end of colonisation and in the era of political independence. Resources extracted from the Majority World have historically and in contemporary times served to enrich the minority world. In addition, minority-world consumption patterns and the underlying economic systems are a significant contributing factor to the changing climate (Pörtner et al. 2022). Majority-World peoples thus continue to be harmed in multiple ways. In this context, ‘aid’ should be seen as part of a package of reparations for historical and ongoing systemic harms caused by the minority world and endured by the Majority World. But the conceptualisation and meaning given to ‘aid’ within the international development praxis and popular conceptions are blind to the harms of modernity because the dominant epistemic frame does not acknowledge these harms.
The impact of the dominant epistemic frame, coupled with the colonialities of race and gender, is one of exclusion. Making an argument about the education received by those working in human rights and social justice—which can equally be applied to international development practitioners—Godoy (2022: 5) writes that ‘education is often rooted in Eurocentric assumptions about modernity, the state, and the autonomous individual in ways that, far from challenging hegemonic approaches, may in fact reproduce them’. Indeed, it reproduces hegemony and subjugation because the dominant epistemic frame excludes the history and context experienced by most peoples on this planet. This continues to be the case even in feminism. Just as Sepoe and Dickson-Waiko have demonstrated, and as Connell (2018: 23) recognises, ‘[t]he social experience of the colonized world is historically different, and the practical work of feminism, in the settings where the majority of the world’s people live, requires theory that responds to this history’. To this I would add that feminist values existed in many Majority-World cultures long before colonisation, as have diverse gender roles that do not correspond to minority-world framing.18
Dickson-Waiko’s and Sepoe’s work also reflect the ways that Connell (2018) has identified in which Majority-World gender scholarship differs in its focus. The four concerns of Majority-World gender and feminist scholarship centre on: state and power, identity as collective, methodology and land. Individual personhood and the construction of womanhood are not a primary concern, which is not to say that cultures are collective only. Many Majority-World cultures, such as matricentric Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea, support BOTH the collective AND the individual. The many commonalities across Majority-World cultures suggest also that Majority-World theory must be considered together. Indeed, according to Connell (2018: 31):
It is not enough to have work from India, South Africa, the Maghreb, Brazil, Mexico, and Australasia separately. It is by seeing this work together that we become conscious of a body of knowledge with a scope and sophistication comparable to the output of the metropole.
We of the Majority World have far more in common with each other than we do with the minority world.19
Reading across Dickson-Waiko and Sepoe is a reminder about whose knowledge is centred in gender and development interventions in Papua New Guinea. Since the theories of gender that underpin these development interventions are generated in the minority world, it is safe to say that minority-world knowledge is centred on development interventions in Papua New Guinea. Indeed, despite all the talk across the sector of the importance of context, the coloniality of knowledge persists because of the centring of minority-world theories.
What might happen if we centred Papua New Guinean feminist thinkers? Let us take a couple of Dickson-Waiko’s and Sepoe’s insights, arranged through some of the concerns that Connell identified as features of Majority-World gender and feminist scholarship and generate some exploratory questions from those.
State and power: Coming to terms with legacies of gendered colonial violence
To understand the many forms of contemporary violence against Papua New Guinean women it is necessary to make visible colonial violence and the gendered nature of state formation. Without this recognition, any approach to address gender equality will not be addressing one of its root causes. The acknowledgement of this root cause opens questions such as: if Papua New Guinea is a liberal state in name only, what does this mean for interventions based on gender mainstreaming and the assumption that increasing the number of women will lead to greater equality as in a liberal state? This equalising of gender certainly has not played out in national politics. Likewise, the problematic assumption of liberal feminism that teaching women ‘leadership’ skills (as if they did not already possess these) will be sufficient to influence an extremely gendered national political process and structure. If the political process and structure are gendered, what women need, according to Dickson-Waiko and Sepoe, is a movement to shift that structure and the norms underpinning it. Furthermore, the strengthening of individuals’ capacities must attend to how to negotiate the processes and structures of national politics in Papua New Guinea because these privilege men. It is for this reason that not even women from matrilineal societies in Papua New Guinea can penetrate contemporary national politics and no amount of leadership training of individual women is going to shift this.
Applying relational methodologies/acknowledging relational identities
Indigenous methodologies of the Majority World are relational, as are decolonial methodologies. The lens of knowledge creation is constructed around the existence of BOTH this AND in lieu of EITHER this OR that. In Papua New Guinea, as in other parts of the Majority World, identity is constructed as BOTH collective AND individual.
How might the BOTH/AND lens work to support gender equality in Papua New Guinea? Let us look at this in the context of eliminating gender-based violence. Dickson-Waiko wrote of Papua New Guinean women’s concern about not alienating men. Indeed, the development narrative about PNG masculinities is a harmful one as it focuses on the negative norms of gender-based violence (Masta 2021). It is a discourse that generates resistance to the language and practice of gender equality and, unsurprisingly, this one-dimensional perspective of PNG masculinity alienates many Papua New Guinean men.
Recognition of BOTH the collective AND the individual nature of PNG societies with the deliberate use of a BOTH/AND methodology would open questions such as: How might interventions support bringing men on a shared journey instead of alienating them through representation based on a single masculinity steeped in violence? What might be the impact on the desired systemic change of BOTH identifying and celebrating positive norms AND working against negative norms? In lieu of an oppositional stance, what would allyship look like and what might it yield? Furthermore, why assume that interventions by international actors applying theories generated in the minority world will lead to transformational change? If Papua New Guineans are going to enact transformational change it will be because there is a cause around which people (that is, women and men) can unite and mobilise, such as through the movement-building suggested by Dickson-Waiko and Sepoe. To understand what will inspire people to unite and how to mobilise them requires a great deal of cultural fluency. Indeed, the early Papuan missionaries in Milne Bay very successfully created large movements that translated into thousands of converts to Christianity (Lawrence 2018; Wetherell 1986, 2012).
The need for cultural fluency
Both Dickson-Waiko and Sepoe are Papua New Guinean feminist experts in the field of gender and gender relations. In their texts, they acknowledge the complexity of gender in this ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse nation. If they as Papua New Guineans find the terrain challenging, on what basis can a foreigner claim gender expertise in Papua New Guinea? Moreover, their insights point to many pathways through which women’s equality and rights can be pursued and enhanced. It is far from clear that gender programming by international actors draws on this expertise. In fact, when I shared this chapter with white women who work as gender ‘experts’ in Papua New Guinea they acknowledged that they had never heard of Dickson-Waiko though some had met Sepoe. They also acknowledged that the theories, insights and questions I raised above had never occurred to them. One could read into this that cultural fluency is necessary to enact social transformation and that an absence of cultural fluency is harmful because it serves to maintain the status quo. That status quo unfolds as the subjugation of both PNG feminist knowledge and Papua New Guinean women because development interventions create piecemeal change but are ineffective at enabling transformation.
What, then, is the relationship of cultural fluency with epistemic injustice? Since epistemic injustice is the privileging of knowledge generated only through one lens and the coloniality of knowledge plays out as the imposition of that knowledge on peoples from different geographies with different histories, politics and ethics, epistemic justice and decoloniality are both necessary to the practice of do no harm or do the least harm. And part of the practice of decoloniality is to centre cultural fluency through both experiential and academic knowledge.
Epistemic justice is more than the development buzzword of ‘contextualisation’ since this contextualisation in development practice has meant the superficiality of attempting to retrofit minority-world theories to PNG contexts. Indigenisation is true contextualisation. And Indigenisation, as the uptake of Christianity in Papua New Guinea demonstrates, is most successfully done by those with cultural fluency through processes and language that are culturally appropriate. Indeed, epistemic justice demands the recognition of local knowledge and centres situated knowledge over universal knowledge claims.
As an aside, and to those who might want to regurgitate old arguments about cultural relativism, decolonisation from the decolonial perspective requires recognition and acknowledgement of the harms caused by universals that are generated from a single cultural context. When we all recognise this, we will be able to negotiate whether we agree on any social knowledge that is truly universal. To get to that point first requires the practise of epistemic justice. With regard to gender theory, Connell (2018: 22) recognises that
[t]he problem is not a deficit of ideas from the global periphery—it is a deficit of recognition and circulation. This is a structural problem in feminist thought on a world scale. If the only versions of theory that circulate globally and hold authority are those that arise from the social experience of a regional minority, there is a drastic impoverishment of gender studies as a form of knowledge.
Decentring the dominant epistemic frame
Here is an example of what organisations working in the sector could do to support the decentring of the dominant epistemic frame and challenge the hegemony of whiteness in international development.
At the time of writing this chapter, the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) is supporting a research project in Papua New Guinea. Since one of the IWDA’s strategies is to support movement-building that contributes to gender equality, the project must fit within these parameters. Beyond this, the Papua New Guinean lead researcher, Dr Orovu Sepoe, has the licence to determine the research questions, the methodology and approach and to select steering committee and project team members. The entire team is Papua New Guinean. The research maps the ecosystem of organisations working on women’s rights in Papua New Guinea and will provide recommendations on how to strengthen that ecosystem. The project has stimulated much interest in the country, not least for the IWDA’s decolonising approach of trusting that locals know best their own context. In relation to the previous discussion, this project applies relational methodologies, acknowledges relational identities and the entire team possesses cultural fluency.
It is being able to support work such as this that enables me to continue working in a sector in which decolonisation is fast becoming a metaphor, and in which the hegemony of whiteness continues to subjugate Majority-World peoples.
Concluding thoughts
My opening to this chapter asked whose knowledge is privileged and whose knowledge is not privileged, and why that matters. And I asked what changes are possible for women in Papua New Guinea if whiteness via the coloniality of gender and the coloniality of knowledge that underpinned colonialism persists through developmentalism?
I argued that systemic changes towards greater gender equality in Papua New Guinea are possible only through a decolonial praxis that values the intellectual and experiential knowledge of locals and supports Indigenisation. I also argued that Indigenisation and cultural fluency are inextricably linked since without cultural fluency in a particular context there simply is no possibility of switching epistemic frames to enable the decentring of whiteness and the centring of Indigeneity.
I finished with an example of decentring whiteness in international development knowledge-creation. My final thoughts about whose knowledge matters acknowledges that many different people work in the space of knowledge production—some Indigenous to their context, many not. It may be impossible for some to switch epistemic frames since they lack even basic cross-cultural competencies, especially to do with relational thinking and execution. In this instance, the least that can be done is for knowledge and its production to be situated. Despite Donna Haraway’s (1988) groundbreaking essay on the particularity of knowledge—now some 37 years since publication—white feminists still largely do not situate themselves and the knowledge they produce. White feminists often therefore practise epistemic injustice by contributing to normalising and maintaining the idea that the knowledge they produce is objective and that those of us who emplace ourselves do not and cannot produce knowledge. Thus, the Australian Volunteers International volunteer’s belief that she was teaching agriculture to long-time agriculturalists. Thus, the invisibility of Dickson-Waiko and Sepoe in feminist and gender theory. Thus, the continued subjugation of Majority-World women in gender and development.
References
Alam, Shahidul. 2008. ‘Majority World: Challenging the West’s Rhetoric of Democracy.’ Amerasia Journal 34 no. 1: 88–98. doi.org/10.17953/amer.34.1.l3176027k4q614v5.
Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2012. ‘Enrique Dussel’s Transmodernism.’ Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 3: 1, 60–68. doi.org/10.5070/T413012882.
Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter, eds. 1993a. Feminist Epistemologies. London: Routledge.
Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter. 1993b. ‘Introduction: When Feminisms Intersect Epistemology.’ In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. London: Routledge.
Allen, Amy, and Eduardo Mendieta. 2021. Decolonizing Ethics: The Critical Theory of Enrique Dussel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. doi.org/10.1515/9780271090320.
Bellwood, Peter. 2017. ‘Early Agriculture in World Perspective.’ In Ten Thousand Years of Cultivation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, edited by Jack Golson, Tim Denham, Philip Hughes, Pamela Swadling, and John Muke, 29–37. Canberra: ANU Press. doi.org/10.22459/TA46.07.2017.02.
Connell, Raewyn. 2018. ‘Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale.’ In Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge, edited by Bernd Reiter. Durham: Duke University Press. doi.org/10.1215/9781478002017.
Dalmiya, Vrinda, and Linda Alcoff. 1993. ‘Are “Old Wives” Tales’ Justified?’ In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. London: Routledge.
Demian, Melissa. 2000. ‘Longing for Completion: Toward an Aesthetics of Work in Suau.’ Oceania 71: 94–109. doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.2000.tb02729.x.
Demian, Melissa. 2006. ‘“Emptiness” and Complementarity in Suau Reproductive Strategies.’ In Population, Reproduction and Fertility in Melanesia, edited by Stanley J. Ulijaszek. New York: Berghahn Books.
Denham, T.P., S.G. Haberle, C. Lentfer, R. Fullagar, J. Field, M. Therin, N. Porch, and B. Winsborough. 2003. ‘Origins of Agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea.’ Science 301, no. 5630: 189–93. doi.org/10.1126/science.1085255.
Dickson-Waiko, Anne. 2001. ‘Women, Individual Human Rights, Community Rights: Tensions within the Papua New Guinea State.’ In Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, edited by Marilyn Lake, Katie Holmes, and Patricia Grimshaw. Basingstoke: Palgrave. doi.org/10.1057/9780333977644_4.
Dickson-Waiko, Anne. 2003. ‘The Missing Rib: Mobilizing Church Women for Change in Papua New Guinea.’ Oceania 74: 98–119. doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.2003.tb02838.x.
Dickson-Waiko, Anne. 2007. ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea.’ In Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, edited by Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Dickson-Waiko, Anne. 2008. ‘Finding Women in Colonial Papua: Gender, Race and Sex in Papua New Guinea History.’ South Pacific Journal of Philosophy and Culture 10: 11–23.
Dickson-Waiko, Anne. 2009. ‘Women, Policy Making and Development.’ In Policy Making and Implementation Studies from Papua New Guinea, edited by R.J. May, 281–98. Canberra: ANU E Press. doi.org/10.22459/PMI.09.2009.15.
Dickson-Waiko, Anne. 2010. Taking Over, of What and From Whom? Women and Independence, the Papua New Guinea Experience. Alfred Deakin Research Institute Working Paper No. 10. Geelong: Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University.
Dickson-Waiko, Anne. 2013. ‘Women, Nation and Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea.’ The Journal of Pacific History 48, no. 2: 177–93. doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2013.802844.
Duituturga, Emele. 2017. ‘Rethinking Development: Reshaping the Pacific We Want.’ In Relational Hermeneutics: Decolonising the Mindset and the Pacific Itulagi, edited by Upolu Luma Va’ai and Aisake Casimira, 199–214. Suva: University of the South Pacific & Pacific Theological College.
Escobar, Arturo. 1992. ‘Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements.’ In Social Text: Third World and Post-Colonial Issues, no. 31–32, 20–56. Durham: Duke University Press. doi.org/10.2307/466217.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Esty, Daniel C. 2002. ‘The World Trade Organization’s Legitimacy Crisis.’ World Trade Review 1, no. 1: 7–22. doi.org/10.1017/S1474745601001021.
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001.
Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. 2022. ‘What Are We Trying to Do Here? Epistemic Racism in Human Rights Teaching.’ International Journal of Human Rights Education 6, no. 1.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2002. ‘Colonial Difference, Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Global Coloniality in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist World-System.’ Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 25: 203–24.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2007. ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn.’ Cultural Studies 21, nos 2–3: 211–23. doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162514.
Haberle, Simon G., Carol Lentfer, Shawn O’Donnell, and Tim Denham. 2012. ‘The Palaeoenvironments of Kuk Swamp from the Beginnings of Agriculture in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.’ Quaternary International 249: 129–39. doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2011.07.048.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies 14, no. 3: 575–99. doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
Harding, Sandra. 1993. ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: “What Is Strong Objectivity”?’ In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. London: Routledge.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. ‘Our Sea of Islands.’ The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1: 148–61. hdl.handle.net/10125/12960.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. 2008. ‘The Ocean in Us.’ We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Held, David. 2006. ‘Reframing Global Governance: Apocalypse Soon or Reform!’ New Political Economy 11, no. 2: 158–76. doi.org/10.1080/13563460600655516.
Hoekman, Bernard. 2002. ‘Strengthening the Global Trade Architecture for Development: The Post Doha Agenda.’ World Trade Review 1, no. 1: 23–45. doi.org/10.1017/S1474745601001008.
Lagi, Rosaina. 2017. ‘Vanua Sauvi: Social Roles, Sustainability and Resilience.’ In Relational Hermeneutics: Decolonising the Mindset and the Pacific Itulagi, edited by Upolu Luma Va’ai and Aisake Casimira, 187–98. Suva: University of the South Pacific & Pacific Theological College.
Lawrence, Salmah Eva-Lina. 2018. ‘Speaking for Ourselves: Kwato Perspectives on Matriliny and Missionisation.’ PhD diss., The Australian National University.
Lawrence, Salmah Eva-Lina. 2022. ‘The Majority World: What’s in a Phrase?’ News and Stories, 4 November. Melbourne: Philanthropy Australia. www.philanthropy.org.au/news-and-stories/the-majority-world-whats-in-a-phrase/.
Lawrence, Salmah Eva-Lina. 2023. ‘Challenging Power and Discrimination: A Letter to My Younger Self.’ In Dear Younger Me, edited by Lee Wilson and Simon Milligan. London: Routledge.
Lawrence, Salmah Eva-Lina. Forthcoming. Decolonising International Development: The View from the Majority World. London: Bloomsbury.
Longino, Helen. 1993. ‘Subjects, Power and Knowledge: Description and Prescription.’ In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. London: Routledge.
Lugones, María. 2007. ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.’ Hypatia 22, no. 1: 186–209. www.jstor.org/stable/4640051.
Lugones, María. 2008. ‘The Coloniality of Gender.’ Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (Spring): 1–17.
Masta, Mercy Natalia. 2021. ‘Pacific Masculinities: Exploring Men’s Perspectives and Experiences of Masculinity, and Efforts to Engage Men and Boys in Preventing Violence in Papua New Guinea and Fiji.’ PhD diss., RMIT University, Melbourne.
Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mignolo, Walter. 1998. ‘Coloniality at Large: The Western Hemisphere in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity.’ CR: The New Centennial Review 1, no. 2: 19–54. doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2003.0057.
Mignolo, Walter D. 1999. ‘I Am Where I Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference.’ Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 8, no. 2: 235–45. doi.org/10.1080/13569329909361962.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2002. ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1: 57–96. doi.org/10.1215/00382876-101-1-57.
Mignolo, Walter. 2009. ‘Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity.’ Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 7: 69–87.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jqbw.
Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Msimang, Sisonke. 2022. Another Australia. Melbourne: Affirm Press.
On, Bat-Ami Bar. 1993. ‘Marginality and Epistemic Privilege.’ In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. London: Routledge.
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónk.é. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pahuja, Sundhya. 2011. Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth, and the Politics of Universality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139048200.
Pörtner, Hans-Otto, Debra C. Roberts, Melinda M.B. Tignor, Elvira Poloczanska, Katja Mintenbeck, Andrés Alegría, Marlie Craig, Stefanie Langsdorf, Sina Löschke, Vincent Möller, Andrew Okem, and Bardhyl Rama, eds. 2022. Climate Change 2022—Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844.
Quijano, Aníbal. 1992. ‘Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad [Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality].’ Peru Indigena 13: 11–20.
Quijano, Aníbal. 1995. ‘Raza, etnia y nación en Mariátegui: Cuestiones abiertas [Race, Ethnicity and Nation in Mariátegui: Open Issues].’ Estudios Latinoamericanos [Latin American Studies] 2: 3–19. doi.org/10.22201/cela.24484946e.1995.3.49720.
Quijano, Aníbal. 1999. ‘Colonialidad del Poder, Cultura y Conocimiento en América Latina [Coloniality of Power, Culture and Knowledge in Latin America].’ Crítica Cultural en Latinoamérica: Paradigmas globales y enunicaciones locales [Cultural Criticism in Latin America: Global Paradigms and Local Communications] 24: 137–48.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.’ International Sociology 15, no. 2: 215–32. doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2007a. ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.’ Cultural Studies 21, nos 2–3: 168–78. doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2007b. ‘Questioning “Race”.’ Socialism and Democracy 21, no. 1: 45–53. doi.org/10.1080/08854300601116704.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2013. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Sepoe, Orovu V. 2000. Changing Gender Relations in Papua New Guinea: The Role of Women’s Organisations. New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors Ltd.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
Stauffer, Robert H. 2003. Kahana: How the Land Was Lost. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2003. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Sullivan, Shannon. 2006. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1: 1–40.
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). 2024. ‘Papua New Guinea.’ World Population Dashboard. [Online]. New York: UNFPA. www.unfpa.org/data/world-population/PG.
Va’ai, Upolu Luma. 2017. ‘E ititi a lega mea—Less is more! A Pacific Relational Development Paradigm of Life.’ In Relational Hermeneutics: Decolonising the Mindset and the Pacific Itulagi, edited by Upolu Luma Va’ai and Aisake Casimira, 215–31. Suva: University of the South Pacific & Pacific Theological College.
Wetherell, David. 1986. ‘An Elite for A Nation? Reflections On a Missionary Group in Papua New Guinea, 1890–1986.’ Pacific Studies 9: 1–40.
Wetherell, David. 2012. ‘Creating an Indigenous Christian Leadership in Papua: Three Missions Compared.’ The Journal of Pacific History 47, no. 2: 163–85. doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2012.684767.
Yunupingu, Galarrwuy, ed. 1997. Our Land Is Our Life: Land Rights—Past, Present and Future. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.
1 The contours of international development discourse and practice suggest an embedded and unchanging hierarchy in which the ‘developed’ coloniser of the West/Global North occupies the apex and all others are infantilised as needing development, reiterated through the legacy ordinal numbering of worlds as first, third, etcetera. This othering narrative also psychologically reinforces the idea that ‘developing’ communities are lacking, rendering invisible cultural, social and environmental wealth. I expand on these ideas in Lawrence (forthcoming).
2 Feminists have also argued this point. See, for example, Fricker (2007).
3 Regarding the World Trade Organization (WTO), the growth of economic nationalism in the interwar years of the 1920s is cited as a contributor to World War II by way of reducing global trade, which instigated the Great Depression, which in turn generated fascism and eventual war. The link, seemingly direct, between economic nationalism and war so influenced US planning for the postwar era that global institutions were created to promote the counter position, that of economic liberalism—supposedly a path to peace. The global regime of trade is today governed by the WTO. In its first institutional incarnation as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947, the free-trade regime sought to reduce trade barriers. As the WTO, its mandate has broadened to include regulation of trade in services and intellectual property, as well as a dispute-resolution mechanism. This mandate has not been without controversy. While free trade has indeed increased interdependence and has not triggered war, the free-trade regime has generated criticisms of and concerns about distributive justice and the democratic legitimacy of the system (Esty 2002) as it does not allow for many Majority-World countries to be treated fairly in the global arena. Joseph Stiglitz (2003: 6) has been vocal about the West’s hypocrisy in pushing for the elimination of trade barriers, while simultaneously erecting them. Others argue that ‘[t]he prevailing pattern of protection in the world today is biased against the poor in that barriers are highest on goods produced by poor people’ (Hoekman 2002: 41). Regarding the IMF, voting is weighted in favour of the minority-world donors with the effect that the many people in the Majority World who are ‘stakeholders in global political problems that affect them … remain excluded from the political institutions and strategies needed to address these problems’ (Held 2006: 166). A further concern about inclusiveness and diversity of views relates to the identities and interests of IMF staff, who, coming mostly from the same demographic and educational background, are hardly able to represent the diversity of stakeholders in today’s world.
4 Enrique Dussel’s work on liberatory ethics intersects with the theoretical school of modernity/coloniality to propose a decolonial ethics towards liberation from oppression and subjugation. See Alcoff (2012); Allen and Mendieta (2021).
5 For example: the Great Mahele, the division of communal lands in Hawai’i in 1846–55 (Stauffer 2003); Indigenous Australians in Our Land is Our Life (Yunupingu 1997).
6 See Epeli Hau’ofa (2008) on how the ocean unites rather than divides Pasifika peoples.
7 This relationship to Country is also significant to First Nations Australians, who are considered by many Pasifika peoples to be part of the Pasifika community.
8 After marriage, couples live primarily on land belonging to the wife and her matriline.
9 See also Demian (2000, 2006).
10 My mother, Dineheilo Dickson Lawrence, was the first Papuan woman to be accepted into an Australian university; my great aunt Alice Wedega was in the Legislative Council of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. On her travels, she was once in Northern Ireland, where, to my astonishment, she lectured the Irish on peace; my cousin Pauline Bona was the first female journalist in Papua New Guinea.
11 The IWDA works to support partner organisations across the Pacific and Asia and is committed to decolonising its practice.
12 Although Aníbal Quijano (1999) coined the phrases ‘coloniality of power’, ‘coloniality of knowledge’ and ‘epistemic decolonisation’, Walter Mignolo is better known in the Anglophone world for theorising modernity/coloniality and decoloniality. Mignolo (1998: 22), however, acknowledges that ‘the contribution of Anibal Quijano … is a fundamental theoretical turn in outlining the conditions under which the coloniality of power … was and is a strategy of “modernity”’.
13 See also Haberle et al. (2012).
14 ‘Cultivation and domestication are not one and the same thing’ (Bellwood 2017).
15 See Lawrence (2023).
16 Sisonke Msimang (2022) writes about this in relation to Indigenous Australians.
17 See also Papua New Guinean Mercy Masta’s (2021) research into Papua New Guinean masculinities.
18 Oyèrónk∙é Oyěwùmí (1997) writes of female husbands in precolonial Nigeria—a reflection of gender roles very different to those in the minority world.
19 Argued in my book (Lawrence forthcoming) and my thesis (Lawrence 2018).
Previous Next
