Share Your Decolonising Story – Debating Development Research

14/10/2025

Transforming the International Development Cooperation System – Mission Impossible?

Interview with Aram Ziai, Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kassel, Germany.

Professor Aram Ziai is an academic who has been writing on Post-Development for over 20 years. His work is all centred around decolonising the sector – and on how colonial injustices are still effective in our day-to-day life. He is also Executive Director of the Global Partnersh i p Network, which has been explicitly set up to try to decolonise international cooperation and knowledge production as far as the structures of the ‘development industry’ will allow.

26/08/202527/08/2025

Merit, Meritocracy, and Decolonising Knowledge for Development

By Amitabha Sarkar / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project

I grew up in a family shaped by the complexities of colonial misadventure in Calcutta, a refugee past marked by economic hardship and structural violence. For my mother, merit was the only way out. She believed that humility, hard work, and academic excellence could open doors that history had closed. As a child and young adult in South Asia, I absorbed this moral ideal without question.

17/06/202517/06/2025

Decolonizing Expertise: Reflections on Power, Knowledge, and Governance in International Organizations (IOs)

By Marine Gauthier / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project

A Personal Reckoning with Expertise

My engagement with international development has always been entangled with postcolonial sensitivities—an awareness shaped by my Belgian family’s colonial past, my academic training on North-South relations in environmental governance, and my own professional trajectory which started in Senegal as the only white development worker in a national NGO. Yet, despite this awareness, I found myself deeply embedded in the very structures I sought to critique.

10/06/202517/06/2025

Epistemic (Ir)relevance, Language & Passport Positionality

The three hurdles I’m navigating as a UK-based Ethiopian academic

By Eyob Balcha Gebremariam / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project

I write this reflection piece to use my personal experiences as a UK-based academic with an Ethiopian passport as a lens to comment on the structural power asymmetries of the academic landscape. I believe I’m not the only one facing these challenges. However, there is hardly sufficient attention, recognition, and space to discuss them. I have no intention of reducing the importance of other challenges by focusing on these three topics. I focused on the three hurdles because I experience them in everyday scholarly work and am determined to engage in critical discussions and reflections.

22/04/2025

Feeling the Colonial: Affective Decolonisation in Development Studies Classrooms

By Carla Maria Friederike Diem / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project

“I hope for a world where International Development Studies cease to exist.” was the first line of my motivation letter to the University of Amsterdam (UvA). A provocation, yes – but also a belief. A way to signal that I saw the contradictions at the heart of the discipline – that a field born out of colonial legacies, and sustained by the hierarchies it claims to dismantle, cannot be reformed without eventually ceasing to exist. I thought this was an idealistic position. What I did not realise was just how intimately I would come to feel the weight of those contradictions – in my emotions, in my learning, and in my hope.