Cloning the Empire: The Persistence of Colonial Science in Postcolonial Contexts

Type

Single Panel

Schedule

Session 3
Tue 15:00-16:30 Classroom NT-159

Convener

Gani Jaelani UMC Utrecht

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Papers

In cash crops’ shade; colonial and post-colonial initiatives to diversify Indonesia’s home gardens Haro Maat Wageningen University
The proposed paper looks at the extractivism of State-like revolutionary armed authorities in Myanmar. Using a Critical Political Economy perspective, the paper analyses how global capitalist structures and resource-frontier making shape the reproduction of extractive state-making by revolutionary authorities. It argues that revolutionary state-making cannot be disentangled from extractive practices within a global capitalist system driven by the need to sustain accumulation through the continual search for cheap resources. This cheapening nature of capitalist accumulations is well benefited by the ‘distress selling of the nature’ of most of the armed resistance groups in Myanmar in desperate need of financing the revolutionary state making. Processes of accumulation, resource cheapening, and state-making through extraction thus operate within the same global capitalist circuit. Among ethnic armed groups, this paper focuses primarily on those operating in Karenni State, also known as Kayah State. Armed resistance groups in Karenni, together with other political actors—including former members of civil society organisations and ethnic political parties that have long resisted Myanmar’s centralised authority and military rule—collectively formed a governing council in 2022 amid intensified armed struggle against the Myanmar military. Based on this theoretical foundation, I conceptualise wartime revolutionary extractive imperative as the structurally induced reliance on resource extraction by revolutionary state-like actors during armed struggle and contested state formation. This imperative arises from conditions of war, non-recognition, and integration into global capitalist circuits, rather than from ideological commitment to extractivism.
Medical research on indigenous peoples of Malaysia: Colonial legacies and the ‘white man’s burden’ transformed in the 21st century Sandra Khor Manickam Erasmus university Rotterdam
Medical research on Indigenous peoples of Malaysia has been welcomed by Indigenous communities themselves, activists, and biomedical scientists. Forming one of the smallest and most disadvantaged groups in Malaysia, medical research is seen as a way to address structural health inequalities and to improve quality of life. At the same time, discourses surrounding Indigenous health expressed by some government agents and researchers contain a mix of developmentalist views and civilizational superiority towards Indigenous lifeways in addition to altruistic feelings towards the communities. This paper questions the hallowed status of medical research as opposed to other forms of research relating to Indigenous people, and asks for more critical engagement with medical research’s colonial legacies and its embedding in the context of internal colonialism experienced by Indigenous communities in Malaysia today.
Security and Reparation: Agent Orange, Science, and the (Dis)continuity of (Neo)colonial Logics Dat Nguyen NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
During the Second Indochina War, the US military and their allies utilised toxic herbicides—the most famous of which was Agent Orange, containing a high dose of dioxin—in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to destroy the foliage that provided the hiding place for the Vietnamese communist guerilla forces. Agent Orange has left behind long-lasting, intergenerational negative impacts on local ecologies, people’s health and livelihoods in the region. Up until recently, the US government had been providing Vietnam with aid and technical expertise to assist families and individuals who have endured the health consequences of the chemicals and to remediate soil heavily contaminated by the chemicals. These reparative endeavours have played a key role in the development of US-Vietnam bilateral relation.

As many scholars have shown, the scientific story behind Agent Orange—its development, testing, and utilisation—closely intertwined with the history of US empire-making in the Pacific Region. Much of it was predicated on colonial, racialised, and militarised scientific thinking about the securitisation of ecologies and the human bodies, both civilian and military. In this paper, building on these earlier works and examining contemporary bilateral US- Vietnam and local efforts to address Agent Orange consequences, I trace the continuity and discontinuity of colonial and militarised logics in these programmes, particularly as they are connected to the continual formation of, but also resistance against, US empire-making. The paper highlights how scientific knowledge plays an essential role in engendering both militarised, geopolitical security and postwar reparation. It, I argue, can perpetuate, while simultaneously offering ways for various local and international actors to challenge and ascribe new meanings to, (neo)colonial ideas and relations.
Defining the ‘Normal’ Indonesian: Physical Anthropology and Physiological Research in Post-Independence Indonesia Gani Jaelani UMC Utrecht
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International aid and Dutch FAO consultants: The State Committee on Food Improvement and (post)colonial strategies against Indonesia’s pre-independence food crisis Grace Tjandra Leksana Utrecht University
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Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

This panel investigates the afterlife of colonial science across diverse forms and national contexts: from the deployment of Agent Orange not only as a military strategy but also as a mechanism in the ongoing construction of U.S. imperial power; the involvement of Dutch scientists in international aid programs addressing Indonesia’s food crisis in the 1950s; to the use of physical anthropology and physiological research to define what constituted a “normal” Indonesian body from a medical standpoint; and finally, to medical research on Indigenous communities in Malaysia that continues to carry colonial assumptions. Each case exemplifies both the transformation and persistence of colonial scientific practices. By “colonial science,” we refer to state-sponsored research and knowledge systems— particularly in medicine, agriculture, and anthropology – developed to serve imperial governance and control. While these practices were originally designed to advance colonial interests, they were later repurposed in post-independence contexts to fulfill new political and ideological agendas. For example, physical and medical anthropology – once used to justify racial hierarchies in the late 19th century – was later mobilized to construct narratives of national identity. Similarly, medical research on Indigenous Malaysian communities continues to reflect developmentalist and civilizational hierarchies. In nutritional research, the dominance of scientific actors and their assumptions – often neglecting the socioeconomic dimensions of malnutrition – continues to shape the field.
Agent Orange, initially used by the United States to destroy forest cover sheltering Vietnamese communist guerrillas, later became a subject of U.S. aid efforts aimed at mitigating its consequences. Although the actors in these cases differ – U.S. scientists, Dutch nutritionists, Indonesian and Malaysian medical professionals – they share a common thread: the continued use of scientific authority to marginalize others and perpetuate the legacy of colonial domination. By presenting these three cases, the panel aims to spark critical dialogue on how colonial science continues to shape knowledge production and power relations in postcolonial societies.