This is 100m from my place 😅

Expressions of interest close in a few days 24 August 2025. More info can be found at the IITB-Monash Academy. It's a very cool joint institutional PhD across India and Australia 🇦🇺 🇮🇳 iitbmonash.org

The project asks: why have some borderland communities in Northeast India integrate forced migrants peacefully, while others have become embroiled in ongoing conflict? Methods include ethnography, surveys & archival work.

We’re looking for strong social science candidates (Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies) with both qualitative & quantitative training + readiness for fieldwork.

9) Anyway, this is my first foray into public writing and I hope you find some value in it.

Thankfully, this is a much better place to have this kind of conversation than X

8) It's all too easy to criticise Du Bois with the benefit of hindsight, of course.

But I conclude that if we fail to learn from his mistakes in Manchuria, we will no doubt keep repeating them in Xinjiang, West Papua, Kashmir, Western Sahara, and so on.

7) Du Bois's mistakes in the 1930s, in other words, shed light on the errors made by Western thinkers today who are ostensibly anti-colonial and anti-imperial but who end up doing the same state-sponsored work of downplaying violence in non-Western countries.

6) I connect Du Bois and prominent Western leftists today like Prashad, Sachs, or Chomsky who are so concerned with what they see as the fundamental evil of the world — American imperialism — that they ignore, deflect, or justify atrocities committed by countries aligned against the US

5) As he would later explain: “It is not that I sympathize with China less but that I hate European and American propaganda, theft, and insult more".

Japan needed Manchuria's resources to defend itself, and also look at all the economic development and "happy" people there.

4) Du Bois essentially disregarded Chinese complaints about Japanese imperialism and settler colonialism in north-east Asia because he saw the conflict between China and Japan as a distraction from the much more fundamental global division between white and non-white peoples.

3) I argue that Du Bois's defense of Japanese policies in Manchuria highlight how even the most otherwise insightful political observers can totally misjudge racial and power dynamics in "colored nations." It was perhaps the greatest misjudgement of Du Bois' career.

2) The strange phenomenon of Western leftists ignoring or even defending atrocities against minorities in the Global South isn't really a new phenomenon.

W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance, was a surprisingly staunch defender of Japanese imperialism in northeast Asia in the 1930s