CPD Paper Prize Honourable Mention 2024: Decolonisation and the displacement of the Chagos Islanders

RIS Editor Cian O'Driscoll talks to Alice Engelhard (LSE) about her paper which was a runner up in the BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group's third annual Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize. 

The paper is a rigorous exploration of the archival legacies of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s interventions in the legitimisation of their displacement of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, in order to set up a US military base on the islands. But in its excavations of and against the grain of the archive (with the help of key postcolonial and decolonial scholarship), it evolves into an incredible intervention into the core questions that shape CPD’s work. It contributes to essential debates on the categories of migrants, indigeneity and political belonging, while making visible the ongoing role of empire within an ‘international’ order, and the way that this coloniality is obscured through claims to - as Alice Engelhard puts it - ‘national sedentarism’ and ‘territorial fixity’. We were impressed with the paper’s depth and the granular way it engages with its source material.