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Paper short abstract

This presentation suggests Japan’s Colonial Policy Studies (植民地政策学: Shokuminchi seisaku gaku) holds a key to understand colonial legacies in the personnel, ideas, and institutions to manage ‘post-colonial’ countries in the early UN era.

Paper long abstract

This presentation suggests Japan’s Colonial Policy Studies (植民地政策学: Shokuminchi seisaku gaku) holds a key to understand colonial legacies in the personnel, ideas, and institutions to manage ‘post-colonial’ countries in the early UN era. Scholars identified Colonial Policy Studies as a long-lost genealogy of the ‘discipline’ of International Relations (the knowledge on how to manage the world) in the US (Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2015). There has also been a suggestion on how former colonial officers assumed the positions at the UN and its related agencies in the projects addressing to the post-colonial countries (Gorman 2012). There has not been, however, an explicit study examining the legacies of Colonial Policy Studies in these projects. In contrast, the shift of pre-1945 Colonial Policy Studies to post 1945 ‘International Political Economy’ and then ‘Development Economy’ had been documented in the case of Japan (Kawata 1988; Imaizumi 1996; Sakai 2007; Nakano 2013; Akami 2023), and Baji (2022) also sees the creation of the racialized Global South in it. This paper argues that since the inter-imperial origin of Colonial Policy Studies at Japan’s imperial metropole at the turn of the twentieth century, the field developed as the knowledge to manage ‘under-developed’ resources on the earth both by the Japanese empire, and by inter-imperial cooperations. It suggests the transformation of Colonial Policy Studies in post-empire Japan can give a clue to colonial legacies of ‘development’ programs at the UN and its agencies in its early stage. This is a part of the collaborative project of the Australian Research Council on Pacific Powers, 2025-2028.