Decolonizing Medicine
- NOTOC**
Decolonizing Medicine
Decolonizing medicine is a broad movement that examines how colonial conquest, slavery, racial hierarchy, imperial governance, and unequal economic relationships have shaped modern medical knowledge and healthcare institutions. It seeks to identify and transform the structures that allow some countries, universities, professions, and forms of knowledge to dominate others.
The movement extends beyond adding diverse authors or cultural examples to existing institutions. It calls for changes in who controls funding, defines research priorities, manages health data, teaches medical students, owns scientific knowledge, and makes decisions about healthcare. Decolonizing medicine also emphasizes the authority of patients, local communities, Indigenous peoples, traditional healers, and scholars who have historically been excluded from medical decision-making.
Although much of the discussion occurs within global health and medical education, decolonial analysis also applies to clinical algorithms, psychiatry, public health, reproductive healthcare, pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, humanitarian assistance, environmental health, and scientific publishing.
Colonialism and the Development of Modern Medicine
Modern medicine developed partly through colonial networks. European empires created medical schools, research institutes, tropical-medicine programs, hospitals, laboratories, and public-health systems to support military campaigns, commercial expansion, plantation economies, settlement, and colonial administration.
Colonial authorities often used medicine to protect soldiers, settlers, workers, and trade routes rather than to provide equal care to colonized populations. Disease-control programs could involve surveillance, forced treatment, segregation, quarantine, displacement, or restrictions on movement. Medical classifications were sometimes used to portray colonized peoples as biologically inferior, culturally backward, or incapable of governing themselves.
Colonial encounters also contributed to the growth of epidemiology, tropical medicine, nutrition research, psychiatry, obstetrics, pharmacology, and other medical fields. Knowledge about plants, diseases, healing practices, and local environments was frequently obtained from African, Indigenous, Asian, Caribbean, and other communities without equal recognition or compensation.
The influence of colonial medicine did not disappear when formal empires ended. Colonial institutions, research networks, professional hierarchies, legal systems, racial categories, and patterns of resource extraction continued to shape national and international health systems.
Decolonizing Global Health
Global health is one of the principal areas in which decolonization is being debated. Although global-health programs often seek to address disease and inequality, critics argue that they can reproduce unequal relationships between wealthy institutions and the communities they claim to serve.
Universities, charitable foundations, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and research institutions located in wealthy countries frequently control funding, research agendas, employment, data, publication, and program evaluation. Organizations in lower-income countries may be treated primarily as sites for collecting information or implementing decisions made elsewhere.
Decolonizing global health requires shifting authority, money, leadership, and institutional ownership toward the countries and communities most directly affected by health programs. Local institutions should participate in defining the problem, designing the research, controlling budgets, interpreting findings, and deciding how results are used.
This approach challenges the idea that expertise flows primarily from wealthy countries to poorer ones. It recognizes that knowledge and innovation emerge in every region and that health systems in the Global North can learn from community-based, Indigenous, and locally developed approaches elsewhere.
Some scholars caution that the language of decolonization can be adopted without changing institutional power. Universities and organizations may issue statements, establish committees, or promote diversity while leaving funding structures, leadership, compensation, and decision-making authority largely unchanged. Meaningful decolonization therefore requires measurable changes rather than symbolic commitments.
Medical Education and Curriculum Reform
Medical education can reproduce colonial assumptions through its curriculum, teaching materials, examinations, professional culture, language requirements, and definitions of legitimate knowledge.
Many medical curricula present Western biomedicine as universal while treating Indigenous, traditional, or community-based healing systems as secondary or unscientific. Students may learn little about colonial history, racism, slavery, forced sterilization, medical experimentation, or the political and economic causes of health inequality.
Decolonizing medical education involves examining who is represented in textbooks, case studies, clinical images, reading lists, faculty leadership, and institutional histories. It also requires evaluating whether assessment systems assume that one cultural model of communication, illness, family, or professional behavior is universally appropriate.
Representation of different skin tones has become an important example. Medical textbooks and teaching materials have historically relied heavily on images of conditions as they appear on light skin. This can make it more difficult for clinicians to recognize disease in patients with darker skin and may contribute to delayed diagnosis and unequal treatment.
Curriculum reform may include colonial medical history, structural racism, cultural safety, social determinants of health, Indigenous health, traditional healing, community knowledge, and critical examination of medical authority. It should not treat these issues as optional additions but as fundamental parts of clinical competence and ethical practice.
Knowledge, Publishing, and Epistemic Justice
Decolonization asks whose knowledge is recognized, published, cited, funded, and taught. Medical research has often privileged English-language scholarship, Western academic methods, elite universities, and journals based in wealthy countries.
Researchers from the countries where studies take place may be excluded from authorship, leadership, interpretation, or access to the resulting data. Local scholars may provide recruitment, translation, fieldwork, and logistical support while researchers from foreign institutions receive greater professional recognition.
This pattern is sometimes described as parachute research, helicopter research, or extractive research. Outside researchers enter a community, collect information, publish the findings, and leave without establishing lasting partnerships or returning meaningful benefits.
Epistemic justice requires recognizing that patients, communities, traditional practitioners, Indigenous peoples, health workers, and local researchers possess valuable forms of knowledge. Lived experience and community memory can reveal health conditions and institutional failures that are not visible through conventional academic methods alone.
Scientific journals can support reform through equitable editorial leadership, scrutiny of authorship practices, recognition of local scholarship, multilingual publishing, and policies requiring meaningful participation by researchers from the places being studied.
Citation is also an issue of power. Repeatedly citing scholars from dominant institutions while ignoring relevant work from the Global South reinforces the appearance that authoritative knowledge originates only in certain countries.
Equitable Research Partnerships and Funding
Equitable partnerships require shared decision-making throughout the research process. This includes setting priorities, designing methods, controlling budgets, employing staff, collecting data, interpreting findings, publishing results, and determining how discoveries will benefit participating communities.
Funding structures often place institutions in wealthy countries in the role of primary grant recipient. Partner organizations may receive smaller subcontracts and have less control over the project. Decolonial reform calls for more direct funding of local institutions and greater authority over financial and scientific decisions.
Compensation should reflect the actual labor and expertise provided by local researchers, translators, health workers, community representatives, and participants. Institutions should also address differences in salaries, employment security, travel opportunities, and access to professional development.
Equity requires long-term relationships rather than temporary collaborations formed only when a grant becomes available. Research should strengthen local institutions, infrastructure, and careers instead of creating continuing dependence on foreign universities and funders.
Accountability mechanisms are necessary to determine whether partnerships are genuinely equitable. Institutions can assess who controls the budget, who occupies leadership positions, whose priorities shape the project, who owns the data, and who receives authorship and career benefits.
Indigenous Health, Sovereignty, and Cultural Safety
For Indigenous peoples, decolonizing healthcare is closely connected to sovereignty, land, language, culture, and self-determination. Colonial governments frequently disrupted Indigenous healing systems, removed children from families, restricted cultural practices, displaced communities, and imposed outside medical institutions.
Healthcare systems may continue to reproduce these harms through racism, dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, inadequate consultation, coercive treatment, and exclusion from governance.
Cultural competency generally refers to a professional’s knowledge about cultural differences. Cultural safety goes further by examining power, racism, institutional behavior, and the patient’s experience of care. A healthcare service cannot simply declare itself culturally safe; safety must be judged by the people receiving care.
Decolonizing Indigenous healthcare involves Indigenous leadership, community-controlled health services, protection of traditional medicines, support for Indigenous health workers, and recognition of community authority over research and data.
It also requires addressing the political and material conditions that influence health, including land dispossession, environmental destruction, poverty, incarceration, family separation, inadequate housing, and unequal access to healthcare.
Traditional Medicine and Medical Pluralism
Medical pluralism describes the coexistence of multiple healing systems. People may seek assistance from hospitals, clinics, herbalists, spiritual practitioners, traditional healers, midwives, religious leaders, family members, and community networks.
Colonial administrations and modern medical institutions often attempted to suppress or marginalize traditional medicine. Local healing systems were sometimes labeled irrational even when colonial physicians relied on local knowledge of plants, environments, diseases, and treatments.
Decolonization does not require accepting every medical claim without evaluation. Traditional and biomedical practices can both involve benefits, limitations, and risks. The goal is to avoid assuming that Western biomedicine is the only legitimate source of health knowledge.
Respectful integration requires community consent, protection of intellectual property, appropriate regulation, benefit sharing, and safeguards against commercial exploitation. Traditional knowledge should not be extracted, patented, or repackaged without recognition and control by the communities from which it originated.
Race, Biology, and Clinical Algorithms
Colonial and racial theories contributed to the false belief that socially constructed racial groups represent fixed biological divisions. These assumptions entered medical education, research, diagnosis, and clinical decision-making.
Race-based clinical algorithms have adjusted estimates or treatment recommendations according to a patient’s racial classification. Examples have appeared in kidney-function calculations, pulmonary testing, obstetric risk assessment, and other areas of medicine.
Critics argue that race is an unreliable substitute for genetics, ancestry, environment, exposure, or socioeconomic conditions. Using race as though it were a precise biological category can conceal the actual effects of racism, pollution, unequal care, stress, poverty, and other social determinants.
Removing race from an equation is not necessarily sufficient. Health systems must also examine whether unequal referral patterns, insurance coverage, specialist access, diagnostic testing, and treatment practices continue to produce disparities.
Decolonizing clinical medicine requires replacing racial essentialism with more accurate analysis of ancestry, biology, environment, lived experience, and structural inequality.
Medical Racism and Structural Inequality
Medical racism includes discriminatory beliefs, practices, policies, and institutional arrangements that produce unequal healthcare. It can affect pain treatment, diagnosis, maternal care, mental-health services, medical technology, research recruitment, and communication between clinicians and patients.
Some medical myths developed during slavery and colonialism continue to influence clinical judgment. False claims about biological racial differences have been used to justify experimentation, segregation, neglect, reproductive control, and undertreatment of pain.
Structural racism does not depend entirely on openly prejudiced individuals. Inequality can be produced through hospital location, insurance rules, environmental exposure, employment patterns, residential segregation, unequal research investment, and biased technologies.
Anti-racist medical practice involves recognizing racism as a health determinant, responding to discriminatory conduct, reviewing institutional outcomes, and holding healthcare organizations accountable for unequal care.
Slavery, Experimentation, and Medical Ethics
The history of medicine includes knowledge produced through slavery, coercion, colonial rule, imprisonment, and experimentation on populations with limited ability to refuse.
Enslaved people were subjected to medical observation and experimentation while also developing and preserving their own healing knowledge. Their botanical expertise and medical practices were sometimes appropriated by physicians, plantation owners, and scientific institutions without attribution.
The history of gynecology includes experimentation on enslaved Black women. Celebratory accounts that focus only on prominent physicians can erase the suffering, knowledge, and resistance of the women whose bodies were used to advance medical techniques.
Colonial medical experiments were often conducted within systems where political domination made meaningful consent impossible. These histories demonstrate why formal consent procedures alone cannot resolve ethical problems when participants lack power, resources, or realistic alternatives.
Decolonial medical ethics emphasizes historical memory, community participation, reparative action, fair distribution of benefits, and accountability for institutional harm.
Psychiatry and Mental Health
Colonial psychiatry often interpreted resistance, cultural difference, spirituality, or social distress through diagnostic models developed by colonial institutions. Psychiatric systems could be used to classify and control colonized populations.
Contemporary global mental-health programs may continue to export Western diagnostic categories and treatment models without sufficient attention to local languages, histories, family structures, community practices, and understandings of distress.
Decolonizing mental healthcare involves recognizing multiple ways of understanding wellness, suffering, disability, and healing. Indigenous and community-based approaches may emphasize relationships, land, spirituality, collective identity, harmony, and balance rather than focusing only on individual symptoms.
Survivor-led movements and Mad Studies also question the concentration of authority within psychiatric professions. They call for greater recognition of people with lived experience and closer examination of coercion, institutionalization, forced treatment, and diagnostic power.
Sexual, Reproductive, and Maternal Health
Colonial governments frequently attempted to control reproduction through marriage laws, population policies, child removal, forced sterilization, and restrictions on Indigenous family and cultural life.
Reproductive-health programs can reproduce colonial relationships when outside institutions determine priorities, define acceptable family structures, or design interventions without community leadership.
A decolonial approach connects reproductive healthcare with bodily autonomy, land, racial justice, disability rights, economic conditions, gender, sexuality, and political self-determination.
Maternal-health inequalities are also linked to slavery, segregation, dismissal of pain, unequal access to care, and racism within obstetrics and gynecology. Decolonizing maternal healthcare requires respectful treatment, informed consent, patient autonomy, cultural safety, and accountability for unequal outcomes.
Midwifery education can support reform by recognizing Indigenous and community birth knowledge, confronting professional hierarchies, and including the histories through which traditional birth attendants were displaced or criminalized.
Public Health and Epidemiology
Public health developed partly through colonial systems of surveillance, sanitation, quarantine, labor regulation, and population management. These methods were often designed to protect commerce and imperial authority.
Epidemiological categories can reproduce inequality when they treat racial or geographic differences as natural while ignoring colonial history, environmental exposure, occupation, housing, borders, and access to resources.
Decolonizing epidemiology means examining who defines research questions, who owns public-health data, how populations are classified, and whether communities benefit from surveillance and research.
Indigenous public-health systems demonstrate the importance of local governance, community knowledge, language, and self-determination. Public-health responses are more legitimate and effective when communities participate in decisions rather than being treated solely as populations to be managed.
Medicines, Vaccines, and Pharmaceutical Power
Access to medicines is shaped by patents, corporate ownership, manufacturing capacity, trade agreements, public investment, regulation, and global supply chains.
The unequal distribution of vaccines and treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how wealthy countries and pharmaceutical companies could control scarce technologies while poorer countries remained dependent on donations.
A decolonial approach frames access to medicines as a matter of rights, sovereignty, and reparative justice rather than charity. It supports regional manufacturing, technology transfer, public financing, fair licensing, and stronger regulatory capacity.
Pharmaceutical sovereignty allows countries and regions to produce essential medicines, control supply chains, and make health decisions without excessive dependence on foreign corporations or governments.
Digital Health, Data, and Artificial Intelligence
Digital-health platforms and artificial-intelligence systems create new forms of medical power. Companies and research institutions may collect health data from populations that have little control over how the information is stored, analyzed, commercialized, or shared.
Data colonialism occurs when information is extracted from communities and converted into economic or scientific value elsewhere. The communities supplying the data may receive few of the resulting benefits.
Artificial-intelligence systems can reproduce bias when their training data underrepresent certain populations or when models rely on assumptions developed in different social and medical contexts.
Decolonizing digital health requires informed consent, community governance, data sovereignty, transparent algorithms, locally controlled infrastructure, and fair distribution of benefits.
Cognitive sovereignty extends this argument beyond ownership of data. It asks who controls the categories, values, and forms of reasoning built into digital systems. Communities should have authority over how artificial intelligence defines health problems and recommends solutions.
Planetary Health and Indigenous Knowledge
Colonialism has affected health through land seizure, mining, deforestation, pollution, forced settlement, agricultural transformation, and disruption of Indigenous food and water systems.
Planetary-health frameworks connect human health with ecosystems, animals, climate, and the environment. Decolonial perspectives argue that these frameworks must confront extractive economies and unequal responsibility for environmental damage.
Indigenous knowledge offers relational approaches that understand human well-being as inseparable from land, water, animals, community, and future generations. Incorporating this knowledge requires Indigenous leadership rather than simply adding Indigenous concepts to institutions controlled by others.
Epistemicide, or the destruction of knowledge systems, can weaken both healthcare and environmental stewardship. Protecting languages, cultural practices, and community authority is therefore part of protecting planetary health.
Humanitarianism and Saviorism
Humanitarian and global-health programs can portray communities as helpless recipients of foreign expertise. Savior narratives may center the generosity or heroism of outside workers while obscuring local leadership and the political causes of crisis.
Short-term training placements can also burden host institutions when visiting students receive educational opportunities without providing equivalent benefits to local communities.
Decolonizing humanitarian practice means replacing paternalism with solidarity, accountability, redistribution, and community-led action. Programs should support local institutions rather than competing with them or making them dependent on outside funding.
Critics also warn that avoiding paternalism should not become an excuse for indifference. The alternative to saviorism is not withdrawal but accountable cooperation in which affected communities determine priorities and external organizations provide support under local leadership.
Institutional Reform and Practical Action
Decolonizing medicine requires action at multiple levels. Medical schools can review curricula, archives, teaching images, admissions, staffing, assessment, and institutional history. Research organizations can reform authorship, budgeting, partnerships, data ownership, and publication practices.
Funders can direct more resources to local institutions, simplify grant requirements, and allow communities to define priorities. Journals can diversify editorial leadership, recognize multilingual scholarship, and challenge research that excludes local experts.
Healthcare systems can remove unsupported race-based practices, improve cultural safety, support Indigenous governance, measure unequal outcomes, and establish mechanisms for reporting discrimination.
Professional organizations can acknowledge historical harms and develop reparative policies. These may include returning archives or cultural materials, supporting affected communities, funding scholarships, changing institutional names, or investing in health systems damaged by colonial rule.
Evaluation is essential. Institutions should not measure progress only through statements, workshops, or representation. They should examine whether decision-making authority, employment, funding, ownership, and material benefits have actually shifted.
Conclusion
Decolonizing medicine is not a rejection of scientific evidence or modern healthcare. It is an effort to examine how medical knowledge and institutions were produced, whose interests they have served, and why health authority remains distributed so unequally.
The movement challenges colonial history, racial hierarchy, extractive research, paternalistic humanitarianism, unequal publishing systems, pharmaceutical dependency, and technological control. It also supports Indigenous sovereignty, cultural safety, medical pluralism, equitable partnerships, community governance, and epistemic justice.
Meaningful decolonization requires more than symbolic inclusion. It demands changes in funding, leadership, institutional ownership, education, research, clinical practice, and accountability. Its central question is not simply how to make existing systems more diverse, but how to redistribute the power to define health, produce knowledge, and determine the future of medicine.
- TOC**
Core Concepts and Decolonial Frameworks
Decolonizing global health in an age of fragmentation
| E. K. Afriyie et al. | Health Policy and Planning | 2026
Examines how geopolitical fragmentation could create space for health sovereignty, regional production, and decision-making beyond donor-led institutions.
Decolonizing global health: a scoping review of its key principles and ethical implications
| M. Amri et al. | Global Health Research and Policy | 2025
Synthesizes decolonization principles including power redistribution, local agency, epistemic justice, accountability, and institutional reform.
Decolonizing global health: a scoping review
| D. Mehjabeen et al. | BMC Health Services Research | 2025
Maps how researchers define decolonization and identifies recurring demands for equitable partnerships, leadership, financing, and knowledge production.
Transforming global health: decoloniality and the human condition
| R. Lencucha et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2024
Connects global health reform to decolonial thought and argues that technical fixes cannot substitute for transforming political and economic relations.
Decolonising global health research: shifting power for transformative change
| R. Kumar, R. Khosla and D. McCoy | PLOS Global Public Health | 2024
Calls for structural changes in research governance, funding, agenda setting, authorship, and ownership rather than symbolic diversity measures.
Epistemic disobedience—undoing coloniality in global health research
| T. Naidu | PLOS Global Public Health | 2024
Explains epistemic disobedience as a refusal of hierarchies that privilege Eurocentric academic knowledge over lived, Indigenous, and community expertise.
Global health and the elite capture of decolonization
| D. W. Krugman | PLOS Global Public Health | 2023
Warns that powerful institutions can absorb decolonial language while preserving the leadership structures and material inequalities the movement challenges.
Decolonizing Global Health Research: Perspectives from US and LMIC Scholars
| M. DeCamp et al. | Annals of Global Health | 2023
Compares scholars’ perspectives on colonial legacies, partnership inequities, authorship, funding, and practical routes toward more accountable research.
Decolonising global health in 2021: a roadmap to move from rhetoric to reform
| M. Khan et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Proposes reforms involving leadership, institutional culture, education, research partnerships, funding, publishing, and accountability.
Decolonising global health: if not now, when?
| A. M. Büyüm et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2020
Frames decolonization as a demand to confront racism, colonial power, and unequal control over global-health institutions and resources.
Decolonizing Medical Education and Curricula
Towards decolonising medical education assessments
| MJA Insight+ contributors | MJA Insight+ | 2026
Explores how examinations and assessment systems can reproduce cultural assumptions and proposes fairer, more context-aware approaches.
Decolonising medical and dental curricula
| Medical Schools Council and Dental Schools Council | Medical Schools Council | 2025
Offers guidance for examining curriculum content, institutional culture, teaching materials, assessment, staffing, and student participation.
Advancing culturally competent medical education: decolonising the curriculum and promoting inclusive healthcare
| J. Leblanc et al. | Critical Public Health | 2025
Links curriculum reform with culturally responsive practice, representation, critical reflection, and more equitable patient care.
Mitigating racial disparities in healthcare: medical education and representation of skin tones
| S. Kesavan | MedEdPublish | 2025
Reviews educational gaps in depicting disease across skin tones and recommends systematic inclusion in teaching and assessment.
“Colonialism” in modern allopathic medical education
| P. R. Shankar | Annals of Research in Medical and Health Sciences | 2024
Considers how imported curricula, language hierarchies, and Western institutional models shape contemporary medical training.
A course auditing system of skin color in preclinical medical education
| J. Lamb et al. | Family Medicine | 2023
Describes a method for auditing visual teaching materials and improving representation of diverse skin tones in preclinical courses.
Decolonising medical education regulation: a global view
| M. A. Rashid et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2023
Examines how accreditation and regulation can perpetuate imported standards and argues for locally accountable, context-sensitive systems.
‘Decolonising the Medical Curriculum’: humanising medicine through epistemic pluralism, cultural safety and critical consciousness
| S. H. M. Wong et al. | London Review of Education | 2021
Presents curriculum reform as a process of widening legitimate knowledge, fostering cultural safety, and developing critical consciousness.
Modern medicine is a colonial artifact
| T. Naidu | Academic Medicine | 2021
Argues that medical education must confront the colonial institutions, categories, and hierarchies embedded in modern medicine.
Decolonising medical education and exploring White fragility
| J. Hartland and E. Larkai | BJGP Open | 2020
Discusses resistance to curriculum reform and how White fragility can obstruct meaningful engagement with racism and colonial history.
Power, Governance, and Global Health Institutions
Re-imagining global health: perspectives from the next generation
| S. Boladuadua et al. | The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific | 2026
Presents emerging scholars’ proposals for locally led governance, reciprocal collaboration, plural knowledge, and institutional accountability.
Dignity-based practice in global health research
| A. Bayingana et al. | The Lancet Global Health | 2025
Centers dignity as a practical standard for relationships, consent, compensation, recognition, and decision-making in research.
Mapping the material contingencies of change in global health
| D. W. Krugman | PLOS Global Public Health | 2025
Shifts attention from rhetoric to the financial, organizational, and labor conditions that determine whether reform can occur.
Lancet Commissions must challenge colonial knowledge systems
| I. Torres et al. | The Lancet | 2024
Calls on influential commissions to diversify leadership, recognize Southern scholarship, and examine the power behind evidence production.
Settler colonialism and racial capitalism as drivers of health inequity
| B. Wispelwey et al. | The Lancet Global Health | 2023
Analyzes settler colonialism and racial capitalism as continuing structures that shape health systems, exposure, dispossession, and unequal care.
Decoloniality in global health research: ten tasks for early-career researchers
| R. C. Keynejad et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2023
Provides practical tasks involving reflexivity, citation, partnership, budgets, authorship, mentorship, dissemination, and institutional advocacy.
Turning the lens inward: foreign aid and the decolonisation of institutional practices
| D. Sharma et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2023
Urges organizations to examine their own staffing, procurement, compensation, governance, and accountability rather than externalizing reform.
Is decolonisation sufficient?
| S. Q. Contractor et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2022
Questions whether decolonization language alone can address capitalism, caste, patriarchy, racism, and other intersecting systems of domination.
Undoing supremacy in global health will require more than decolonisation
| S. Abimbola et al. | The Lancet | 2021
Argues for confronting supremacy across race, class, gender, geography, expertise, and institutional authority.
Will global health survive its decolonisation?
| S. Abimbola and M. Pai | The Lancet | 2020
Asks whether global health can relinquish concentrated Northern authority and become accountable to the people whose health is at stake.
Equitable Research Partnerships and Funding
How to (or how not to) enhance equity in global health research collaborations
| D. Nambiar et al. | Health Policy and Planning | 2025
Identifies practices that strengthen or undermine equity across agenda setting, budgets, implementation, credit, capacity, and long-term partnership.
How can global health institutions join the decoloniality movement?
| ISGlobal | ISGlobal Policy Brief | 2025
Recommends institutional reforms in governance, employment, funding, research priorities, partnerships, and evaluation.
Advancing a decolonial lens for global health research: facilitator manual
| H. Eger et al. | Bielefeld University | 2025
Provides facilitated exercises for examining positionality, colonial histories, partnership dynamics, and organizational change.
Towards authentic institutional allyship by global health funders
| S. O. Oti et al. | PLOS Global Public Health | 2024
Challenges funders to move beyond statements by transferring resources, decision authority, and accountability to historically marginalized institutions.
A decolonial framework for applying reflexivity and positionality in global health research
| T. Naidu et al. | Global Health Promotion | 2024
Offers a structured approach for examining researchers’ identities, institutional locations, relationships, and effects on knowledge production.
What makes working together work? A scoping review of equitable partnerships in global health
| S. Voller et al. | Health Policy and Planning | 2022
Reviews partnership features including trust, shared governance, transparent funding, communication, mutual benefit, and sustained commitment.
Decolonising global health evaluation
| I. Pant et al. | PLOS Global Public Health | 2022
Examines how evaluation criteria and evaluator authority can reproduce colonial power and proposes participatory, locally grounded alternatives.
Addressing power asymmetries in global health: imperatives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic
| S. Abimbola et al. | PLOS Medicine | 2021
Uses the pandemic to highlight inequities in expertise, financing, data, manufacturing, and decision-making between institutions and countries.
Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings
| TRUST Project | Global Code of Conduct | 2018
Sets principles intended to prevent ethics dumping and promote fairness, respect, care, and honesty in international research.
Moving to research partnerships in developing countries
| A. Costello and A. Zumla | BMJ | 2000
An influential early call to replace extractive research relationships with durable partnerships, local capacity, and shared scientific leadership.
Knowledge Production, Authorship, and Publishing
AfriScience-MT: towards decolonizing science in Africa through text translation
| I. Abdulmumin et al. | arXiv | 2026
Introduces multilingual translation resources intended to widen access to scientific knowledge and reduce English-language dependence in African research.
Unfair knowledge practices in global health: a realist synthesis
| S. Abimbola | Health Policy and Planning | 2024
Analyzes how institutions value some knowers, methods, languages, and locations over others and identifies mechanisms sustaining epistemic injustice.
Editors as allies: our two-year experience at PLOS Global Public Health
| J. Robinson, C. Kyobutungi and M. Pai | PLOS Global Public Health | 2024
Reflects on editorial policies designed to broaden participation, scrutinize parachute research, and improve equity in authorship and peer review.
Where is knowledge from the global South? An account of epistemic justice for global bioethics
| Journal of Medical Ethics contributors | Journal of Medical Ethics | 2023
Examines why Southern ethical traditions and scholarship remain marginalized in global bioethics and how citation and curricula can change.
How we classify countries and people—and why it matters
| Global health scholars | BMJ Global Health | 2022
Critiques labels such as developed, developing, and resource-poor for flattening history, hierarchy, and diversity.
Decolonising the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine archives
| V. Cranna et al. | Archives and Records | 2021
Describes archival work to expose colonial provenance, improve description, widen access, and include perspectives missing from institutional records.
The uses of knowledge in global health
| S. Abimbola | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Distinguishes knowledge used for understanding, action, and control while asking whose knowledge guides global-health priorities.
The foreign gaze: authorship in academic global health
| S. Abimbola | BMJ Global Health | 2019
Critiques research written for foreign audiences that sidelines local interpretation, relevance, readership, and scholarly authority.
Facing up to injustice in genome science
| G. Guglielmi | Nature | 2019
Reports concerns about unequal participation, sample extraction, benefit sharing, and control of genomic data involving African populations.
It’s time to redraw the world’s very unequal knowledge map
| L. Czerniewicz | The Conversation | 2013
Explains how publishing infrastructure, language, rankings, and resources concentrate recognized academic knowledge in wealthy countries.
Indigenous Health, Cultural Safety, and Sovereignty
Beyond cultural competency: what does it actually mean to decolonise healthcare?
| The George Institute for Global Health | The George Institute for Global Health | 2026
Summarizes research identifying practical elements of decolonized healthcare, including Indigenous governance, workforce support, cultural safety, and accountability.
Implementing healthcare decolonisation for Indigenous people: a systematic review
| C. A. K. Santos et al. | International Journal for Equity in Health | 2025
Reviews interventions intended to transform healthcare structures, relationships, education, governance, and service delivery for Indigenous peoples.
Decolonising primary health care practice: a definition and its importance
| Medical Journal of Australia contributors | Medical Journal of Australia | 2025
Defines decolonizing practice in primary care and relates it to power, Indigenous self-determination, cultural safety, and structural accountability.
Refining definitions of cultural safety, cultural competency, and Indigenous health
| E. Curtis et al. | International Journal for Equity in Health | 2025
Clarifies frequently conflated concepts and emphasizes that cultural safety is determined by patients and requires attention to power.
First Peoples’ cultural medicines: a review of Australian policies and guidelines
| A. Gall et al. | The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific | 2025
Assesses whether health policies recognize, protect, and enable First Peoples’ cultural medicines and healing practices.
A systematic review of Indigenous cultural safety training interventions for healthcare professionals
| B. J. Hardy et al. | BMJ Open | 2023
Evaluates training approaches and stresses the need for organizational change rather than treating cultural safety as individual competence alone.
Indigenous patients’ experiences of racism and cultural safety in health care
| A. Pilarinos et al. | CMAJ Open | 2023
Documents patient experiences of stereotyping, dismissal, mistreatment, and culturally unsafe care while identifying conditions that build trust.
Decolonizing health in Canada: a Manitoba First Nation perspective
| R. Eni et al. | International Journal for Equity in Health | 2021
Centers First Nation perspectives on colonial determinants, community control, culturally grounded services, and systemic health reform.
Why cultural safety rather than cultural competency is required to achieve health equity
| E. Curtis et al. | International Journal for Equity in Health | 2019
Argues that cultural safety better addresses power, racism, institutional responsibility, and patient-defined quality than competency models.
Educating for Indigenous health equity: an international consensus statement
| R. Jones et al. | Academic Medicine | 2018
Sets shared principles for medical education involving Indigenous leadership, anti-racism, community partnership, curriculum integration, and institutional accountability.
Traditional Medicine, Healing, and Medical Pluralism
Decolonizing mental health practice through traditional healing
| R. S. K. Ting et al. | American Psychologist | 2025
Explores how traditional healers and culturally grounded practices can challenge the universalization of Western psychiatric models.
Decolonizing healthcare: the role of traditional medicine in the lives of Cameroonian women
| E. A. Chance | Academic research publication | 2025
Examines women’s navigation of traditional and biomedical care and the social meanings attached to healing choices.
Religious and medical pluralism among traditional healers in South Africa
| M. Galvin et al. | PLOS Global Public Health | 2023
Shows how healers combine spiritual, Indigenous, biomedical, and religious frameworks rather than operating within rigid medical categories.
Medical pluralism: Indigenous healing systems versus modern medicine
| Biomedical Journal contributors | Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research | 2023
Reviews tensions and possible complementarities between Indigenous healing traditions and institutional biomedicine.
WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine
| World Health Organization | World Health Organization | 2022
Describes an international initiative focused on evidence, biodiversity, innovation, regulation, and respectful use of traditional medicine.
Decolonising ideas of healing in medical education
| A. U. Lokugamage, T. Ahillan and S. Pathberiya | Journal of Medical Ethics | 2020
Argues that medical training should recognize plural healing traditions and question the assumed universality of Western biomedical knowledge.
Knowledge of sickness and healing: medical pluralism and health-seeking in Vanuatu
| Development Policy Centre contributors | Devpolicy Blog | 2017
Explains how people combine local, spiritual, community, and biomedical explanations when deciding where and how to seek care.
WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2014–2023
| World Health Organization | World Health Organization | 2013
Provides a policy framework for integrating traditional medicine while addressing quality, safety, regulation, research, and access.
Medical pluralism and global health policy
| B. J. Foran | Global health policy research | 2007
Considers how health policy can account for multiple medical systems without subordinating local traditions to biomedicine.
Medical pluralism and the maintenance of a traditional healing technique on Lihir, Papua New Guinea
| M. Macintyre | Pimatisiwin | 2005
Examines how a traditional healing practice persists and adapts alongside Christianity, mining development, and biomedical services.
Race, Biology, and Clinical Algorithms
Clinical algorithms and the legacy of race-based correction
| L. J. Horsfall et al. | Medical research review | 2025
Reviews the history and consequences of race adjustments in clinical tools and the movement toward more biologically and socially valid alternatives.
Race is not biology
| Johns Hopkins Medicine | Johns Hopkins Medicine | 2025
Explains why race is a social and political classification rather than a reliable biological proxy for diagnosis or treatment.
New York City’s public health approach to reexamining race-based clinical algorithms
| M. E. Morse et al. | NEJM Catalyst | 2024
Describes a citywide effort to identify, evaluate, and replace clinical algorithms that use race in ways that may reinforce inequity.
Eliminating race-based medicine
| Children’s Hospital Association | Children’s Hospitals Today | 2024
Reviews pediatric health-system efforts to remove race corrections and improve the evidence used in clinical decision tools.
Algorithmic changes are not enough: the removal of race adjustment from eGFR equations
| M. M. Cusick et al. | arXiv | 2024
Shows why changing a formula must be accompanied by attention to referral patterns, access, institutional workflows, and structural racism.
How abolition of race-based medicine is necessary for American health justice
| S. P. Richmond II | AMA Journal of Ethics | 2022
Argues that race-based clinical practices misrepresent biology and must be replaced by approaches centered on racism and social conditions.
Race correction and the X-ray machine
| I. Bavli | New England Journal of Medicine | 2022
Traces historical racial assumptions in diagnostic technology and shows how apparently objective devices can encode social bias.
Race-based medicine in the point-of-care clinical reference
| J. P. Cerdeña et al. | EClinicalMedicine | 2022
Assesses how clinical references invoke race and calls for replacing essentialist claims with evidence about racism, ancestry, and environment.
Hidden in plain sight—reconsidering the use of race correction in clinical algorithms
| D. A. Vyas, L. G. Eisenstein and D. S. Jones | New England Journal of Medicine | 2020
Identifies widely used algorithms that adjust care by race and examines their potential to direct resources away from marginalized patients.
Toward the abolition of biological race in medicine
| N. Chadha et al. | Othering & Belonging Institute | 2020
Provides a framework for replacing biological notions of race with analysis of racism, ancestry, environment, and political inequality.
Medical Racism and Structural Inequality
A French medical course examines implicit racial bias in healthcare
Reports on medical teaching that confronts racial bias, unequal diagnosis, communication, and the legacy of race in clinical practice.
Is systemic racism in medicine putting Black people’s lives at risk?
| Layal Liverpool | The Guardian | 2024
Surveys evidence that racial bias and structural inequality affect pain treatment, diagnosis, technology, research, and patient outcomes.
Racial biases in clinical practice and medical education
| A. Mouhab et al. | Medical education research | 2024
Reviews how bias enters training and practice and proposes curriculum, assessment, recruitment, and institutional reforms.
Promoting anti-racism in clinical practice
| C. Boutin-Foster et al. | Journal of General Internal Medicine | 2023
Offers practical approaches for recognizing racism, responding to discriminatory encounters, and changing clinical environments.
Past, present and future of race and colonialism in medicine
Connects colonial medical history with contemporary racial categories, health inequities, and professional responsibility.
Racism in medicine
| British Medical Association | British Medical Association | 2022
Presents survey evidence on workplace racism experienced by doctors and calls for leadership, reporting, accountability, and cultural change.
Why medical schools usually don’t teach about the health effects of racism
| Time contributors | Time | 2021
Explores gaps in medical education about racism as a health determinant and the consequences for clinical reasoning and patient care.
The world’s leading medical journals don’t write about racism
| Health-equity scholars | Time | 2021
Highlights the limited attention historically given to racism in major medical journals and urges sustained editorial responsibility.
Dark skin is underrepresented in medicine. Here’s how students are changing that
| Verywell Health contributors | Verywell Health | 2020
Describes student-led efforts to expand clinical images and reduce diagnostic disparities caused by predominantly light-skin teaching materials.
Systemic racism and U.S. health care
| J. Feagin and Z. Bennefield | Social Science & Medicine | 2014
Analyzes how institutional racism shapes medical organizations, professional behavior, treatment, access, and health outcomes.
Colonial Histories of Medicine and Public Health
Ailing Empires: medicine, science and imperialism
| S. Goodman | Social History of Medicine | 2026
Reviews scholarship on the reciprocal relationship between imperial expansion, medical knowledge, scientific institutions, and colonial governance.
Where have you been? Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and its colonial histories
| A. Murphy | Social History of Medicine | 2026
Examines how a major tropical-medicine institution represents, researches, and publicly engages with its imperial past.
From colonialism to global health: frameworks for the Portuguese empire
| History Compass contributors | History Compass | 2023
Reviews historical frameworks linking colonial medicine, missionary work, tropical health, development, and later global-health institutions.
Diagnosing the medical history of British imperialism
| A. Greenwood | The Lancet | 2022
Assesses how medicine supported imperial rule while colonial encounters also transformed British medical knowledge and institutions.
Colonialism, malaria, and the decolonization of global health
| J. B. Bump and I. Aniebo | PLOS Global Public Health | 2022
Uses malaria control to show how colonial assumptions continue to shape priorities, expertise, programs, and relations with African communities.
Colonial medicine from a different perspective
| University of Sydney | University of Sydney News | 2018
Introduces research that examines colonial medicine through local intermediaries, patients, Indigenous knowledge, and everyday negotiation.
Medicine, empires, and ethics in colonial Africa
| H. Tilley | AMA Journal of Ethics | 2016
Explains how colonial administrations used medicine and science while Africans shaped, resisted, and repurposed medical systems.
What is ‘colonial’ about medieval colonial medicine?
| I. McCleery | Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies | 2015
Questions how colonial categories should be applied to medical exchange, conquest, religion, and governance in medieval Iberian contexts.
Colonialism and British chronic disease research, 1940–1975
| M. D. Moore | Social History of Medicine | 2015
Shows how imperial networks and colonial populations influenced British research on nutrition, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and epidemiology.
Coming ‘home’ to postcolonial medicine
| R. Bivins | Medical History | 2012
Explores how migration and decolonization brought colonial medical ideas, practitioners, and populations into Britain’s domestic health system.
Slavery, Experimentation, and Medical Ethics
Enduring medical knowledge in the age of slavery
| R. A. Hogarth | Past & Present | 2026
Examines how medical knowledge produced through slavery endured in institutions, racial theories, practice, and historical memory.
Maladies of Empire: how colonialism, slavery, and war transformed medicine
| K. W. Lin | Journal of General Internal Medicine | 2024
Reviews a history of how imperial expansion, forced labor, warfare, and extraction influenced modern medical knowledge and systems.
Medical racism and the mistreatment of Black Americans through history
| Teen Vogue contributors | Teen Vogue | 2023
Introduces examples of exploitation, segregation, coercion, and unequal treatment that continue to shape mistrust and health inequity.
The international slave trade, colonialism, and epidemiology
| African American Intellectual History Society contributors | AAIHS | 2022
Connects the emergence of disease surveillance and population medicine to commerce, enslavement, colonial ports, and imperial administration.
Secret cures of slaves: people, plants, and medicine in the British West Indies
| É. Edwards-Grossi | Catalyst | 2021
Explores enslaved people’s botanical and healing knowledge and the colonial efforts to appropriate, regulate, or suppress it.
How the origins of epidemiology are linked to the transatlantic slave trade
Shows how records of captive people, ships, disease, and mortality contributed to early epidemiological observation and analysis.
West African medical knowledge, the slave trade, and the Royal Society archives
| Carolyn Roberts | The Royal Society | 2021
Recovers African medical knowledge from archival records while examining extraction, translation, and unequal attribution.
The racist and unethical origins of modern gynecology
| Clue contributors | Clue | 2021
Reviews experimentation on enslaved Black women and the ethical failures obscured in celebratory histories of gynecology.
Improvising Caribbean medicine in the age of slavery
| J. D. La Fleur | New West Indian Guide | 2018
Examines how enslaved and free people developed medical practices through African, Indigenous, European, and Caribbean knowledge exchange.
Medical experimentation on slaves in eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies
| Stanford University | Stanford News | 2017
Reports historical research on physicians’ experiments on enslaved people and the relationship between medicine, plantation power, and coercion.
Psychiatry, Mental Health, and Decolonial Care
Decolonizing mental health: rethinking implementation science from the ground up
| F. Agudelo-Hernández et al. | Global Mental Health | 2025
Calls for mental-health implementation research rooted in community knowledge, local priorities, historical context, and reciprocal learning.
Beyond compliance: addressing Indigenous mental health and what is missing in clinical practice
| Psychiatric Times contributors | Psychiatric Times | 2025
Argues that effective Indigenous mental-health care requires sovereignty, relationship, cultural continuity, and institutional accountability.
Decolonising global mental health: the role of Mad Studies
| P. Beresford and D. Rose | Global Mental Health | 2023
Brings survivor-led and Mad Studies perspectives into debates about psychiatric authority, knowledge, coercion, and global mental-health policy.
The network approach: a path to decolonize mental health care
| R. E. G. Alemu et al. | Frontiers in Public Health | 2023
Proposes network models that examine relationships among symptoms and contexts without assuming universal Western diagnostic structures.
Decolonizing mental health and moving toward harmony and balance
| Jesse Valentin | Center for Victims of Torture | 2023
Presents an Indigenous perspective emphasizing relational wellness, community, spirituality, land, and balance rather than individual pathology alone.
Global mental health research and practice: a decolonial approach from the HEROES team
| E. Rivera-Segarra et al. | The Lancet Psychiatry | 2022
Introduces a team framework for humility, equity, reflexivity, openness, engagement, and sustainability in mental-health research.
Decolonizing madness? Transcultural psychiatry and the birth of a global psyche
| A. Antić | Modern Intellectual History | 2022
Traces postwar efforts to universalize psychiatric knowledge and the tensions between decolonization, culture, and international expertise.
Re-thinking the history of psychiatry from the edges of empire
| C. Edington | Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry | 2021
Uses colonial and postcolonial settings to reconsider standard histories of psychiatric institutions, diagnosis, patients, and professional authority.
Decolonising the medical curriculum: psychiatry faces particular challenges
| P. Bracken | Medical Anthropology | 2021
Questions psychiatric universalism and urges medical education to engage culture, power, history, and alternative understandings of distress.
Decolonizing global mental health through Jamaican psychiatry
| Mad in America contributors | Mad in America | 2020
Examines Jamaican psychiatric history and critiques the export of Western diagnostic and treatment models as culturally neutral.
Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
Reclaiming sexual and reproductive rights through a decolonial lens
| Health and Human Rights Journal contributors | Health and Human Rights Journal | 2025
Connects reproductive rights with colonial histories, racial capitalism, bodily autonomy, community knowledge, and self-determination.
Decolonising sexual and reproductive health and rights
| LPF Development contributors | LPF Development | 2025
Examines how funding, expertise, policy language, and program design can reproduce colonial power in reproductive-health work.
Decolonization in sexual and reproductive health research methods: a scoping review
| M. Stevens-Uninsky et al. | Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters | 2024
Maps decolonial methods involving community governance, reflexivity, Indigenous methodologies, language, compensation, and shared ownership.
Decolonizing Indigenous reproductive healthcare and politics
| A. Gonzalez | Claremont Pressbooks | 2024
Links reproductive healthcare to settler colonialism, forced sterilization, family separation, sovereignty, and Indigenous reproductive justice.
Why decolonization is necessary for reproductive justice
| URGE contributors | URGE | 2023
Argues that reproductive justice requires confronting land theft, population control, racial hierarchy, and colonial governance.
Decolonization in sexual and reproductive health research methods: a scoping-review protocol
| M. Stevens-Uninsky et al. | JMIR Research Protocols | 2023
Defines a research plan for identifying how decolonial principles have been applied in sexual and reproductive health studies.
Decolonising sexual and reproductive health and rights: a practical framework
| Make Way Consortium | Make Way | 2023
Provides an accessible framework for examining power, language, representation, funding, partnerships, and intersectionality in SRHR programs.
The importance of decolonising sexual reproductive healthcare
| King’s College London | King’s College London News | 2022
Highlights research and practice aimed at centering communities, challenging inherited assumptions, and improving culturally safe reproductive care.
Colonial conundrums in sexual and reproductive health and rights
| P. Keogh | The Open University | 2021
Explores how colonial histories influence contemporary SRHR policy, development programs, sexuality, and claims of universal expertise.
The history of coerced sterilization in the United States
| Teen Vogue contributors | Teen Vogue | 2020
Surveys eugenic and colonial sterilization practices targeting Indigenous, Black, Latina, disabled, incarcerated, and poor people.
Maternal Health, Obstetrics, and Midwifery
Key principles for decolonising interventions in midwifery education: a systematic review
| S. Thomas et al. | Women and Birth | 2025
Identifies principles for reforming midwifery education through cultural safety, Indigenous leadership, anti-racism, reflexivity, and structural change.
Decolonising practice in midwifery
| Royal College of Midwives | Royal College of Midwives | 2024
Sets out a professional commitment to confronting colonial histories, racism, curriculum bias, workforce inequality, and unequal maternity outcomes.
Decolonizing maternal health research: an introduction to Indigenous methods
| Oxford Academic contributors | Oxford Academic | 2024
Introduces Indigenous methodologies that emphasize relationship, reciprocity, community authority, cultural protocols, and accountability.
The Black maternal health crisis is generations in the making
| Parents contributors | Parents | 2024
Connects current maternal disparities with slavery, medical experimentation, segregation, dismissal of pain, and structural racism.
A historical primer on obstetrics and gynecology health disparities
| A. Nnoli et al. | Obstetrics & Gynecology | 2023
Reviews historical policies and practices that shaped racial inequities in reproductive medicine and women’s healthcare.
Understanding and addressing the influence of colonialism on obstetrics and gynaecology specialty training
| Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists | RCOG | 2023
Discusses curriculum, assessment, institutional culture, differential attainment, and the specialty’s colonial history.
Respectful maternity care in the UK using a decolonial lens
| A. U. Lokugamage et al. | Women and Birth | 2022
Applies decolonial analysis to maternity systems, professional hierarchies, patient autonomy, racism, and respectful care.
Obstetrics and gynecology and reparations: the debt we owe
| M. L. Swanson et al. | Obstetrics & Gynecology | 2021
Argues that the specialty should acknowledge historical harms and pursue reparative changes in education, research, care, and institutions.
Understanding the history of racism in obstetrics and gynecology
| American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists | ACOG | 2021
Provides historical context on exploitation, segregation, reproductive control, and the continuing responsibilities of the profession.
Historian uncovers gynecology’s brutal roots in slavery
| UC Berkeley | Berkeley News | 2020
Profiles scholarship recovering enslaved women’s experiences and challenging heroic narratives about the origins of American gynecology.
Decolonizing Public Health and Epidemiology
Seventy years of decoloniality: epistemic disobedience and global public health
| J. M. McGovern and L. Fusco | Frontiers in Public Health | 2025
Reviews epistemic disobedience and suggests ways public-health research can detach knowledge from colonial hierarchies of authority.
Decolonizing global health research: experiences from a Kenyan health-systems project
| A. Adam et al. | Frontiers in Public Health | 2025
Describes locally responsive dissemination, knowledge brokerage, arts-based communication, and engagement with health workers and communities.
A proposed guide to reducing bias and improving assessments of decolonization in global health research
| C. Ngaruiya et al. | Frontiers in Education | 2024
Offers a multilevel framework for assessing institutions, funders, journals, and research relationships rather than relying on broad claims.
Decolonizing epidemiological research: a critical perspective
| Y. A. Adebisi et al. | Annals of Medicine and Surgery | 2023
Examines colonial influences on epidemiological questions, categories, data ownership, methods, interpretation, authorship, and public benefit.
Introducing the settler colonial determinants of health
| B. Wispelwey et al. | Frontiers in Public Health | 2023
Frames settler colonialism as an ongoing determinant operating through land, law, incarceration, borders, resources, and institutional power.
Decolonising ‘man’, resituating pandemic
| R. J. Jolly | Medical Humanities | 2022
Uses Sylvia Wynter’s thought to challenge universalized ideas of the human in pandemic policy and public-health theory.
Decolonizing public health requires an epistemic reformation
| B. Wispelwey and M. J. Tanous | American Journal of Public Health | 2021
Argues that public health must transform the categories, histories, and power relations through which it produces knowledge.
COVID-19 and the decolonization of Indigenous public health
| L. Richardson and M. Crawford | CMAJ | 2020
Shows how Indigenous governance, community knowledge, and self-determination offer essential alternatives to colonial public-health responses.
History shows that when prejudice overrides science, public health is at risk
| Medical historians | Time | 2020
Reviews episodes in which racial prejudice distorted disease explanation, surveillance, quarantine, treatment, and public communication.
On the coloniality of global public health
| E. T. Richardson | Medicine Anthropology Theory | 2019
Argues that global public health can manage rather than eliminate inequality when it leaves imperial political and economic structures intact.
Medicines, Vaccines, and Pharmaceutical Power
Transforming corporate governance to improve access to medicines in the Global South
| Institute for New Economic Thinking contributors | Institute for New Economic Thinking | 2026
Examines how pharmaceutical ownership, governance, pricing, and public investment affect equitable access to essential medicines.
Decolonizing global health: Africa’s pursuit of pharmaceutical sovereignty
| M. Mulumba et al. | BMC Health Services Research | 2025
Explores regional manufacturing, technology transfer, regulation, financing, and political autonomy in African pharmaceutical systems.
Ending pandemics within the shadow of trade
| S. Sekalala et al. | International Journal of Health Policy and Management | 2025
Analyzes how trade and intellectual-property rules constrain public-health responses and access to technologies during pandemics.
Decolonizing human rights law in global health: intellectual property and access to essential medicines
| K. Zaman | Asian Journal of International Law | 2024
Uses COVID-19 to examine how intellectual-property law and colonial legal structures limit equitable access to medicines.
WTO fails to reach agreement on providing global access to COVID treatments
| Kat Lay | The Guardian | 2024
Reports on failed negotiations over patent rules and the continuing divide between pharmaceutical interests and treatment access.
Balancing intellectual property rights with post-COVID access to medicines
| S. P. Park et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2023
Reviews policy options for innovation, licensing, public financing, manufacturing, and equitable access after the pandemic.
Global access to medicines and legacies of coloniality in COVID-19 vaccine inequity
| S. Geiger | Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review | 2022
Links vaccine inequity to colonial economic relations, monopolies, manufacturing concentration, and unequal political influence.
Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence
| M. M. Ayyash | Distinktion | 2022
Interprets unequal vaccine access through histories of border control, racial hierarchy, dispossession, and sovereign violence.
Decolonising human rights: intellectual property laws and unequal access to COVID-19 vaccines
| S. Sekalala et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Argues that intellectual-property protections reproduced colonial inequities by limiting vaccine production and access in poorer countries.
Global vaccine equity demands reparative justice—not charity
| S. Harman et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Frames vaccine equity as a matter of repair, redistribution, technology sharing, and structural justice rather than benevolent donation.
Digital Health, Data Colonialism, and Artificial Intelligence
Regulating digital health in the Global South: critical and decolonial approaches
| S. Sekalala et al. | International Journal of Law in Context | 2026
Examines regulation of platforms, data, infrastructure, and digital care from perspectives centered on Southern sovereignty and public interest.
Cognitive sovereignty and decolonial public health
| S. Kakraba et al. | Frontiers in Public Health | 2026
Argues that communities should govern not only health data but also the concepts and reasoning used by artificial-intelligence systems.
Cloud, control and diagnostic sovereignty: the political economy of AI-enabled health diagnostics in Africa
Analyzes dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure, proprietary models, extracted data, and external control of diagnostic systems.
Decolonizing AI ethics in Africa’s healthcare
| M. K. Grancia et al. | AI and Ethics | 2025
Calls for African ethical traditions, institutions, languages, and public priorities to shape healthcare AI governance.
Decolonizing digital health: reclaiming equity, consent, and governance in global health innovation
| Petrie-Flom Center contributors | Bill of Health | 2025
Examines informed consent, community governance, benefit sharing, infrastructure, and power in digital-health innovation.
Digital diagnosis without permission: AI, health data, and colonial echoes
| LPF Development contributors | LPF Development | 2025
Critiques health-data extraction and AI deployment that proceed without meaningful community authorization, ownership, or accountability.
Whose health counts? Decolonising global health in a digitally connected world
| Aditi Kapadia | University of Oxford | 2025
Questions who designs digital systems, whose data is visible, and whose definitions of health guide technological solutions.
Colonialism in the new digital health agenda
| S. Sekalala et al. | BMJ Global Health | 2024
Identifies extractive data practices, market concentration, and imported technological priorities within international digital-health policy.
The case for globalizing fairness: colonialism, AI, and health in Africa
| Mercy Asiedu et al. | arXiv | 2024
Shows why standard fairness metrics may overlook colonial history, infrastructure inequality, local disease burdens, and African social contexts.
Reflections on ‘decolonizing’ big data in global health
| D. M. Qato | Annals of Global Health | 2022
Examines data ownership, representation, infrastructure, analytic authority, and the unequal benefits produced by global-health data systems.
Planetary Health, Environment, and Indigenous Knowledge
Planetary health and Indigenous sovereignty
| L. O’Sullivan et al. | BMJ Paediatrics Open | 2025
Links child health and planetary well-being to Indigenous sovereignty, land rights, knowledge, and protection from environmental violence.
Justice, decolonisation, and planetary well-being
| Adewunmi O. Adebayo | Planetary Health Alliance | 2025
Connects mental health, ecological disruption, colonial histories, and unequal exposure to environmental and social harms.
Epistemicide, health systems, and planetary health
| N. Redvers et al. | The Lancet Planetary Health | 2024
Examines the destruction of Indigenous knowledge systems and its consequences for health, ecological stewardship, and resilient care.
Climate change and healthscapes: toward a postcolonial perspective
| E. Prah et al. | Health, Culture and Society | 2024
Uses postcolonial analysis to examine unequal climate exposures, health infrastructures, mobility, and the politics of adaptation.
On the possibility of decolonising planetary health
| D. Hoogeveen et al. | The Lancet Planetary Health | 2023
Argues that planetary health must confront colonial land relations, extractive economies, knowledge hierarchies, and unequal responsibility.
Embedding Indigenous knowledges and voices in planetary health education
| G. Brand et al. | The Lancet Planetary Health | 2023
Proposes educational practices that center Indigenous leadership, relationships to land, reciprocity, and multiple ways of knowing.
Decolonising mindsets around environmental sustainability
| G. T. Gangatharan et al. | BMJ | 2023
Calls on health professionals to examine colonial consumption, extraction, institutional practices, and whose knowledge informs sustainability.
Navigating fundamental tensions toward a decolonial relational vision of planetary health
| R. Jones et al. | The Lancet Planetary Health | 2022
Contrasts dominant universal frameworks with relational approaches grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, reciprocity, and place.
From modern planetary health to decolonial promotion of One Health
| O. S. Baquero et al. | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health | 2021
Critiques technocratic planetary-health models and advocates plural, political, and decolonial approaches to human-animal-environment relations.
Molecular decolonization: an Indigenous microcosm perspective of planetary health
| N. Redvers | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health | 2020
Uses Indigenous relational thought to reconsider bodies, microbes, ecosystems, and health beyond separations common in Western science.
Humanitarianism, Saviorism, and Global Health Training
Is White saviorism blocking progress in global health?
| Health Policy Watch contributors | Health Policy Watch | 2025
Examines how paternalism, unequal visibility, and foreign control can persist in global-health organizations and humanitarian narratives.
Are we training students to be White saviours in global health?
| A. T. Banerjee et al. | The Lancet | 2023
Questions educational experiences that center visiting students while burdening host institutions and reinforcing assumptions of Northern expertise.
Glocal is global: reimagining the training of global health students in high-income countries
| Global health educators | The Lancet Global Health | 2023
Proposes locally grounded training on migration, inequality, racism, and health systems instead of treating global health as work done elsewhere.
White saviourism is a colonial legacy—but White indifference is the larger one
| Centre for Humanitarian Action | CHA Blog | 2023
Distinguishes paternalistic intervention from disengagement and argues for accountable solidarity led by affected communities.
Can global health abandon saviourism for justice?
| Madhu Pai | Health Justice Initiative | 2023
Calls for a shift from charity narratives toward redistribution, rights, reparative action, and locally controlled health systems.
Reimagining global health: from decolonisation to community-led action
| S. Hindmarch et al. | Global Public Health | 2023
Argues that communities should lead priority setting, program design, implementation, evaluation, and decisions about external support.
Decolonising humanitarianism or humanitarian aid?
Separates reform of aid practices from deeper challenges to the political order and racial hierarchy underlying humanitarianism.
Disrupting global health: from allyship to collective liberation
Argues that individual allyship is insufficient without organized challenges to institutional power, privilege, and resource concentration.
What is White savior complex—and why is it harmful?
| Health contributors | Health | 2021
Explains how helping narratives can center the helper, deny agency, simplify structural problems, and reproduce racial hierarchy.
Using the COVID-19 pandemic to reimagine global health teaching in high-income countries
| Global health educators | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Proposes teaching that foregrounds humility, reciprocity, colonial history, local inequity, and lessons flowing in multiple directions.
Toolkits, Reading Lists, and Institutional Change
Decolonization Library
| Copenhagen Decolonization Committee | Decolonizing Global Health | 2026
Collects readings, media, organizations, and practical resources on coloniality, racism, knowledge, power, and institutional reform.
Decolonising health and medicine: library guide
| University of Exeter Library | University of Exeter | 2026
Organizes books, articles, histories, and teaching resources for examining colonialism across health and medical disciplines.
Introducing the twelve-part Decolonising Global Health blog series
| University of Oxford contributors | University of Oxford | 2025
Introduces a series addressing power, storytelling, digital health, research practice, education, leadership, and community knowledge.
Clarifying concepts for equitable practice in decolonizing global health
| E. S. Spanaus et al. | Journal of Public Health | 2025
Distinguishes decolonization from diversity, equity, inclusion, localization, and anti-racism to support clearer institutional action.
Policy document: Decolonising Global Health
| International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations | IFMSA | 2024
Sets student-led positions and recommendations on education, partnerships, research, leadership, accountability, and structural inequity.
Reimagining Global Health reading list
| McGill Summer Institutes in Global Health | McGill University | 2024
Curates readings on colonial history, power, authorship, partnerships, racism, humanitarianism, health systems, and practical reform.
A global effort to decolonise a reading list
| Times Higher Education contributors | Times Higher Education | 2022
Describes collaborative methods for diversifying syllabi, questioning canons, broadening citation, and avoiding tokenistic curriculum change.
Decolonising health and medicine resources
| University of East Anglia Library | University of East Anglia | 2022
Provides a multidisciplinary collection on race, empire, medical history, Indigenous health, global health, education, and clinical practice.
Decolonizing Global Health Toolkit
| Decolonizing Global Health Working Group | University of Washington | 2021
Offers definitions, reflection questions, case discussions, and institutional practices for reversing colonial legacies in health-equity work.
Decolonising the Medical Curriculum reading list
| S. H. M. Wong et al. | Decolonising the Medical Curriculum | 2020
Curates foundational readings on race, empire, medical education, cultural safety, epistemic pluralism, clinical imagery, and structural inequaliy.
