This chapter explores how multiple corporate structures in multinational enterprises operating in developing countries, and in Africa in particular, make determinations of responsibility among the members of such corporate families difficult. Specifically, this chapter challenges the assumption that the end of colonial rule and the founding of African states threw off the economic subordination that characterized colonial-era corporate activity in Africa. The end of colonial rule was accompanied by a desire on the part of multinational corporations to re-legitimize their activities in service of the newly independent governments through Africanization, which involved hiring African directors and officers as well as establishing domestic subsidiaries with African directors and officers. These strategies, together with the indigenization policies of post-colonial governments, in part account for the emergence and proliferation of multiple corporate structures in post-colonial African countries. Those complex structures, in turn, facilitate opportunistic behavior by transnational elites and complicate attribution of responsibility in the context of taxes and other financial liabilities.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sense of a region in crisis had prompted talk of the ‘Africanization’ of the Pacific, with the possibility of state failure creating an ‘arc of instability’ stemming from a malaise in several domestic political settings, all providing opportunities for transnational criminal and terrorist networks to gain a foothold in the region. At least this is how it appeared in some commentaries from Australia. From where New Zealand sits in the regional security scenario, these discourses perhaps seemed rather alarmist, while for most of the Pacific Island states security concerns tended to focus on more immediate, non-traditional threats, including environmental hazards such as adverse climate events impacting infrastructure, productivity and food and water security. Even so, the situations in East Timor, Bougainville and Solomon Islands, in particular, were a matter of life and death for many local people and would only be resolved with external assistance.

This chapter documents the different meanings assigned to decolonization by academic practitioners and why their particular understandings of the concept emerged under the relentless pressure for curriculum change from the protesting students. The absence of some guiding conceptions of the highly political term meant that academics 'filled-in' their own meanings ranging from decolonization as good teaching to remedial education to critical pedagogy.

This chapter explains what happened in the 10 different institutions when decolonization came marching through the gates of the various campuses. The particular histories, cultures, and politics of the different campuses are described as backdrop to the variations of institutional response to the demand for 'a free, decolonized education.' All institutions responded with great urgency to demonstrate managerial commitment to the change project; all but one institution placed the senate as the highest academic body at a university at the centre of the decolonization drive. What did this heightened sense of responsibility mean, and would it carry through on its commitments to student demands for decolonization in general and the curriculum in particular?