[BRIEFING] That's Not a Decolonization Conference

As a junior at Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh, Chalin took an African Liberation Movements class at the University of Pittsburgh. It changed how he saw the world. This week, a conference called the World Decolonization Forum opens in Istanbul — organized by a Turkish think tank, partnered with Al Jazeera and a Chinese government-adjacent university, held in the former capital of the Ottoman Empire. Its agenda dedicates a roundtable exclusively to Palestine. The Uyghurs don't have one. The Kurds don't have one. The Rohingya don't have one. The Sahrawi — whose cause is being actively undermined by the conference's own funders — don't have one. The question this episode asks is simple: if decolonization is the cause, why are tens of millions of colonized people missing from the conversation?