This study explores the relationship between proximity to a conflict and the tendency to use peace journalism rather than war journalism modes of reporting. In the context of the current drug war occurring in Mexico, articles from both local, border region US newspapers and distant US newspapers were coded according to their usage of war or peace journalism frames. Analyses revealed that local newspapers utilized more peace journalism frames overall, and presented a less pessimistic and negative view of the conflict and parties. Distant newspapers, however, were more likely to showcase complexity of the conflict and many parties and people involved.

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In 1885, the Berlin pathologist Rudolf Virchow presented three human skeletons from the colony of German South West Africa to the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory. The remains had been looted from a grave by a young German scientist, Waldemar Belck, who was a member of the second Lüderitz expedition and took part in the occupation of colonial territory. In an attempt to re-individualise and re-humanise these human remains, which were anonymised in the course of their appropriation by Western science, the authors consult not only the colonial archive, but also contemporary oral history in Namibia. This allows for a detailed reconstruction of the social and political contexts of the deaths of the three men, named Jacobus Hendrick, Jacobus !Garisib and Oantab, and of Belck’s grave robbery, for an analysis of how the remains were turned into scientific objects by German science and institutions, as well as for an establishment of topographical and genealogical links with the Namibian present. Based on these findings, claims for the restitution of African human remains from German institutions cannot any longer be regarded as a contemporary phenomenon only but must be understood as part of an African tradition of resistance against Western colonial and scientific practices.

The Tsunami in South‐East Asia in 2004 prompted the largest military disaster response in history. Encouraged by the success, increasing attention has been paid to the various humanitarian assistance and disaster relief activities conducted by US armed forces. Since 2006, the US Navy deploys one of its two large hospital ships in annual missions to either Central and South America or the Asia–Pacific region to provide people in need with free care. These missions offer many opportunities to increase the soft power capital of the United States by forging ties with host nation governments and improving the image of the United States within the local population. However, this article argues that we need more research on the impact of humanitarian assistance to justify a continuation in a fiscally constrained environment.

Based on our experience as editors of a debate on ethnographic museums in a German journal, we analyse the conditions and limits of the current debate on the ‘decolonisation’ of ethnographic museums in the German-speaking context. Strictly speaking, the German debate lags behind a bit in relation to the Anglophone debate, but in the face of the re-organisation of the Berlin ethnographic museum as ‘Humboldt-Forum’ it provides crucial insights into the epistemology of unfolding postcolonial debates. We diagnose certain pitfalls of this discussion, e.g. a tendency towards antagonisms and dichotomisation, an overemphasis on the topic of representation and on deconstructionist approaches, an underestimation of anthropology’s critical and self-reflexive potential and too narrow a focus on ethnographic collections. From our point of view, decolonisation must be a joint effort of all kinds of museum types - ethnographic museums, art museums and (natural) history museums as well as city museums, a museum genre being discussed with increased intensity these days. As a consequence, we suggest a more thorough reflection upon the positionality of speakers, but also upon the format, genre and media that facilitate or impede mutual understanding. Secondly, a multi-disciplinary effort to decolonise museum modes of collecting, ordering, interpreting and displaying is needed, i.e. an effort, which cross-cuts different museum types and genres. Thirdly, curators working towards this direction will inevitably have to deal with the problems of disciplinary boundary work and the underlying institutional and cultural-political logics. They eventually will have to work in cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional ways, in order to reassemble disparate collections and critically interrogate notions of ‘communities’ as entities with clear-cut boundaries. After all, in an environment of debate, an exhibition cannot any longer be understood as a means of conveying and popularising knowledge, but rather as a way of making an argument in 3D.