Biography

Carmina Yu Untalan is an FCT Junior Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA University Lisbon. She holds a PhD in International Politics from Osaka University, where she worked on American hegemony in East Asia, focusing on the US-Japan-Okinawa and US-Philippine-Mindanao relations. Her main research interests, critical international relations, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and East Asia, inspired her to expand the geographical scope of her investigation to Africa and develop her current project, ‘Weaving a common world: rethinking International Relations with anticolonial figures Rizal, Cabral, Fanon, and Hatta‘. She also looks at the Anglo-Eurocentricity of international relations as a discipline. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden University and a graduate student fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore and the Institute for Social Critical Social Inquiry, The New School.

Research fields

• International relations
• Postcolonialism
• Anticolonial thought
• Asia-Africa Nexus

Selected publications

• Untalan, Carmina Yu. “Perforating colour lines: Japan and the problem of race in the ‘non-West’,” Review of International Studies 51 (2025): 102-120. [link] 🔓
• Untalan, Carmina Yu. “Beyond Empire: Okinawa and the politics of American Military bases in Japan,” Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS) 5 (2024): 62-80. [link] 🔓
• Untalan, Carmina Yu, “Turtles amid Healing and Extinction. International Relations and Question of Animal Agency in the South China Sea Disputes,” in Human-Animal Interactions in Anthropocene Asia, editado por Victor Teo. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. [link]
• Untalan, Carmina Yu. “Decentering the Self, Seeing Like the Other: Toward a Postcolonial Approach to Ontological Security,” International Political Sociology 14 (2020): 40–56. [link]

Main projects

• Individual project ‘Weaving a common world: rethinking International Relations with anticolonial figures Rizal, Cabral, Fanon, and Hatta‘ — Hosted by the IHC and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (2023.08358.CEECIND). 2024-2030
• Researcher in the project ‘Base Women and Beyond: Developing a Decolonial Feminist Approach to Military/Nuclear Installations‘ — Coordinated by Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde) and Maria-Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast), and funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation. 2024-2025 [link]
• Member of the workshop ‘Coercive and Emotional Diplomacy in East Asia: Japanese Responses‘ — Coordinated by Raymond Yamamoto (Aarhus University) and funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS). 2023-2025