Decolonizing Politics

Political science emerged as a response to the challenges of imperial administration and the demands of colonial rule. While not all political scientists were colonial cheerleaders, their thinking was nevertheless framed by colonial assumptions that influence the study of politics to this day. This book offers students a lens through which to decolonize the main themes and issues of political science - from human nature, rights, and citizenship, to development and global justice. Not content with revealing the colonial legacies that still inform the discipline, the book also introduces students to a wide range of intellectual resources from the (post)colonial world that will help them think through the same themes and issues more expansively. Decolonizing Politics is a much-needed critical guide for students of political science. It shifts the study of political science from the centers of power to its margins, where the majority of humanity lives. Ultimately, the book argues that those who occupy the margins are not powerless. Rather, marginal positions might afford a deeper understanding of politics than can be provided by mainstream approaches.​

Decolonizing the Republic is a conscientious discussion of the African diaspora in Paris in the post–World War II period. This book is the first to examine the intersection of black activism and the migration of Caribbeans and Africans to Paris during this era and, as Patrick Manning notes in the foreword, successfully shows how “black Parisians—in their daily labors, weekend celebrations, and periodic protests—opened the way to ‘decolonizing the Republic,’ advancing the respect for their rights as citizens.” Contrasted to earlier works focusing on the black intellectual elite, Decolonizing the Republic maps the formation of a working-class black France. Readers will better comprehend how those peoples of African descent who settled in France and fought to improve their socioeconomic conditions changed the French perception of Caribbean and African identity, laying the foundation for contemporary black activists to deploy a new politics of social inclusion across the demographics of race, class, gender, and nationality. This book complicates conventional understandings of decolonization, and in doing so opens a new and much-needed chapter in the history of the black Atlantic.

Leading scholars demonstrate how colonial subjects, national liberation movements, and empires mobilized human rights language to contest self-determination during decolonization.

Sociology, as a discipline, was born at the height of global colonialism and imperialism. Over a century later, it is yet to shake off its commitment to colonial ways of thinking. This book explores why, and how, sociology needs to be decolonized. It analyses how sociology was integral in reproducing the colonial order, as dominant sociologists constructed theories either assuming or proving the supposed barbarity and backwardness of colonized people. Ali Meghji reveals how colonialism continues to shape the discipline today, dominating both social theory and the practice of sociology, how exporting the Eurocentric sociological canon erased social theories from the Global South, and how sociologists continue to ignore the relevance of coloniality in their work. This guide will be necessary reading for any student or proponent of sociology. In opening up the work of other decolonial advocates and under-represented thinkers to readers, Meghji offers key suggestions for what teachers and students can do to decolonize sociology. With curriculum reform, innovative teaching and a critical awareness of these issues, it is possible to make sociology more equitable on a global scale.

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria (1830–1962) is such that only aesthetic works have been able to register its enduring effects. In Decolonizing Memory Jill Jarvis examines the power of literature to provide what demographic data, historical facts, and legal trials have not in terms of attesting to and accounting for this destruction. Taking up the unfinished work of decolonization since 1962, Algerian writers have played a crucial role in forging historical memory and nurturing political resistance—their work helps to make possible what state violence has rendered almost unthinkable. Drawing together readings of multilingual texts by Yamina Mechakra, Waciny Laredj, Zahia Rahmani, Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche, Assia Djebar, and Samira Negrouche alongside theoretical, juridical, visual, and activist texts from both Algeria’s national liberation war (1954–1962) and war on civilians (1988–1999), this book challenges temporal and geographical frameworks that have implicitly organized studies of cultural memory around Euro-American reference points. Jarvis shows how this literature rewrites history, disputes state authority to arbitrate justice, and cultivates a multilingual archive for imagining decolonized futures.

The modern discipline of International Relations (IR) is largely an Anglo-American social science. It has been concerned mainly with the powerful states and actors in the global political economy and dominated by North American and European scholars. However, this focus can be seen as Eurocentrism. Decolonizing International Relations exposes the ways in which IR has consistently ignored questions of colonialism, imperialism, race, slavery, and dispossession in the non-European world. The first part of the book addresses the form and historical origins of Eurocentrism in IR. The second part examines the colonial and racialized constitution of international relations, which tends to be ignored by the discipline. The third part begins the task of retrieval and reconstruction, providing non-Eurocentric accounts of selected themes central to international relations. Critical scholars in IR and international law, concerned with the need to decolonize knowledge, have authored the chapters of this important volume. It will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, international law, and political economy, as well as those with a special interest in the politics of knowledge, postcolonial critique, international and regional historiography, and comparative politics. Contributions by: Antony Anghie, Alison J. Ayers, B. S. Chimni, James Thuo Gathii, Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Sandra Halperin, Sankaran Krishna, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, and Julian Saurin