Decolonize the museum, science, the university, the syllabus, the diet, the body, tourism, music, the internet, geoscience, the avant-garde. These are among the appeals one reads today in blogs, journal articles, and conference papers.Footnote 1 To decolonize, in such terms, is to eliminate racial, class, gender, and religious hierarchies, to combat discrimination, exploitation, and cultural denigration, and to give full voice to the political ideas and cultural expressions of people who have been subordinated by imperial powers.
Such calls appear to extend an appeal from 1986 by the noted Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o to “decolonize the mind.” Ngugi argued that living under colonial rule had produced habits of mind among the colonized that needed to be overcome. Formerly colonized people, he argued, should express themselves in indigenous languages rather than those of their colonizers. He himself had decided to write and present works of theater in his natal language, Kikuyu, and had suffered the consequences. Although his English-language novels had criticized elite Kenyans for collaborating with colonizers and later perpetuating colonialism’s inequalities, he became the target of government repression only after he started writing in Kikuyu. Ngugi was imprisoned for nearly a year in 1977–1978.Footnote 2 Kenya, apparently, had a lot of decolonizing to do.
What is accomplished by extending Ngugi’s call to “decolonize” to a wide variety of domains? The term has power as a metaphor for extreme forms of prejudice and oppression.Footnote 3 But as an historian who has written, using the word, about decolonization in its most literal sense—the ending of colonial rule over territories that were once part of European empires—I fear that the wide use of the term conceals as much as reveals.Footnote 4 Does the call to “decolonize this!” extend or dilute the meaning of decolonization?
Decolonization, along with the Cold War, is a fundamental component of the history of the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 5 A form of political power that had been both widespread and contested for centuries lost its legitimacy and its hold over vast portions of the globe. A world of fifty states and subordinated territories became a world of nearly two hundred states—juridically equal, formally recognizing each other. This process has now received extensive scholarly attention. But if the goal of anti-colonial activists was to eliminate the extremes of global inequality, that objective remains distant. As a report of leading economists concluded, “Global inequalities seem to be as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.”Footnote 6
This article poses the question of what the concept of decolonization can and cannot do, with special regard to the history of former French and British Africa (the prime focus of my own research), but also in reference to the wider world. It emphasizes that much can be learned about how decolonization came about by exploring the different goals that activists sought in their time. If instead of looking for a colonial “legacy,” we explore historical trajectories of colonization and decolonization, we can reveal how political, economic, and social structures in both ex-colonies and ex-metropoles were shaped and reshaped over time. Finally, the article extends consideration of decolonization to recent scholarship on Russian empire and the Soviet Union. Calls for “decolonization” have emerged insistently from the space of the former Soviet empire. They draw our attention to both different patterns of imperial collapse and the possibility of “reimperialization,” of reconstituting empire in new contexts.
Some of the questions that need to be asked about decolonization are structural: what institutions—economic and social as well as political—shaped by colonial rule remained in place after independence? How much were newly independent states constrained by changing global economic structures that cannot be reduced to colonial artefacts? How much room for maneuver did leaders and collectivities in ex-colonial states acquire? Other questions, as Ngugi recognized, are cultural. The pain and humiliation of subordination did not dissipate easily. Europeans transferred some of their stereotypes and prejudices from the overseas “native” to the “immigrant”; in much of the world, literature, the arts, and the social sciences were slow to open their doors to people and ideas from former colonies.
The colonial question has not been consigned to the past. The President of the United States has proposed that his country proclaim sovereignty over Gaza, the Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada. Whatever comes of these proposals, this fantasy turns “America first” into an assertion of imperial power in an age that had seemingly repudiated it—reimperialization. And it assumes that the wishes and concerns of people who live in the desired spaces do not matter, a central conceit of colonialism.
There is thus good reason why we should now be thinking about colonization and decolonization yet thinking about them carefully. If colonialism is everywhere, it is nowhere. But it is somewhere. We need to be able to make clear both the persistent effects of the colonial past and its dangerous actuality.
In May 2024, the French press had to confront the colonial question when riots—causing weeks of unrest, at least fourteen deaths, and extensive destruction of property—took place in New Caledonia, islands in the Pacific incorporated into the French empire in 1853 and still part of France.Footnote 7 With an indigenous population known as Kanaks and a population of old and new settlers from Europe, New Caledonia has for decades witnessed tension between activists seeking independence and those seeking to keep the territory French. Intermediary solutions, positing varying degrees of autonomy from and membership in the French polity, have been proposed. After episodes of violence in the 1980s, a fragile peace had been maintained by negotiations that assured Kanaks that their familial and personal affairs could be regulated in accordance with their customs (as had been the case for African citizens of France under the constitution of 1946) and that their voices would be heard regarding future political status. This equilibrium was thrown off in May 2024 by a proposal from the French government that made sense under classical republican principles: to add to the islands’ voting rolls settlers who had been in New Caledonia for ten years. But seen through a colonial lens, the initiative promised to turn a question of negotiations among communities into a question of individual voters, violating in the eyes of Kanak leaders political understandings and with the possible effect of drowning Kanaks in a sea of self-consciously European voters, leaving them unprotected from the consequences of a history of colonization, discrimination, and cultural denigration.Footnote 8 A year after the riots, over sixty years after France’s territories in North and Sub-Saharan Africa became independent, the Minister of Overseas France finds it necessary to appeal “to end the process of decolonization and always allow for the exercise of the right of self-determination.”Footnote 9
Whatever the controversies over applying the word “colonialism” to Israel-Palestine, Israel is clearly a state that colonizes—in the old, Roman sense, that is as an imposed movement of one self-defined people to territories occupied by another.Footnote 10 Colonization is brazenly ongoing in the West Bank. At the same time, the Israeli state acts in a manner reminiscent of colonial distinction-making regarding its mixed population. Israeli Arabs, around 20 percent of the population, have some of the rights of citizens and at least some access to excellent medical and university systems, but in daily life they are likely to be treated as citizens of the second zone, subject to intense surveillance and discrimination. Palestinians living in the West Bank lack political rights and are subject to the depredations of settlers and soldiers. Palestinians in Gaza have experienced the utter destruction of their lives and livelihood, on the grounds—typical of the wars of decolonization—that terrorists are harbored in their midst.
Many people see Israel’s devastation of Gaza, its attacks on Lebanon, and its actions as occupying power in the West Bank as crimes against humanity, but others—including the past and present governments of the United States—give Israel a free pass that decades ago was taken away from other states that colonize. The past of Jewish people is part of this story, but Palestinians have their past too. In many minds Jewish lives matter and Palestinian lives do not. To make this point is not to say that any opposition to Israeli power also deserves a free pass by being labeled “liberation.” The murder by Hamas of twelve hundred Israelis and the taking of hostages on October 7, 2023, was an act of brutality and terror. The leadership of Hamas acts as if neither Israeli nor Palestinian lives matter, exposing the latter to predictable assault and brutally repressing any dissent from the people of Gaza.Footnote 11
I will turn later to what appears to be the most blatant contemporary instance of reimperialization—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But to point to reimperialization and colonization today is not to project a colonial innocence on the rest of the world. The difficult task is to explore the possibilities that the coming apart of colonial power after 1945 opened up, shut down, or reconfigured without assuming a dichotomy between continuity and change, subordination and independence, colonial and decolonial.
Neocolonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial
As colonial empires fell apart, many scholars were captivated by what they were observing; they saw themselves as part of decolonization. John Lonsdale describes the African Studies community of the 1960s and 1970s as the “Committee of Concerned Scholars for a Free Africa.”Footnote 12 Africanists advocated the eradication of the last vestiges of colonialism but worried that freedom in one sense might not imply freedom in others. A half-century later, many people do not think we have reached a world that could be described as “decolonial.”
As someone old enough to have lived through “neocolonial” and “postcolonial” perspectives, I meet the recent advent of the “decolonial” with a certain skepticism. All three concepts bring a welcome focus on the importance of colonization in world history and its effects in the present. Neocolonialism was a militant concept of the immediate independence years, set forth powerfully in the 1965 book by Ghana’s first President Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Footnote 13 As an analytic concept, neocolonialism had the virtue of pointing to the continued exercise of economic power by Western states and corporations and the flaw of positing an answer before clearly posing the question: what did and did not change as former colonies became sovereign actors in international politics?
Postcolonial studies, in contrast, emerged within academia. It reflected scholars’ frustration, evident by the late 1970s, with the failure of radical agendas for transforming the colonial. The “post” called attention to time, that the colonial was something people lived through and combated, and which had consequences. A variety of arguments fit under the rubric of postcolonial studies, something its more strident critics did not appreciate.Footnote 14 Scholars operating within this framework were at their weakest when they posited an all-embracing “coloniality” followed by a generic “post-colony,” at their best in open-ended exploration of social and economic relations, intellectual trends, and political conflicts after the collapse of empires, on both sides of the colonizer-colonized divide. Some scholars looked beyond critique of European oppression to focus on the originality and importance of the thought and action of diverse peoples from colonized territories, from peasants to intellectuals. Others argued that the very categories through which we analyze and criticize colonialism are tainted by the colonizing past of “Western” intellectual traditions.Footnote 15 These are important arguments.
The decolonial paradigm originated with scholars of Latin America, who argue that colonialism was intrinsic to the very constitution of “modernity” across the globe and that in Latin America two hundred years after independence the effects of colonialism still shape the exclusions of indigenous people from political life, the continued racialization of society, and the privileging of modes of thought and culture perceived to be European. This school insists that only by looking toward indigenous forms of discourse can one move toward a decolonial world.Footnote 16 Important as its objectives are, the decoloniality approach risks reifying a “coloniality of power” with all-determining effects from 1492 to the present. It leapfrogs over the long history of the struggles and creative efforts of people across Latin America—not least workers and peasants—to confront political, economic, and cultural inequality, struggles that were more than an insurgency valiantly but vainly standing against “modernity/coloniality.”Footnote 17 At crucial moments, they altered the terms in which power was conceived and executed. Decolonial represents an ethical stance against oppressive power more than an historical argument.
This perspective directly addresses the humiliation and frustration still felt by people in the ex-colonial world.Footnote 18 But it does not provide the tools for analysis of how political, economic, and social structures operate, in past and present. It also provides an argument for elites to turn their claim to being the vanguard of decoloniality into a justification for personal power. I will return to these issues.
Decolonization, unlike decoloniality, has the virtue of most process-nouns (-izations) of calling attention to change over time, leaving room for differing chronologies, different narratives, and different consequences. It has the flaw of most process-nouns of suggesting that the phenomenon is self-propelled. What is not clear in either decoloniality or decolonization is what an end point might be. The Senegalese poet-politician Léopold Sédar Senghor wondered over a half-century ago what independence meant “where the interdependence of peoples affirms itself so manifestly.”Footnote 19
We live in a world that is both connected and unequal. We need adequate conceptual tools to specify what we confront and how it can be changed. Even the most industrialized and powerful states find their sovereignty compromised by both agreed-upon rules governing international commerce and communications and the threat of multinational corporations to move to states with the lowest rates of taxation and fewest protections for labor and the environment. Some seventy-five years after Senghor’s statement, the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, who grew up in Nigeria and now teaches in the United States, observed: “In fact, no society, whether former colony or not, is anywhere near human emancipation.”Footnote 20
Even as they struggled to topple colonial regimes, some anti-colonial leaders worried that independence would create countries too poor, too weak, and in some cases too sparsely populated to prosper in an unequal world.Footnote 21 It was with this concern in mind that some leaders of ex-colonial states joined in the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955, held in Bandung, in newly independent Indonesia, with the hope that by working together they could counter the range of mechanisms that diminished the sovereignty they were acquiring.Footnote 22
Recognizing the powerful effects of colonization should not lead us to play down the multiple forms of agency of colonized people.Footnote 23 Táíwò points out that African intellectuals and political leaders domesticated many practices attributed to their colonizers, selecting what was useful, rejecting what was demeaning, transforming ideas into something that they could claim as their own. In his words, “If decolonising means no more than broadening our horizons of what counts as significant ideas or ways of thinking, many of us are already doing that without the additional fuss of subscribing to a particular ideology.”Footnote 24
The goal of African political movements was rarely to restore a pristine Africa devoid of European influence or to reject Africa for the West. Too all-embracing, too abstract a dichotomy between “coloniality” and “indigeneity” reproduces Eurocentrism with the value sign reversed.Footnote 25
The agency of the (formerly) colonized also implies responsibility. We need not engage in a sterile debate between those who blame all the problems of Africa on a colonial legacy and those who find fault in supposed characteristics of Africa. The political economy of Africa is a co-production, and a probing analysis of economic interactions—asymmetrical as they are—is needed.Footnote 26 African elites have been in power in most of the continent for over sixty years, a time period as long as that of colonial occupation in much of the continent and in which new generations have come into play.
Some postcolonial regimes devoted far more resources to education and health than their predecessors, but others enhanced their own wealth and power without regard to their countries’ citizens. A Sékou Touré or a Robert Mugabe could heroically challenge colonialist and racist power structures and mobilize a wide spectrum of people in their territories and then turn into an authoritarian ruler who imprisoned or killed opponents.Footnote 27 Mobutu Sese Seko could advocate indigenous “authenticity,” symbolized by his own name change (from Joseph Mobutu) and a change in the name of the country (from Congo to Zaire), even while enriching himself and Western corporations, with the connivance of the United States, France, and Belgium. As Achille Mbembe says of the current crop of African military rulers, “In the name of complete decolonization and the enjoyment without impediment of their sovereignty, they affirm that Africa could accept the suppression of civic rights and individual liberties and consider liberal democracy a trap, the Trojan horse of western domination.”Footnote 28
The terms decoloniality and decolonization both illuminate and obscure issues that are important historically, politically, and ethically. As Stuart Ward has pointed out, few African activists during the height of anti-colonial mobilization were using the word decolonization.Footnote 29 Some activists and intellectuals prefer the term “liberation,” emphasizing what people were striving for rather than working against and suggesting the agency of liberators rather than a metahistorical process.Footnote 30 That still leaves open the question of the dimensions—social? economic?—of liberation, as well as the possibility that in some cases liberation exchanged a foreign tyrant for an indigenous one.
Ending Colonialism in Africa
What if we turn the imperative “decolonize!” into a question about how colonial empires came to an end? Instead of starting with a known outcome—a world of nation-states—can we examine historical transformations as shaped by actors who could not know how things would turn out? This means opening ourselves to their imaginations rather than to what we now think they should have imagined. The empire-to-nation-state narrative has variants: inevitable social forces (“modernization”), top-down (engineered from Paris or London), and bottom-up (the achievement of liberation movements). There may be truth in each of them, and they may not be incompatible historically, even if they suggest opposed political values.Footnote 31 But more ideas than these were in play in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 32 Certainly, nationalism was among them, with a long historical trajectory, in the Americas and India for example.Footnote 33 Available visions included global communist revolution, with communist parties following the ups and downs of the USSR’s flirtation with “bourgeois nationalism.” They included pan-movements—pan-Arab, pan-Islamic, pan-African, pan-Asian—often vague on what institutions would govern geographically dispersed nationalities but committed to conceptions of collectivity.Footnote 34 Nationalism itself was a protean concept, which whenever focused on a particular nation also provided a basis for different ones: Hyderabad instead of India, Asante instead of Ghana (see below).Footnote 35 Some leaders saw in federalism a way to reconcile aspirations to self-determination with the multiplicity of national claims and the need for wider solidarity against imperialism.Footnote 36 Although many anti-colonial activists saw themselves as a part of an interconnected struggle against global imperialism, colonial rule collapsed through the overlap of multiple trajectories, not the success of a singular movement. Not only did activists come with different world views, networks, and ideological commitments, but they faced a moving target, a dialectic of resistance and concession by imperial powers in a volatile global context.
Let me illustrate alternatives to the construction of territorially bounded nation-states with two examples. One is based on my own research, the efforts of most political leaders in French Africa to form a federal or confederal structure that would, in principle, transform the hierarchy of colonialism into a relationship of equality.Footnote 37 Before World War II, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal helped develop the philosophy of négritude, emphasizing the common cultural cause of people of African descent throughout the world, set alongside other civilizations of equal status—European, Arab-Berber, Chinese, et cetera. Together, he argued, these cultures could shape a globally inclusive humanism. As mobilization against colonial rule escalated after the war, Senghor advocated combining “horizontal” and “vertical” solidarity. Horizontal solidarity linked people of a geographic region or cultural complex—in his case Africa—while vertical solidarity entailed relationships between political entities with unequal resource endowments, notably between France and French Africa. To Senghor, vertical solidarity without horizontal constituted colonialism, while horizontal solidarity without vertical signified unity in poverty. But if Africans exercised horizontal solidarity, making use of the partial citizenship rights they acquired under the French constitution of 1946, they could bring pressure on France to redistribute resources—financial, educational, experience with law and democratic governance—and thus change the nature of the relationship.
In practical terms, Senghor argued that the territories of French Africa should each be governed by elected politicians through legislative and executive institutions and come together in a “primary federation” that would also have legislative and executive institutions. This African federation, along with other parts of the former French empire, would join European France in a confederation of equals that would exercise power in specified domains, like defense and foreign policy. Meanwhile, political parties and social movements in French Africa were using their horizontal solidarity to demand not just political voice at all levels but social and economic equality across the French polity: in wages and working conditions, veterans’ treatment, women’s rights, access to education and medical care, and—not least—freedom of movement across that space, in Europe, the Caribbean, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific.Footnote 38
Political parties in most of Sub-Saharan French Africa advocated variations on this approach. In Cameroon, a radical political party advocated immediate independence and was accordingly repressed.Footnote 39 In Algeria, the possibility of a more inclusive imperial formation ran into die-hard opposition from European settlers and metropolitan advocates of “L’Algérie française,” setting the stage for violent confrontation.
The great theorist and spokesperson of Algerian independence, Frantz Fanon, put forth a different vision from Senghor’s: revolutionary nationalism rejecting association with the colonizer, a nation defined by its mobilization against imperialism. In his recent study of Fanon’s life and thought, Adam Shatz nuances the celebratory view of anti-colonial violence that some see in Fanon’s text, stressing instead Fanon’s basic goal: “The challenge is to create a new universalism, in which Black and white coexist on the basis of equality, recognition, and solidarity.”Footnote 40 In these terms, Fanon’s goal was not poles apart from Senghor’s: Senghor sought a universal humanism through recognition of the contribution of different civilizations to a wider whole, Fanon through the tearing down of the colonial edifice, not least through a revolution in the consciousness of the colonized. Senghor, as Fanon charged, tended to essentialize an African civilization, while Fanon had little interest in the particularities of culture and society in Algeria, so much so that he failed to grasp the identitarian and Islamicist turn in the ideology of its anti-colonial movement. As the post-independence histories of Senegal and Algeria revealed, neither imagined path out of empire led to a fully liberated future.Footnote 41
The French government, anxious to avoid a second Algerian War, engaged in a back-and-forth debate with political leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa, and for a time advocated including African territories (including Algeria) in the European Economic Community (EEC) then under consideration. This initiative, also sought by Senghor and other African leaders, went under the name Eurafrica. But France’s would-be partners refused to take on what they saw as the burdens of ex-empire. They feared what Senghor most wanted: for African voices to have a place within EEC institutions. When, in 1957, negotiations for founding the EEC relegated France’s African territories to the voiceless status of “associate member,” the attraction of political affiliation across two continents diminished for both French and African leaders.Footnote 42
African political elites, meanwhile, were becoming more focused on their territorial constituencies as France—hoping to deflect demands for social and economic equality—began in the mid-1950s to devolve real power to individual territories, weakening the incentives for an African federation. African politicians and French officials backed into a form of decolonization as territorial states that neither had sought until the late 1950s.Footnote 43 Revolutionary violence à la Fanon and the politics of vertical and horizontal solidarities à la Senghor both played a role in the last stage of French empire.Footnote 44
In her book Algérie 1962, Malika Rahal argues that the year of Algeria’s independence was a break point between a past in which multiple futures were imagined by different activists and a present in which alternatives became “rapidly obsolete.”Footnote 45 The Algerian situation was particularly fraught because of the violence of French-Algerian confrontation, the return of many Algerians from detention camps or exile, a terrorist campaign by elements of the French military that refused to accept the independence treaty France had negotiated, and the flight of most European settlers to what remained of France. With power at hand and not just imagined, fighting among factions of the liberation movement erupted. “Revolutionary effervescence” among Algerians became the “institutional order” of a state, with elites maneuvering to control government institutions and other leaders excluded from any political role.Footnote 46 For many Algerians, the “emergence of a state born in inter-Algerian violence” was disillusioning. A long-time leader of Algerian nationalist movements, Ferhat Abbas, later gave his book the title “Independence Confiscated.”Footnote 47 For all the importance of 1962 as a break point, the rupture with France was not complete. The treaty gave France the right to maintain for a time military bases and conduct atomic tests in Algeria’s sovereign space. The Algerian government sought a continued relationship with the EEC even as it established itself as an anti-imperialist vanguard.Footnote 48
Like other new states, Algeria found in international institutions a template for inserting itself into a world of sovereign polities: a seat in the United Nations General Assembly, membership in councils and agencies, exchanges of ambassadors with established states.Footnote 49 Other imagined post-imperial polities did not have such a ready-made place. In former British Africa, traditions of decentralized imperial governance set out a more direct path to independence as territorial states than was the case in French Africa. But when Kwame Nkrumah took his Ghana to independence in 1957, he was aware of the limitations of a fragmented continent in an unequal world. He called on African leaders to give up some of their hard-won sovereignty to create a United States of Africa. Unlike Senghor’s Eurafrica, Nkrumah’s USA broke the connection to the colonizing power. But to his fellow leaders the temptations of national power exceeded the idealistic vision of a united Africa. As Marc Matera points out, some of the most vigorous opponents of European colonialism in the 1950s “viewed the failure to achieve the pan-Africanist dream of continental federation as the tragedy of decolonization.”Footnote 50
This brings me to my second example of alternatives claimed and alternatives foreclosed, described in Lydia Walker’s study of Nagaland in northeastern India. When India achieved independence in 1947, some leaders among the Naga, led by Angami Zapu Phizo, insisted that Naga constituted a distinct people and merited sovereignty as much as did India. With Indian leaders rejecting not just claims to independence but to autonomy within a federal structure, Naga leaders turned to the international arena. But they received a chilly reception from states that had recently acquired independence and found that the UN “had a vested interest in maintaining the legitimacy and territorial integrity of its new member-states.”Footnote 51 The nation-state model—one people, one territory, one state—led to an all-or-nothing dilemma: “the Naga people needed to be recognized as sovereign to be recognized at all.”Footnote 52 Similar demands from once semi-sovereign princely states within the Indian Raj (like Hyderabad) were rejected by India’s rulers intent on building a unitary state capable of decisive action.Footnote 53 Most tragic was the inability of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League to find an alternative to partition, resulting in the split between India and Pakistan and the mass murder of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the partition line in August 1947.
Although leaders like Nkrumah and Senghor hoped to see structures beyond the individual state, they rejected federalism within the state, that is partial autonomy for self-defining national groupings.Footnote 54 In a few instances in Africa, regional nationalisms led to unsuccessful secession movements—Biafra/Nigeria and Katanga/Congo in the 1960s—and more rarely successful ones, Eritrea/Ethiopia (1990s) and South Sudan/Sudan (2010s).
Palestinians, Kurds, and Rohingya are among the peoples who have asserted themselves as nations but have been unable to achieve recognition as a state or even as an autonomous element within a federal system. The point is not to say that all claims to national self-determination are equal, but to suggest the need to examine how some nationalisms acquired world-wide recognition and others did not, as well as to underscore the inconsistent history of a world political order based on the supposed correspondence of state and nation.
Some postcolonial states have engaged in colonization themselves, encouraging settlers to move into territories largely inhabited by ethnically distinct peoples—Indonesia in East Timor, Israel in Palestine, India in Kashmir. What is sometimes described in such contexts (or in relation to the United States) as settler colonialism might in these instances be reconfigured as settler nation-statism, with an ideology of ethnic homogenization added to land-grabbing.Footnote 55
On the other side of the national coin are barriers erected against migration in once interconnected regions; “modern citizenship in South and Southeast Asia was built upon the disavowal of migration,” writes Sunil Amrith. In some African states, the presence of people from neighboring countries, now considered “foreign,” has given rise to exclusion and violence.Footnote 56
Mahmood Mamdani imagines a decolonization different from the one that occurred: “This decolonization is not simply independence from outside rule. It is an act of thinking, of imagination. It means dreaming up a political community that undoes the organic link between state and nation that has gelled over the past five centuries.” For him, building a community that is not based on the boundary-drawing concepts of tribe, ethnicity, religion, or nationality entails political action—mobilization, debate, compromise.Footnote 57 Studying the history of decolonization makes clear that alternatives beyond the nation-state have been imagined and, for a time, acted upon.
After Independence: Decolonizing Perspectives on Africa
Historians studying the period after independence are painting a picture more revealing than one of “incomplete decolonization.” African leaders did not lack for ideas or initiative.Footnote 58 Programs for “African socialism” espoused by leaders of different stripes reflected an urge to chart paths different from those advocated by either side of the Cold War.Footnote 59 The idea of harnessing African traditions of village-level cooperation to develop agricultural production, in Tanzania for example, acquired support from young militants who saw it both as a means of personal advancement and for dynamizing what to them were static rural societies. Visionaries like Julius Nyerere sought to combine socialism with federalism. Understanding the attractions and limitations of such schemes has taken scholars into the interplay of politics at village, regional, national, continental, and global levels.Footnote 60 Even the military rulers who overthrew elected governments had their own ideas of what a state should be.Footnote 61
What concerns us here are plausible hypotheses for describing and explaining the political economy of decolonization.Footnote 62 Multinational corporations and international financial institutions may have benefitted at least as much from decolonization as they had earlier from colonization. Operating in what was becoming a world of nearly two hundred states, many with dire needs, corporations could choose where to invest, where to seek raw materials or markets, where to avoid. Capital is highly mobile; workers much less so; states not mobile at all. Colonies were freed into a world of rules they had not set: international agreements and institutions protecting property rights and regulating commercial interactions, which were hard to go against because of the weight of the apparatus of international law and ex-colonies’ acute need for investment.Footnote 63 It was to address the asymmetry of global economic power that the Bandung Conference of 1955 tried to develop cooperative relations among ex-colonial states, that Nkrumah in 1958 proposed creating a United States of Africa, and—nearly twenty years later—a group of seventy-seven states from Asia, Africa, and Latin America called for the development of a New International Economic Order. In all these instances, visionary leaders faced not only the power of capital and wealthy states but the immediate interests of the elites that had acquired power in formerly colonized states.
Although in the 1940s and 1950s trade unions and other social movements had, through strikes and mass protests, put pressure on colonial regimes to improve social conditions, the “freer” market of the postcolonial era encouraged a race to the bottom. Independent Africa states often curtailed the labor movements they had supported when they were directed against the colonial state.Footnote 64
Inheriting a colonial infrastructure focused on draining resources rather than developing interconnections within Africa, ex-colonial states found that the most attractive investments were those that focused on the narrow export channels, the limited areas with the climate and facilities to make export agriculture feasible, and mines that depended on vast areas of impoverished populations to provide cheap labor, all of which tended to exacerbate regional differentiation and foster social tensions. Governing elites, with minimal levers over productive facilities, could gain an advantage by acting as gatekeepers, collecting import-export taxes, distributing foreign aid, making deals for foreign investment.Footnote 65
Gatekeeping provided a means for ruling elites to ensure that potential rivals lacked resources, and some African rulers have proven remarkable for their longevity in power: Félix Houphouët-Boigny thirty-three years, Paul Biya forty-two years, Yoweru Museveni thirty-eight years (the latter two still in power as of this writing). But gatekeeping also encourages contestation over the gate. The flip side of individualized and prolonged power is reversal of regimes, not by elections but by coups and assassinations, a pattern that began in Sub-Saharan Africa in Togo in 1963. Even a regime apparently based on popular revolution could fall into this pattern, as did Algeria in 1965.
There are risks in turning an argument about structural inequality into a determinist vision. There are escapes from colonial strictures and poverty; South Korea is the most obvious example of an ex-colonial territory that has become industrialized, with a well-educated, internationally connected, relatively prosperous population. Similarly, one should be careful about consigning all of Africa to the same impoverished fate. Ghana is not Somalia.
While a substantial literature critical of “development”—as self-conscious state programs to improve the welfare of populations—comes from both ends of the political spectrum and different academic traditions, the impact of such programs deserves careful treatment.Footnote 66 In the 1960s and into the 1970s, as now-sovereign governments devoted more resources to health and education, rates of literacy and education in much of Africa jumped upward; infant mortality declined; life expectancy rose.Footnote 67 Even if patron-client relations with rich states and corporations were hard to escape, independent states could choose their international patrons, especially in the context of Cold War rivalries.Footnote 68
But the world recession of the 1970s put a damper on development initiatives, and as African governments fell into debt, the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions made the cutting of social spending a condition of loans (a policy called structural adjustment), jeopardizing both social gains and future economic prospects.
Development, especially after the 1940s, had been a colonial project of France, Great Britain, and Portugal: an effort to preserve colonial rule by reforming it. In the 1950s and 1960s it became a decolonizing project: a strategy to manage a transition to independent states while enhancing their links to the capitalist world economy. When international financial institutions in the 1980s pulled back from development initiatives and imposed austerity and structural adjustment on much of Africa, they were in effect saying that decolonization had been accomplished, that independent countries had to swim or sink in the waters of the world economy. These policies were an erasure of history—of the mechanisms, colonization among them, that had produced and were perpetuating global inequality.Footnote 69 Development initiatives were later revived, albeit with limited resources from the richer countries. The politics of austerity have come to haunt Europe itself, through calls to roll back welfare measures that European citizens had claimed for themselves. The end of colonial empires figures importantly in the history of twentieth-century political economy, but it has more twists and turns than a story of incomplete decolonization.
If widespread disillusionment with decolonization began with the shortcomings of economic transformation, it soon extended to the realm of culture. The relationship of “Western” and “indigenous” culture, during and after colonization, was more complex than a dualism. Africans created distinct versions of Christianity and Islam. Reckoning with the traumas and social dislocations of colonization led to adaptive and inventive ritual practices and spiritual movements. Some accounts of such practices from the 1950s saw both syncretistic and autonomous cultural and religious practices feeding into a nationalist consciousness, but other work has treated modes of understanding and healing as subjects in themselves.Footnote 70
Did the collapse of empires transform the imperialism of knowledge production? Or did decolonization mean only the welcoming of new personnel into established institutions and paradigms whose claims to universality were rooted in European assertions of mastery of the world—in the physical, biological, and social sciences, in law, in history, in literature and the arts? Could conceptual schemes coming from different cultures acquire a place in international scholarly life or were scientific and cultural interactions inherently Eurocentric? Could Europe, as Dipesh Chakrabarty asked, be provincialized?Footnote 71 Controversies over cultural imperialism have extended into public spaces: over statues of notorious colonizers in Oxford or Cape Town, over museums in Europe or North America filled with objects looted by colonial expeditions.Footnote 72 Such questions have received much attention and deserve more.
The other side of the picture is the extent to which African innovations in literature, music, painting, sculpture, cinema, and other art forms have not only captured the imagination of younger generations in Africa but have influenced cultural life in Europe and North America. African writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Footnote 73 Equally important are the limits on this expansive cultural history: the lack of resources of African cultural institutions such as museums and theaters, the lack of finance for art education.
Some scholars from former colonies question the pertinence of the call for epistemological decolonization. Táíwò, as cited above, insists that African intellectuals have been decolonizing without having to label themselves. Emnet Tadesse Woldegiorgis, a scholar of higher education based in South Africa, warns that the decoloniality argument “inadvertently reinforces the very binary that decolonization aims to dismantle—an opposition between “Western” and “non-Western” epistemologies.” He worries that calls to decolonize knowledge are largely performative—“a checklist”—and beg the question of how to transform institutions, in Africa, Europe, North America, and elsewhere.Footnote 74
Soulaymane Bachir Diagne offers a way forward in a book entitled (in French) Universaliser—to universalize. Instead of using the adjective “universal” to apply a particular canon—notably European—worldwide, he uses the verb to imagine a universal to be built out of many particularities. He rejects indigenizing as well as Europeanizing essentialisms, seeing a world of many creolizations. Translation is at the center of his project, for it accepts cultural difference while stressing interaction.Footnote 75
This perspective goes against the argument Ngugi advanced in 1986. Writing in indigenous languages, as Ngugi advocated, might solidify cultural self-confidence in particular communities but also makes communications within states and across Africa difficult. Few countries have chosen to dethrone European languages in official communication for fear that choosing one African language over another would exacerbate hierarchy and tension among communities. Some observers, like Táíwò, have argued that as Africans use European languages, they appropriate—one might say Africanize—them.Footnote 76 Táíwò and Diagne are not just calling for cross-linguistic communication; they see such communication as part of long-term historical experience.6 They do not presume equivalence among communicating parties, hence the continued importance of Senghor’s notion of conjugating horizontal and vertical solidarities. Asymmetrical relations are still relations.
Such considerations imply that when it comes to debating a question like “gender equality” or “rule of law” the basic issue is not whether an argument is based on “European values” or “African values” but what the arguments actually are and their effects on the humans concerned. Such arguments are political acts, to be met by counterclaims, sustained by resources that are not necessarily equal. For scholars, multiplying the particularities encourages not just openness to different ways of understanding society and history but also the hard work of bringing such ways into relationship with each other, to both deconstruct claims to intellectual domination and construct more inclusive social theory.
Decolonizing European History
For Europe to decolonize itself means, for one, to recognize its colonial roots. Over the last two decades or so, historians have endeavored to show how much societies in different parts of Europe were shaped by colonial connections. They have brought out not just the impact of the colonial past on present-day patterns of racial discrimination and prejudice, but also the influence of once-colonized peoples on popular culture in Europe.Footnote 77
After World War II, intellectuals, social scientists, and political actors in Great Britain and France had to reexamine their assumptions about the relationship of colonized spaces to their own societies. The vain attempt to reform and re-legitimize colonialism entailed reimagining the African or Asian as a person who could be turned into a “modern” being, no longer permanently slotted into the category of primitive, if properly educated and supervised.Footnote 78 The colonial officer who knew his natives gave way to the expert in agronomy, industrial relations, law, or public health—an opening to be sure, but one that presumed that expertise came with a European pedigree. To further decolonize these domains of social science would be not only to recognize their origin stories in an imperial Europe but to acknowledge the importance of encounters with other forms of knowledge production.Footnote 79
The transformed colonized person could not be kept overseas. The French Constitution of 1946 and the British Nationality Act of 1948 gave the people of the colonies the right to come to France and Great Britain as rights-bearing citizens. In Britain, the first post-1948 migrants are known as the Windrush generation after the ocean liner that brought hundreds of them from the Caribbean to the UK. The political need to re-legitimize empire was reinforced by an economic need—for labor. There were acute misgivings about the process, but racial prejudice had to accommodate reasons of state and reasons of economy. Migration from overseas territories grew rapidly in the 1950s. This demographic, social, and legal transformation, intended to stave off or at least control decolonization, reshaped contemporary British and French societies, with a wider impact across Europe. Much of Europe became more multiracial, more multicultural.Footnote 80
The opposite tendency became stronger beginning in the 1960s. When Britain and France—and later Portugal—gave up their attempts to maintain a diverse imperial polity, they could make themselves more national and more European. In the 1960s and 1970s, the British and French governments began to erode the provisions that had allowed inhabitants of its overseas territories to enter their countries as rights-bearing citizens. Right-wing parties made political hay out of distinguishing people who looked like Asians or Africans—whatever their citizenship status—from the true French (français de souche) or British person.Footnote 81 The openings of the 1950s were closing by the 1970s. The route from colonial racism to anti-immigrant discrimination is thus not a straight line, and it leaves many people with a sense of betrayal.
The idea of a community transcending nationality nevertheless continued to have its attractions in Europe, not with relatively impoverished former colonies but among the more affluent states of Europe. Supranational connection took the form of the European Economic Community in 1958, then the European Union in 1993. There was something Senghorian about European integration, not that European elites would admit it: recognition of distinct nationalities combined with confederal institutions bringing them together. But it was a bounded confederalism, one which enforced barriers to entry—keeping out the children of people France, most notably, had once wanted to keep in. Europe-oriented politics encouraged, in some quarters, claims to represent “European values” distinguished from something else—Islamic? Russian? Chinese? American?
The European Union goes beyond the nation-state model. Its genesis is not simply a set of nation-states forging integration from scratch, but a story beginning with European states with imperial pedigrees—France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, as well as Luxembourg—trying to remake their relationship as colonial empires were collapsing. The line from empire to EU passes through the thwarted attempt at forging a Eurafrican polity in which African leaders insisted on having a political voice. The separation of sovereignties that decolonization entailed allowed Britain and France to develop their welfare states without having to respond to demands from Africa to extend them to imperial citizens.Footnote 82 The EU is now beset by tensions between its innovative supranational institutions and national sentiments in its member states and by conflicts over the place of people of different cultural and religious affiliations in a project that had become specifically European. Here is another story of openings and closures in a time of decolonization.
Decolonizing International Order
The word “international” is often given an historical depth it does not merit. It presumes that the units that are interacting are “national,” something that only became a general condition with the breakup of colonial empires between the 1950s and 1970s. Until then, much of the nexus of war, alliances, enmities, and cooperation could better be labeled inter-imperial. What came to be called international law was shaped beginning in the nineteenth century via a distinction between “civilized” and “uncivilized” spaces, the former a domain of legally regulated interaction, the latter subject to the arbitrary actions of a civilized power.Footnote 83
Well into the twentieth century, the units of world politics were varied and non-equivalent: empires, national states, colonies, protectorates, kingdoms, emirates, chieftaincies, a self-styled union of national republics (the USSR). For decolonizing territories, the national form was available, underscored by the institutions erected by imperial states, and alternatives were gradually excluded. The making of an “international” world after World War II, Jens Bartelson argues, reproduced the hierarchy of the inter-empire world both within each state and among states, whose actual differentials in military and economic power and influence over regulatory institutions belied the juridical equality of sovereign states.Footnote 84 The structures perpetuating inequality were what leaders of ex-colonial states, from Bandung to the New International Economic Order, sought to transform, and what leaders of the wealthy states were able to defend.Footnote 85
Writing about decolonization cannot be separated from other major issues in today’s scholarship: the nature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism, competition among big powers during and after the Cold War, the USSR’s rise and fall and China’s fall and rise, the impact of international financial institutions, global patterns of migration, the differential impact of climate change, and shifting forms of cultural representation. The challenge is to bring different framings into conversation with each other.Footnote 86
Such approaches permit us to look beyond the taken-for-granted structure of global politics. It may seem banal that poor states appeal to rich ones for something labeled “foreign aid,” but the story looks different when one considers that the units involved were not givens but emerged from particular patterns of decolonization. Had Senghor and others got what they wanted—and what French leaders for a time claimed to want too, albeit with different goals—the people they represented would have been part of a federal or confederal polity and their leaders would have had a place in French institutions of governance. They would have claimed resources as citizens of France, not as citizens of Senegal asking for aid.
Obtaining sovereignty was a great victory for colonized people. But the form it took implied that responsibility for the welfare of people in each territory rested with its own political leaders, regardless of the history that had shaped their economic and social conditions, regardless of the resources which colonial borders assigned to each territory. Corporate capital might no longer be assured of the backing of colonial armies or courts of law, but multinationals were free to invest or disinvest where conditions suited them. Decolonization implied, in Radhika Mongia’s words, “the standardization of inequality structured through the form of equivalence.”Footnote 87 All this now appears as the natural order of things, not as an historical trajectory.
Colonial regimes had naturalized a different kind of order: explicitly hierarchical, racialized, where subjects could be denied rights and exploited at will. The brave new world after empire was riven by a tension between boundedness, affirmed through concepts of sovereignty and national identity, and the movement of people, ideas, cultural practices, commodities, technologies, and capital. States often sought to look beyond their boundedness through the formation of blocs (free world versus communist), attempts at federation and confederation (the failed Eurafrica, the European Union), patron-client relations (American and Soviet “soft power”), and attempts at cooperation among the less affluent states against the asymmetry of the world order. Regulatory mechanisms largely shaped by the major powers, like those of the World Trade Organization, put some economic relationships outside of the control of democratic processes within states. It is too simple to characterize this order on one of its dimensions—international, postcolonial, postnational—when it is unresolved tensions that are fundamental to it. The reimperialization advocated by the current administration in the United States and practiced by Russia calls into question even those aspects of world order that had seemed to have become accepted norms.
Another Decolonization?
The collapse of European colonial empires in Asia and Africa in the decades after World War II left in question the relevance of concepts of empire and colonialism to polities that had not necessarily seen themselves as imperial powers and could indeed lay claim to an anti-colonial agenda—notably the United States, China, and Russia. In recent years, some scholars have called to “decolonize” their histories, not least to own up to the colonial dimensions of their pasts, including subordination of people defined as “other,” mass displacements of people, the influx of alien settlers.Footnote 88 Here, I will take up the instance where a call to “decolonize Russia” confronts, especially since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a state politics of reimperialization.
To decolonize Russian history would also be to counter the relative inattention to Russia and the Soviet Union in comparative scholarship on empire.Footnote 89 Among specialists in Russian history, however, attention to the imperial nature of Russia’s regimes is not new. During the Soviet era, scholars both outside and inside the USSR took up the histories of non-Russian peoples. Soviet historians described the tsarist regime—but not the Soviet Union—as imperial. From the 1950s courageous historians inside the USSR produced studies of Stalinist repression of national groups,Footnote 90 as did scholars outside the Communist bloc.
As postcolonial studies flourished in North America and Europe in the 1990s, empire in both tsarist and Soviet variants became a major subject for historians of Russia, both inside and outside formerly Soviet space, often working together.Footnote 91 Particularly notable is the journal Ab Imperio, founded in 2000 by a team of scholars from Russia with international connections and training. Published at first in Kazan, the journal’s goal was not to make “Eastern” and “Western” versions of empire converge, but to illuminate the complex histories, repertoires, and interactions of imperial states and societies.Footnote 92
For some students of Russian empire, the call to “decolonize” was both familiar and bothersome. The sticking point was the term “colonial.” As in other empires, Russian (and Soviet) officials ruled different regions differently, and as elsewhere the participation of “native” authorities was essential to sustaining imperial control. But two factors complicate analogies with European colonialism.
One was the multiplicity and mixity of ethnic and religious people both on the territories of Russia’s empiresFootnote 93 and inside the top layers of government. Expansion—much of it violent—extending outward from Moscow, starting from its modest, fourteenth-century beginning as a Mongol principality, brought into the empire hundreds of “peoples” with distinctive languages, religions, and social practices, from Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic and Arctic Sea littorals, east-central Europe, and Ukraine. Since the sixteenth-century conquest of remnant Mongol khanates, the Russian empire has included large numbers of Muslims and significant clusters of Buddhists, Jews, and animists and other pagans, not to mention Christian sects that challenged the Eastern Orthodoxy of the rulers. An enduring component of Russian political culture has been to recognize these different religions and to manage them pragmatically, balancing discipline and tolerance.Footnote 94
A second major element affecting comparisons is the nature of Russian political rule: the empire was an autocracy, ruled by an emperor advised by a circle of dependent individuals. All the people of imperial Russia were subjects, and none of them were rights-bearing citizens. The empire allocated rights and duties as it saw fit, claiming control over property and labor, location and law, expression and bodies. All subjects, not just non-Russians and not just subalterns, were dependent on the emperor’s ultimate power to rule and to change the rules.
The interlacing of multi-nationality and autocracy meant that Russian administrators, themselves of different ethnicities, could move selected ethnic or religious groups (Russian and non-Russian) about. One might describe Russia as a “resettlement” empire—one that worked by recognizing ethnic and religious difference and exploiting these differences in multiple campaigns of expansion and control over an enormous space. Colonization—including settlers who displaced indigenous nomads, prisoners in labor camps, unruly religious minorities, peasants invited from abroad to improve agriculture—was a wide-ranging and fundamental Russian strategy, but the colonizers were not all Russian, and they, like the colonized, were vulnerable to the emperor’s whims.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian elites, like those in other parts of the world, strove to belong fully to the club of colonial powers.Footnote 95 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian leaders expanded their resettlement policy with campaigns to bring peasants, mostly Russian, into several regions of the empire, displacing indigenous and other residents and nomadic groups, disrupting earlier collaborations with local elites, contributing to a vast rebellion in Turkestan in 1916.
The downfall of the Romanovs, the improvisations of the Provisional Government, and the Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917 led to five years of devastating wars across the empire. Bolshevik leaders both exploited and tried to control nationalist sentiment, and were able, after losses on the western border, to reconfigure the empire once again.
The Bolsheviks created an apparently new form of state. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, formally proclaimed in 1922, was a federation of national republics, each named after its majority ethnic group. The whole was held together by the Communist Party, charged with controlling politics at every level of the composite entity, a structure that gave authority to communists of many ethnicities.Footnote 96 In every “national” republic, some nationalities appeared to be ranked higher than others, especially in the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR), that stretched from the Baltic across Siberia and included vast numbers of non-Russian groups. While “native” languages could for the most part be taught, learning Russian was obligatory and essential for advancement in the Soviet system. During the Stalinist period, millions of people were displaced or sent to camps, often on the basis of ethnic criteria.Footnote 97 Questions of communist elites’ “colonial” attitudes toward “our native peoples” are thus pertinent in the Soviet context.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 into fifteen independent states, each again named for one ethnic group, their new leaders faced challenges specific to their multi-ethnic condition. Russian “colonizers” did not exit en masse to the Russian Federation (as happened with Algerian independence from France for example), and Russian language and culture were vital assets to repositioned elites. Nationalists both within the Russian Federation (the descendent of the RSFSR) and in the fourteen new states raised the vital issue of unwinding, or not, economic, political, and cultural connections forged in Soviet times, and tensions between Russians and non-Russians persisted in both the Russian Federation and ex-Soviet states.
Inside the Russian Federation, the state’s policy could not be fully national or Orthodox: other ethnic groups and other religions had to be kept inside the polity. The colonial label and comparisons to earlier imperial breakups underscore the hierarchical nature of power arrangements between Moscow and the eighty-five subunits of the federationFootnote 98—among them Tatarstan and Chechnya—but occlude the particularities of a federal structure that both empowers non-Russian leaders and keeps them dependent on the center.Footnote 99
The sovereignty gained by the new states created out of the debris of the USSR mattered. But the degree to which de facto autonomy corresponded to de jure independence remained in question. Even in what had been the Soviet Union’s “external” empire in Eastern Europe—Poland for instance—the threat of a reassertion of power from Moscow has not disappeared.
One might better call the devolutions of power and/or sovereignty that took place between 1989 and 1991 deimperialization rather than decolonization. But almost no one uses this term, perhaps because a focus on European colonial empire has been so dominant in recent historiography. Russia’s takeover of two provinces of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014, and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 point in the opposite direction: toward reimperialization.Footnote 100 Russian efforts to transplant new people to the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine revives the empire’s long-term tactic of resettlement. The Russian leaderships’ explicit goal of eradicating Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture, the kidnapping and forced Russification of Ukrainian children, and the mass killings, torture, and rape of Ukrainian people, bring to mind the extremes of European colonization.Footnote 101 But the Russian stated goal in Ukraine is not exploitation of the colonized; it is the eradication of Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a distinct people.
One decolonization can hide another. For a leading guru of “decoloniality,” Walter Mignolo, the menace facing the world is “re-Westernization”—the efforts of states in North America and Europe to reverse the gains of movements against colonialism and to preserve the capitalist modernity that colonization had shaped. For Mignolo, “Ukraine is a point of no-return in the re-Westernizing effort to contain de-Westernization.”Footnote 102 The problem, therefore, is the West, not the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022, with the intention of obliterating a sovereign nation. Never mind the mass movements and elections through which Ukraine claimed its independence, never mind Russian bombs targeted at schools, cultural institutions, markets, and apartment buildings. Other proponents of the decolonial approach have taken the opposite tack, seeing Russia’s invasion as an imperialist act and insisting on the colonial status of different peoples inside the Russian Federation.Footnote 103 Russia’s attack on Ukraine shares with Israel’s attack on Gaza a conceit that reflects a history of empire and an actuality of colonial thinking: that certain categories of people are acceptable targets for extreme violence by virtue of who they are.Footnote 104
Conclusion
Historians have applied the concept of decolonization to the breakup of European empires in Africa and Asia sixty to eighty years ago, to the liberation of much of South and Central America from Spanish rule two hundred years ago (or the independence of the United States and Haiti even earlier), and to the breakup of the Soviet Union nearly thirty-five years ago. Why is “decolonize!” such a popular term now? A plausible explanation is that this injunction calls attention to the tension between formal structures and the actual operations of power. To some people in Europe and North America, evoking decolonization responds to the question: why, if all people are free and equal, do so many feel marginalized, discriminated against, and unable to act in the world? To people in former colonies, asserting that we still need to decolonize responds to the question of why, if our oppressor is gone, are we still poor, powerless in our own countries, and looked down upon in the rest of the world?
The term underscores the continued inequality within and among states in terms of economic opportunity, race, gender, culture, and social status. In pointing to alternative—“indigenous”—conceptions of society, it reflects the salience of political self-identification, a search for an anchor in a context of variable and unequal forms of connectivity.
These are significant, human, tragic questions. But how far does the response “decolonize!” get us? Evoking the colonial emphasizes that powerlessness, poverty, sexism, racism, and cultural denigration are not inherent conditions of humankind but historically constructed, and that their undoing will also take place in time. But if we are to change power relations, we need to understand what they are, in all their complexity. Rulers and oppositions within states act within a matrix of possibilities and constraints, but as they do so, they change that matrix. To study these complexities is to look at the opening and closure of alternatives rather than inevitabilities, to focus more on trajectories than on legacies.
For anti-colonial movements, much of the power of naming the colonial was to bring together multiple struggles, to enable people in one part of the world to draw on the strength of others, to insist that colonialism was both identifiable and vulnerable. It was to say we can get rid of colonialism and get on to something else. We can appreciate the power of this perspective while recognizing its historical limitations. That colonialism ceased to be a legitimate form of political organization reflected a lot of hard, and varied, efforts and sacrifices. As people try to change today’s world, they draw on multiple pasts, visions, and ways of situating themselves in society and politics.Footnote 105 Should we keep pursuing Senghor’s call, made in the heat of struggles against colonial rule, to combine horizontal and vertical solidarities? Can we go further by taking up the challenge of scholars like Diagne and Táíwò, who in different ways call for a politics that keeps the accent on interdependence while recognizing the unequal terms of such interactions in both past and present?
The most important lesson for the future from looking with fresh eyes at the history of decolonization is that it happened. Decolonization in the political sense was one of the most significant transformations in the history of the past century. What was once a distant possibility, with no clear path leading in that direction, became an actuality, reconfiguring what people could imagine and what possibilities and constraints they would face.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Jane Burbank for her insight, knowledge, and editorial skill and especially for her help with the section “Another Decolonization.” I am grateful to Botakoz Kassymbekova for conversations that also contributed to that section and to many other colleagues whose insights expressed at academic meetings and personal conversations shaped my thinking on the subject of this article.
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