As postcolonialism turned its attention to African literature, culture, and intellectual history, a number of very productive alliances between postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, subaltern studies, decoloniality, and transnational cultural studies emerged, but the relationship to poststructuralism has always been an ambivalent one. Taking Sunday Anozie’s debt to structuralism as a point of departure, the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist readings – with specific reference to Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Achille Mbembe – is seen as indicative of a general move from a relatively static model of analysis to a more dynamic one. Using the case studies of Sony Lab’ou Tansi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, the chapter argues that the theoretical richness and dynamism of poststructuralism, as evidenced by the proliferation of its tropes and strategic gestures, demonstrates clearly its value and potential for contemporary African contexts.

The ten years between Joseph Stalin’s death and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought both dangerous crises and fitful steps toward an easing of superpower tensions. While this chapter describes the confrontations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere, it also emphasizes four breakthroughs toward coexistence and cooperation: the Geneva summit of 1955; the agreement on cultural exchanges in 1958; Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the United States in 1959; and the conclusion of a partial test ban treaty in 1963. Such progress was delayed and complicated both by domestic political dynamics and by international rivalries in an era of accelerating decolonization and the fraying of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Yet perhaps most remarkable was how far top political leaders, journalists, scientists, musicians, dancers, and others were able to go to transcend ideological tensions and negative stereotypes through dialogue, negotiation, travel, and cultural exchange.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

This Epilogue documents the colonial coal regime’s struggle for survival during the twilight of French colonialism in Indochina. It also examines the closure and decolonization of large-scale coal mining enterprises and discusses the legacy of coal mining in postcolonial Vietnam.

Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

The chapter explores the declaration of contraception as a human right within the United Nations, focusing on key events such as the International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran in 1968. The involvement of transnationally operating NGOs such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council is highlighted. The narrative showcases the shift toward population control as a human right, despite opposition from such entities as the Catholic Church. The chapter delves into the resolutions and debates at the Tehran conference, emphasizing differing perspectives on population control as a human rights issue. It particularly highlights contributions from the opposing blocs in the Cold War and the Communist critique against what Soviet states understood as the fusion of human rights and Neo-Malthusianism. The chapter concludes by discussing a significant transition toward justifying population control programs in terms of human rights rather than just economic necessity, arguing that the fusion of human rights with population control in the 1960s marks a significant turning point in the global discourse on demographic policies and individual rights.

The minority claims made by the various minority movements that emerged in the 1950s coalesced in separate state movements. Separate states claims were made by minority communities in all three major regions and these claims were championed by their political elites who strategically occupied seats in the regional houses of assembly, starting in 1953. Niger Delta elites formed provisional alliance, supressing local disputes and differences, in order to keep their claim for a separate Mid-West state alive in the constitutional reform process. Their efforts succeeded in halting the final constitutional conference, which was to be held in London in 1957. The push for separate states was strong enough to threaten the decolonization process altogether, and the British government decided to establish a Minorities Commission to address and resolve these claims prior to formal independence.

Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Despite allegations of governmental misconduct and questionable legal rulings, the conviction was affirmed on appeal by several federal courts. After nearly fifty years in prison, Peltier was granted clemency by President Biden in 2025 and allowed to finish his sentence under home confinement. This chapter recounts Peltier’s background, his involvement with the American Indian Movement, and the events surrounding the incident at Pine Ridge. His memoir, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, was published in 1999. The chapter examines the book’s experimental, transgressive form and its subversion of standard memoir style and structure. Prison Writings utilizes a nonlinear structure, multiple voices, surreal elements, and political and legal analyses, as well as the inclusion of poetry and photographs. Peltier also incorporates Native history and social issues as well as a critique of carceral standards in the federal prison system.

Chapter 4 widens the view on those interested in controlling Kenya’s colonial-era documents at the time leading up to and directly following political independence to include British and US-American academics and the formation of area studies. It historicizes the formation of archival collections in Nairobi, Oxford, Syracuse, and London as the result of entangled interests held by Oxford and Syracuse Universities, the British colonial government in Kenya, the Department of Technical Co-operation, and the Colonial Office, namely, its Intelligence and Security Department. By claiming colonial-era documentation as archival rather than as a political record with current relevance for incoming African ministers, these institutions scrambled to collate and control colonial-era documents for different purposes but all through the exclusion of African partners.

Chapter 7 frames Kenyan attempts of archival retrieval as a matter of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels. Importantly, it also draws attention to how the concealment of the “migrated archives” affected political activity not only within Kenya but also in England, as a country undergoing its own re-nationalization process at the end of empire. The process of recovering records from the UK provided the Kenyan Government a framework in which to invoke a sovereign and unified Kenyan polity as the rightful home for the “migrated archives,” while dissent over Kenyatta’s centralized authority grew within the country. Meanwhile, British engagement with the “migrated archives” throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the consolidation of postcolonial archival secrecy with other European partners as evident in the voting blocs formed in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts.

This chapter engages with the philosophy of liberation of the Algerian philosopher and anticolonial thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973). It argues that Bennabi’s decolonization theory aims at transforming the structural conditions of the colonized that made colonization even possible. The chapter lays out some of the significant aspects of Bennabi’s theory, focusing on how Bennabi conceived the problem of colonialism/colonizability and what answers he attempted to offer to overcome it. The chapter also examines Bennabi’s theory of society and its elementary aspects before explicating Bennabi’s politics of liberation that aims at transforming (and perfecting) both the means of transformation and the humans as its agents. Bennabi’s philosophy of liberation is not predicated on changing the political system or institutions but on the transformation of their sociopsychological infrastructures in which the behaviors of the individuals can be molded, making their social actions engender a different kind of politics.

This chapter focuses on the emancipatory sociology developed by the Algerian scholar Abdelmalek Sayad (1933–1998). Sayad’s pathbreaking theory on immigration is progressively acknowledged today. However, we know less about the anticolonial roots of his innovative approach. From the Algerian liberation war against the French Empire to neoliberalism, Sayad’s social thought led to an anticolonial theory of domination and resistance. The chapter shows how Sayad dealt with political concerns scientifically and how his anticolonial engagements challenged conventional ways of doing science. It traces four components of his anticolonial thought: the understanding of the logics of empire; the paths toward decolonization; the epistemic grounds for a social revolution within postcolonial regimes; and the mechanisms that reconfigure the colonized condition into the immigrant experience. Discussing these aspects of Sayad’s social thought against the imperial episteme in the academic and political fields, this chapter proposes to restore the grounds of an anticolonial sociology.

The negotiated South African revolution of the 1990s inaugurated a marked shift toward strong constitutionalism: the post-apartheid Constitution comprised an extensive Bill of Rights, including substantial socioeconomic rights and constitutional duties for far-reaching redistributive measures, and established an independent judiciary under the auspices of a new constitutional (rather than, as before, parliamentary) supremacy. This way, South Africa quickly turned into a paradigmatic case of “juristocracy” (Hirschl 2004) and became imbued with an iconic indexicality for the enormous hopes for transformative justice that came to be vested in the law during the post-cold war era. Based on this progressive Constitution, the government immediately embarked upon a massive land reform in order to address persisting racial inequalities regarding access to and control of the land. Aiming at “putting land rights in the right hands under the rule of law,” as the former minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs put it in 2007 in contradistinction to ongoing extralegal land occupations in neighboring Zimbabwe, South African land reform exemplified a profound belief in “transformative constitutionalism” that was advocated as the solution to many of South Africa’s pressing political concerns. However, growing criticisms of the limited impact and slow pace of South African juristocracy in general and of law-based land reform in particular have substantially altered public discourse over the past decade, revealing a more complex and ambiguous dialectics of reckoning to be at play. Transformative constitutionalism is increasingly also portrayed as being part of the problem – or at least as suffering from “a dis/empowerment paradox” (Mnisi Weeks 2022) – that needs to be overcome in order to finally transform South Africa, which remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, in substantive and meaningful ways. This contested development is paradigmatically exemplified in the recent constitutional amendment process, designed to allow for “expropriation without compensation” in order to fast-track South African land reform, as its advocates claim. This chapter charts the contested terrain of this complex dialectic of juristocratic reckoning in order to evaluate the potentials and pitfalls of a continued project of transformative constitutionalism that increasingly has to operate in an era in which South Africa’s moment of iconic indexicality seems to be passing.