A Political Theory of Decolonization

This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with a racialized international order, anticolonial nationalists turned to projects of worldmaking that would secure the conditions of international nondomination. It argues that attention to the specificity of political projects that emerged out of the legacy of imperialism provides a postcolonial approach to contemporary cosmopolitanism. A postcolonial cosmopolitanism entails a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire and a normative orientation that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.

Cosmopolitanism · Decolonization · Empire · International law · International relations · Nationalism · Normative · Political economy · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law