Colonial legacies,armed revolts and state violence: the Maoist movement in India

Abstract

This article examines the connected histories of armed tribal and peasant revolts in colonial and postcolonial India with reference to the ongoing Maoist conflict in rural and tribal areas of central and eastern India. The article makes two interrelated arguments about the violent continuities that endure from colonial to postcolonial contexts: (1) the nation-state system, in its efforts to establish control and influence, creates a hierarchy of citizenship engaging in the hostile policing of marginalised subjects, thereby engendering armed revolts and political violence; (2) the postcolonial state’s response to these armed revolts by marginalised subjects who challenge its sovereignty and monopoly over violence, is equally violent and repressive. Most significantly, the state’s response is legitimised in the same colonial idioms and justifications that mark epistemic and physical violence against the third world.     

Language attitudes,generations, and identity in coastal Belize

This paper reports on a study of language attitudes and generational differences with respect to two varieties of Kriol, the Afro-Belizean language of Belize. We investigate attitudes toward Belize City Kriol and Punta Gorda Kriol with a special focus on differences across generations of Belizeans. We employed a verbal-guise test with 131 participants, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, and found that BC Kriol was in general rated more highly than PG Kriol among two generations of those surveyed. We attribute this among other things to the fact that BC Kriol is considered to be the more traditional variety, and that this tradition translates into status and prestige at a time when the newly independent country is faced with fashioning a postcolonial Belizean identity.     

Farmer resistance to agriculture commercialisation in northern Ghana

Drawing on postcolonial literature and theories of farmer resistance, this article provides an empirically based alternative explanation of African farmer behaviours to narratives that blame them for their lack of technology adoption. Based on six months of ethnographic immersion in one district in the Northern Region of Ghana^a, we identify the ways that farmers defy commercial agriculture investment, government services and non-governmental organisation (NGO) project interventions aimed at intensification, and describe their reasons for doing so. This study interprets farmers’ acts of defiance, such as side-selling or falsely weighting their products, as insights into everyday acts of resistance. We find that throughout Ghana’s postcolonial period, agriculture intensification policy and practice have produced an environment where various development actors and farmers have both a sense of entitlement and mistrust of each other. Farmers’ acts of sabotage may be spaces where they make rational choices based on experiences of historical antecedence, including decades of failed development projects, elite corruption and mismanagement, degrading ecologies and donor hegemony.     

Con-/divergences between postcolonial and critical peace education: towards pedagogies of decolonization in peace education

This paper focuses on the limitations of the Eurocentric modernist framework that undergirds Freirean theory and critical pedagogy in relation to critical peace education, highlighting in particular the contributions of post-colonial and decolonial thinking. The paper posits that critical approaches to peace education need to consider these limitations in pushing critical peace education to engage more postcolonial and decolonial thinking. A renewal of critical peace education that integrates the critiques of both decolonial and postcolonial perspectives will provide productive possibilities for revitalizing the transformative orientation within critical peace education and decolonizing the work of research and pedagogical praxis in peace education. This means to evoke discourses and practices that move away from the dominant categories of Eurocentric thought and engage explicitly with the ways in which understandings and pedagogies of peace education are implicated in modernity and coloniality.     

Paradoxes of (dis)empowerment in the postcolony: women,culture and social capital in Ghana

Women’s empowerment discourses in Africa involve contradictory desires from women on one hand and society at large on the other. This article argues that the traditional validation mechanisms for women’s identities are crucial avenues for analysing both the conceptions and experiences of empowerment. Drawing on primary ethnographic data, I analyse paradoxes in women’s empowerment discourses in postcolonial Ghanaian societies, where neoliberal discourses thrive side-by-side with collectivist–socialist cultural ideals. Using an example of social capital, gained largely through mothering, I suggest that, because women’s relationships with capital are structured by local socio-cultural and global economic structures and relations, the theorisation and application of the concept of empowerment need to recognise the complicated relationships (with capital) that women negotiate on a daily basis.     

The state as a political practice: Pakistan’s postcolonial state beyond dictatorship and Islam

Abstract

The emphasis since the 1990s in the neoliberal paradigm on the non-interventionist state, and the theoretical disinterest in the state by critical scholarship, has negatively affected the prospects for political and social change. The fragmented and dispersed social movements analysed by critical scholars have proven insufficiently counter-hegemonic. All this invites us to reconsider the postcolonial state at a new theoretical level to guide better choices for political practice. This article analyses the prevalent academic literature on the postcolonial Pakistani state. In these analyses, an omnipresent and omnipotent military state decides the fate of democracy, now and again replacing politicians at the helm and also promoting Islam. Political practice remains confined to inter-elite struggles for the restoration of democracy, whereas imperialist hegemony and the role of marginalised classes as reservoirs of counter-hegemony are largely missing. This article critically builds on the legacy of the renowned Pakistani scholar Hamza Alavi to show, historically and empirically, how imperialist powers (from the United States to China) have used the military as a seat of power to bring the local elite under their hegemony. A political theoretical practice and the building of a counter-hegemony which goes beyond and beneath inter-elite struggles is much needed.     

Informed powerlessness: child marriage interventions and Third World girlhood discourses

Child marriage has gained increased international prominence over the past decades. Organisations working with the issue have promoted empowering girls as the best strategy to address it. Informed by postcolonial feminist theory, this article will locate these discourses in broader ‘turn to the girl’ and ‘turn to agency’ in international development, analysing how Third World girlhood, agency, resistance and voice are conceptualised. Girls are constructed as threatened by their families and communities, with agency exercised through resistance and materialised by their voice. I argue that this ignores the complexity of decision-making processes and broader structural factors related to child marriage, so that interventions providing ‘empowerment-as-information’ for girls to be agents of change instead leave them in a state of informed powerlessness.     

Carbon Markets,Debt and Uneven Development

This essay critically examines the nature and scope of postcolonial interdisciplinarity. Although postcolonial studies claims to operate on, and forge in, an interdisplinary approach, its intentions are largely interdiscursive. In spite of the vague and elusive claims evident in the catalogue of introductory texts on postcolonial theory, neither postcolonial theorists nor its exponents have adequately established the disciplinary bounds or their methodological fusion(s) specific to, and required for, interdisciplinarity. Drawing from the disciplinary foundations of literature, history and philosophy, this essay demonstrates that postcolonial theory has developed an implicit oppositional critique to eurocentrism. This oppositional critique, while discursive in intention and formulaic in application, is subsequently borrowed by a host of social science disciplines—anthropology, geography and development studies— as a proxy methodology that protects against the perils of eurocentric longings.     

Capitalism,culture, agency: Dependency versus postcolonial theory

This article reads dependency alongside and against postcolonial theory in an attempt to reinvigorate and re-validate some of the insights of the former, while at the same time supporting the latter's current ascendancy in the field of Third World politics. It is argued that although dependency and postcolonial theory share some common territory--a suspicion of Western liberal modernity, a critical-historical analysis--they tend to have irreconcilable differences that show up their respective strengths and vulnerabilities. Dependency chooses a structuralist and socioeconomic perspective, seeing imperialism and development as tied to the unfolding of capitalism, whereas postcolonial theory favours a post-structuralist and cultural perspective, linking imperialism and agency to discourse and the politics of representation. The article stages a mutual critique of them, based on the work of Frank, Cardoso & Faletto, Said, Spivak and Bhabha.     

The ghost of essentialism and the trap of binarism: six theses on the Soviet empire

This article endeavors to open a new critical space for Soviet studies and for nationalities studies more generally. Through analyses of recent trends in Soviet studies, the article dismantles the frequently used opposition between subjective and objective approaches to Soviet empire and suggests instead that truths and categories, whether considered “subjective” or “objective,” are constructed discursively, through legitimizing certain interpretive models over the others. The article also argues against disciplinary avoidance of “what is” questions (e.g. “what is a nation?”) and claims that an excessive concern for (re)producing essentialism should not hinder scholarly inquiry. Several new lines of inquiry for the study of the Soviet empire are suggested and also applicable in nationalities studies more generally: research on the role of symbolic violence in manufacturing consent and research concerning the role of affect in producing linkages between the performative life of a singular human being and the pedagogical discourse of a nation or empire. The article also offers an analysis of the Soviet Union as an empire in becoming and it advocates for postcolonial approaches within Soviet studies. The practical dimensions of Soviet rule are exemplified with data from the Baltic borderlands in the postwar years.     

Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror

This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with realism in its cynical disregard for stated intentions and insistence on the primacy of inter-state rivalry. It contains a theory of the postcolonial state as part of a wider international system based on class-conspiracy, wedding imperial interests to those of an indigenous elite, with little concern for preserving liberal norms of statehood. Hence we consider some forms of conspiracy theory a layperson’s theory of the capitalist state, which seeks to explain history with reference to global and domestic material forces, interests and structures shaping outcomes, irrespective of political actors’ stated intentions. While this approach may be problematic in its disregard for intentionality and ideology, its suspicion of the notion that the ‘War on Terror’ should be read morally as a battle between states and ‘non-state actors’ is understandable – especially when technological and political-economic changes have made the importance of impersonal economic forces driving towards permanent war more relevant than ever.     

Michel Foucault's Analytics of War: The Social, the International, and the Racial

The absence of the international as a distinct socio-political sphere in Michel Foucault's work forms a major part of the postcolonial critique of his writings. The absence of the international has a number of consequences for any critical engagement with Foucault in the context of global politics. The significance of these consequences becomes apparent when we consider Foucault's analytics of war and power, situate these in relation to the particularity of the international, consider the very pertinent critiques of Foucault emanating from postcolonial writings, and finally re-locate Foucault in the international not, as is the predominant approach in International Relations, through the application of Foucaultian concepts, but through Foucault's own political writings on the non-western arena, specifically his engagement with the Iranian Revolution. While limited in their scope, an evaluation of these writings appears to vindicate postcolonial critiques of Foucault, though with some revealing qualifications.     

Manicheism delirium: desire and disavowal in the libidinal economy of an emerging economy

This paper explores the motivations behind the outward foreign direct investment (ofdi) decisions in the past decade of an East Asian government-linked corporation (glc), the largest company of its kind in the world in terms of sectoral specialisation. This glc has travelled far from its origins as an agent of European imperialism to its current controversial role spearheading postcolonial extra-territorialisation strategies. I argue that financial predation is the synechdoche for territorialisation in the new imperialism. Consequently emerging economies pre-empt the financial siege by embarking on ofdi strategies themselves to create economic buffer territory. I construct a psychoanalytical framework for examining how anxiety is acted out in the global economy. I apply concepts of the traumatic moment, anxiety and the defence mechanisms of disavowal, splitting, introjection and projection to analyse the glc’s investments as territorial displacements of the libidinal economy.     

Another Baltic Postcolonialism: Young Latvians,Baltic Germans,and the emergence of Latvian National Movement

This article looks at the emergence of Latvian nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century from the intercultural perspective of postcolonial theory. The writings of early Young Latvians, and the reaction to them from the dominant Baltic German elite, show that the emergence of a modern Latvian nationalism is to a large extent due to postcolonial mimicry, as described by Homi Bhabha. Attempts to imitate German cultural models and to develop a Latvian high culture lead to hostile reactions from the German side, which, in their turn, lead to increasing consolidation of Latvian nationalism. Since the Baltic German elite increasingly legitimized its rule in terms of cultural superiority, the Young Latvians' alliance with the Russian Slavophiles led it to treat the Latvian nationalists as culturally inferior and partly Asiatic, like the Russians.     

(An)other Way of Being Human: ‘indigenous’ alternative(s) to postcolonial humanism

This essay articulates the ways in which the Indigenous People's Movement leading to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2007) succeeds in what postcolonial theory has conventionally set out to emancipate, but has failed to do. Postcolonial theory challenges all eurocentric and liberal humanist discourses on rights which place the Western subject as the ideal subject figure of all histories and societies, and appeals for a language that would articulate other ways of being human and humanist. Yet recent trends in postcolonial theory have come to embrace the language of cosmopolitanism and humanism as viable alternatives for a postcolonial future. Drawing upon the principle thematic of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, the article suggests that the Declaration provides an alternative to postcolonial theory's revisionist humanism—the re-cognition of difference. As part of the international legal discourse, the Declaration is particularly noted for its political victory in the legitimisation of collective rights in postcolonial societies. Furthermore, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) remains an integral part of the collective rights of the Indigenous Peoples, the article suggests that the Indigenous People's Movement succeeds in negotiating a language that would legitimise other ways of being human without being adversarial or antithetical to euro-humanism.     

Can Leviathan be Democratic? Competitive Elections, Robust Mass Politics, and State Infrastructural Power

Reconciling effective government with accountable government remains an enormous political challenge, especially in the postcolonial world. Can postcolonial states only gain infrastructural power when their rulers enjoy unencumbered despotic power? With their contradictory findings about the influence of democratic parliaments on state autonomy and capacity, the literatures on constitutional states in Western Europe and developmental states in Northeast Asia provide limited guidance on this normatively critical question. As an alternative approach, this essay proposes three causal mechanisms through which competitive national elections can incite the territorial extension of state institutions: (1) catalyzing the construction of mass ruling parties; (2) energizing state registration of marginal populations; and (3) fostering centralized intervention in local authoritarian enclaves. Evidence from Southeast Asia suggests that competitive elections will only have these infrastructural effects when accompanied by robust mass political mobilization. This has intriguing implications for how scholars understand historical patterns of state-building in the West, as well as how policymakers try to build more effective states in the most ungoverned corners of the contemporary world.     

Conceptualising Third World politics: The state‐society see‐saw

This article presents and juxtaposes critical genealogies of development studies and postcolonial studies, two bodies of literature on the 'Third World' that ignore each other's missions and writings. I demonstrate that the two fields have some areas of convergence, such as groundings in knowledge of and concern about the West, and other areas of divergence: development studies does not tend to listen to subalterns and postcolonial studies does not tend to concern itself with whether the subaltern is eating. I argue that, of the two fields, postcolonial studies has the greatest potential to be a new and different location of human development thinking if it can overcome a tendency to lock into intellectual rather than practical projects of postcolonialism.     

Notes on contributors

‘Postcolonial studies’ is the term given to the study of diaspora and the ideology of colonialism. Since the 1970s, when postcolonial studies was termed ‘Third World’ literature, and the 1980s, when it became ‘Commonwealth’ literature, the persistence of the framework of centre and margin, coloniser and colonised, has endured as a lens with which to view human identity and cultural expression. However, the relationship of postcolonial studies to international development is less well explored. Much of postcolonial studies is concerned with articulating patterns of gain, loss, inclusion, exclusion, identity formation and change, cultural evolution and human geographical dispersal in the wake of the after-effects of colonial rule. Postcolonial critics examine texts and images in order to make inferences about the significance of cultural identity and expression under these conditions. Often this is with a diachronic view of history. International development studies offers postcolonial critics a synchronic perspective on both the policy and materiality of political ideologies affecting cultural identity and expression. This paper looks at how the relationship between postcolonial and international development studies might be furthered in a dialectical exchange. Postcolonial critics such as Said and Pollard et al offer a critical understanding that informs policy making in international development contexts.     

Fiftieth Anniversary of Decolonisation in Africa: a moment of celebration or critical reflection?

This article deploys the concept of coloniality of power to critically reflect on the decolonisation process, using a ‘colonial difference’ perspective which enables a critical reflection on the limits of decolonisation from the side of the ex-colonised ordinary citizens of Africa. Three principal arguments are advanced. First, celebration of the decolonisation process as the proudest moment in African history obscures the continuing operation of the colonial matrices of power in maintaining Africa's subaltern position in global politics. Second, decolonisation resulted only in politico-juridical freedom, which is often conflated with freedom for the ordinary peoples of Africa. Third, celebrations of decolonisation are belied by the fact that ordinary African citizens engaged in new struggles for freedom soon after decolonisation aimed at liberating themselves from oppression by the inherited and imposed postcolonial African state. The article delves into the genealogical, ideological and ethical elements of decolonisation, alongside its political assumptions and implications. This facilitates the decoupling of ideas of liberation from notions of emancipation, which are often considered the same thing. It also enables critical engagement with the character of the postcolonial African state imposed on Africans without being fully reconstituted and decolonized institutionally. The article provides a fresh appreciation of ordinary citizens' ongoing struggles for liberation from the postcolonial state exemplified by the current North African popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes.     

Who governs? Religion and order in postcolonial Africa

Abstract

This article explores how mutually productive intersections between religion and governance constitute international political order in sub-Saharan settings. Asking ‘who governs’, I propose religion–governance entanglement as a means of analysing these intersections and rethinking governance, order and religion in Africa. Existing literatures typically characterise the public reliance on religious actors and institutions as being part of a uniquely ‘post-secular’ moment in contemporary world politics or a wider ‘post-Westphalian’ shift in modern governance. Enduring dynamics between postcolonial states and the Global North problematise these framings. In sub-Saharan Africa, religion has a protracted history in postcolonial hybrid governance, overlapping the regional presence of international non-govermental organisations following decolonisation. Using the example of South Sudan, I build on recent analyses of religious-political activities that leave their collective implications under-theorised.