Anti-Colonial Discourse as Geopolitics :

Abstract

Scholars often view anti-colonialism as litle more than moral rhetoric in which former colonised states question the West by employing narratives of historic victimisation and marginalisation. While this moral messaging has shaped aspects of post-colonial foreign policy, anti-colonialism is rarely appreciated as a tool of geopolitical practice. This article applies theories of critical geopolitics to argue that anti-colonialism was and is a unique geopolitical strategy allowing formerly colonized states to re-balance centers of political, economic, and military power from historically colonising states to the colonised states. Importantly, anti-colonialism is a geopolitical alternative to territorially defined, Westphalian concepts such as sovereignty and the anarchic international system of states. India has historically maintained a leading role in elucidating and employing anti-colonialism as a geopolitical framework and this article explores four sub-themes of this framework: autochthonous freedom, Pan-Asianism, non-violence, and non-alignment. Each of these sub-themes is explored by examining the geopolitical discourse of Indian leaders through the lens of critical geopolitics, which argues that geography is not objective fact but contested history. Through these sub-themes, Indian leaders have used anti-colonialism as a geopolitical tool to challenge existing power-territory structures to rebalance global power in favor of the formerly colonized world.