What happened to neocolonialism? The rise and fall of a critical concept

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a history of the idea of neocolonialism from its first use in the 1960s to its more recent deployments in the 2010s. During the decolonization period, the concept of neocolonialism was a powerful ideological and analytical tool in the service of the global anti-colonial movement to denounce the persistence of subordinate relations between the former colonizers and the newly independent countries. The article argues that the decline of the concept was the result of the crisis of the postcolonial state in the 1980s and the parallel rise of the theory and ideology of globalization which was based on opposite theoretical premises. The crisis of the popularity of globalization in the 2010s has made room for a return of critical concepts in the analysis of international politics and, among them, neocolonialism. This new wave of literature on neocolonialism remains fragmented, undertheorized, and, unlike its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, disconnected from social and political movements. Moreover, Western-based sources have recently started using the concept to describe China’s activities in the Global South in a problematic way that seems to attribute solely to Beijing the very neocolonial practices that Western powers are normally denounced for.