Whatever happened to the idea of imperialism?

Abstract

From the writings of Lenin, the guerrilla activity of Che Guevara, the anti-racism of the Black Panther Party and the Third World’s plan for a New International Economic Order, the idea of imperialism and the politics of anti-imperialism were a mainstay of political vernacular throughout most of the twentieth century. Yet, with the onset of neo-liberal globalisation in the Global North and, most importantly, in the Global South the idea of imperialism has seemingly disappeared or been deemed irrelevant. This special issue draws on a range of theoretical contributions that use the prism of imperialism to explore the strengths and limits of classical Marxist theories of imperialism; the relationship between Marxist, post-colonial and de-colonial approaches; imperialism and social movement theory; and the strengths of returning to ideas of Black Marxism and Pan-Africanism in the midst of contemporary neo-imperialism. These theoretical debates are in turn complemented by the collection exploring the idea of imperialism from different empirical vantage points in the Global North (Europe, US) and Global South (Africa, the Caribbean, Cuba and Kashmir). The issue thus provides both theoretically and empirically innovative interventions on how we should conceptualise and approach the idea of imperialism in the twenty-first century.