Anti-colonial Struggle Research Articles

India, South Korea, and Vietnam: A Triangle of Confidence in the Making

The world today is being pushed closer to a multipolar order by major events in recent times. In facing the ramification of such disruption, many countries have been left with their economies in shambles. Despite the odds, India, South Korea, and Vietnam are the three countries in Asia that have continued to show solid growth throughout the pandemic. Beyond the common economic resilience seen in the present time, the three countries also share mutual defense concerns that trace back to their histories of anti-colonialism. In this paper, we analyze shared features between the three countries that are grounded on the basis of historical anti-colonial struggles, as well as present national security and economic concerns, altogether providing backdrop for a promising three-way alliance.

Can There Be “Normal” Sport in an Abnormal World? Sport Boycott and Athlete Activism for Ceasefire in Gaza

This paper is an edited transcript of an online panel recorded on April 9, 2024, with commentaries provided at the start and the end. Speakers underscore the urgency for the sport industry and governing bodies to react to the genocidal violence in Gaza. Athletes for Ceasefire’s co-founder Omar Dreidi introduces the rationale behind this newly formed coalition. Ultimate Palestine’s Daniel Bannoura recounts the tension in promoting ultimate frisbee in Palestine amidst apartheid and genocide. Sport law scholar Katarina Pijetlovic highlights the discriminatory treatment of Palestine by international sport governing bodies. Irish Sport for Palestine’s Rebecca O’Keeffe and Michael D. Macauley discuss the long tradition of Irish solidarity with Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggles. Former professional soccer player Kaiya McCullough challenges athletes to deepen their understandings of the connections between Black and Palestinian liberation.

Alienation, technicity and raciality: towards a dialogue between Frantz Fanon and Gilbert Simondon

In the face of the expansion of studies onrace and racism in thearea ofScience, Technology, and Society (STS), in addition to the theme’srelevanceforantiracist activism, this work proposes an intervention and a contribution to this field of study reconstructing its theoretical and methodological roots. Without intending toexhausttheavailable research on this subject, the articleemphasizesthe anthropological and sociological ramifications withinSTS studies onrace.It thendemonstratesits rootsin Frantz Fanon’s work. Finally, it suggeststhat Fanon’sapproach to the intersection of racism and technology, grounded inthe context of the anti-colonial struggle, canbe reworked vis-à-visthe transformations presented by thetechnicalrelationsofthe digitalworld. As a critical synthesis, the study proposesnew dialogues with the Philosophy of Technology,especially in light of therenewed interest in Gilbert Simondon’s work, offeringopportunities for explorationand reflection

Algerian Democracy: An Oxymoron or Usurped Opportunity?

ABSTRACT The Algerian state represents a contradictory mixture of opportunity and failure born of a lengthy colonial past, a violent revolutionary independence struggle, and a failed effort to institutionalize a legitimate system of rule since independence in 1962. As the two authors make clear, both the anti-colonial struggle and the post-independence effort at institution-building were usurped by a military-dominated elite class whose political socialization and insurrectional experience prioritized centralized authority over democratic decision-making. The “curse” of ample hydrocarbon resources reinforced this authoritarian impulse over the democratic imperative resulting in an enduring combat between an autocratic state and a democratically oriented civil society. Both books highlight the macro and micro dimensions of this failed experiment in socialist engineering guided by an autocratic military-industrial complex. Each effort at populist revolt whether in 1968, 1988, 1992, or 2019, has been brutally repressed by a determined army high command. Despite a surface appearance of a stable and ordered political entity, Algeria today remains more political precarious and economically insecure than ever before.

Historical Relationship Between Indonesia and Türkiye

This paper examines the historical relationship between Indonesia and Türkiye, tracing its evolution from the Ottoman era to the present. Despite geographical and cultural differences, both nations share a legacy of Islamic heritage and anti-colonial struggles. Early interactions began in the 16th century with the Ottoman support for the Aceh Sultanate against European colonial powers. The rise of nationalist movements in the early 20th century further strengthened their ties, particularly as Indonesia drew inspiration from Türkiye's modernisation efforts under Atatürk. Following Indonesia's independence in 1945, formal diplomatic relations were established, leading to cooperative dynamics during the Cold War despite ideological differences. In the contemporary era, economic, political, and cultural exchanges have intensified, highlighted by collaboration in international forums and shared interests in regional stability. However, challenges remain, influenced by differing foreign policy stances and domestic political changes. This overview underscores the historical foundations and potential for a robust partnership between Indonesia and Türkiye, rooted in mutual interests and a shared legacy. The significance of Ottoman archives for Asian countries like Indonesia is profound, particularly in understanding historical, political, and cultural dynamics. These archives serve as vital resources that illuminate the connections between the Ottoman Empire and Southeast Asia, shedding light on a range of topics.

“Todos precisam despertar”

The article explores Malcom Ferdinand's contribution to ecopolitical and decolonial studies, based on the notion of a “double fracture” that articulates the colonial and environmental dimensions of the ecological crisis. The problem analyzed is how the colonial fracture, which is configured as ontological, can be applied to the Brazilian ecopolitical context. The aim is to demonstrate how Ferdinand's decolonial ecology, by questioning the Anthropocene and problematizing the knowledge of the Global South, provides another perspective for understanding the intersections between colonialism and the ecological crisis. The research uses a theoretical approach, dialoguing with thinkers such as Ailton Krenak, Sueli Carneiro and Bispo dos Santos, in relation to Brazilian thought. The results indicate that decolonial ecology provides a critical framework for rethinking the relationship between humans and nature, emphasizing the need to include anti-colonial struggles in environmental discussions. The articulation between these fractures offers a worldview that integrates global ecological challenges with the struggles of contemporary social and political movements.

Qullasuyu Rising: Indianista-Katarista Politics, Paradoxes of the Plurinational State, and the Fall of Evo Morales

This work centers activist critiques of Evo Morales’s government in order to understand how growing alienation of Indigenous social movements from the state-party apparatus contributed to his controversial fall in November 2019’s right wing coup. To that end, I engage the work of Indigenous activists pertaining to the Indianista and Katarista movements as an evolving body of critical theory produced from the vantage point of racialized subjects engaged in a multivalent, anti-colonial struggle. Rather than considering the introduction of neoliberal reforms from 1985 as the inflection point for Indigenous political participation, a more organic understanding of the scope of these movements and their evolving conceptions of their own struggle requires a longer view, beginning with the fallout from the 1952 National Revolution. Such a perspective calls for closer attention to the various militant Indian organizations active throughout the twentieth century and positions them as key protagonists in Bolivia’s numerous social, political, and economic conflicts. Borrowing from political ontology and activists’ criticisms of the traditional Left, this essay argues that Indianismo and Katarismo are anti-colonial political ideologies whose practices mobilize an ontological politics that goes beyond the nation-state but not necessarily the nation, diverging from the state-led Process of Change. Indeed, the proliferation of the wiphala as a symbol of popular revolt across South America in the ongoing protest cycle since 2019 points to both the importance of Plurinational Bolivia in the contemporary progressive imaginary and the centrality of decolonization to autonomous political projects and horizons of possibility.

Beyond postcolonial heteronomy: Kurdish question, decolonisation, and the relational time of democratic confederalism

Abdullah Öcalan’s theory of democratic confederalism, emerging from the Kurdish anti-colonial struggle against the states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, diverges from a postcolonial framework by centring on social ecology. This paper argues that Öcalan’s approach signifies a rejection of the ‘heteronomy’ of postcolonial theory’s ‘dualist imaginary’, which reduces the interactive agencies shaping societies’ transformation to those implicated in the West–Rest binary. This binarism perpetuates a ‘ruptured’ understanding of non-Western political histories and a dualist notion of ‘unevenness’ that either neglects ‘inter-subaltern’ hierarchical relations – including colonial ones – or distorts their historical and agential roots. Öcalan’s theory, addressing the Kurdish condition as a constellation of fragmented ‘inter-subaltern’ colonies, implies a rejection of heteronomy both analytically and normatively. Analytically, it highlights the simultaneous transformation of state institutions and statelessness through intersocietal interactions, illuminating how the ‘unevenness of possibilities’ influences interactive transformations. Normatively, it aims to address the ‘uneven possibilities’ for ‘interactive’ political ‘doing’ and ‘alterations’, empowering suppressed ‘otherness’ through ‘interactive autonomy’. These proposals promote a relational and interactive understanding of time, framed around the core notion of ‘time as possibility’, which is crucial for advancing a relational international ontology and a decolonising perspective beyond the obstacle of heteronomy.

Towards Hemispheric Conversations in the Americas: Internal Colonialism and Efforts to Decolonise the Self in Abya Yala

AbstractWe bring the concept of internal colonialism—developed by Indigenous and racialised activist‐scholars in Abya Yala—into conversation with settler colonialism, white supremacy, white privilege, and Indigenous fleshed or embodied politics. Our goal is to incite fraught hemispheric conversations about the internalisation of coloniality by subaltern peoples, anticolonial struggles, and the relevance of internal colonial structures of dispossession in the making of Latin American nation‐states. We believe in the power of establishing dialogue/cooperation between grassroots Black, Indigenous, and racialised thought against colonialism in Abya Yala and Turtle Island. A reading of these contributions suggests that binary classifications—oppressor/victim, dominator/dominated—trap our imagination, destabilising commitments to decolonisation. We focus on the construction of the environmental state in Chile, conservation discourse in the Riviera Maya, the rise of corporatist rule in southern Mexico City, and cuerpo‐territorio mapping in the Ecuadorian Amazonia. We propose that a relational reading of colonial power dynamics enables opportunities for liberation.

The Anticolonial Turn in Journalism and the Media in Pre-Independence India: How Newspaper Coverage by Foreign and Indian Newspapers of the Champaran, Dandi, and Dharasana Movements Made Gandhi a Household Name

ABSTRACT This article argues that the role played by the print media in India’s anticolonial struggle was a pivotal point of departure in the episteme of postcolonial histories—one that provided an impetus and guiding light to similar struggles worldwide, a position often ignored by Eurocentric academia studying media historiographies. It is based on extensive reviews of newspaper archives from the northeastern and northwestern states of Bihar and Gujarat in India, as well as archival review of the British press, and it outlines the coverage of Gandhi’s interventions in the two states that ultimately resulted in nationwide mobilization. The authors argue that the journalistic tradition of anti-colonial protest that developed in India provided an impetus to the advancement of anticolonial sentiments and the movement as a whole. This was supplemented in some measure by the more radical members of the British press, while the mainstream British press remained committed to the colonial project.

What It Means To Be Palestinian

Abstract In this essay, I argue that during moments of extreme flux and danger, such as the ongoing Israeli war against Gaza, it becomes relevant to consider how Palestinian identity is constructed and performed by a variety of actors, by Palestinians and by their supporters, as the most compelling contemporary form of a transnational anti-colonial identity emerging within and in opposition to persisting colonial structures, oppression and subjugation. It is also in these moments, I propose, that it becomes necessary to resituate, reconfigure and re-center Palestine in the imagination, not as a pre-determined bounded entity, but as an entity that is always in conversation with its imagined spatiality and temporality and with national and transnational communal anti-colonial struggles.

History, Memory and Memorabilia: Kamala Dasgupta and the Politics of Remembering Revolutionary Bengal

ABSTRACT This paper examines the interplay between memory, history, nationalism, and visual cultures by focussing on a framed photograph of a revolver gifted to Kamala Dasgupta’s family by the Calcutta (Now Kolkata) police after Indian independence. Once used in an attempted assassination during the anti-colonial struggle, the revolver has become an anomaly in the nation’s collective memory – a ‘floating signifier’ with an unfixed meaning. Analysing the photograph as a media spectacle and a symbol within national myths, I argue that it disrupts linear narratives of progress that dominate nationalist historiography. The article shows how Kamala’s act of procuring the revolver has been overshadowed by her comrade Bina Das’s violent act. Drawing on theories of the spectacle, national temporality, and subaltern studies, I illustrate the selective commemoration of revolutionary violence in India. The research in this paper demonstrates how precarious and subaltern histories such as Kamala’s can destabilise established national narratives and pluralise temporal orders of the nation.

Palestine and the Dialectic of Racial Capitalism

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment.

Social Reforms and Political Activism Unpacking the Dual Role of Khudai Khidmatgar Movement

This article examines the Khudai Khidmatgar Movement, led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan popularly known as Fakhr-i-Afghan Bacha khan, which played a pivotal role in social reform and political activism in colonial India. Founded in 1929, the movement adopted non-violent resistance to British rule while also addressing deep-rooted social issues within Pashtun society, such as factionalism, illiteracy, poverty, social and gender discrimination and blood feuds. Implying indegounious values, knowledge and tools, Ghaffar Khan promoted education, unity, and peaceful coexistence among his people, challenging the British narrative of Pashtuns as inherently violent. The article explores how the movement, initially focused on socio-educational reforms, evolved into a powerful force advocating for Indian independence, aligning with other non-violent movements like those led by Gandhi. Despite significant obstacles from the British and local elites, the Khudai Khidmatgar gained mass support, with over 100,000 members at its peak. The article highlights the movement’s transformative impact on Pashtun society and its contributions to the broader anti-colonial struggle, positioning it as a significant yet underappreciated chapter in South Asian history. This articles has relied on both primamry and secondary data for qualitative analysis, with most reliance on primary sorces of data collection. For this purpose, extensive interviews were conducted.

The United States Role of the Occurrence of Violence in Cyprus

Cyprus used to be under occupation of the foreign states for many centuries and sovereignty usually with few exceptions was not transferred peacefully. As it is well known, in the 19th century, use of force in international relations was seen as normal. In the 1878 however, transformation of sovereignty in Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire to the United Kingdom (UK) was by peaceful means. The UK ruled Cyprus mostly in peace until the uprising in 1931. The upheaval of the Greek Cypriots against the UK was to unite Cyprus with Greece (Enosis). The uprising was settled by violence and the constitutional rights suspended immediately. In 1955 when the riot of the Greek Cypriots occurred again this time the UK was successful to get support of Türkiye and the Turkish Cypriots and converted the anti-colonial struggle to the ethnic strife. Clearly, the occurrence of violence in Cyprus in 20th Century begun during the British period but it continued after the colonial period. Although the United States (US) refrained direct involvement to Cyprus problem it assisted to the formation of the Republic of Cyprus by 1960s. During the Cold War conditions, the US had to involve to the Cyprus problem because of two reasons: Firstly, in order to prevent a war between Türkiye and Greece, the two “motherlands” of the Turkish and Greek Cypriots; secondly to stop the violence between two local communities. In Washington DC the US leadership met with Greek and Turkish prime ministers in 1964 and they decided to solve the Cyprus problem forever. In Geneva the US representative had several meetings with the officials of Greece and Türkiye. There, the US former secretary of state offered his plan that included the use of violence for the dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus. The US plan could not be implemented at the time but after 10 years, its spirit became the source of the violence in Cyprus. In this study mainly the role of the US in occurrence of violence in the island will be studied.

Maneuvering Colonial and Postcolonial Resistances with Poetry: A Comparative Study of Nazrul and Walcott

This article aims to place poems by Kazi Nazrul Islam of Bangla literature in a comparative study with those by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. Nazrul wrote when his country India was under British colonial rule and Walcott wrote when his Caribbean region was under British colonialism and in postcolonial period. The study becomes inevitable against a backdrop where comparative studies of Nazrul have been conducted with American and European authors who lack similar colonial backgrounds. Additionally, when Nazrul is compared with non-American and non-European authors, his Islamic identity, which transforms into his all-embracing humanity, is often omitted or sidelined. Thus, when poems by Nazrul and those by Walcott are in a comparative study, the two poets from two different marginalized nations exhibit conspicuous affinities in their poetic resistances. This is how this paper looks forward to doing a comparative study of the poems by Nazrul and those by Walcott by adopting the methods of Traditional Literary Criticism and a new comparative study as shaped by Zepetnek. The results which the study yields are that the poets maneuver identical poetic resistances by addressing the nation’s unity, revival of history, composition of unique literature, concern for the working-class people, and anti-colonial struggle. The results of the research may contribute to raising cultural awareness among marginalized nations about resisting aggression.

African Entrepreneurship in urban colonial Zimbabwe: The case of Highfield, 1953–1965

Abstract This paper examines the importance of Highfield to the African entrepreneurship history of colonial Zimbabwe, then known as Southern Rhodesia. The Southern Rhodesia colonial state established the township of Highfield in its capital city, Salisbury (now Harare), in 1936 as part of its spatial and racial segregation policy. The policy made Africans temporary residents in the urban areas. However, the post-Second World War industrial growth forced the colonial state to revisit its stance on African urbanisation. Seen as critical for the expanding manufacturing sector, African labour now had to be accommodated in the urban areas, which triggered the colonial state to expand the township of Highfield in 1956. That very year, enterprising Africans responded by taking up the expanded township’s entrepreneurial opportunities. This response and the subsequent evolution of African entrepreneurship in Highfield township are the focus of this paper. The paper provides a historical kaleidoscope of Highfield as a place of African entrepreneurship, which thus far has been occluded and separated from the dominant literature on the township’s role in the rise of African nationalism and anti-colonial struggles. Highfield emerged as a cultural milieu hosting an African Renaissance in food, fashion and lifestyle inspired by a mix of modernity and indigenous ethos. Thus, the paper argues that Highfield was the entrepreneurial centre of various businesses and startups. These colourful stories of African entrepreneurship are gleaned from handwritten business stand applications by African traders, archival documents, and newspapers in piecing together an urban history of African entrepreneurship in the township of Highfield in colonial Zimbabwe.

Weapons of Theory

Abstract This article critically engages with central tenets of decolonial thought. While sympathetic to decolonial thought's anti-colonialism and critique of Eurocentric universalism, the article argues that decolonial thought's understanding(s) of knowledge relies on an essentialising centralisation of origins and roots. Against decolonial thought's assertion that a knowledge's relevance for anti-colonial struggle results from its position of exteriority vis-á-vis colonial systems of domination, the article suggests that we need to look at the dialectical and hybrid processes through which bodies of knowledge are made agentic in relation to concrete contexts of political conflict. To discern a body of knowledge's meaning and relevance for anti-colonial struggles, we need to understand that it is continually shaped and reshaped from recurrent practices of reading, dissemination and re-articulation, through which the theory or knowledge body becomes hybridised and reformulated in relation to incessantly evolving contexts.

Anarchist tendencies in the early socialist movement in Korea, 1919–1924

Korean anarchism is in many ways a unique phenomenon, as is the history of this Far Eastern country. Anarchists played a prominent role in the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule, which dominated the country from 1910 to 1945. Along with Korean nationalists and communists, they became the “third force” in the anti-colonial struggle, which has attracted the interest of historians. A close connection with the issues of the struggle against the colonial power of Japan gave special features and direction to Korean anarchism, which was forced to oscillate between the demands for restoring the country’s independence and the anarchist tradition of denying any state as such. Unfortunately, the history of Korean anarchism remains virtually unexplored in Soviet and Russian academic literature. This article is intended to make the first steps in researching this topic. The article analyses the initial period in the development of the anarchist movement in the country, the time of its birth, drawing on original texts and publications by Korean socialists and anarchists of the early 1920s and taking into account the study of the issue in Korean and foreign historiography. The article shows that, as in other East Asian countries (Japan and China), anarchism in Korea was not initially identified as a special current in the socialist movement, and elements of anarchism, Bolshevism and social reformism were often mixed in the ideas of early Korean socialists. The separation of anarchism as a movement from this general socialist “conglomerate” occurred under the influence of disappointment in Russian Bolshevism and the results of the Great Russian Revolution.

The West and the Rest of Us?

A number of the luminaries of the Pan-African movement such as Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, W.E.B Dubois, C.L R James and Eric Williams as anti-colonial thinkers and political leaders cherished aspirations of an alternative international order. Their anti-colonial struggle was not just nationalistic and continentalist in outlook but was inspired by visions of “world-making” (Getachew 2019). Their project of African Independence as undergirded by Pan-Africanism sought to challenge the West as the embodiment of slavery and colonialism (Chinweizu 1975) not only on the continent where it created colonies but the post-World War II dispensation. Many of them propagated socialist sentiments and objectives. W. E.B. Dubois was a Marxist until the moment of his transition. It was in this sense that as Marxist in ideological outlook and socialist in political praxis, they were anti-capitalist in orientation. They embraced the Afro-Asian call of cooperation (Bandung spirit) to challenge the world hegemony of the West which characterised “the long twentieth century” (Arrighi 2010). Thus, a foundation of the “global South” as a victim of underdevelopment by the West was laid. They wanted to challenge the hegemony of the political economy of the imperialist West.