Political Claims Research Articles

Private electoral finance and democratic theory

Private electoral finance and democratic theory

The ethics and politics of world heritage: local application at the site of Laponia

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of world heritage (WH) through a cosmopolitan lens. It proposes that cosmopolitanism provides fertile ground for the study of WH, in particular if combined with sensitivity to distinct indigenous ethical and political claims. Underpinning my article is the question of whether the politics of WH, despite its peaceful and universalist intensions, obscures local disputes and subaltern voices. The empirical emphasis is placed on the WH site of Laponia in the North of Sweden – a location of Sami indigenous communities and commercial mining interests. I provide a narrative analysis of the inconsistencies between the Swedish ‘good state’ narrative defined by support for human and indigenous rights globally and the protection ambition of WH and its generally favourable attitude towards mining, despite its potentially damaging effects on the WH site of Laponia and the cultural heritage and land rights of Sami people living there. My study also provides an analysis of Sami narratives on Laponia – storylines that are rarely included in the Swedish ‘good state’ narrative. The study seeks to contribute to scholarly understandings of indigenous peoples’ ability to lay claims to the cosmopolitan protection logic that prevails in WH.

Novel Spaces

Novel Spaces

Regional reindustrialization patterns and productivity growth in Europe

ABSTRACT After a long period of deindustrialization, Europe faces ‘the need to reverse the declining role of industry’, as the European Union officially claims, to relaunch productivity. Despite this strong political claim, scientifically sound analyses on whether a reindustrialization process takes place, and if it is accompanied by a relaunch of productivity, are still missing. Drawing on the path-dependence theoretical framework, different reindustrialization patterns are conceptually identified and operationally associated with European NUTS-2 regions thanks to an original database of value added at (sub-manufacturing) sectoral regional level in different time spans. Results suggest that the patterns are associated with different degrees of industry productivity growth. Ad-hoc policies accompanying different reindustrialization modes are suggested. They can help to achieve a critical mass of reindustrialization that could potentially stimulate a still missing effect on aggregate productivity increase.

Do Basic Income Models Cope with Poverty and Inequality Sustainably? Some Critical Reflections and Alternatives

The United Nation’s Agenda 2030, with its seventeen sustainable development goals, aims to alleviate poverty and reduce social inequality, among other things. The political program provokes numerous ambitious measures but leaves room for various definitions and interpretations about which measures perform well. The challenge lies in understanding poverty and inequality in ways that move beyond a pure income-related perspective. In accepting this challenge, measures have been elabourated, which are supposed to advise the Austrian government in their efforts to implement the SDGs. The ‘unconditional basic income’ and the ‘all citizens’ insurance scheme’ represent two approaches among those measures, which call themselves for a comprehensive consideration of social justice. Both approaches will be discussed in terms of their political and normative claims. While basic income remains dominated by income, the insurance scheme engages with the question of who is entitled to benefits. Both approaches are ultimately unable to unfold their potentials as long as a territorial–administrative space concept is utilized. Since urban environments have their own specific social and spatial characteristics, it is essential to trigger a thorough discussion of political concepts which cope with the particular causes and effects of urban poverty, exclusion and inequality.

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison

Reviewed by: Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison Johanna I. Mueller Elizabeth L. Jemison, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) After reading over the manuscript of his 1845 autobiography, Frederick Douglass noted that he had “spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion.” In an elaborate appendix, Douglass clarified his position. His condemnation of religion and religious actors in the foregoing pages, he explained, applied strictly to the “corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” which he perceived as entirely separate from the “pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.”1 To Douglass, American Christianity had two distinct faces, which appeared to be irreconcilable. Throughout US history, different groups of Christians have used the Bible to make competing political claims. Whether Christianity has been a source of liberation and empowerment or a tool of continuous racial oppression in US [End Page 145] history has been debated by both historical actors like Douglass and subsequent historians. Elizabeth L. Jemison’s monograph Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South adds to this conversation. Examining the discourse on religion and citizenship among Black and white Protestant Christians in the lower Mississippi River Valley between 1863 and 1900, Jemison demonstrates that both groups believed that the Bible should govern society and politics during and after Reconstruction. “Religious arguments,” she explains, “laid the foundation for a new South” (2). But, as the book shows, with Black Christians demanding equal civil rights and white Christians calling for a continuation of a “biblical organic hierarchy” (10), these competing claims of Christian citizenship were ultimately “mutually exclusive” (79). Sticking strictly to the 1863–1920 time period in the main body of the text, Jemison relegates larger historiographical claims about the framing of American religious history to her introduction (“Afterlives of Proslavery Christianity”) and her conclusion (“Family Values and Racial Order”), in which she argues that the divergent concepts of Christian citizenship articulated by white and Black southerners in the post-emancipation period would shape debates about US politics and society in the twentieth century and indeed into the present day. Drawing on a wide array of archival and published materials such as sermons, religious newspapers, diaries, letters, and denominational meeting minutes, Jemison’s five chapters move chronologically with each representing a different phase in late nineteenth-century southern history (“Emancipation,” “Reconstruction,” “Redemption,” “Paternalism Reborn,” and “Segregation”). Tracing the evolution of religious claims about citizenship, she argues that proslavery theology, which Douglass and others had so forcefully rejected, “had a long afterlife to justify racial hierarchy and Jim Crow segregation” (11) and did not disappear with emancipation as other historians of religion in the Civil War period such as Mark Noll, Harry S. Stout, and George Rable have suggested. White southerners, Jemison proposes, merely transformed theological justifications for slavery into a benevolent and seemingly race-blind model of biblical paternalism. They appealed to an invented “version of antebellum history as a peaceful paternalistic order” (155) after emancipation to argue that a Christian society, just like a Christian marriage, necessitated a hierarchical organization with white men at the top. Both during slavery and after emancipation, white southern Christians legitimized racial violence as an indispensable tool to uphold this supposedly biblical social order. They positioned themselves as the true Bible-believing Christians while claiming that Black southerners and white northern Christian allies prioritized “fashionable extra-biblical notions of human rights and political activism over biblical truth” (162). [End Page 146] As they had done under slavery, Black southern Christians after the Civil War used the Bible to argue for autonomy, self-determination, and equal civil rights, stressing that racial prejudice and oppression were incompatible with Christianity’s liberating message. Positioning themselves as fellow pious Christians, Black southerners argued that they deserved equal citizenship, insisting that “both the law and true Christianity [were] on their side” (90). With increasing disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and escalating white...

On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life by Heather H. Yeung

Reviewed by: On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life by Heather H. Yeung Paul Sutherland Sherban On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life. By Heather H. Yeung. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. vii+111 pp. $59.99. ISBN 978-3-030-44157-9. 'Plastic has bad press.' So begins Heather H. Yeung's book. In her introductory chapter, she emphasizes plastic's political image by referencing National Geographic articles that portray plastic as the new 'bedrock' of our planet, replacing floating icebergs with drifting plastic bags (p. 1). Despite these opening remarks, On Literary Plasticity is not an anti-plastic treatise. Rather, the book questions humanity's 'addiction to plastic'. It takes Kafka's story Die Sorge des Hausvaters as its focal point and elucidates the titular concept via a close reading. Yeung maintains that critics must consider plastic in its various guises: plastic history, neuroplasticity, linguistic plasticity, and (her own contribution here) literary plasticity (p. 3). Far from a condemnation of plastic, this book dwells with Kafka's Kurzprosa to elucidate the plastic processes of reading and encourage a deeper understanding of 'the hold that plastic exerts on us' (p. 4). In Chapter 2, Yeung highlights the word and figure of 'Odradek' in Kafka's story, its plastic implications, and propounds an ethical imperative from the text. Critics mostly disagree on how to categorize Odradek, thus leading Yeung to conclude that it evades taxonomy (p. 42). However, as the story progresses, Odradek becomes more familiar, moves from neuter to masculine pronouns, and receives a voice. Yeung argues that this development reflects the human disposition to value familiarity and fear alterity (p. 43). The image of Odradek mutates like plastic and, like plastic's many polymers, Odradek contains various synthetic units (p. 48). Yeung thus draws Kafka's ethical injunction from the text, namely that we must not take literary creation for granted, and we must allow a story 'to simultaneously take us over and resist comprehension' (p. 44). In Chapter 3, Yeung considers Roland Barthes's Le Plastique in tandem with Kafka's story because both texts share critical qualities in common with plastic; [End Page 312] they are 'ultimately unnatural' and mobile (pp. 58–59). Yeung illustrates their unnatural aspects by showing that each of the texts evades genre; they elude categorization into short story, aphorism, prose poem, or scientific observation (p. 63). Hedging genre, both present unnatural morphology (p. 60). Additionally, owing to their small size, they share the quality of mobility with plastic; they can easily travel in a pocket or purse, and one might quickly replicate or recite them just as one might recycle plastic (p. 66). On Literary Plasticity offers a particularly valuable contribution to Kafka scholarship in its fourth chapter, wherein Yeung diverges from the most familiar reading of the final paragraph of Die Sorge des Hausvaters. Noting that Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, and 'Theodor Adorno all assume the narrator to be the eponymous Hausvater, Yeung focuses instead on the plasticity of points of view (p. 88). 'Thus, she shifts the 'work and literary power' of the text from the figure of the father onto the text's 'formal machinations' (p. 89) and argues that it would be mistaken to assume that the narrative voice of the opening paragraph coincides directly with that of the Hausvater. Instead, Yeung contends that the narrative voice is 'disembodied', and in so doing offers a novel interpretation (p. 89). Although the final chapter presents a satisfying shift from Kafka's early twentieth century to plastic's twenty-first century, I had hoped to find a more explicit illumination of the political implications of Yeung's engaging assertion. If we rely extensively on plastic objects and plastic modes of thought in the Anthropocene age, precisely how might we perceive oceanic plastic anew after Yeung's reading of Kafka? Yeung implies that we ought to embrace literary plasticity and neuroplasticity in our approach to the ecological threat of plastic objects, yet the political claim remains implicit (p. 99). An explicit visualization of how this perception of plastic might transmute the environmental gaze on...

Humanitarian Help and Refugees: De-Bordering Solidarity as a Contentious Issue

This article aims at discussing the involvement of “humanitarian” actors, stemming from civil society, in treatment of the issue of refugees’ reception. It suggests the concept of “de-bordering solidarity,” to express the political meaning of such mobilizations. With this term, it refers to various forms of support provided by activists and volunteers, through which these actors contest policies of asylum and borders in practice, even when they do not advance overt political claims. Furthermore, the article factors four types of actors involved in the reception of asylum seekers, namely NGOs, other Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), social movements and common citizens.

The domestic sources of sub-state foreign policymaking: determinants of subnational development cooperation across European regions

ABSTRACT Subnational governments have come to challenge the foreign policymaking monopoly of national governments. An increasingly salient area of sub-state foreign policymaking is international development cooperation, but systematic knowledge about the drivers of such activities is limited. We argue that subnational governments develop capacities for international development cooperation for domestic region-building purposes, geared toward advancing political claims for regional autonomy that can take institutional, political, and cultural representations. To test this argument, we construct a new dataset of 195 politically relevant European regions which maps the autonomous engagement of regions in international development cooperation. Large-N regression analysis establishes that regions are significantly more likely to be engaged in international development cooperation where they have greater constitutional autonomy, cultural-linguistic distinctiveness, and a regionally-based party to advance the regional agenda. These results have important implications for our understanding of sub-state foreign policy actors and their role in the global governance of development.

An unthinkable cinema: Deleuze’s mutant politics of film

In this paper, I defend a conception of Deleuze’s two volumes dedicated to film – Cinema I: The Movement-Image, and Cinema II: The Time-Image – as protracted expressions of his political philosophy. In this context, I will elaborate the difficult and entwined political claims Deleuze makes on behalf of cinema: that it is capable of engendering a tentative ‘belief in the world’, such as is the necessary correlate of political action; that it captures the contemporary political fact that ‘the people are missing’, as a unified or coherent political agent; and finally that it might reveal those ‘impossible’ or ‘intolerable’ situations which would provoke such a people into being. In advancing this conceptual triumvirate, I will argue that the claims made here on behalf of cinema overspill the art form itself, linking up with Deleuze’s broader political ontology of thought and constituting a generalised political philosophy proper to so-called ‘late-capitalism’.

Oil, Money and Decolonization in South Asia

Abstract Why did oil become a privileged object for debating economic sovereignty during the Cold War? Recent scholarship has attempted to answer this question by drawing attention to decolonizing struggles for oil nationalization across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. At the core of these inquiries is the presumption that a global proliferation of oil production after 1945 — now referred to as ‘the great acceleration’ — reflected a growth in global demand for fossil fuels, and that oil’s economic significance thus motivated new political claims over national oil reserves. This article takes a different position by turning to one of the earliest projects to build a post-colonial national oil programme, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Commission, under the socialist politician K. D. Malaviya. Using Malaviya’s project to trace the international politicization of oil in the 1950s and 1960s, it demonstrates how sovereignty over oil was used to contest the structures of unequal currency valuation and foreign debt enforced by the Bretton Woods institutions and the Western bloc. Rather than a source of fuel, Indian politicians understood the struggle over oil as a struggle about money, and the power of global financial interdependence in demarcating the political horizons of post-colonial sovereignty.

Online opinions, sentiments and news framing of the first nuclear referendum in Taiwan: a mix-method approach

ABSTRACT This mixed-method study uses a big data approach to examine cross-platform public sentiments towards Taiwan’s first nuclear energy referendum, and further conducts content analysis for nuclear news framing strategies. Sentiment analysis shows polarized affective attitudes towards Go Green with Nuclear (GGWN) referendum, regardless of media types. News coverage and social media contents reveal significant sentiment differences in narrating the referendum, nuclear energy, and political party-related issues. Polarized political party-related nuclear claims tend to show negative sentiments. As for agenda setting, the big data analysis shows that politics dominate nuclear narratives on news, Facebook and forums. In addition, content analysis reveals that the majority of news articles involve politics, but rarely report on energy and environmental subjects. In terms of generic news framing strategies, dramatic framing is used more than substantive framing in nuclear narratives. Conflict is the leading framing, followed by action. As for environmental news framing, most GGWN-related news is not eco-centric. Eco-efficient framing is most used to emphasize economic growth, national development and people’s livelihood. Moreover, mainstream and alternative media show no significant differences in using generic and environmental news framing to report nuclear referendum issues. Implications are discussed.

Magnificent Decay: Melville & Ecology by Tom Nurmi

Reviewed by: Magnificent Decay: Melville & Ecology by Tom Nurmi Michele Navakas TOM NURMI Magnificent Decay: Melville & Ecology Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. xiii, 276 pages. Tom Nurmi's Magnificent Decay insightfully recasts Melville as an unheralded literary ecologist. A "writer of relations, networks, and systems that we now term 'ecological'" (xi), Melville pursued a lifelong investigation of "how 'Nature' is made legible and at what scales" (26), Nurmi argues. At a moment when responding ethically and effectively to the Anthropocene requires us to grasp the complex place of humans within the planet's various spatial and temporal histories, we need to read Melville, a writer who made "the complexity of human-planetary relations accessible to a broad spectrum of readers" (5). Nurmi pursues this ecological reframing of Melville by reading descriptions of spirals, flowers, stones, corals, shells, skeletons, trees, birds, honeycombs, and other more-than-human entities as more than metaphorical. By following their manifold appearances across Melville's work and outward, into the larger scientific and cultural contexts that Melville engaged, Nurmi illuminates the ecological contours of Melville's thinking—and, thereby, some unexpected ontological, philosophical, and even political claims. Interestingly, Nurmi's ecological reframing of Melville does not center on Melville's most "obviously ecological" (40) work, Moby-Dick (1851). Rather, Nurmi primarily attends to the form and content of major texts that have received comparatively less consideration: Mardi (1849), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856) taken as a whole, and John Marr (1888). Each text becomes relevant to the pressing and intersecting crises of the Anthropocene, Nurmi shows, when we dispense with well-worn reasons for not reading them—Mardi as plotless, Pierre as absurd and repellent by turns—and instead approach each as a complex, meditative reflection upon ecological processes and the forms of life they produce. Accordingly, the book is arranged around four compellingly titled chapters: "Pearl: Mardi," "Tendril: Pierre," "Honeycomb: The Piazza Tales," and "Pebble: John Marr." Each explores a particular set of neglected substances and materials, and each offers "fresh sets of coordinates" (227) through which to perceive Melville's ecological orientations. The bones, pearls, and [End Page 93] gold of Mardi urge us toward ever closer attention to our profound entanglements with geological materials, and the processes shaping them, until we verge upon "mineral unconscious" (68), the knowledge that "we are our shared minerality" (79)—that we are inseparable from, similar to, and ever emerging with forms of nonlife both visible and invisible to us. Pierre's spirals, foams, and "vegetal structure" (84) encourage us to attend to life forms that resist human use and cultivation, and thus typically remain overlooked, while also informing us of our own vegetality—both our barely perceptible entanglements with entities living and dead, and our relative lack of agency as organic bodies within an ever-changing ecological system. The Piazza Tales is "a series of modern fables about dwelling among, and as, animals in the Anthropocene" (146). Unlike readings that separate out the individual stories and sketches of this collection, Nurmi treats it as a complete work. In both well-known tales (such as "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno") and lesser-known pieces (such as "The Piazza" and "The Lightning-Rod Man"), Nurmi finds that the collection's honeycombs, chimneys, ships, and tombs (among other structures) prompt us to understand that dwelling may take a number of forms beyond the violent displacements of settler colonialism. And John Marr "compresses a lifetime of ecological thought into a single collection of linked poems" (201). "Pebbles," the title of the sequence of poems that concludes John Marr, are a clue to the meaning of the whole, Nurmi argues; rather than seeking an overarching coherence, we should approach the text as a work as "non-additive" and "emergent" as the pebbles that make up the planet itself (224). By reading each poem both individually and also in relation to all others, while following out the "interlinked energy pathways" of particular materials such as sharks and kelp, dust and wind, Melville's readers experience nothing less than "our planet's mineral-vegetal-animal-atmospheric complexity" (202, 224). These and other novel claims are supported with sustained, frequently...

Machine learning political orders

AbstractA significant set of epistemic and political transformations are taking place as states and societies begin to understand themselves and their problems through the paradigm of deep neural network algorithms. A machine learning political order does not merely change the political technologies of governance, but is itself a reordering of politics, of what the political can be. When algorithmic systems reduce the pluridimensionality of politics to the output of a model, they simultaneously foreclose the potential for other political claims to be made and alternative political projects to be built. More than this foreclosure, a machine learning political order actively profits and learns from the fracturing of communities and the destabilising of democratic rights. The transformation from rules-based algorithms to deep learning models has paralleled the undoing of rules-based social and international orders – from the use of machine learning in the campaigns of the UK EU referendum, to the trialling of algorithmic immigration and welfare systems, and the use of deep learning in the COVID-19 pandemic – with political problems becoming reconfigured as machine learning problems. Machine learning political orders decouple their attributes, features and clusters from underlying social values, no longer tethered to notions of good governance or a good society, but searching instead for the optimal function of abstract representations of data.

The politicization of everyday life: understanding the impact of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Protests on pro-democracy protesters’ political participation in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT The 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in Hong Kong culminated in diverse forms of political participation, but as yet little attention has been paid to the impact on the pro-democracy movement at the micro-level. This paper explores pro-democracy protesters’ evolving views of politics and their new modes of political participation during and after the protests. Using interview data, this paper shows that participants in the pro-democracy movement have increasingly recognized the inseparable relationship between everyday life and political life. This paper examines two forms of everyday political participation – political consumption and digital activism – that have been widely deployed by protesters to express political claims, circulate political information, and garner support from local and international audiences. While the politicization of everyday life provided impetus to street demonstrations in 2019, it has continued despite the adoption of a wider scope of repressive measures by the Chinese and Hong Kong governments after the protests. Through the case of Hong Kong, this paper demonstrates how, in an authoritarian context, everyday resistance is applied to struggle for regime change and democratization.

“We Think About Our Children First”: Asian Skilled Professionals, Liberal Multiculturalism and the Borders of Educational Inequality in Fremont, California

ABSTRACT This essay examines how the suburban built environment of affluent skilled professionals shaped the political claims that affluent Asian parents made as suburban residents during the 1990 to the early 2000s. In focusing on the school boundary debates and redistribution of educational resources in the Silicon Valley suburb of Fremont, California, I critically unpack how Asian parents advocated for liberal multiculturalism and racial segregation in protecting their access to Fremont’s best schools. In contrast to the conception that liberal multiculturalism is a form of resistance to suburban white cultural dominance in school settings, I argue that there are ideological consistencies between suburban homeowner politics of self-interest and Asian parent demands for cultural autonomy. I show how suburban homeowner politics compelled Asian parents to distance themselves from addressing the educational needs of low-income and working-class whites and people of color in Fremont.

The Schema of Institution

Regress threatens throughout Lyotard’s Differend, especially where the argument appears to make normative ethical or political claims. How a term, a case or an example “links onto” a phrase serves as a way of examining how instituting can be non-regressively grounded, and with what consequences for abstract political subjectivity. The essay offers an alternative to liberal philosophical (Arendt, Nussbaum) and jurisprudential (Marbury v. Madison) schemata of political institution.

Creating a Sense of Glorious Destiny. Mastery of Speech in the Libellus de Situ Civitatis Mediolani (Late 10th-Early 11th Centuries)

In the decades around 1000, an anonymous cleric at Milan Cathedral wrote a booklet on the history of his city which he built as a collection gathering, in chronological order, the Lives of the local bishops. The unfinished work not only testifies to the learning and culture of the author but also to the historical relevance of an ambitious text commissioned to support the political claims and the legitimacy of the Milanese church in its quest for primacy in the kingdom of Italy. This chapter explores the refined style of the author and the ways in which he constructed a coherent and cohesive narrative by sewing together individual biographies. The medieval reception of this biographical collection also shows the ways in which the text was repurposed to fulfil different functions and multiple goals, both within and beyond the city of Milan. Finally, this study analyses the text in the light of two interpretative concepts borrowed from the field of social anthropology. De situ clearly appealed to the literary tastes of the scholars trained in the cathedral school, thus addressing an audience shaped as a specific »community of learning«. More generally, the collection contributed to nourishing the sense of identity of the clergy and the people of Milan, that is a »textual community« which, through the acts of reading and listening to the text, felt it belonged to that glorious history and expected to see its reflection in the present.

The idea of a city for people as a factor in the localization of protest voting in new residential complexes

The gradual formation of income segregation in the post-Soviet city leads to the localization of protest voting. New residential complexes are significant spatial elements of this process. The new housing attracts citizens with similar income levels and perception of the quality of the living environment, empowering urban segregation. Moreover, the gap between expected and experienced urban life is usually observed in the new housing, supported by frequent practices of deceptive marketing and concluding real estate transactions long before the construction is over. Following that, the discrepancy between the character of the urban environment inside and outside the residential complex forces the localization of protest voting within the new housing. The key concept in explaining that kind of a protest vote localization is “city for people”. The external attributes of the city for people, including safety, accessibility, sustainability, are promoted by developers as part of marketing campaigns and shape a latent demand from the buyers. However, the systematic lack of these claimed elements in new residential complexes leads residents to political protest and focus on the political component of the city for people. Citizens adopt a critical attitude towards the infringement of the rights of residents by developers and urban administration and a request for equal participation in city management. The paper critically observes the case of protest voting in the residential complex «Ya - Romantik» in St Petersburg. The significant lack of infrastructure empowers citizens there to manifest political claims and exercise solidarity. Also the prospective locations of the protest voting are discussed.

Moral Empire and the Global Meaning of Gandhi's Anti-imperialism

AbstractGandhi famously shook the foundations of the British Empire and sparked the beginning of a new anti-imperial era. But his critique of empire does not quite fit the familiar script of twentieth-century anti-imperialism. Gandhi's positions ranged from sincere expressions of imperial loyalty to a condemnation of English civilization while endorsing its moral empire, to an unqualified disavowal of the Britsh Empire without necessarily claiming independence. Reconstructing the long arc of his (anti-)imperial thought, this article shows that the idea of empire operated in the early Gandhi's thought in two ways: as the authorizing source of the rights of Indians and as the addressee of political claims. This genealogy helps explain the complex trajectory of his two separate breaks from empire. The article ultimately suggests that the key to understanding the global resonance of Gandhi's ideas lies in his transformation of the imperial adversary into a universal addressee of action.