Postcolonial State Research Articles

The power of old ideas newly expressed

Abstract This article tracks the legitimization practices deployed to change the discourse regarding coercive interventions to protect human lives which, at the end of the 1990s, became both acceptable practices discussed in multilateral settings and deeply controversial issues. It focuses on the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) and two important strategies. The first is the proposition to change the ways in which we talk about (military) intervention for human protection purposes, i.e. a passage from “humanitarian intervention” and the “right to intervene” towards R2P. The second is the practices that agents hoped would give legitimacy to their ideas, especially regarding postcolonial states, historically skeptical and critical of humanitarian intervention. I argue that the agents were able to reframe the debate using more legitimate discourse while adopting legitimization practices to raise the acceptability of R2P.

Ruling the Borderlands: An Ethnography of the Pakistani State’s Everyday Practices in Dir

ABSTRACT This article analyses how and why the northwest borderland region of Pakistan has become one of the world’s most heavily militarised regions. Before 9/11, the area was a historical colonial frontier, experiencing significant militarism and violence during the Cold War. After the 9/11 attacks and the American and allied forces’ invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, however, the Pakistani military undertook a massive intervention and deployment in the region and established a chain of checkpoints aimed at filtering and disciplining the local population. Consequently, local inhabitants have endured severe treatment from the military and other coercive apparatuses. Using an ethnographic method, this article documents the daily experiences of the local people amidst pervasive militarisation. It contends that recent instances of state violence and militarisation cannot solely be attributed to 9/11 but are deeply rooted in the region’s historical treatment as a buffer zone during colonial times. In this context, Pakistan’s postcolonial state has heavily relied on its violent methods and securitised infrastructure to regulate both the region and its people.

Unveiling the Stylistic Features of Tayeb Salih's "Season of Migration to the North: A Postcolonial Analysis"

The book represents the fullest example of stylistic analysis within an important novel in the postcolonial canon-Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. The research provides a deep linguistic, structural, and thematic insight into how Salih's stylistic options build a peculiar picture of postcolonial themes, cultural identity, and the difficulties and contrasts of cultural exchange. While situating the bilingual narrative, symbolic imagery, and satirical moments of intertextual dialogue and celebration of oral traditions in their historical and cultural context, it proves how such features set the tone and atmosphere of the novel and give further depth to its themes. By doing so, Salih's style refutes and rebukes colonialist discourses, while engaging readers in a critical consideration of postcolonial identity, power relationships, and cultural exchange. These findings underline the continuous popularity of the novel and its status as a strong work of postcolonial literature, with much to offer about the postcolonial condition and its representation in literature.

Active non-alignment, the sovereignty paradox and the Russia-Ukraine war

ABSTRACT The differing reactions between Western nations and the Global South to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine present a puzzle. Shouldn't post-colonial states be just as concerned about the principles of national sovereignty and non-intervention as Western countries? The idiosyncratic, ad hoc explanations on a country-by-country basis are insufficient to account for a much broader phenomenon. This article deconstructs the “sovereignty principle” as it is seen in the Global South and examines the standing of the so-called Rules-Based Order (RBO), allegedly under mortal threat by Russia’s action. It then argues that a far better explanation for the Global South’s reaction is the rise of Active Non-Alignment (ANA). The foreign policy doctrine of ANA arose in Latin America in 2019–2020 in response to US–China tensions, It then spread to the rest of the Global South in 2022–2024 because of the war in Ukraine, BRICS expansion, and the war in Gaza.

Crafting theories about living heritage: the postcolonial condition of contemporary Asian architecture and urbanism as an Asian ‘display’

ABSTRACT Heritage usually represents how the past is valued today. This paper, however, introduces a new perspective based on historical materialism, which is evident in modern Asian architecture. It argues that contemporary Asian architecture moves away from traditional historicism and embraces different ways of relating to history. The paper explores the idea of “living heritage”, which is shaped by the postcolonial nature of current Asian architecture and urban planning. The core idea is that immediate historicity, the presence of appreciated historical values, creates a unique quality called “display-ness”. This concept involves not just physical, visual, and spatial aspects, but also how a place is institutionalised. As evidence, modern heritage is influenced by global political dynamics. In Asia, the quality of architecture has shifted from modernism to what might be called colonial modernity, showing a new focus on hybridity. By comparing Japan and Singapore, this paper illustrates this idea of display-ness, which suggests a blend of future urban developments and cultural history in the present.

Gendering visions of the postcolonial modernist state through names: a literary onomastic analysis of Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird (2009)

African literature is a crucial arena for deconstructing norms, and imagining communities or alternative modes of sociality and being. In many postcolonial African literary works, particularly those grappling with the legacy of European colonisation and the challenges of nation-building, the modernist state is frequently depicted as an entity emblematic of violence and dispossession inflicted upon the populace. However, it is also sometimes portrayed as offering a degree of hope and possibility amidst the turmoil. Drawing on literary onomastics and insights from Rights and Feminist theories, the article examines Parkes’ strategic use of names to articulate ethicality in Tail of the Blue Bird. Parkes argues for a true decolonisation by radically replacing and reassessing the patriarchal ideology that creates violence and trauma in postcolonial societies. This should happen by embracing the feminine principles represented by the main female characters in the novel. The article shows that the semiotics and character roles of Esi Mensisi and Yaa Somu as women constitute crucial sites for Parkes’ rumination on human flourishing and ethicality in the postcolonial modernist state. The article has implications for studies on literary onomastics, characterisation, and how African writers attempt to reimagine postcolonial politics and sociality.

For the archive yet to come

Abstract This article explores the promises and pitfalls of the colonial archives for the study of seeing and knowing contemporary violence. As an ethnographic field and a site of decolonial struggles, the colonial archive is increasingly mobilised in scholarship that seeks to historicise and disrupt conventional, Western-centric knowledge production. While using the colonial archives might reproduce asymmetrical power relations, they also hold the potential to unsettle the ‘toxic imperial debris’ of our time. How can the colonial archives challenge the post-colonial politics of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures? Drawing on research in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women as always already violated or silenced. We argue that the logics of the African Archives reveal a set of destabilising state anxieties that reflect the duality and instability of colonial rule itself and that infuse contemporary (international) politics. This recounting of the violence contained in the archives both narrates the concrete, violent manifestations of our ‘global coloniality’ and works towards its own demise as part of a broader ‘anticolonial archive’.

Sustainable development goals implementation in a post‐colonial African State: Any future for the African Continental Free Trade Area?

AbstractThis paper examined the prospect of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement in the context of the SDGs. It took its bearing from the contemporary structure of most African states, arguing that the reality of the continent's postcolonial condition could impede the implementation of the AfCFTA. Its refrain is that studies on how Nigeria and South Africa, as regional powers, have used their economic and political influence to advance the SDGs' implementation throughout Africa, using different South–South development frameworks are few. In other words, the institutionalization of a strategic collaboration agenda through a Nigeria‐South Africa‐coordinated African response to the new powers, in the area of timely implementation of the SDGs is lacking. This study affirms that for the AfCFTA to be successful, it is incumbent on the regional hegemons to build a suitable institutional framework and governance structure that upholds the rule of law and encourages harmonization, consistency, and predictability.

Promises of Development, Land Acquisition, and Dispossession

This article examines how the futures promised by the postcolonial state through various projects leave peasants sceptical about a new government project at the rural margin of India. Focusing on a car factory project undertaken in 2006 by the government of the West Bengal Indian state, I explore how a half century-long project of land reforms shaped the dispossession politics of the peasants whose lands have been acquired for a car factory project. Based on an ethnography in Singur, this article explores how a car factory project at the very onset of its implementation instilled a sense of harm to life and livelihoods. Consequently, that project produced forms of spatiotemporal inequality between different socioeconomic groups in connection, not only with their ownership of land, but also with their respective vision of their work futures. Keywords: project form, dispossession, land acquisition, peasantry, India

Nation-state influence on tourism path creation in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of agency in the emergence and evolution of tourism paths in the post-colonial states of Southern Africa. Building on the Trinity of Change Agency concept, we emphasise the critical role of the nation-state by spotlighting the multi-scalarity of institutional entrepreneurship and the impact of triggering events. These elements are essential for understanding the decisive forms of agency that can redirect tourism economic paths at pivotal moments. This approach is adapted to explain the uneven evolution of tourism paths across the border regions of Chobe, Victoria Falls and Zambezi. Our findings suggest that the interplay between regional actors and a responsive nation-state during periods of change plays a crucial role in shaping the development of tourism paths.

Reversing Sovereignty: Deconstructing State ‘Rights’ and ‘Welfare’ in Jacinta Kerketta’s Poetry

In the prefatory remarks to her translation of Mahashweta Devi’s Draupadi, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that the self-fulfilling premise of knowledge regarding the objects of critical discourse colours Western observations on the Other, although the text of Draupadi is potent enough in showing its blatant inadequacies and thus rendering the character of Dopdi Mejhen as neither completely understandable nor ‘translatable’. Translation, in critical discourse, therefore transcends the literal definition of the term as change of diction or language and encapsulates the idea of discursive readjustment as well. Jacinta Kerketta’s poems highlight the politics of ‘translation’ adopted by the modern welfare state in postcolonial India vis-à-vis the plight of Adivasis. While constitutional guarantees and safeguards constitute the benevolently sovereign nature of the postcolonial state, the complexities involved in the execution of these guarantees render them fallible in co-opting the demands and rights of the Adivasi in the narrative of national progress and other statist goals and objectives. On the other hand, Kerketta’s poems serve to offer a literary resistance to the complaisant presumptions of politico-legal discourse and create unprecedented fissures in concepts that are held to be self-explanatory and integral features of the modern welfare state.

EXPLORING POSTCOLONIAL RAMIFICATIONS IN NADEEM ASLAM‟S SEASON OF THE RAINBIRDS

This study examines the postcolonial implications in Nadeem Aslam’s Season of the Rainbirds (2007). It explores the aftermaths of postcolonialism and its enduring impacts on culture, religion, and language within Pakistani society. The study adopts a postcolonial lens, reflecting the enduring influence of colonial legacies on identities, religious dynamics, and social structures. It also examines the religious persecution of minorities and depicts the social and political reality in Pakistan, where religion serves as an instrument of tyranny. Furthermore, English serves as an emblem of privilege, highlighting the enduring effects of linguistic imperialism as the novel depicts the power dynamics between indigenous and colonial languages. This article contends that these themes depict how the postcolonial condition in the novel reflects overarching issues of identity, marginalization, and power dynamics that endure long after independence.

State Categories and Their Afterlives: The Politics of “Tribalisation” in Eastern India

This article examines the afterlives of state classificatory categories in everyday engagements between state and society. It examines how a community of cultivators in eastern and central India, the Kudmi-Mahatos, have reshaped their group identity through categories of the state. They have oscillated between not wanting to be labelled as “tribal” by the colonial state to seeking to be recognised as “Scheduled Tribes” by the post-colonial state. Using ethnographic and historical methods, this article investigates the shifting claims of the Kudmi-Mahatos with respect to “tribal” status. It argues: (i) that communities use state categories of classification to remake their identities vis-à-vis both the state and other communities they live with; and (ii) tribalisation as a strategy of claiming recognition reworks the tribe-caste continuum in India. The article builds on historical and anthropological scholarship that looks at political contestations over classification in modern states.

Conflict, Borderlands and Displacement: The Persistent and Escalating Crisis in Northwest India

Borderlands are the geographical spaces or zones around a territorial border between nations. Defined by the borders that create and maintain the nation–state, the borderlands are the sites in the making, continually moulded, transformed or reconstructed by the social actors inhabiting them. Going beyond the boundary lines, borderlands encapsulate a much broader area where the impact of happenings at the border is felt and reverberated. Borderlands are of different types. They are classified as ‘alienated’ when dominated by conflict, hostility, insecurity and instability, as in parts of northwest India, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) since 1947–1948. The border between India and Pakistan in J&K called the ‘Line of Control’ (LoC), is a de facto and not an international boundary and remains contested, disturbed, militarised and controlled. The borderlands surrounding it have witnessed many wars, war-like situations and displacement of people with several socio-economic ramifications. The post-colonial state tried to settle these conundrums of border-making but got entangled in the persistent and escalating crisis of intractable border disputes. The state and the media reconstructed and reproduced the rhetoric of nationalism and national security, sustaining the conflict and border entanglements. This paper argues for an alternative discourse to understand the crises of conflict based on people’s lived experiences, border formation and displacement in the wake of the partition of India and thereafter.

Decentralisation and Water Governance in Africa: A Zimbabwean Case Study

Decentralisation is widely seen as an effective method for empowering local communities in developing countries. This article discusses decentralisation within the context of water governance, using Zimbabwe as a case study. Its main argument is that although decentralisation is faced with challenges, it remains one of the most effective ways to govern water resources. At the core of decentralisation is the belief that citizens should have the opportunity to participate directly in governing resources in their communities. Within the African context, decentralisation becomes even more important considering the continent’s history of colonisation, where certain communities were marginalised and had little influence over the management of resources, such as water. The introduction of Integrated Water Resources Management aimed to address the inequalities inherited by post-colonial states. It advocated for a decentralised system of governance, and countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe incorporated it into their new water policies. In Zimbabwe, the 1998 Water Act aimed to address the inequalities caused by colonial rule. While the article argues for the importance of decentralisation in effective water governance, it also outlines the challenges faced in this process. For instance, it contends that in some countries, like Ghana, the government often interferes in the decentralisation process to assert its authority. In Zimbabwe, the main challenge arises from the ruling party, which perceives decentralisation, particularly devolution, as an obstacle to its control over the country.

Itihasam of/as Legend: Time, Space, and Narrative Consciousness in The Legends of Khasak

Truth is light splintered through a prism and that gave me the idea of the astrophysicist who turns away from the outer universe to the space within. V. Vijayan, ‘Afterword’, The Legends of Khasak The Legends of Khasak (1969) by O.V. Vijayan has enjoyed a cult readership in the Indian subcontinent. The dominant critical or scholarly strain has been to read it as a literary symptom of the postcolonial imaginary. However, this has restricted the thematic potentialities of the text. While it employs the conventional postcolonial contestation between modernity and tradition as its framework, it far exceeds the binary in the forging of a novel consciousness and form. Using this as the theoretical springboard, the paper will attempt an exploration of Vijayan’s revisioning of the postmodern novel through the reconfiguration of the coordinates of time and space. This reconfiguration occurs through the lens of magic realism in so far as the experience of space – or Khasak as a site of the legendary – is conditioned by the experience of time. The aim of the paper is to look at the protagonist Ravi and his experience of the liminal boundary between history and myth, and the concomitant form of the novel through its reconceptualization of the Eurocentric theoretical paradigms of novelistic and epic time. This anticipates the emergence of a new spatio-temporal and narrative consciousness symptomatic of the fragmentary postcolonial condition.

Credit in agrarian India: narrative policy struggles over farmer surplus

Debt is fundamental to agrarian life across the world. In India, over half of agricultural households are indebted and borrow from myriad credit sources. Formal institutional credit (e.g., bank loans) has historically, and up to the present day, been proposed as a tool for rural development and to eliminate exploitative informal moneylenders. This is true in India, where despite decades of state policies to displace informal lending using formal credit, informal lending persists and increasing debt is an ever-present symptom of the agrarian crisis. Informal lending made up 30% of farmers’ credit sources in 2019; for farmers who owned less than 0.01 ha of land, this was 71.8%. In this paper we provide an historical examination of the numerous state responses to the proliferation of agrarian debt, surveying lending policy as a state development tool in India. We analyze how moneylending has been treated in different historical periods and the increasing participation of the state (from colonial to present times) in agrarian debt and use a Narrative Policy Analysis to synthesize the underlying “narratives” that characterize evolving policy forms. In the process, we reveal not only a consistent narrative assuming the displacement of informal credit with formal credit, one contradicted by the situation on the ground: an absolute increasing trend in borrowing, and a crucial propagation of the number and variety of credit sources. This we observe to be precisely a result of the largely fruitless state effort to formalize credit and to eliminate informal lending. This persistent discourse that posits formality as a solution to informality, we further conclude, is not only a cultural project of the colonial, post-colonial, and modernization state, but one essential for the circulation and accumulation of capital, enhancing its urgency. The failed effort to eliminate informal lending has resulted, furthermore, in a decline in farmer autonomy and the creation of a state-underwritten struggle − between multiple actors in the credit sector − over the redistribution of agrarian surplus.

Debating Diya: Indirect Rule and the Transformation of Islamic Law in British Colonial Northern Nigeria

Abstract For all of British Colonial Indirect Rule’s avowed deference to Islamic law and institutions in Northern Nigeria, it radically transformed them. Of the most overt areas in which this occurred was the colonial state’s elimination of diya, the payment of compensation for unlawful killing. Justified by the colonial state on the basis of good order, the abolition of diya was the product of a debate over who had the prerogative to respond to crimes directed at the person: the aggrieved individual or the state. Prominent Muslim jurists argued in favor of the former, citing source texts and the precolonial practice that gave life to those textual prescriptions. On the other hand, colonial administrators insisted that the response to crimes against the person was the state’s prerogative and that interpersonal resolution of such matters challenged imperial authority, the protection of which was not without basis in Islamic law. At the same time, the peculiar design of Northern Nigerian indirect rule meant that statutory, and therefore, unequivocal elimination of diya, remained elusive—at least until the eve of independence. This article traces the contours of the debate over the fate of diya as a lens through which one may apprehend the impact of colonial indirect rule on Islamic law, particularly criminal law, in Northern Nigeria. The demise of diya illuminates colonial indirect rule for what it was: a “constitutional trick” that paid lip service to Islamic law and institutions while radically transforming their essence and, eventually, eliminating them. Ultimately, however, that the means through which the demise of diya was brought about—the reconfiguration of the precolonial constitutional balance between political and juristic authorities—is, at least, as significant as the demise of diya itself. Indeed, that constitutional transformation has endured, surviving colonialism and finding expression in nascent attempts to reinstate Islamic law in the postcolonial state.

The contested terrain of sport, media & indigenous representation: a case study of sámi sport organisation in Norway

This paper examines the representation of Sámi sport in Norwegian media by applying a Nordic-informed ‘critical ethnicity theory’, and a media framing perspective. The study extends previous analyses that have focused on media stereotyping of Indigenous athletes to explore how the media represent Sámi sport. Drawing from a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of Norwegian print media from 1994-2017, Sámi sport is represented as both a unique organisational phenomenon and as part of the overarching Norwegian sport context. Three main findings are revealed. First, Sámi sport has shifted from being an exotic exhibit to being framed as a potential partner for mainstream (Norwegian) sport within specific contexts, such as during an Olympic bid process. Second, there is an emerging tension between the understanding and celebration of Sámi sport as something exclusive within Norwegian society and its potential to be inclusive via organisational mergers. Third, the findings illustrate the need to recognise that Sámi culture, including sport, also spans Sweden, Finland, and Russia thus any structural reorganisation creates consequences across multiple state borders. Overall, the results indicate several co-existing, and sometimes competing and contradictory representations, all of which must consider the postcolonial conditions of the Sámi as an Indigenous people.

Interventions of post-colonial states in the normative structure of world politics: the case of Iran and the norm of democracy

Within Global IR a constructivist-postcolonial literature is emerging which inquires into how postcolonial states intervene into the normative structure of world politics. This research programme has less covered the question how postcolonial states relate to the international norm of democracy, how and in which ways do they contest this norm, and to which effects? This question is important both to study how the ‘postcolonial condition’ can be overcome, as well as to understand which contours and shapes the norm of democracy might be taking in a multiplex world. To study this multifaceted question from a perspective which acknowledges the shadow of the past, as well as the agency of postcolonial states, Wiener’s concept of norm contestation is applied and further developed in three respects: firstly, by staking out various forms of contestation, that is rejection, strategic contestation and the construction of alternative meaning; secondly, by bringing in identity as a mediating device which impacts the forms of contestation; and thirdly, by studying various sites of contestation where actors beyond the state are also taken into account. This framework is then applied to heuristically study the case of Iran which is of particular interest as it intervenes in the global contestation of the norm of democracy on a dual level of external resistance and internal dissent. Studying Iranian contestation at the UN, within Iran and in Iranian-EU engagement, it becomes evident that during times of geopolitical confrontation with the US, the spectre of the past is produced as present and the form of contestation features dialectics of hypocrisy which harm the norm of democracy. At the same time, we also see a strengthening of the norm of democracy through hybridity both in Iranian encounters with the EU, as well as in the contestation of meanings of democracy within Iran itself.