Decolonization War Research Articles

Empire’s Violent End: comparing Dutch, British and French wars of decolonization 1945–1962 Edited by Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis

<i>Empire’s Violent End: comparing Dutch, British and French wars of decolonization 1945–1962</i> Edited by Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis

Evolving Grand Narratives: A Forty-Year Perspective

Eminent historians reflect on the creation, evolution, and in some cases the destruction of the field of military history’s ‘grand narratives,’ ‘master narratives’, or ‘metanarratives’ over the past forty years in the following areas: race and the history of the modern US military; Asian military history; US military history; African military history: Europe 1789 to 1900; European history since 1914; wars of decolonisation; explanations of Confederate defeat; gender and war; and early modern European warfare.

War and decolonization in Ukraine

This essay considers the Ukraine conflict as a war of decolonization. It understands decolonization as a practice of world order making that creates international relations out of imperial relations. What does such a perspective tell us about the conflict in Ukraine and its implications for world politics?

The Multidirectional memory connecting the Holocaust and French decolonization

Memory studies have grown rapidly around the world since the late 20th century. Past memory studies in history assumed that politics of memory is a struggle of different collective memories over limited resources. In the past, they have mainly assumed that competitive memory models, namely memory politics, represent a competition among victim groups over limited resources (social recognition and compensation from the state). In particular, as the memories of the Holocaust have been highlighted intensively internationally, it was considered that Holocaust memories were given a privileged status compared to other memories. However recent studies such as Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory attempts to illuminate the interconnections of different memories of wars and violence for the sake of new mnemonic solidarity. Based on his memory theory, this article focused on the memories of the Holocaust and those of decolonization (in particular the Algerian War context). By engaging the case of the Affaire Maurice Papon (1997-98), this essay offers the implications of multidirectional memory theories for today’s politics of memory and the relationship between history and memory. The rationale is that the Papon trial is considered one of the best examples of the connection between the memories and history of World War II and the decolonization war in French West Africa. In the conclusion, this paper examines the limitations and possibilities of multidirectional memory theory through the above process.

International Law of War, War Crimes in Ethiopia, and Italy's Imperial Misrecollection at the End of Empire, 1946–1950

AbstractThe article explores the post-1945 discourse around Italian war crimes committed in Ethiopia from 1935 to 1942. Although Italians largely escaped prosecutions after the Second World War, the article demonstrates how an international controversy – the appointment and dismissal of a former general of the Italian army as governor of Somalia in 1949 – forced a reappraisal of Italy's imperial, fascist, and wartime past. Exploring this discourse is important for three reasons. First, it shows that, contrary to long-held assumptions, questions related to war crimes and empire were part of Italy's public debate after 1945. Second, it challenges the notion of national forgetting of the imperial past in post-war Italy. Third, it helps us better understand the multiple and subtle connections between empire and international legal order in the interwar and the early post-war period. It shows that arguments based on race, which drew heavily on fascist rhetoric and were made within rather than outside the law, served to justify violations of international legal conventions before similar issues were raised during the wars of decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s.

Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s &lt;em&gt;Periodizing&lt;/em&gt; the Black Internal Colony

In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for Charles Olson and Sun Ra and Toni Morrison’s theorization of “Village Values” in her talk on the short-fiction of Toni Cade Bambara.

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's <i>Gardiennes d'images</i>

Making Sense of Mind-Boggling Violence

The First Vietnam War, better known to many as the First Indochina War (1945–1954), has always taken a back seat to other conflicts. When it comes to France’s wars of decolonization, French scholarship on the Algerian War (1954–1962) is far ahead. There are many reasons explaining this asymmetry, but the work of a new generation of French scholars since the early 2000s is one important factor. Historians like Emmanuel Blanchard, Raphaëlle Branche, and ­­Sylvie Thénault, to name but three, have expanded our understanding of the Algerian conflict with ­­theoretically sophisticated and carefully researched studies of violence, state, society, law, and memory making on both sides of the ­Mediterranean. Backing them up in English has been an equally impressive phalanx of cutting-edge scholarship, led by the likes of Todd Shephard, James House, and Neil ­­MacMaster. Strangely, the French study of the Indochinese War has experienced no such revival. Long-departed specialists, like...

Women's Rights and Global Socialism: Gendering Socialist Internationalism during the Cold War

AbstractThis Special Issue explores the complicated relationship between women's rights and global socialism during the Cold War. This Introduction describes how the articles deal with this relationship in three, partly overlapping, periods. The first set of articles looks at how the ethos of the Popular Front resonated among women's movements in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, and examines the connections between interwar anti-fascist and anti-imperialist feminisms and those that re-emerged after World War II. The second set of articles focuses on the role and development of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and its model of internationalism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China in the early Cold War. The final articles centre on the challenges faced by the WIDF from the 1960s, exploring issues such as the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, the Portuguese wars of decolonization, and the United Nations Decade for Women (1976–1985). Together with this process of decolonization, this Special Issue also examines how the consequences of postsocialism, in particular for women's rights (the loss of social rights, material security, and substantial challenges to reproductive freedoms), have triggered renewed debates about the history and legacies of communist women's liberation movements in the former socialist world.

Dutch Speaking to Dutch. Broadcasts from the Netherlands to Indonesia during the Decolonization War (1945–1949)

ABSTRACT Dutch international radio broadcaster Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (RNW) was founded in 1947, during the decolonization war in Indonesia. This paper explores the nature of the broadcasts to Indonesia in the early years of RNW. It is argued that these broadcasts must be seen in the context of the Dutch violent military effort to reestablish colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Moreover, this broadcasting strategy, which was mainly aimed at reaching out to white agents of empire in the Indonesian archipelago, can be seen as a continuation of broadcasting practices during the late colonial period in the 1930s, when Dutch were speaking to Dutch.

The intellectual as partisan: Sylvia Pankhurst and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia

ABSTRACT This article examines the feminist, communist and antifascist campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst as a postcolonial intellectual for our times. A forgotten figure in the history of anticolonialism, Pankhurst was active in the suffragette movement and then the communist movement, before devoting her political energies to supporting Ethiopia against the Italian invasion led by Mussolini in 1935. Pankhurst’s broadsheet New Times and Ethiopia News published articles denouncing the Italian occupation as well as writing by prominent African and Asian anticolonial voices. Through the analysis of Pankhurst, this article argues for an understanding of the postcolonial intellectual as a partisan who cuts across civilizational divides, bringing together metropolitan and colonial networks of resistance. I draw on Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan in which he describes the partisan, exemplified in the political combatant of the wars of decolonization, as the emblematic figure of twentieth-century warfare. I adapt Schmitt’s theory to read Pankhurst’s militancy in favour of Ethiopia in order to argue that the partisan is not only an insurgent fighter but an individual who takes sides in the interconnected struggles against colonialism and fascism. I thus gesture to the possibility of a global theory of resistance.

The Algerian War, The Algerian Revolution

The Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) was perhaps the bloodiest and most violent of the wars of decolonization. Its legacy continues to be felt and hotly debated by historians, journalists and both French and Algerian politicians. Natalya Vince’s book delves into these debates, providing a clear historiography, chronology of events and analysis of current polemics surrounding the conflict. While the majority of the literature on the conflict is in French, a few anglophone historians have produced narrative histories, the most notable of these being Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace and the more recent Algeria: France’s Undeclared War by Martin Evans. Vince, however, offers a refreshingly new perspective on the history of the conflict, predominantly focussing on Algerian viewpoints. This is first evidenced in the title of the book, with the inclusion of the term ‘Algerian Revolution’ (al-thawra al-jazāʾiriyya), favoured by the Algerians, rather than the more commonly employed ‘Algerian War’ which Vince argues reflects a French bias.

Who Controls the Past Controls the Future: How Algeria Manipulated History and Legitimated Power Using its Constitutional Charters and Legislation

Contemporary Algeria was born after 132 years of colonization and a bloody decolonization war that lasted almost eight years. The official version and the dominant historical narrative of the war of independence has been influencing the state-owned media, the process of memorialization and the education system for years. This article will focus on how history was manipulated and used to legitimate political power using ordinary legislation as well as the highest source of law: the constitution. This article argues that by studying Algerian legislation and the various constitutional charters we can obtain key insight into ways in which the triad of the state, the party, and the army has been able to reproduce and re-appropriate symbols and narratives of the nation through constitutional measures and/or amendments.

Human rights and fair access to COVID-19 vaccines: the International AIDS Society–Lancet Commission on Health and Human Rights

Human rights and fair access to COVID-19 vaccines: the International AIDS Society–Lancet Commission on Health and Human Rights

‘Forged in Battle’: The Transnational Origins and Formation of Apartheid South Africa’s 32 ‘Buffalo’ Battalion, 1969–1976

Recent scholarship has begun to study the transnational and non-national aspects of southern Africa’s wars of decolonisation. It has focused primarily on the liberation movements, their hosts and allies, but remained mostly silent on their opponents. In this article, we explore the transnational origins and formation of 32 ‘Buffalo’ Battalion of the apartheid-era South African Defence Force. Formed in late 1975, the unit was led by white South African officers but consisted predominantly of black former guerrillas of different Angolan nationalist movements. Using oral history interviews with former soldiers and recently declassified archival sources, we investigate how these ex-guerrillas came to be recruited into apartheid South Africa’s military. Our argument is that these troops’ transfer of allegiance must be understood in the light of the fragmentation of Angolan nationalist politics and of situational factors such as guerrillas’ alienation from remote political leaders, personal allegiances to particular commanders and the need for protection and resources. These elements greatly facilitated not just military recruitment into the South African military but the making of various opportunistic alliances across the board during Angola’s chaotic decolonisation process. In addition, we emphasise that the common depiction of 32 Battalion’s first recruits as ‘mercenaries’ is factually incorrect and, more importantly, fails to capture their motivations for joining the South African military, which ranged from sheer survival to pragmatism to personal loyalty.

Internationalizing Colonial War: on the Unintended Consequences of the Interventions of the International Committee of the Red Cross in South-East Asia, 1945–1949*

Abstract What is the relationship between decolonization and international law? Most historians agree that empires framed their colonial wars as emergencies in order to escape international scrutiny. After 1945, however, those same imperial powers invited the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to intervene in their wars of decolonization while resisting an official state of war. This article seeks to solve this puzzle by drawing attention to the ICRC’s critical part in reshaping the international legal system regarding colonial war in the critical years before the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) and the Bandung Conference (1955). In this formative period, the organization, together with anti-colonial activists, played a transformative role in contesting accepted ideas of global governance and international law while providing a new stage for anti-colonial resistance, with far-reaching consequences, not just for the ICRC’s own institutional future, but also for the legitimization of (post-)colonial sovereignty in the twentieth century.

The Three Ages of Algerian Emigration.1 By Abdelmalek Sayad.

The three ages of Algerian emigration was first published in 1977 in the Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales (Sayad 1977). Abdelmalek Sayad started his career as a research assistant for Pierre Bourdieu with whom he co-published Le deracinement: la crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algerie (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964), an ethnography of the transformations of Algerian Berber culture at the end of the decolonisation war. Back in France, he refocused his work on immigration and more specifically on the identity dynamics induced by the migration process. Sayad is now regarded as one of the founders of the French sociology of migrations2 and has gained international...

Hoe een gewelddadig verleden dwingt tot zelfonderzoek

Abstract How a violent past necessitates self-exploration. The Indonesian war of decolonization (1945-1949) and the debate about war crimes on radio and television In 2005 the Dutch government for the first time denounced the position it held during the Indonesian war of decolonization (1945-1949). In Jakarta the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ben Bot, declared that in those years the Dutch had been ‘on the wrong side of history’. Until then Dutch governments had been reluctant to publicly address the war and the crimes committed therein, even though these crimes had been brought into the open from 1969 onward in radio and television broadcasts. This article argues that as long as the violent past is not rethought, that past keeps on being news. Individuals may rethink their past in private. Governments have to do it publicly. Rethinking the past, Eelco Runia argued, is addressing the question, who are we that this could have happened? The Dutch do not need to rethink their past to reconcile themselves with the Indonesians, but to reconcile themselves with themselves.

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

Generating distrust through intelligence work: Psychological terror and the Dutch security services in Indonesia, 1945–1949

In insurgent wars, gaining reliable intelligence is of essential importance to both sides of the conflict. This paper examines the functioning of Dutch intelligence and security services in the Indonesian decolonization war (1945–1949), focusing in particular on their practices of arresting people to be questioned or interrogated. On the basis of interrogation reports produced by the various intelligence and security services, it argues that the arrest and interrogation practices of the intelligence apparatus itself should be seen as a form of violence. These practices created a psychological terror that forced ‘ordinary’ citizens to choose a side, exposing them to retribution from the other. The consequence was increasing social distrust, with potentially long-lasting effects.