Decolonization & Nationalism

In den 1990er und 2000er Jahren diskutierten britische Politiker, Akademiker und Journalisten öffentlich über die Definition britischer nationaler Identität, kurz Britishness. Aus der Perspektive der neuen Ideengeschichte versteht diese Studie die Debatte als Teil eines seit den späten 1960er Jahren andauernden Aushandlungsprozesses. Fragen nationaler und gesellschaftlicher Zugehörigkeit wurden zur Chiffre im Umgang mit wirtschaftlichen, politischen und demographischen Veränderungen wie dem Ende des Empire, den Forderungen nach schottischer und walisischer Selbstbestimmung sowie der Sorge um die Konsequenzen postkolonialer Einwanderung, die die bis dahin bestehende Sozialordnung in Frage stellten. Almuth Ebke ordnet dabei nicht nur die einzelnen Debattenstränge in den historischen Kontext ein, sondern untersucht auch den damit zusammenhängenden Wandel der Begriffe, die zur Beschreibung sozialer Zugehörigkeit verwendet wurden. Aus dieser Perspektive gelingt es nicht nur, bis heute verwendete Analysekategorien wie „nationale Identität“ historisch zu verorten. Aktuelle Debatten wie um den Brexit werden darüber hinaus als gegenwärtige Ausprägungen einer schon viel länger ablaufenden Selbstverständigungsdebatte in Großbritannien sichtbar.

Closely associated with China’s growing prominence in international politics are discussions about how to understand Chinese history, and how such perspectives inform the way a stronger China may relate to the rest of the world. This article examines two narratives as cases, and considers how they fit against more careful historical scholarship. The first is the nationalist narrative dealing with Qing and Republican history, and the second is the narrative on the Chinese world order. Analyses of Chinese nationalism tend to see a more powerful China as being more assertive internationally, based in part on a belief in the need to address and overcome past wrongs. Studies of historical regional systems in Asia point to the role that a peaceful ‘Confucian’ ethos played in sustaining a stable Chinese-led order, and highlight the promise it holds for checking regional and international tensions. The two perspectives create an obvious tension when trying to understand China’s rise, which can suggest that using historical viewpoints to understand contemporary developments may be doomed to incoherence. This article argues that difficulties in applying knowledge of the past to analyses of China’s role in contemporary world politics indicate a relative inattentiveness to Chinese and Asian history. It illustrates how the nature of China’s rise may be more contingent on the external environment that it faces than popular received wisdom may indicate. The article suggests that a more extensive engagement with historical research and historiography can augment and enrich attempts to appreciate the context surrounding China’s rise.

During the interwar years, Moroccan anti-colonial activists organized a propaganda campaign abroad to discredit the French and Spanish protectorates that had been established in 1912. Yet it was not the famous nationalist leaders from the country's major urban centres but a small group from the marginalized northern city of Tetuan that played a pivotal role in the internationalization of the Moroccan question. This article demonstrates that, by analysing the emergence of Morocco's nationalist movement through a transnational framework, rather than within the confines of the nation-state, we can rearrange the geographical and political hierarchies of local history as previously disregarded individuals and locations suddenly emerge to the forefront of the narrative.

This chapter examines the development of the concept of international jus cogens at the 1968–69 Vienna Conference on the Law of Treaties. First, it argues that investigating the conditions under which jus cogens entered into widespread international legal discourse demonstrates that many elements of international law that are typically deemed axiomatic are in fact generated through sustained competition. Contemporary international law claims "universality", but jus cogens, arguably the strongest source of this claim, was constructed through far-reaching conflicts between competing world visions. Second, it argues that jus cogens’ contentious history highlights the difficulty of developing an emancipatory political programme through lofty appraisals of international law’s normative force. Jus cogens has contributed only marginally to the effort to consolidate the achievements of decolonization, proving no more valuable a means of furthering respect for sovereign equality or facilitating global redistributions of wealth than the formalism it was intended to supplant.

Veteran politician, inveterate rebel, self-styled defender of progressive values; Mian Iftikhar-ud-Din remains one of the most intriguing individuals to have been associated with the Pakistan movement and the Muslim League. As an outspoken advocate of Muslim self-determination and Pakistan, the inclusion of Mian Iftikhar-ud-Din in this volume might seem like an odd choice indeed. And yet, his political journey reveals much about the tense political climate of the 1940s and the impossible choices that many were confronted with at the time. More importantly, though, his politics also provides an insight into the varied dreams and aspirations that were tied to the idea of Pakistan. In doing so, Mian Iftikhar-ud-Din's political trajectory also contributes to a deeper understanding of relatively neglected aspects of the Pakistan movement and the early years of the nascent post-colonial state when many of those utopian dreams turned sour.

This article focuses on the role of ethnic ideological polarization in consociational democracies. Theories usually present ethnic discourses as a potential impediment to the success of consociation, which therefore has to be contended. But in the case of Mauritius, where consociation was the political tool used to ease the transition from plural society to independence (achieved in 1968), ethnic propaganda, mainly embodied in an alleged “Hindu menace” and its counterparts, played a regulatory role in the setting up of the Mauritian model of democracy.

Cet article a pour objectif d’examiner le rôle des arguments identitaires de type ethnique dans la mise en place de la démocratie consociative, à partir du cas mauricien. Les théories de la consociation présentent généralement la surenchère identitaire comme une dérive des systèmes consociatifs. Mais nous verrons qu’à l’île Maurice, où la consociation a permis la transition politique de la société plurale vers l’indépendance (1947–1968), l’argument d’un “péril hindou”, agité par les opposants à l’indépendance, a constitué, malgré son caractère stigmatisant, un mécanisme à part entière, voire même un régulateur du fonctionnement de la démocratie mauricienne.

"By establishing the dangerous limitations of postcolonial theory, this essay explores the invisibility of Puerto Rico’s colonial status. Mainly, it argues that postcolonial theory has enabled U.S. Congress to keep Puerto Rico as a territory. Using selected quotes from the last three Congressional Hearings on the status of the island, this paper illustrates two basic patterns by which this is done: by employing rhetoric of a caring and compassionate democracy and by employing a “tied hands and loose mouths” approach. The paper concludes that in order to decolonize a territory like Puerto Rico, modifying a political status alone is not enough if other colonial aspects remain in place."

This article studied the international apartheid debate in the early 1960s, putting precedence on how African and Afrikaner nationalists competed to define political 'order' after second-wave decolonization. It won the 2010 Stuart L. Bernath prize for best article in the field of American foreign relations history.

This volume is the first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. More particularly, the book strengthens and improves one of the most important and popular current streams of cultural sociology, that of collective trauma. Using a comparative perspective to study the trajectories of similarly traumatized groups in different countries allows for not only a thick description of the return processes but also a thick explanation of the mechanisms and factors shaping them. Learning from these various cases of colonial returnees, the authors have been able to develop a new theoretical framework that may help cultural sociologists to explain why seemingly similar claims of collective trauma and victimhood garner respect and recognition in certain contexts but fail in others.

A curriculum can be defined as a plan for action or a written document that includes strategies for achieving desired goals or ends . A curriculum determines what should be taught and how it should be taught. A curriculum is informed by who colonized hence we cannot talk of a Eurocentric curriculum without including colonialism within it. Colonialism and education has been identified as instruments

Best's body of ideas -which form the heart of the distinctive Tapia stream -is perhaps most notable because it is an unorthodoxy which is not a variant of radicalism or rebellion. By this I mean that Best's unorthodoxy has not been motivated by a sense of dispossession and the desire to right historical wrongs.

Le rôle des citoyens mauriciens dans la construction de la République. Conférence de Catherine Boudet à Port-Louis, le 10 mars 2020 dans le cadre de la table-ronde sur "Maurice, sommes-nous en République ?". Après 52 ans d'indépendance et 28 ans de République, on constate en 2020 que le républicanisme mauricien n'existe que sur le papier. L'accession de Maurice au statut de République en 1992 est resté essentiellement technique. La Constitution reste élitiste et défend davantage les intérêts de la classe politique que l'intérêt général, tandis que la plupart des lois restent répressives envers les citoyens au lieu d'assurer leur protection. Cette présentation vise, tout en présentant les principes du républicanisme, à questionner quel peut être le rôle des citoyens mauriciens dans la mise en oeuvre d'une République effective, qui reste encore à construire.

Introduction by Tuong Vu, University of Oregon ..................................................................... 2 Review by Joseph M. Parent, University of Miami ................................................................... 5 Review by Thomas B. Pepinsky, Cornell University .................................................................. 7 Review by Feng Zhang, The Australian National University ................................................... 10 Author’s Response by Ja Ian Chong, National University of Singapore.................................. 14

http://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-7-5.pdf

"Recasting the Region studies the trajectories of Muslim Bengali politics and examines the literary and cultural history of Bengali Muslims from the early twentieth century until the 1952 Language Movement. It argues that Muslim political mobilization in late colonial Bengal did not emanate from north Indian calls for a separatist 'Muslim' state of Pakistan, but rather emerged out of a sustained engagement with local Bengali intellectual and literary traditions.

In six chapters, the book features meticulous research on topics like the pursuit of folklore, literary modernism, and intellectual movements in both Dhaka and Kolkata in the late colonial period. Examining language literary texts, the social histories of newspaper and magazine offices, and the writings of Bengali Muslim politicians and intellectuals, the book delves into the meaning of nationalism and decolonization for the Bengali Muslims.

Focusing on the cultural history of the largest Muslim population of the colonial era, the Bengali Muslims, this work utilizes heretofore unexplored Bengali sources as well as offers a new interpretation of the emergence of the state of Pakistan."