Decolonisation talk is everywhere. Scholars write books about decolonising elite universities. The government of India, a country that has been independent for 77 years, built a new parliament building in order to ‘remove all traces of the colonial era’. There are infographics on how to decolonise introductory psychology courses and guides on how businesses may decolonise their work places. Some Christians from regions that used to be colonies look to decolonise mission work through Biblical readings of Christ’s suffering. Why have expressions of decolonisation become so popular? And is there coherence to these many disparate uses of the term?
All these varied and even contradictory forms of decolonisation talk seek to draw upon the moral authority, impact and popular legitimacy of the 20th century’s great anticolonial liberation movements. And it is the gap between these movements’ promise of liberation and the actuality of continued power inequalities even after independence that has given the analytical and political space for such a wide, eclectic and contrasting array of individuals, groups and projects to wield the concept of ‘decolonisation’ to generate support for their endeavours. In the process, decolonisation talk has become more and more attenuated from the historical events of decolonisation.
The events of decolonisation involved colonised peoples, predominantly in Asia and Africa, rising up in the mid-20th century and overthrowing colonial systems of rule. National liberation movements that became postcolonial governments transformed the world order through the historical events of decolonisation. In 1945, for example, there were just 64 independent states, while today there are between 193 and 205, depending on who counts them. Before the Second World War, there were only three sovereign states with a Black head of state – Ethiopia, Haiti and Liberia.
Colonialism itself was uneven, complex and variegated. In practice, empires ruled by governing different communities differently, intensifying and maintaining often elaborate hierarchies of communities based on region, race, religion or ethnicity. For instance, colonial life looked very different in the French settler colonial cities of Algiers and Oran than it did in the Berber regions of Eastern Algeria. British colonial India was a patchwork of direct rule, princely states that were semi-autonomous regarding domestic policy, and excluded areas with a rather light imperial footprint, among other political configurations.
Other examples of colonial difference include the US insular island cases (1901), which determined that particular territories seized during the Spanish-American War would have unequal legal relationships with the continental United States: Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines were made into unincorporated territories where the US constitution did not fully apply, while Hawaii (and Alaska) were placed on the path to US statehood. Elsewhere, in East Africa, the German Empire recruited African soldiers who became a class of colonial intermediaries. The Japanese Empire included direct occupations in Manchuria and Korea with collaborations with anticolonial nationalists in Burma and Indonesia. Yet amid all the complexity, popular understandings of colonialism today have a clear iconography of Western conquest – of maps, pith helmets and boots bestriding non-Western continents.
In contrast to the seeming clarity of colonialism (however much it elides that process’s own complications), current discussions of decolonisation can seem amorphous and slippery. This is not surprising since so many different people and groups are using the concept, at times at cross purposes. There are many forms of decolonisation talk drawn from the realms of culture, education, economics, politics, ideology, psychology, business, religion and more. They include postimperial (related to places that used to be empires or to institutions that used to facilitate empire) and postcolonial (related to places that used to be colonies, or to dependent power relationships created by colonialism) institutions and nations.
People across the political spectrum invoke decolonisation as an ideal and claim to represent its spirit. Some of these decolonisation discourses come from regions in what we now call the Global South, countries that were former colonies or have had continuously dependent economic relationships with postimperial countries and institutions. Calls for decolonisation coming from those regions seek more autonomy and freedom for these postcolonial countries, though they do not necessarily share the same political orientation. There are demands for economic decolonisation, as the New International Economic Order made in the 1970s. There are also claims for the need for cultural decolonisation, as the Indian government does today, which the anthropologist Alpa Shah considers a hijacking of the original concept.
Decolonisation talk also emanates from those affiliated with metropolitan or postimperial institutions, such as universities or corporations. Calls to decolonise curriculums, disciplines and university programmes seek to shift which ideas and communities should be the primary focus for these institutions’ prestige and resources. They highlight some of the seemingly surprising, even counterintuitive applications of decolonisation talk – that it can come from former centres and even agents of empire, such as universities that trained imperial civil servants. Even museums built upon collections amassed through colonial conquest promote their decolonising work.
During the summer of 1960, the United Nations seemed to recognise a new member state every week
We also hear people today use the term ‘decolonisation’ as a pejorative, in order to critique movements that seek to revise the contemporary status quo of international politics, such as those for Palestinian statehood. This is not an exhaustive set of cases. Readers will identify others. But we can see from the use of the term in economics, culture, education and political ideology that it’s a malleable concept and one a lot of people want to use and claim, in both celebration and critique. As the formal political independence moment of the mid-20th century has receded in time, decolonisation has grown less clearly tied to specific events.
Historical decolonisation, the 20th-century process where empires were broken up into independent states through a combination of warfare, protest and political negotiation – was the most significant global event since the Second World War. In the decades following 1945, more than 50 countries, primarily in Asia and on the African continent, gained their independence, mostly from European empires. The creation of newly independent states reached its apex in 1960, when 17 European colonies on the African continent gained independent statehood, such as the Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Madagascar and Somalia. During the summer of 1960, the United Nations seemed to recognise a new member state every week and national independence from colonial control became an international norm.
Countries had different paths to independence. India and Pakistan achieved self-rule (1947) through long, drawn-out, predominantly non-violent mass civil society protest movements. The Dutch were forced to accept Indonesia’s independence (1949) when they lost US financial recovery aid. Algeria (1962) won a war of national liberation. Zambia (1964) had a nationalist leader, Kenneth Kaunda, who held authority with fellow nationals as a legitimate anticolonial figure and also was recognised by US and UK mining companies as a reliable negotiating partner. Botswana became independent (1966) with its original capital located in a different country, as the UK government sought to quickly divest from an increasingly unpopular and financially unsustainable empire.
‘Decolonisation’ – the word for this transformation from a world of empires to that of postimperial and postcolonial states – was first a scholar’s or bureaucrat’s term, a description that gained popularity after the fact for the events it described. Outside of Frantz Fanon (himself a scholar) or some of the imperial civil servants that sought to constrain nationalist independence movements, few physically involved in the historic events of mid-20th-century decolonisation used the term itself at the time. Independence movements generally spoke of national liberation, which signalled the active purpose of their struggle. ‘Decolonisation’ has passivity embedded within. It does not point to who were the colonial subjects or who was the colonial ruler, who fought for independence or who fought to prevent it.
Since the word does not identify or signal who might be the specific actors responsible for ending (or perpetuating) colonial rule, it was a fundamentally small-c conservative label for revolutionary forms of politics – of regime change. The passive voice, the lack of a clear, active subject, has also helped to create analytical space for multiple and mutating meanings, which have made the term popular with governments and relatively powerful institutions today who can benefit from such strategic ambiguity.
Amid the moral legacy of national liberation movements’ pursuit of independence, the passivity embedded in the actual term, and the reappearance of decolonisation talk, it is worth remembering that, for many communities, the promise of such liberation remains largely unfulfilled. Not all peoples who sought national independence at the end of colonial rule received statehood. Kurds and Palestinians, Nagas and Tibetans, Catalans and West Papuans, among many others, have claimed independence without receiving the international recognition of statehood for their nationalist movement.
In addition, not all governments have fully enfranchised peoples claiming that they have been colonised and deserve national sovereignty: Uyghurs in China and Roma in Europe can attest to this. And for many postcolonial states, political sovereignty did not lead to economic empowerment in global systems of trade and resource extraction. Today, refugees and migrants regularly risk their lives in search of viable livelihoods, demonstrating the limits of the political decolonisation of the 20th century in fulfilling the goals of nationalist revolutionaries. Since the promise of decolonisation remains so clearly incomplete, the concept remains open to continuous interpretation.
Soon after the wave of political independence of former colonies in the 20th century, critics of neocolonial power relationships promoted the continuing need for economic decolonisation. As Margarita Fajardo has shown, Latin American international civil servants who founded and operated CEPAL – the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean – sought to broaden the project of political independence to include economic and social rights. Their endeavour, which began in the late-1940s, before national self-determination became an international norm, remains ongoing. Economic dependency theorists, cepalinos, advocates of the New International Economic Order and their heirs all called for decolonisation following political independence. They wanted to found a democratic global order of economically sovereign states with greater economic and social prosperity than that allowed by the postcolonial world order.
The Argentine economist and UN bureaucrat Raúl Prebisch emerged as a central figure in the movement for economic decolonisation. Prebisch’s leadership of CEPAL (1950-63) and then as founding secretary general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) supported the creation in 1964 of the group of 77 ‘developing countries’ (G-77) to ‘promote their collective economic interests and enhance their joint negotiating capacity on all major international economic issues.’ The G-77 was (and is, now made up of 134 countries) a group of Latin American, Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries that sought to reinforce each other’s political and economic sovereignty. They harmonised their views on global economic issues and worked for higher prices in global economic markets for the raw commodities their nations produced. The demand that greater economic equality – not just political independence – was part of decolonisation transformed what had been a set of movements to overthrow colonial rule into a mode of analysis employed by postcolonial states for challenging enduring hierarchies of economic power.
India assumed global standing as the exemplary case of peaceful, successful, anticolonial national liberation
Due to the power of a US-led global financial order, few of these economic decolonisation projects achieved their goals. However, their impact included the 1973 Oil Embargo where the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) used their control of a tight energy market to punish countries that had allied with Israel during the 1973 War, including the US. The embargo caused Western countries to become less reliant on Middle Eastern oil. In addition, the international economic boycott and divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa helped isolate the regime and push it towards negotiations by 1990. In this way, the economic projects of CEPAL, UNCTAD, the G-77 and those in their surrounding orbits shifted decolonisation from a historical process to a critical analysis of enduring economic inequality.
The Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi in India, which governs the largest postcolonial state in the world, has championed a very different decolonisation discourse, that of cultural decolonisation. India became independent in 1947, to a large extent through the peaceful popular mobilisation of the anticolonial leader M K Gandhi. After independence, India assumed global standing as the exemplary case of peaceful, successful, anticolonial national liberation in general perception. The government of Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64) offered strong rhetorical support to decolonisation efforts across the world.
Nehru was a British-trained lawyer who traded his Western tailoring for traditional Indian clothes. In broad, simplistic strokes, Nehru came to symbolise a modern idiom of Indian politics – of the constitution, administration and secularism, meaning that the Indian state had no established religion. In contrast, Gandhi embodied a saintly idiom, focused on voluntary sacrifice, nonviolence even at the potential cost of life, attempting to reform politics by remaining at a distance from the functions of government. Modi himself has embraced a traditional idiom, connected to popular mobilisation along lines of religion and caste.
Modi is not only India’s head of government since 2014. He is the central figure of a large, organised, popular movement, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) constructed around a form of politicised Hinduism (Hindutva) as well as the Hindi language (which is not the birth-language of most Indians) in national politics. The Modi regime has attempted to re-cast Nehru’s ‘secular modernity’ as a form of self-hating, colonial hangover. Modi has argued that independent India continues to require decolonisation from English-language education, as well as from the legacies of Muslim Mughal rule (1526-1857) which predated the British Raj. This call for cultural decolonisation combines the BJP’s ideological commitment to Hinduism and the Hindi language (the bridge language of the regions from which the party draws upon for its traditional strength) with Modi’s political charisma and skill.
The Modi government uses cultural decolonisation talk to combat Nehruvian secularism. They consider British imperial cultural remnants such as the English language within contemporary India and the presence of Islam as necessary targets for decolonisation. Since Nehru was a famous anticolonial nationalist leader during the events of historical decolonisation, it is ironic that the BJP has claimed that his legacy now requires cultural decolonisation.
The Modi regime’s use of decolonisation talk highlights the continuities between imperial cultural institutions and practices – of law, racism, language – in postcolonial states. Colonial governments prioritised European over vernacular languages, provided administrative and military jobs to particular communities defined by race or religion (or both), and enshrined these distinctions and illiberal forms of divide-and-rule into legal codes. Yet, with the exception of the anti-English-language policies, the Indian government does little to divest itself of the tools from the British Empire that they still find useful. For example, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 originated in a piece of British colonial law that shields the military from legal accountability in particular regions where it is deployed. The Indian government is not planning to decolonise itself of such a potent tool of government, despite its imperial origins. This logic of power is unsurprising. However, it remains seemingly incongruous for a dominant government, rather than dissidents or protestors, to wield decolonisation talk, a shift from the concept’s original meaning. While both economic decolonisation and cultural decolonisation are reappraisals of the results of historic decolonisation, the latter represents a change in who mobilises the discourse: from those who resist powerful established governments, to one of those governments itself. Therefore, it is a reconstitution of the history of decolonisation.
Students, scholars and activists within elite metropolitan and postimperial institutions also engage in decolonisation talk. An exemplary case is the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which originated as a student protest against a large bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa (a postimperial institution set up under empire) and spread globally, with particular resonance at the University of Oxford in the UK (a metropolitan institution located at the former empire’s centre).
Rhodes served as the prime minister of the Cape Colony in British South Africa, colonised Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia), and donated the land on which the University of Cape Town was constructed, as well as the endowment for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. In 2015, students at Cape Town demanded the removal of his statue on campus and called for the ‘decolonisation of education’. They launched a series of protests and an occupation of the university, which eventually removed the statue. Student protesters saw the university as ‘a microcosm of society’. What did it mean for contemporary South Africa that their university held ‘a landmark that bears this person’s name’? What can ‘decolonisation’ mean for those who attend a university built upon the legacy of one of the ultimate imperialists?
A new form of decolonisation talk, responding to the Gaza War, utilises ‘decolonisation’ as a pejorative
The Rhodes Must Fall protests spread nationally in South Africa and globally. They focused on emblematic images of colonialism and apartheid, which was the legal policy of racial segregation, discrimination and disenfranchisement in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. The movement’s protests extended into calls for the decolonisation of education as a broad aspiration. They sought to shift whose histories curriculums celebrate or endorse – those who built empire, such as Rhodes, or those from historically disenfranchised communities? Valuable and important political ideals are by no means the unique property of Europeans and their descendants. The movement also focused its attention on which people should have access to the material resources of elite educational institutions such as scholarships, places at universities and employment opportunities. In this way, the call to decolonise education attempted to link the moral legitimacy of anticolonialism (and, in South Africa, the anti-apartheid movement) to conversations of decolonising curriculums, syllabuses and institutions.
The people – economists and civil servants, heads of government, and student protest movement members – who call for economic, cultural and educational decolonisation all claim the legacy of anticolonial national liberation movements and link their professional aspirations to that legacy. They draw upon the political legitimacy of these historic struggles against empire, even as they call for further transformations. In contrast, there is a relatively new form of decolonisation talk, responding to the Gaza War, that utilises ‘decolonisation’ as a pejorative. In a piece in The Atlantic in October 2023, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore called decolonisation an ideology ‘taught in our universities as a theory of history’ that supports Palestinian self-determination at the expense of Israeli sovereignty. He argued that decolonisation ideology ‘dehumanises [the] entire nation’ of Israel. This condemnation and description of decolonisation ideology reacts to and reflects upon educational decolonisation, rather than the historic events of decolonisation.
All these discourses of economic, cultural, educational and ideological decolonisation are not compatible with each other. Economic decolonisation, for which Prebisch’s work and career were emblematic, critiqued the power of postimperial states to economically control ‘developing’ countries. In contrast, Modi’s call for cultural decolonisation has sought to strengthen the influence of his governmental authority within a postcolonial state (that was a symbol of historic decolonisation’s national liberation) by revising that same history. The Rhodes Must Fall protest movement and its global responses have focused on elite institutions that were at the heart of empire as they attempt to reconfigure who are the primary beneficiaries of those institutions’ resources, prestige and perceived legitimacy. In riposte, Sebag Montefiore’s characterisation of ‘decolonisation ideology’, ascribes a level of political influence and raw power to the ‘decolonisation of education’ that proponents of the movement have not attained.
As the actual events of historical decolonisation grow more distant, forms of decolonisation talk increase. Decolonisation was once primarily a scholar’s term that effectively depolarised violent national liberation. Now it ascribes radicalism to projects in the realms of economics, culture, education and ideology – spheres whose purpose is not violent regime change.
Historical decolonisation was an international liberation project that reached the height of its political optimism in the 1960s and ’70s. It also provided an attractive source of inspiration and even analogy for movements that sought to rectify racism and other forms of injustice in the US and elsewhere. These connections dissolved as many postcolonial states were unable to provide peace and prosperity to their residents and citizens, the Black freedom movement grew less united, and deindustrialisation in so-called ‘developed’ countries (and the perception that it was caused by cheap imports and labour from predominantly postcolonial countries) eroded global solidarities.
The declining appeal of historical decolonisation led to its transformation into decolonisation talk. At the same time, it is the original promise (and the perceived viability of postcolonial states to deliver upon that promise) of its national liberatory potential that has made it a recurring source material to legitimise movements, even – or especially – for those whose aims are far removed from historic decolonisation’s regime change. While historic decolonisation is a continued reservoir of legitimacy for decolonisation talk, its inability to deliver liberation to many has created the space for so many discourses to flourish, even as they become increasingly distant from the history of decolonisation.
