Gathering researchers from or towards Global South epistemologies, this book enriches the debate on crucial questions for liberation in the South and the improvement of South relations. It argues that coloniality and colonialism are not outdated phenomena of the historical past, but contemporary marks that remain repressed. The dominance of Eurocentric paradigm in the social sciences explains the long-lasting detachment between thinkers and politicians from the Global South, which have been historically presented according to their respective relations with the West (Europe and North America). The dialogue on common problems and challenges to people and societies in the South, largely derived from their colonial past and condition, is still sparing. This book actively promotes and demonstrates the value of intercultural dialogue and debate amongst voices from within the Global South on issues to do with decoloniality, cultural rights, law and politics.

Decolonisation and Regional Geopolitics argues that as much as the ‘Congo crisis’ (1960-1965) was a Cold War battleground, so too was it a battleground for Southern Africa’s decolonisation. This book provides a transnational history of African decolonisation, apartheid diplomacy, and Southern African nationalist movements. It answers three central questions. First, what was the nature of South African involvement in the Congo crisis? Second, what was the rationale for this involvement? Third, how did South Africans perceive the crisis? Innovatively, the book shifts the focus on the Congo crisis away from Cold War intervention and centres it around African decolonisation and regional geopolitics.

An introduction to African history and politics since decolonization, emphasising the political, economic and socio-economic diversity of the continent.

Between 1945 and 1965, more than fifty nations declared their independence from colonial rule. At the height of the Cold War, the global process of decolonization complicated US-Soviet relations, while Soviet and American interventionism transformed the decolonizing process. Remaking the World examines the connections between the Cold War and decolonization. Through six carefully selected case studies—India, Egypt, the Congo, Vietnam, Angola, and Iran—historian Jessica M. Chapman addresses the shifting of Soviet, American, Chinese, and Cuban policies, the centrality of modernization, the role of the United Nations, the influence of regional actors like Israel and South Africa, and seminal post–Vietnam War shifts in the international system. Each case study analyzes at least one geopolitical turning point, demonstrating that the Cold War and decolonization were mutually constitutive processes in which local, national, and regional developments altered the superpower competition. Chapman presents the complexities of international relations and the ways in which local communist and democratic movements differed from their Soviet and American ties, as did their visions for independence and success.

What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Political Decolonization, Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial accomplishment of political independence or self-determination in Ghana. He argues that political independence is insufficiently a decolonial claim because it is framed within the context of a country, where a permanent colonial settlement was never deemed necessary for the consolidation of future colonial political obligations. So, while territorial dissolution was politically engineered by Ghanaians, the colonial merely reconstitutes itself in different legal and ideological forms. Forjwuor offers new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to engaging the questions of colonialism, political independence, political decolonization, justice, and freedom, and constructs multiple conceptual bridges between traditional disciplinary fields of inquiry including politics, history, law, African studies, economic history, critical theory, and philosophy and political theory. Using the Ghanaian experience as a rich case study, Forjwuor rethinks what colonialism and decolonization mean, and asserts that decolonization is primarily a question of justice.

Through six carefully selected case studies - India, Egypt, the Congo, Vietnam, Angola, and Iran - historian Jessica M. Chapman addresses the shifting of Soviet, American, Chinese, and Cuban policies, the centrality of modernisation, the role of the United Nations, the often-outsized influence of regional actors like Israel and South Africa, and seminal post-Vietnam War shifts in the international system. Each of the case studies analyses at least one geopolitical turning point, demonstrating that the Cold War and decolonisation were mutually constitutive processes in which local, national, and regional developments altered the superpower competition. Chapman presents a picture of the complexities of international relations and the ways in which local communist and democratic movements differed from their Soviet and American ties, as did their visions for independence and success.

An important building block for further advancing world-system theory, this book considers the theory from the perspectives of global processes and antisystemic movements, feminist theory, and the aftermath of the colonial system. The volume addresses three myths tied to Eurocentric forms of thinking: objectivist and universalist knowledges, the decolonization of the modern world, and developmentalism. All three myths, the authors argue, conceal the continued hierarchical and unequal relations of domination and exploitation between European and Euro-American centers and non-European peripheral regions. In this volume, world-system scholars address these and related aspects of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. Addressing the myth of universalist knowledge, the volume reminds us that our knowledge is situated in the gender, class, racial, and sexual hierarchies of a specific region in the world-system, while the coloniality of power additionally situates our knowledge. The volume further argues that the postcolonial era retains the hierarchy of colonialism, and the possibility of national development without global structural changes is one of the greatest 20th-century myths. Taking these perspectives into consideration, the contributors examine and help to refine classic world-system theory.