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Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published November 30, 2020
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About the author
Mahmood Mamdani
33 books259 followersMahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
Mamdani is married to Mira Nair, the acclaimed Indian film director and producer. Mamdani and Nair's only son, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor-elect of New York City.
Mamdani is married to Mira Nair, the acclaimed Indian film director and producer. Mamdani and Nair's only son, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor-elect of New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
October 14, 2021
Mamdani's central thesis is that the birth of the nation-state emerged from colonialism, and that the colonizer (often the British, etc.) worked to politicize and entrench ethnic and religious differences in a divide and conquer strategy that gave new political meaning to difference and led to a more violent order. Each identity, which had been malleable previously, was turned into a hardened political group in competition for the nation-state, and only one identity group could claim the nation-state and wield power over the other minorities. Even after the departure of the colonizer, this logic of the nation-state has remained. This helps explain the outbreak in civil wars, genocide, and other major violence in the post-colonial period.
The next point in Mamdani's argument is that the human rights framework has failed to find a solution to these outbreaks in violence because it analyzes the problem as one of individuals rather than peoples or ideologies, and criminalizes certain individuals in a very narrow model, that of the Nuremberg model. He shows the South African anti-apartheid movement as an example of the opposite, where anti-apartheid activists redefined race and Blackness.... Mamdani's examples are Germany and failed denazification; Israel as the outcome of this same European nation-state model; the US and its system of reservations and genocide which initially inspired Hitler; South Africa and its anti-apartheid struggle; Sudan and South Sudan where the British artificially separated 'Arab' from 'African' and created politicized tribal homelands, leading to genocide. But the same thesis could apply to, and helps explain, Syria and Lebanon in the ways that colonialism entrenched sectarian differences into political domination, the partition of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, and many more....
There were a few problems within his chapters, for example he thinks that Israelis need to be convinced of a progressive alternative by Palestinians and that will change the balance of power (not likely, by our measure!); he sees the US as moving to include Black people but not Indigenous/Native Americans (hardly!); and of course a lack of class analysis or focus on anti-fascist efforts or experience.... Still I highly recommend as it helps explain massive violence in countries worldwide in the post-colonial moment.
The next point in Mamdani's argument is that the human rights framework has failed to find a solution to these outbreaks in violence because it analyzes the problem as one of individuals rather than peoples or ideologies, and criminalizes certain individuals in a very narrow model, that of the Nuremberg model. He shows the South African anti-apartheid movement as an example of the opposite, where anti-apartheid activists redefined race and Blackness.... Mamdani's examples are Germany and failed denazification; Israel as the outcome of this same European nation-state model; the US and its system of reservations and genocide which initially inspired Hitler; South Africa and its anti-apartheid struggle; Sudan and South Sudan where the British artificially separated 'Arab' from 'African' and created politicized tribal homelands, leading to genocide. But the same thesis could apply to, and helps explain, Syria and Lebanon in the ways that colonialism entrenched sectarian differences into political domination, the partition of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, and many more....
There were a few problems within his chapters, for example he thinks that Israelis need to be convinced of a progressive alternative by Palestinians and that will change the balance of power (not likely, by our measure!); he sees the US as moving to include Black people but not Indigenous/Native Americans (hardly!); and of course a lack of class analysis or focus on anti-fascist efforts or experience.... Still I highly recommend as it helps explain massive violence in countries worldwide in the post-colonial moment.
December 22, 2024
This is a fantastic book. World-spanning, epoch-capturing, but let down, ever so slightly, by a certain political naïvety. But first, the good stuff. More than anything, what Mamdani has shown here is the specificity of our post-colonial present: that the colony and its afterlives are, in fact, a present, and not just a long forgotten past, swamped over by the march of a homogenising globalisation. Which is to say: even as we live in an age characterised by the “end of colonialism”, what has been reproduced everywhere are the dynamics of colonialism in conditions other than directly colonial ones. Despite having wrested self-determination for themselves, many ex-colonies have nonetheless been left with the poisoned inheritance of colonial governing structures, whose extraordinary capacities for violence remain continuous with their pasts.
Hence the pattern of distinctively post-colonial violence laid out here, violence not simply arbitrary or the mark of ‘backward’ peoples or ‘ancient’ hatreds, but instead modes of ruin shaped and given form by the contemporaneity of yet unreckoned-with colonialism. Central to the narrative here is the yoking of the post-colonial nation to the post-colonial state, with both sitting uneasily - and sometimes in murderous concatenation - in the form of the ‘nation-state’. For Mamdani, this fatal conjunction between the state-form - which offers indiscriminate legal equality to all within a territory - and the the nation-form - a political community defined instead by particularist membership - has never found adequate resolution except in ongoing legacies of apartheid, genocide and continual war.
Against the nation-state then, does Mamdani opt instead for a future of states without nations. It’s a bold, even utopian vision, but one throughly informed by the bloody histories of nation-formation. For at stake in the book is precisely an effort to ‘politicize’ nations, that is, to show their throughly constructed nature, not as ‘natural’ givens merely stumbled upon by colonial governments, but actively and even aggressively assembled by them, all the better to rule over. “Define and Rule”, so goes the title of Mamdani’s previous book, whose implications are carried over here into telling a global story of our post-colonial condition.
In saying all this Mamdani is not exactly out to make friends. By challenging the naturalness of the ‘nation’, so too is the designation of ‘native’ put under massive strain. Understood here not as aboriginal peoples with ‘original’ claims to land and rights, but as continually constructed communities with distinctive claims against others in the state, even ‘native’ marks a colonial holdover in need of undoing. While native claims have indeed been successfully used as bulwarks against settler expropriation, for Mamdani, the settler-native distinction is itself a double-edged sword whose benefits have come at costs now too high to continue bearing. On offer instead is the title of the book: neither settler nor native. The alternative being the political subjectivity of the survivor.
Mamdani’s model here is post-apartheid South Africa, which, on his telling, at least had some success in bringing the perpetrators of apartheid… not exactly to justice, so much as to the same table in order to work out a shared future, however unevenly. This at least politicised the country’s future, in contrast to the mostly prevailing ‘Nuremberg model’ of criminal justice, which, by individualising responsibility, closed off avenues of common reckoning, and enabled - in fact still enables, in the form of the UN's International Criminal Court, for example - colonial modes of government. To imagine a future of neither settlers nor natives is to imagine a future of survivors, in which who counts as a survivor is quite literally everyone: victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and beneficiaries. It is by hewing to this model of working through the past without distinction that alone holds the promise of bringing even the ‘post’ of the ‘post-colony’ to an end.
At least that’s the wager of this powerfully argued book. It’s not clear however, that’s it’s a wager than can be truly won, at least on the terms set out here. For underlying it all is a certain ‘voluntarism’ on the part of Mamdani, from whom one gets the sense that, if only everyone simply chose to do the right thing, things would turn out better. But what remains unengaged with - at least to my satisfaction - are the the global mechanisms that spur and motivate the reproduction of such post-colonial relations. I’m referring of course, to capitalism. Although occasionally gestured at, the role of capitalism in maintaining demographic hierarchies goes largely unremarked upon, which leaves Mamdani arguing for, of all things, an “epistemic revolution” in service of a “reform agenda”. What miserable rocks to have such great ambitions dashed upon.
Still, despite this gaping analytical lacuna, this is nonetheless a stunningly impressive text. To see Mamdani chart the prolongation of colonial categorising into postcolonial contexts is to watch a master at work. The detail marshalled here across the five case studies chosen to illustrate his point - the US, Germany, South Africa, Sudan, and Palestine - is a real feat of scholarship and worth reading for the synoptic power alone. As I write these words, the people of both Palestine and South Sudan are themselves being subject to horror upon horror in acts of genocidal violence in which it’s not clear that humanity itself can, or should, recover from. At the very least, this book offers some of the most powerful - albeit incomplete - tools to understand how and why we got to this irredeemable point.
Hence the pattern of distinctively post-colonial violence laid out here, violence not simply arbitrary or the mark of ‘backward’ peoples or ‘ancient’ hatreds, but instead modes of ruin shaped and given form by the contemporaneity of yet unreckoned-with colonialism. Central to the narrative here is the yoking of the post-colonial nation to the post-colonial state, with both sitting uneasily - and sometimes in murderous concatenation - in the form of the ‘nation-state’. For Mamdani, this fatal conjunction between the state-form - which offers indiscriminate legal equality to all within a territory - and the the nation-form - a political community defined instead by particularist membership - has never found adequate resolution except in ongoing legacies of apartheid, genocide and continual war.
Against the nation-state then, does Mamdani opt instead for a future of states without nations. It’s a bold, even utopian vision, but one throughly informed by the bloody histories of nation-formation. For at stake in the book is precisely an effort to ‘politicize’ nations, that is, to show their throughly constructed nature, not as ‘natural’ givens merely stumbled upon by colonial governments, but actively and even aggressively assembled by them, all the better to rule over. “Define and Rule”, so goes the title of Mamdani’s previous book, whose implications are carried over here into telling a global story of our post-colonial condition.
In saying all this Mamdani is not exactly out to make friends. By challenging the naturalness of the ‘nation’, so too is the designation of ‘native’ put under massive strain. Understood here not as aboriginal peoples with ‘original’ claims to land and rights, but as continually constructed communities with distinctive claims against others in the state, even ‘native’ marks a colonial holdover in need of undoing. While native claims have indeed been successfully used as bulwarks against settler expropriation, for Mamdani, the settler-native distinction is itself a double-edged sword whose benefits have come at costs now too high to continue bearing. On offer instead is the title of the book: neither settler nor native. The alternative being the political subjectivity of the survivor.
Mamdani’s model here is post-apartheid South Africa, which, on his telling, at least had some success in bringing the perpetrators of apartheid… not exactly to justice, so much as to the same table in order to work out a shared future, however unevenly. This at least politicised the country’s future, in contrast to the mostly prevailing ‘Nuremberg model’ of criminal justice, which, by individualising responsibility, closed off avenues of common reckoning, and enabled - in fact still enables, in the form of the UN's International Criminal Court, for example - colonial modes of government. To imagine a future of neither settlers nor natives is to imagine a future of survivors, in which who counts as a survivor is quite literally everyone: victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and beneficiaries. It is by hewing to this model of working through the past without distinction that alone holds the promise of bringing even the ‘post’ of the ‘post-colony’ to an end.
At least that’s the wager of this powerfully argued book. It’s not clear however, that’s it’s a wager than can be truly won, at least on the terms set out here. For underlying it all is a certain ‘voluntarism’ on the part of Mamdani, from whom one gets the sense that, if only everyone simply chose to do the right thing, things would turn out better. But what remains unengaged with - at least to my satisfaction - are the the global mechanisms that spur and motivate the reproduction of such post-colonial relations. I’m referring of course, to capitalism. Although occasionally gestured at, the role of capitalism in maintaining demographic hierarchies goes largely unremarked upon, which leaves Mamdani arguing for, of all things, an “epistemic revolution” in service of a “reform agenda”. What miserable rocks to have such great ambitions dashed upon.
Still, despite this gaping analytical lacuna, this is nonetheless a stunningly impressive text. To see Mamdani chart the prolongation of colonial categorising into postcolonial contexts is to watch a master at work. The detail marshalled here across the five case studies chosen to illustrate his point - the US, Germany, South Africa, Sudan, and Palestine - is a real feat of scholarship and worth reading for the synoptic power alone. As I write these words, the people of both Palestine and South Sudan are themselves being subject to horror upon horror in acts of genocidal violence in which it’s not clear that humanity itself can, or should, recover from. At the very least, this book offers some of the most powerful - albeit incomplete - tools to understand how and why we got to this irredeemable point.
April 5, 2021
I really loved how Mamdani pushes toward a political agenda of emancipation, and as he states; this is not a romantic positionality; while he embraces a Foucauldian insight of power permeating agency -only in it’s formative stage- he brings to the forefront the South African story to give us a “glimpse” of other possibilities; of how mobilizing and organizing can break through the parameters of power relations, showing how the relation between power and agency is neither determinative nor irrelevant.
Overall this is a really important book to anyone working on settler-colonialism, de/postcolonialism and the law making/preserving of the status quo of minorities.
Overall this is a really important book to anyone working on settler-colonialism, de/postcolonialism and the law making/preserving of the status quo of minorities.
November 13, 2021
One of the most important books I've read. It already has - and I suspect it will continue to change how I see the world, which is just about the highest praise I can give. While I don't necessarily buy the specific solutions he suggests for dealing with the various cases he highlights, his framework for understanding the past and a potential future are new to me, and compelling.
November 24, 2020
What the fuck
September 8, 2024
أجاد ممداني في تشريح بنية الاستعمار الاستيطاني وأدواته الرامية لفرض الهيمنة على المجتمع المستعمَر، وتحليله للعنف المفرط في الدول الناشئة بعد رحيل الاستعمار
يحيل ممداني ولادة الدولة الحديثة (الدولة - الأمة أو الدولة القومية) إلى التطهير العرقي في شبه جزيرة إيبيريا بعد سقوط الأندلس والسيطرة على المستعمرات في الأمريكيتين، ويثبت أن هذه الدولة الحديثة كانت مفتاحاً للغزو والهيمنة. ويشرح كيف خلق الاستعمار أقليات من السكان الأصليين وحكمهم بقوانين مختلفة لدفعهم لتعريف أنفسهم عبر هوياتهم الفرعية، لكي يضمن حاجتهم له لحماية أساليب عيشهم. وهذا ما أدى إلى صناعة هويات "أكثرية" و "أقلية" دائمة ودفع دول الاستقلال للعنف المفرط.
كما جاء تحليل ممداني لمحاكمات نورمبرغ بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية بليغاً ودقيقاً واصفاً إياها بالعملية المقصودة والمنظمة لنزع التسييس عن الإبادات الجماعية، حيث أن إقامة هذه المحاكمات سياسياً كان ليضع الدولة الحداثية ذاتها وبالتالي الدول المنتصرة أيضاً في قفص الاتهام جنباً إلى جنب مع النازيين.
يحاجج ممداني بأن التخلص من الإرث الاستعماري لا يتحقق إلا بإعادة تخيل الهويات السياسية على أنها أمر تاريخي بدلاً من كونها أمراً طبيعياُ وبالتالي اعتبار كل الهويات الفرعية من "الناجين" من الاستعمار يتساوون في حقوق المواطنة داخل دولهم. رغم أهمية الفكرة وصحة تطبيقها على الكثير من الدول لا سيما العربية منها، إلا أن محاولة ممداني تطبيقها على الحالة الفلسطينية بادعاء نجاحها في جنوب أفريقيا قد جانب الصواب، إذ أن المستعمِر نفسه يقف على أحد طرفي النزاع في الحالتين.
يحيل ممداني ولادة الدولة الحديثة (الدولة - الأمة أو الدولة القومية) إلى التطهير العرقي في شبه جزيرة إيبيريا بعد سقوط الأندلس والسيطرة على المستعمرات في الأمريكيتين، ويثبت أن هذه الدولة الحديثة كانت مفتاحاً للغزو والهيمنة. ويشرح كيف خلق الاستعمار أقليات من السكان الأصليين وحكمهم بقوانين مختلفة لدفعهم لتعريف أنفسهم عبر هوياتهم الفرعية، لكي يضمن حاجتهم له لحماية أساليب عيشهم. وهذا ما أدى إلى صناعة هويات "أكثرية" و "أقلية" دائمة ودفع دول الاستقلال للعنف المفرط.
كما جاء تحليل ممداني لمحاكمات نورمبرغ بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية بليغاً ودقيقاً واصفاً إياها بالعملية المقصودة والمنظمة لنزع التسييس عن الإبادات الجماعية، حيث أن إقامة هذه المحاكمات سياسياً كان ليضع الدولة الحداثية ذاتها وبالتالي الدول المنتصرة أيضاً في قفص الاتهام جنباً إلى جنب مع النازيين.
يحاجج ممداني بأن التخلص من الإرث الاستعماري لا يتحقق إلا بإعادة تخيل الهويات السياسية على أنها أمر تاريخي بدلاً من كونها أمراً طبيعياُ وبالتالي اعتبار كل الهويات الفرعية من "الناجين" من الاستعمار يتساوون في حقوق المواطنة داخل دولهم. رغم أهمية الفكرة وصحة تطبيقها على الكثير من الدول لا سيما العربية منها، إلا أن محاولة ممداني تطبيقها على الحالة الفلسطينية بادعاء نجاحها في جنوب أفريقيا قد جانب الصواب، إذ أن المستعمِر نفسه يقف على أحد طرفي النزاع في الحالتين.
April 22, 2023
"Neither Settler nor Native" critiques the idea of the nation-state as foundational to the modern history of imperial violence and colonialism. Rather than seeing the foundation of the modern state in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Mamdani sees the origins of the nation-state in 1492, when the Castilians ejected the Moors and the Jews and started taking overseas colonies in the Americas.
The critique of this book is specifically against the nation-state rather than the state as such: against the fusion of a nation - a people - with a state, resulting in the creation of a permanent majority-minority distinction (or civilized and uncivilized) and in repetitive episodes of ethnic cleansing (either through genocide and/or through population transfers).
Mamdani's key insight is sound and explains much of modern European history. But the point is not only to explain Europe's history but to explain the outbreak of violence in postcolonial territories. Rather than liberation and independence leading to peaceful self-rule, independence in decolonized territories often led to violence. Mamdani argues that this is due to post-colonial leaders assuming the same or similar frameworks and attitudes to the colonizers - resulting in post-colonial leaders drawing on tribal identities to assert their rule, leading to ethnic conflict, genocide in some places, and to population transfers to ensure predominance of the predominant population group.
Mamdani elaborates his argument in five different examples: the Indians in the United States, the Germans and post-World War II denazification, apartheid South Africa, Sudan and South Sudan, and Israel/Palestine.
In each situation, he shows how the polarization of a majority led to violence against the minority. Settler Americans fought against and pushed the Natives into reservations, with the Constitution - still today - treating Native Americans as wardens and as a domestic dependent nation (which he describes as a "two state solution") that still today doesn't enjoy the same level of constitutional rights as other Americans (with their rights adjudicated under the authority of Congress, much like the U.S. territories). In the chapter on denazification, Mamdani shows how Hitler used the American model vis-à-vis the Jews and other Europeans: and argues that Nuremburg was a failure as it focused on specific individuals rather than more collective guilt, allowing the failed paradigm of the nation-state to continue. Indeed, he critiques surrounding countries for "ethnic cleansing" through massive population transfers (including resultant deaths) of Germans expelled from neighboring territories took place.
South Africa is the one bright example: a situation where, Mamdani argues, the prior ethnically divided anti-apartheid groups came together, including a tiring white population, to successfully abolish apartheid. South Africa therefore stands out as the (partly) successful example of a state overcoming the restrictive features of the nation-state. Partly successful due to cessions to white people and even more so to the continued role of tribalization in South Africa. Tribalization, Mamdani argues, is a colonial construct - at least in its present form - having molded and politicized pre-existing identities to divide and rule. Tribalization is also partly to blame for the failures of Sudan and South Sudan - alongside that of the colonially politicized "Arab" and "African" divisions that eventually precipitated the secession of South Sudan. The unified, multi-ethnic, and "Sudanist" identity that Garang promoted would have been an improvement. (As an aside, I agree with Mamdani's comment that the characterization of South Sudan as a "failed state" is inaccurate, since it never really became a "state").
The last example - the Israel/Palestine question - shows how the framework of the nation-state resulted in the mass relocation of Jews to Palestine, as a solution more palatable to European nation-states than to actually allowing the Jews a better life within Europe. Mamdani distinguishes between earlier migrations of Jews to Palestine, as immigrants who became members of the preexisting local community, from later waves of migrations, with settlers coming armed with weapons and nationalism, resulting in the creation of a nation-state that still today grants Jews - including outside of Israel - a significant level of rights, while restricting the rights of Palestinians. Zionism is thus criticized as "both a product of the oppression of Jews under European modernity and a zealous enactment of European modernity under colonial conditions" (p. 250).
While Mamdani's critique of the nation-state is on point, his resolution to the nation-state is more fuzzy. Yes, we should all strive for more just and equitable political communities where the majority and minorities can live alongside each other as equal citizens. Yes, we should strive to abolish legal discrimination, including the inequities of the legal codes of the United States and Israel. And we should work to ensure that ethnic conflict, ethnic cleansing, and genocide can one day become a thing of the past. We should not mold a citizen of the nation as being only a true citizen if s/he has the same ancestry or culture of the majority. But the very existence of countries with majorities and minorities means that we will always encounter some amount of differentiation, and overcoming the nation-state in favor of just the state is no easy task, given humanity's tendency towards tribalization. Read Mamdani's book as a solid critique, but go elsewhere for more thinking on how to resolve the issues discussed here.
The critique of this book is specifically against the nation-state rather than the state as such: against the fusion of a nation - a people - with a state, resulting in the creation of a permanent majority-minority distinction (or civilized and uncivilized) and in repetitive episodes of ethnic cleansing (either through genocide and/or through population transfers).
Mamdani's key insight is sound and explains much of modern European history. But the point is not only to explain Europe's history but to explain the outbreak of violence in postcolonial territories. Rather than liberation and independence leading to peaceful self-rule, independence in decolonized territories often led to violence. Mamdani argues that this is due to post-colonial leaders assuming the same or similar frameworks and attitudes to the colonizers - resulting in post-colonial leaders drawing on tribal identities to assert their rule, leading to ethnic conflict, genocide in some places, and to population transfers to ensure predominance of the predominant population group.
Mamdani elaborates his argument in five different examples: the Indians in the United States, the Germans and post-World War II denazification, apartheid South Africa, Sudan and South Sudan, and Israel/Palestine.
In each situation, he shows how the polarization of a majority led to violence against the minority. Settler Americans fought against and pushed the Natives into reservations, with the Constitution - still today - treating Native Americans as wardens and as a domestic dependent nation (which he describes as a "two state solution") that still today doesn't enjoy the same level of constitutional rights as other Americans (with their rights adjudicated under the authority of Congress, much like the U.S. territories). In the chapter on denazification, Mamdani shows how Hitler used the American model vis-à-vis the Jews and other Europeans: and argues that Nuremburg was a failure as it focused on specific individuals rather than more collective guilt, allowing the failed paradigm of the nation-state to continue. Indeed, he critiques surrounding countries for "ethnic cleansing" through massive population transfers (including resultant deaths) of Germans expelled from neighboring territories took place.
South Africa is the one bright example: a situation where, Mamdani argues, the prior ethnically divided anti-apartheid groups came together, including a tiring white population, to successfully abolish apartheid. South Africa therefore stands out as the (partly) successful example of a state overcoming the restrictive features of the nation-state. Partly successful due to cessions to white people and even more so to the continued role of tribalization in South Africa. Tribalization, Mamdani argues, is a colonial construct - at least in its present form - having molded and politicized pre-existing identities to divide and rule. Tribalization is also partly to blame for the failures of Sudan and South Sudan - alongside that of the colonially politicized "Arab" and "African" divisions that eventually precipitated the secession of South Sudan. The unified, multi-ethnic, and "Sudanist" identity that Garang promoted would have been an improvement. (As an aside, I agree with Mamdani's comment that the characterization of South Sudan as a "failed state" is inaccurate, since it never really became a "state").
The last example - the Israel/Palestine question - shows how the framework of the nation-state resulted in the mass relocation of Jews to Palestine, as a solution more palatable to European nation-states than to actually allowing the Jews a better life within Europe. Mamdani distinguishes between earlier migrations of Jews to Palestine, as immigrants who became members of the preexisting local community, from later waves of migrations, with settlers coming armed with weapons and nationalism, resulting in the creation of a nation-state that still today grants Jews - including outside of Israel - a significant level of rights, while restricting the rights of Palestinians. Zionism is thus criticized as "both a product of the oppression of Jews under European modernity and a zealous enactment of European modernity under colonial conditions" (p. 250).
While Mamdani's critique of the nation-state is on point, his resolution to the nation-state is more fuzzy. Yes, we should all strive for more just and equitable political communities where the majority and minorities can live alongside each other as equal citizens. Yes, we should strive to abolish legal discrimination, including the inequities of the legal codes of the United States and Israel. And we should work to ensure that ethnic conflict, ethnic cleansing, and genocide can one day become a thing of the past. We should not mold a citizen of the nation as being only a true citizen if s/he has the same ancestry or culture of the majority. But the very existence of countries with majorities and minorities means that we will always encounter some amount of differentiation, and overcoming the nation-state in favor of just the state is no easy task, given humanity's tendency towards tribalization. Read Mamdani's book as a solid critique, but go elsewhere for more thinking on how to resolve the issues discussed here.
February 11, 2022
In Neither Settler Nor Native, Mahmood Mamdani widens the historical lens, starting with “political modernity,” which he sees as core to a historical trajectory that produces categories of population and distinctions that historically—and still in the present—determine domination and dispossession through the extremes of violence. I really appreciated how Mamdani rejected the assumed beginning of statehood as Westphalia states which is the beginning of Introduction to International Relations and therefore, the beginning of countless Tufts’ students’ assumptions of the foundations of statehood. Instead, Mamdani began in 1492 when modern colonialism and the nation-state were born at the same time as the European settler colonization of the Americas. In this historical analysis, the focus is on North America and the gradual near extermination and wholesale dispossession and displacement of its Indigenous populations. Mamdani questions conventional understandings of the “revolutionary” founding of the United States by its “immigrants.” Instead, he suggests an alternative reading that recognizes the United States as an on-going settler colonial project. This reading enables us to understand how violence operates in the construction of “permanent minorities” subjected to exclusionary practices, for example, in the reservation system. Mamdani argues that the American model has inspired many nationalist projects that have aimed to create permanent minorities. His case studies include Nazi Germany, Israel and the Palestinians, the breakup of Sudan, and post-apartheid South Africa. South Africa is the one case that has emerged out of the debris of colonial modernity, where settlers and natives became “survivors,” juridically equal citizens in a post-apartheid nonracial democracy.
Mahmood Mamdani articulated in a well-laid out compilation, a sentiment that has been explored throughout my work as an organizer with SJP. Often our work revolves around bringing parallel struggles into Palestinian liberation and particularly, similarities along with being distinctly unique sociopolitical locales, between histories of colonialism and on-going resistance in Kashmir and Palestine. An additional case study that could add depth to Mamdani’s analysis is that of Pakistan, India, and Kashmir and the foundation in British colonialism that has cemented ethnic-national divides between the majority Hindu Indians and minority Muslim Pakistanis with Kashmir as the contested battleground. Further, in more global movements for decolonization, increasing calls for global solidarity are made.
I was fascinated with the idea of “de-Zionization” that Mamdani suggests as a future for occupied Palestine that “would involve the depoliticization of Jewish and Palestinian identity, so that Israel may be a rights-protecting democracy rather than the servant of a permanent national majority” (255). Mamdani presents Israel as a colonial and apartheid state, meaning that the “de-Zionization” of Israel could be applied to other nation-states as a template for de-colonization; however, framing that process within the boundaries of the contemporary state of Israel feels incredibly limiting as those were established through the seizure of the Golan Heights of Syria and the remainder from Palestinians and the very borders of Israel could never be “depoliticized”.
Are there ways of understanding decolonization within Palestine, specifically, beyond the nation-state boundaries of present-day Israel? At what level does decolonization happen ‒ first through building international solidarity or first through overthrowing colonial regimes and reshaping from a national level? In what ways can “Native” be defined outside of settler frameworks, in which Indigenous people are creating meaning for themselves?
Mahmood Mamdani articulated in a well-laid out compilation, a sentiment that has been explored throughout my work as an organizer with SJP. Often our work revolves around bringing parallel struggles into Palestinian liberation and particularly, similarities along with being distinctly unique sociopolitical locales, between histories of colonialism and on-going resistance in Kashmir and Palestine. An additional case study that could add depth to Mamdani’s analysis is that of Pakistan, India, and Kashmir and the foundation in British colonialism that has cemented ethnic-national divides between the majority Hindu Indians and minority Muslim Pakistanis with Kashmir as the contested battleground. Further, in more global movements for decolonization, increasing calls for global solidarity are made.
I was fascinated with the idea of “de-Zionization” that Mamdani suggests as a future for occupied Palestine that “would involve the depoliticization of Jewish and Palestinian identity, so that Israel may be a rights-protecting democracy rather than the servant of a permanent national majority” (255). Mamdani presents Israel as a colonial and apartheid state, meaning that the “de-Zionization” of Israel could be applied to other nation-states as a template for de-colonization; however, framing that process within the boundaries of the contemporary state of Israel feels incredibly limiting as those were established through the seizure of the Golan Heights of Syria and the remainder from Palestinians and the very borders of Israel could never be “depoliticized”.
Are there ways of understanding decolonization within Palestine, specifically, beyond the nation-state boundaries of present-day Israel? At what level does decolonization happen ‒ first through building international solidarity or first through overthrowing colonial regimes and reshaping from a national level? In what ways can “Native” be defined outside of settler frameworks, in which Indigenous people are creating meaning for themselves?
July 21, 2021
There is some interesting and worthwhile stuff in here, but the chapter on Nazi Germany is a revisionist travesty. No one deserves more than one star who, whether intentionally or negligently, repeats the right-wing lie about the number of deaths in Dresden just to make the cheap point that the poor poor Germans were really just victims, too.
March 26, 2023
This book is a strong critique of the nation-state and a call for its decolonization. Decolonizing the nation-state, Mamdani argues, means depoliticizing identities such as race, ethnicity, religion, and tribe, and decoupling the nation from the state. In five historical case studies, the United States, Germany, South Africa, Sudan/South Sudan and Palestine/Israel, he traces historically the politicization of identity and its consequences.
He starts the book by proposing a correction of the historiography of the United States, emphasising its invention of the settler-colonial model, by reconstructing the creation of “the native” through law. In the South African case he traces a similar genealogy of what became the primary categories of segregation under apartheid rule. In Palestine/Israel he shows how the category of the native, which in previous examples worked to exclude people thus designated from the polity, was re-signified to claim exclusive rights to Palestinian land for Jewish people. He points out how in the German post-war case, a liberal victim’s justice approach, which became the foundation of the human rights framework, led to the depoliticization of violence, trying individual perpetrators while leaving the root cause of the Holocaust – namely the nation-state form itself – unchallenged.
The ambitious approach of comparing five case studies in their long duration sometimes causes historical inaccuracies. Nevertheless, the reconstructions show the interconnections between the different histories and are far from superficial. As both a political theorist and a former officer of the African Union, Mamdani writes with a commitment to fundamental political reform, but he fails to engage with existing scholarship such as Indigenous knowledge production (this is probably not unrelated to his dismissal of indigeneity as colonial construct, which in turn should be problematised given his own positionality). While his criticism of the ongoing legacy of colonial governance is sharp, in his firm belief in the state as the necessary form of political organisation for a just and democratic society, he does not account for the problematic history and ongoing violence of border-drawing and other issues that would arise even in a de-nationalised state, such as redistribution of wealth. While the arguments about the pitfalls of secessionism are not void, it remains unclear why the 1878 borders should make of pre-2011 Sudan a state more fit for a decolonial democratic project. And, to remain with this particular case study, Mamdani neglects the agency of colonised peoples in the process of the politicisation of their identity, not accounting for the dialectical processes at play in British colonial rule and resistance to it.
It is certainly due to the specific location from which I am reading this book, that the German case study was especially interesting and revealing, in particular because of the links Mamdani draws to the history of US American settler-colonialism on the one hand, and the Zionist project on the other. Both connections are taboo in German public discourse and academia, which makes this book rather provocative in the German context. But, despite the many shortcomings, I appreciated it not for its provocative effect, but as a rich analysis on which Mamdani builds concrete suggestions for rethinking justice, decolonisation and the path to reconfiguring the nation-state into a society of its survivors.
For a very grounded and solid critique of takes such as those of Mamdani, I recommend reading Zoe Samudzi‘s work as well as this podcast, for example: https://thefunambulist.net/editorials...
He starts the book by proposing a correction of the historiography of the United States, emphasising its invention of the settler-colonial model, by reconstructing the creation of “the native” through law. In the South African case he traces a similar genealogy of what became the primary categories of segregation under apartheid rule. In Palestine/Israel he shows how the category of the native, which in previous examples worked to exclude people thus designated from the polity, was re-signified to claim exclusive rights to Palestinian land for Jewish people. He points out how in the German post-war case, a liberal victim’s justice approach, which became the foundation of the human rights framework, led to the depoliticization of violence, trying individual perpetrators while leaving the root cause of the Holocaust – namely the nation-state form itself – unchallenged.
The ambitious approach of comparing five case studies in their long duration sometimes causes historical inaccuracies. Nevertheless, the reconstructions show the interconnections between the different histories and are far from superficial. As both a political theorist and a former officer of the African Union, Mamdani writes with a commitment to fundamental political reform, but he fails to engage with existing scholarship such as Indigenous knowledge production (this is probably not unrelated to his dismissal of indigeneity as colonial construct, which in turn should be problematised given his own positionality). While his criticism of the ongoing legacy of colonial governance is sharp, in his firm belief in the state as the necessary form of political organisation for a just and democratic society, he does not account for the problematic history and ongoing violence of border-drawing and other issues that would arise even in a de-nationalised state, such as redistribution of wealth. While the arguments about the pitfalls of secessionism are not void, it remains unclear why the 1878 borders should make of pre-2011 Sudan a state more fit for a decolonial democratic project. And, to remain with this particular case study, Mamdani neglects the agency of colonised peoples in the process of the politicisation of their identity, not accounting for the dialectical processes at play in British colonial rule and resistance to it.
It is certainly due to the specific location from which I am reading this book, that the German case study was especially interesting and revealing, in particular because of the links Mamdani draws to the history of US American settler-colonialism on the one hand, and the Zionist project on the other. Both connections are taboo in German public discourse and academia, which makes this book rather provocative in the German context. But, despite the many shortcomings, I appreciated it not for its provocative effect, but as a rich analysis on which Mamdani builds concrete suggestions for rethinking justice, decolonisation and the path to reconfiguring the nation-state into a society of its survivors.
For a very grounded and solid critique of takes such as those of Mamdani, I recommend reading Zoe Samudzi‘s work as well as this podcast, for example: https://thefunambulist.net/editorials...
February 23, 2025
the decolonial project is not about morality or criminality, it cannot be the simplistic (and hopelessly cyclical) game of blame and retribution– it must be epistemic and political (which also means it is necessarily historical). nation states can never be democratic because they always already presume who gets to belong, thus creating and catering exclusively to a majority and tolerating (at best) the incumbent minority– this is what the legacy of europe's political modernity has been, which Mamdani illustrates through case studies of USA, Germany, South Africa, Sudan, Israel, and Palestine.
"We can all learn to see ourselves as survivors of political modernity– created by it, but not doomed to repeat it."
"We can all learn to see ourselves as survivors of political modernity– created by it, but not doomed to repeat it."
February 19, 2024
I'm not exaggerating when I say that I haven't read a book that has really gave me new language to describe all the fucking shit happening in the world. The arguments and framing of how genocide and ethnic cleansing are integral features of all modern nation states were really enlightening as well as the descriptions of possible ways toward decolonization.
November 22, 2024
This book is extraordinary. I've loved all of Mamdani's books, but this one is exceptional. It's comparative framework - looking at the United States, Germany, Sudan/South Sudan, Palestine/Israel, and South Africa - enables one to glimpse the inter-workings of nation states and how they continue to reproduce the same political violence even in a postcolonial context. His analysis is smart, insightful, and possibly even hopeful in places like Palestine/Israel and Sudan/South Sudan if people in power were to heed his wise words of advice.
May 17, 2023
تأملات وأفكار هامة حول واحدة من أهم المشكلات التي ارتبطت بدول ما بعد الإستعمار. الجزء الخاص بالسودان وجنوب أفريقيا هو الأفضل- من وجهة نظري- وبالتأكيد جاء ثراء الفصلين نتيجة للخبرة الطويلة لممداني في القضايا الأفريقية. الترجمة أكثر من رائعة.
April 21, 2024
The most provocative piece of political philosophy and theory I’ve read in a long time. Challenging sacred beliefs of various political persuasions about modernity, anticolonialism, human rights, the national state, transitional justice, and more, this book will challenge anyone and spark all kinds of imagination about possible futures. I’m sure at least one part will be an “aha” moment, one will make you quite angry, and one will keep you thinking for long time coming.
May 3, 2021
The historical details in the South Africa and Sudan chapters are sometimes a bit elliptical, with references and thus historical arguments that were a bit hard to follow—but the general lesson is super interesting and well argued. Bonus points for regularly name-dropping Hegel.
December 22, 2025
Well written and argued book about the impact of colonialism in 5 different parts of the world. Some of the arguments, including his disparaging of human rights work, are unpersuasive.
September 8, 2025
In Neither Settler nor Native, Mahmood Mamdani analyzes the epistemic conditions of colonial modernity in different geographical and temporal contexts while also attempting to propose meaningful ways to undermine the “political subjectivities [such epistemic conditions] afford[]” for alternative ways of structuring state power. The latter should be constructed, in Mamdani’s view, in ways that do not “pre-politically” determine permanent national majorities and minorities; his project is aimed squarely at dissolving the nation-state, a formation he sees as co-constitutive of colonialism. Separating the state from serving the nation would enable, then, “a democratic process of majority formation [that] can give every minority the assurance that it can one day hope to persuade enough of those outside its ranks to forge a new majority."
A “de-Zionization of Israel” is his formulation for solving Israel’s political crises, one he finds inspiration for in the First and Second Intifada, and in particular the bills written by Palestinian MK Azmi Bashara. A great chunk of the substance of the politics of Mamdani’s intellectual project lies in seeking “allies” in current and former beneficiaries of colonial modernity; together with the victims of colonial modernity, each group can understand their identities as historically formed rather than permanent, and thus subject to change. Together, they can become “survivors” of colonialism, on equal footing in forging a new world. The “South African moment” serves as his most compelling example.
My main qualm with Mamdani is that he does not adequately weigh the role of armed conflict in deteriorating socio-economic conditions in 1980’s South Africa. These were conditions necessary for SA's settler intelligentsia to lose faith in its state – for segments of the “white” population to see an end to apartheid as in their self-interest.
There arises in the 4th chapter the question of treason. Azmi Bishara is charged with treason and espionage, forcing him to flee for Qatar. Mamdani elucidates the radicalism for of Bashara’s two proposed bills – how a movement political equality for all of Israel’s inhabitants posed a challenge to the nation-state structure of Israel, its insisted-on nature as “a Jewish state.” Mamdani also sees how Bishara’s proposals, off the heels of the Second Intifada, were part of what forced Israel’s hand in formalizing its apartheid. But to me, he does not do enough to connect the fate of Bishara to his discussion of changing people’s political subjectivities. His rhetorical posture is academic, of “bridging and sublating differences,” “link[ing] up,” “epistemic revolution[s],” “backing those [forces] which would dismantle [the state]” without saying, well, how. (Other than, like, "doing what South African anti-apartheid movement did in the 1970s and 1980s" – but, again, he elides the details of the armed conflicts that informed the realities of the SA anti-apartheid movement). As Bishara’s fate illustrates, what Mamdani is talking about in practice is treason: treason to Israel, to Zionism. People have to commit treason. This is probably more about the limits of academic inquiry than of Mamdani's thinking, but still: is he not dancing around the question – what means of persuasion could Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, possibly deploy to induce a beneficiary of colonialism to commit treason?
Mamdani also emphasizes the importance of “presenting to Israeli Jews a livable future beyond Zionism,” as South African anti-apartheid activists, radical white students, migrant white laborers did in the 70s and 80s. I agree this is of paramount importance. Yet of what worth are such presentations of livable futures if they are not backed by some demonstrable measure of power? As in, why would the middle ground of Israeli Jewish society bother to “open up to alternatives” to Zionism if they cannot sense that an alternative has a chance of supplanting the current order – of winning?
Overall, tremendous book, genuinely. Just colored, as another reviewer said, by a certain political naivete, a voluntarist (?) vision of political activity.
A “de-Zionization of Israel” is his formulation for solving Israel’s political crises, one he finds inspiration for in the First and Second Intifada, and in particular the bills written by Palestinian MK Azmi Bashara. A great chunk of the substance of the politics of Mamdani’s intellectual project lies in seeking “allies” in current and former beneficiaries of colonial modernity; together with the victims of colonial modernity, each group can understand their identities as historically formed rather than permanent, and thus subject to change. Together, they can become “survivors” of colonialism, on equal footing in forging a new world. The “South African moment” serves as his most compelling example.
My main qualm with Mamdani is that he does not adequately weigh the role of armed conflict in deteriorating socio-economic conditions in 1980’s South Africa. These were conditions necessary for SA's settler intelligentsia to lose faith in its state – for segments of the “white” population to see an end to apartheid as in their self-interest.
There arises in the 4th chapter the question of treason. Azmi Bishara is charged with treason and espionage, forcing him to flee for Qatar. Mamdani elucidates the radicalism for of Bashara’s two proposed bills – how a movement political equality for all of Israel’s inhabitants posed a challenge to the nation-state structure of Israel, its insisted-on nature as “a Jewish state.” Mamdani also sees how Bishara’s proposals, off the heels of the Second Intifada, were part of what forced Israel’s hand in formalizing its apartheid. But to me, he does not do enough to connect the fate of Bishara to his discussion of changing people’s political subjectivities. His rhetorical posture is academic, of “bridging and sublating differences,” “link[ing] up,” “epistemic revolution[s],” “backing those [forces] which would dismantle [the state]” without saying, well, how. (Other than, like, "doing what South African anti-apartheid movement did in the 1970s and 1980s" – but, again, he elides the details of the armed conflicts that informed the realities of the SA anti-apartheid movement). As Bishara’s fate illustrates, what Mamdani is talking about in practice is treason: treason to Israel, to Zionism. People have to commit treason. This is probably more about the limits of academic inquiry than of Mamdani's thinking, but still: is he not dancing around the question – what means of persuasion could Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, possibly deploy to induce a beneficiary of colonialism to commit treason?
Mamdani also emphasizes the importance of “presenting to Israeli Jews a livable future beyond Zionism,” as South African anti-apartheid activists, radical white students, migrant white laborers did in the 70s and 80s. I agree this is of paramount importance. Yet of what worth are such presentations of livable futures if they are not backed by some demonstrable measure of power? As in, why would the middle ground of Israeli Jewish society bother to “open up to alternatives” to Zionism if they cannot sense that an alternative has a chance of supplanting the current order – of winning?
Overall, tremendous book, genuinely. Just colored, as another reviewer said, by a certain political naivete, a voluntarist (?) vision of political activity.
October 12, 2021
An absolutely phenomenal piece of scholarship. Mamdani has excellently laid out the way that different settler-states, from the U.S. to South Africa to Israel, have built their regimes of violence and oppression, and how different strategies for decolonization might be realized. A text many will no doubt be returning to in the future.
April 6, 2021
Mahmood Mamdani has written an ambitious book that seeks to show the unexamined legacy of nation-states and the exclusion of people represented as standing outside ‘civilisation’ and what it has laid down in principles of international law and state formation.
The nation-state, he argues, has invariably involved the violent exclusion of people constructed as the ‘other’. The idea of ‘tolerance’ followed on from the religious wars in Europe during the seventeenth century which tempered the rejection and exclusion to some degree, but this rarely reached the territories which were being governed as colonial possessions. On the contrary, what became in Europe the idea of majority and minority among civilian populations were hardened in the colonies into a permanent division between the ‘civilised’ national and the ‘uncivilised’ native.
This was so profound a distinction it survived the independence of the former territorial
possessions and remained even when the new polity presented itself, as in the case of the United States of America, as the exemplar of a society founded on the liberty. Mamdani provides a fulsome and poignant account of the genocidal policies directed at the Indian people. (He insists on that term rather than the now more common ‘Native American’ on the grounds that ‘American’ was the very thing that the new state was determined the indigenous people could never be.)
The reduction of the pre-Columbian population of the hemisphere from an estimated 100 million to one-tenth of that number was achieved primarily through the perhaps unintended importation of European disease. But it was added to by quite deliberate policies that ensured the Indians were not permitted to recover from the pandemics that hit them. Expulsion from their traditional lands and forced marches resulting in the deaths of thousands became the lot of the native peoples.
The important part of Mamdani’s argument is that the memories of this holocaust has haunted internal law ever since and has impacted on the ways in which other atrocities in other times have been considered and has also guided the processes which have brought other nation-states into existence. More accurately, not the memories as such, but the need to suppress the memory of a genocide associated with the formation of the United States nation, has limited the capacity of the modern community of nation-states to address the mass murders and associated injustices of their own times.
The book looks at the strange procedures that governed the trial of Nazis at Nuremberg after the second world war. Contrary to what most believe was the heart of the indictment, the murder of millions of Jewish and other people who were despised by the regime did not figure in the charges. American prosecutors resisted efforts to include these deaths on the grounds that it would furnish the defence with an opportunity to argue that the Nazi death machine had its precedents in the population policies of US governments. Keen to hide what would otherwise be revealed as the criminality of an entire system founded on nations organised as states, the victor’s justice at Nuremberg preferred instead to brand individual Nazis as cri
minals in order to protect the integrity of the state system which had enabled their power.
Could it have been done differently? Mamdani makes the case that the experience of the South African people in accounting for the legacy of apartheid suggests that it could, even if the pious rigmarole of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission managed to muddy the waters.
In the South African case, the charge sheet was drawn up by a liberation movement that, by the time of the fall of apartheid, was compromised of the ANC, a black consciousness movement that united Africans with mixed-ethnicity ‘coloured’ people together with South Asian Indians, and a radical movement of white students who were refusing the privilege of their skin colour. Together they formulated a view of their collective history which made the apartheid state the criminal entity, with the actions of its people best understood as the adaptions required in order to survive in a political community founded on atrocity. Whilst individual behaviour had to be accounted for, the central task was to change the character of the state to ensure that its crimes could never again be repeated.
Mamdani considers the application of this principle of holding the nationalist component of the state to account in detailed consideration of the situations of Palestine/Israel and the formation of South Sudan as a state independent of Sudan in 2011. There is much profound insight in these reflections that needs to be bought into a much wider conversation about states groundedon the principle of nation rather than democracy.
The nation-state, he argues, has invariably involved the violent exclusion of people constructed as the ‘other’. The idea of ‘tolerance’ followed on from the religious wars in Europe during the seventeenth century which tempered the rejection and exclusion to some degree, but this rarely reached the territories which were being governed as colonial possessions. On the contrary, what became in Europe the idea of majority and minority among civilian populations were hardened in the colonies into a permanent division between the ‘civilised’ national and the ‘uncivilised’ native.
This was so profound a distinction it survived the independence of the former territorial
possessions and remained even when the new polity presented itself, as in the case of the United States of America, as the exemplar of a society founded on the liberty. Mamdani provides a fulsome and poignant account of the genocidal policies directed at the Indian people. (He insists on that term rather than the now more common ‘Native American’ on the grounds that ‘American’ was the very thing that the new state was determined the indigenous people could never be.)
The reduction of the pre-Columbian population of the hemisphere from an estimated 100 million to one-tenth of that number was achieved primarily through the perhaps unintended importation of European disease. But it was added to by quite deliberate policies that ensured the Indians were not permitted to recover from the pandemics that hit them. Expulsion from their traditional lands and forced marches resulting in the deaths of thousands became the lot of the native peoples.
The important part of Mamdani’s argument is that the memories of this holocaust has haunted internal law ever since and has impacted on the ways in which other atrocities in other times have been considered and has also guided the processes which have brought other nation-states into existence. More accurately, not the memories as such, but the need to suppress the memory of a genocide associated with the formation of the United States nation, has limited the capacity of the modern community of nation-states to address the mass murders and associated injustices of their own times.
The book looks at the strange procedures that governed the trial of Nazis at Nuremberg after the second world war. Contrary to what most believe was the heart of the indictment, the murder of millions of Jewish and other people who were despised by the regime did not figure in the charges. American prosecutors resisted efforts to include these deaths on the grounds that it would furnish the defence with an opportunity to argue that the Nazi death machine had its precedents in the population policies of US governments. Keen to hide what would otherwise be revealed as the criminality of an entire system founded on nations organised as states, the victor’s justice at Nuremberg preferred instead to brand individual Nazis as cri
minals in order to protect the integrity of the state system which had enabled their power.
Could it have been done differently? Mamdani makes the case that the experience of the South African people in accounting for the legacy of apartheid suggests that it could, even if the pious rigmarole of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission managed to muddy the waters.
In the South African case, the charge sheet was drawn up by a liberation movement that, by the time of the fall of apartheid, was compromised of the ANC, a black consciousness movement that united Africans with mixed-ethnicity ‘coloured’ people together with South Asian Indians, and a radical movement of white students who were refusing the privilege of their skin colour. Together they formulated a view of their collective history which made the apartheid state the criminal entity, with the actions of its people best understood as the adaptions required in order to survive in a political community founded on atrocity. Whilst individual behaviour had to be accounted for, the central task was to change the character of the state to ensure that its crimes could never again be repeated.
Mamdani considers the application of this principle of holding the nationalist component of the state to account in detailed consideration of the situations of Palestine/Israel and the formation of South Sudan as a state independent of Sudan in 2011. There is much profound insight in these reflections that needs to be bought into a much wider conversation about states groundedon the principle of nation rather than democracy.
August 22, 2025
More of a 4.5, but I really enjoyed this.
I wasn’t with Mahmood Mamdani on two points. Firstly, his argument that nation states can be dated back to 1492 is weak. It’s a claim at odds with scholarly consensus, it’s one he takes as a starting point for the text but then doesn’t really justify, and - given all his case studies are from the twentieth century - it’s one Mamdani doesn’t even need to make. I therefore found it perplexing that he leapt into this assertion in a matter of pages. Secondly, Mamdani’s pessimism about the role of human rights and international law (which he describes as not just futile but even counterproductive) is difficult. Many of the criticisms he makes are valid; it’s a truism that, as an apparatus, the international legal regime cannot help but reflect the geopolitical configuration of its makers. But does that make it worthless? I baulk at the suggestion that international criminal procedures can only entrench divide rather than progress; this seems to me at odds with the situations in Kosovo and (to a lesser extent) Bosnia (neither of which Mamdani considers), and - as a matter of principle - I can’t get over the conviction that some crimes simply must be punished. Mamdani’s criticisms of Nuremberg are particularly uncomfortable, and one can fully sign up to his argument that treating international crimes as solely criminal in nature misses the mark without agreeing with his conclusions. Describing violence as reflective of underlying sociopolitical formations is correct, but - in my view - still leaves space to condemn individuals for particular actions taken in furtherance of political goals. As a matter of practice, I think Mamdani is wrong too. In specifically noting that the International Criminal Court has never condemned Israel, he left himself hostage to fortune - and thereby demonstrates my intuition that he pays insufficient attention to the idea that a child may develop a life beyond the intentions of its parents.
All the same, this is a book of force, elegance and real scholarship in the field of decolonisation theory. Each case study - the US and the Native Americans; Nuremberg; South Africa; Sudan; Israel-Palestine - taught me a lot, and Mamdani challenged my thinking and opened up new perspectives. Much of what he was saying wasn’t new to me; I had little trouble, for example, in agreeing that nationalism are colonialism are co-constituted. Yet Mamdani challenged me to think about my own country in different ways, and developed and crystallised my thinking. For all that I remain attached to the role of international tribunals as a route to justice, Mamdani is essentially correct to say that their work is invalidated if not paired with a comprehensive political project aimed at tackling the origins of crimes against humanity in the first place. The failure of de-Nazification in Germany can be contrasted with the South African experience, and South Africa remains an admirable real world example of the possibilities that emerge when we learn to think beyond the nation state (as Mamdani says - “In the state with no nation, the majority is an outcome of the democratic process”). I also found the text profoundly hopeful: its denouement via an interrogation of Israel-Palestine offers a hopeful vision of a better future, which is particularly encouraging at the present hour.
Hope his son smashes the New York mayoral election; it was through him that I found this book in the first place.
I wasn’t with Mahmood Mamdani on two points. Firstly, his argument that nation states can be dated back to 1492 is weak. It’s a claim at odds with scholarly consensus, it’s one he takes as a starting point for the text but then doesn’t really justify, and - given all his case studies are from the twentieth century - it’s one Mamdani doesn’t even need to make. I therefore found it perplexing that he leapt into this assertion in a matter of pages. Secondly, Mamdani’s pessimism about the role of human rights and international law (which he describes as not just futile but even counterproductive) is difficult. Many of the criticisms he makes are valid; it’s a truism that, as an apparatus, the international legal regime cannot help but reflect the geopolitical configuration of its makers. But does that make it worthless? I baulk at the suggestion that international criminal procedures can only entrench divide rather than progress; this seems to me at odds with the situations in Kosovo and (to a lesser extent) Bosnia (neither of which Mamdani considers), and - as a matter of principle - I can’t get over the conviction that some crimes simply must be punished. Mamdani’s criticisms of Nuremberg are particularly uncomfortable, and one can fully sign up to his argument that treating international crimes as solely criminal in nature misses the mark without agreeing with his conclusions. Describing violence as reflective of underlying sociopolitical formations is correct, but - in my view - still leaves space to condemn individuals for particular actions taken in furtherance of political goals. As a matter of practice, I think Mamdani is wrong too. In specifically noting that the International Criminal Court has never condemned Israel, he left himself hostage to fortune - and thereby demonstrates my intuition that he pays insufficient attention to the idea that a child may develop a life beyond the intentions of its parents.
All the same, this is a book of force, elegance and real scholarship in the field of decolonisation theory. Each case study - the US and the Native Americans; Nuremberg; South Africa; Sudan; Israel-Palestine - taught me a lot, and Mamdani challenged my thinking and opened up new perspectives. Much of what he was saying wasn’t new to me; I had little trouble, for example, in agreeing that nationalism are colonialism are co-constituted. Yet Mamdani challenged me to think about my own country in different ways, and developed and crystallised my thinking. For all that I remain attached to the role of international tribunals as a route to justice, Mamdani is essentially correct to say that their work is invalidated if not paired with a comprehensive political project aimed at tackling the origins of crimes against humanity in the first place. The failure of de-Nazification in Germany can be contrasted with the South African experience, and South Africa remains an admirable real world example of the possibilities that emerge when we learn to think beyond the nation state (as Mamdani says - “In the state with no nation, the majority is an outcome of the democratic process”). I also found the text profoundly hopeful: its denouement via an interrogation of Israel-Palestine offers a hopeful vision of a better future, which is particularly encouraging at the present hour.
Hope his son smashes the New York mayoral election; it was through him that I found this book in the first place.
January 4, 2026
The good: Mamdani presents a convincing case for how the politicization of identity is an inherently colonial construct and that nationalism in the post-colonial world has led to horrific genocides and extreme violence of post-colonial nations against each other, which continues to this day (see: Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia and the many conflicts in South Asia). Much of what we call "tribalism" is not something that pre-dated colonialism, but a politicized identity created by the colonial occupier to divide and conquer, and the same nationalism that was directed against the colonizer then often is turned against fellow colonized nations. Mamdani's introspection on the death of the idea that all violence is either revolutionary or counter-revolutionary as someone who has been involved in anti-colonial and post-colonial studies is also very interesting. Mamdani advocates for divorcing political from national identity and overcoming the settler/native distinction (hence the title) and the book is a strong critique of nationalism overall, even in the anti-colonial context.
The bad: For a Marxist scholar I'm pretty surprised at the amount of idealistic drivel in this book. Mamdani is critical of the BDS movement for targeting Israelis as a whole, suggesting that instead we should rely on convincing Israelis that what they are doing is morally wrong. He suggests that this is how apartheid was ended in South Africa, a claim that I don't think he supports strongly enough with any convincing evidence. The fact is that people's ideology is shaped by material circumstance (Marxism 101), and I think it's very hard to argue against the fact that white South Africans turning against apartheid was in large part DUE to the boycotts, sanctions, and international isolation that they felt. Middle-class white South African youth would have had no reason to question the assumptions underpinning white supremacy if they did not feel the economic effects of sanctions and see the rest of the world treating them as a pariah state. The same will certainly be true in Israel, where the circumstance (as Mamdani notes) are even more difficult due to: Israel no longer relying on Palestinian labour, Israelis being far more numerous as a percentage of the population of historical Palestine than white South Africans, and Israelis being even more unified behind the current apartheid system than South Africans were.
As far as I can tell, Mamdani is overly rose-tinted when it comes to South Africa as well, arguing that economic justice and redistribution was simply impossible because the white South Africans would have never accepted it and the ANC/tripartite had to take what they could get. Maybe so, but it seems a bit ridiculous to acknowledge that fact and then use South Africa as the model for a post-racial society, when it is one of- if not the most unequal countries on earth, largely to the benefit of the white minority. South Africa is also not the only post-colonial country to have been founded on the idea of building an inclusive political identity (India is the prime example, which at least at its founding aimed to overcome caste, religious, and linguistic differences), and I would have been interested to hear his take on the successes and numerous pitfalls of the Indian state or other post-colonial countries which have attempted the same. I guess the book was focusing on settler colonies but to me there is an obvious connection there.
The bad: For a Marxist scholar I'm pretty surprised at the amount of idealistic drivel in this book. Mamdani is critical of the BDS movement for targeting Israelis as a whole, suggesting that instead we should rely on convincing Israelis that what they are doing is morally wrong. He suggests that this is how apartheid was ended in South Africa, a claim that I don't think he supports strongly enough with any convincing evidence. The fact is that people's ideology is shaped by material circumstance (Marxism 101), and I think it's very hard to argue against the fact that white South Africans turning against apartheid was in large part DUE to the boycotts, sanctions, and international isolation that they felt. Middle-class white South African youth would have had no reason to question the assumptions underpinning white supremacy if they did not feel the economic effects of sanctions and see the rest of the world treating them as a pariah state. The same will certainly be true in Israel, where the circumstance (as Mamdani notes) are even more difficult due to: Israel no longer relying on Palestinian labour, Israelis being far more numerous as a percentage of the population of historical Palestine than white South Africans, and Israelis being even more unified behind the current apartheid system than South Africans were.
As far as I can tell, Mamdani is overly rose-tinted when it comes to South Africa as well, arguing that economic justice and redistribution was simply impossible because the white South Africans would have never accepted it and the ANC/tripartite had to take what they could get. Maybe so, but it seems a bit ridiculous to acknowledge that fact and then use South Africa as the model for a post-racial society, when it is one of- if not the most unequal countries on earth, largely to the benefit of the white minority. South Africa is also not the only post-colonial country to have been founded on the idea of building an inclusive political identity (India is the prime example, which at least at its founding aimed to overcome caste, religious, and linguistic differences), and I would have been interested to hear his take on the successes and numerous pitfalls of the Indian state or other post-colonial countries which have attempted the same. I guess the book was focusing on settler colonies but to me there is an obvious connection there.
September 18, 2024
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though I'm not sure it's an amazing book per se. Some history I was decently familiar with, a lot I was not familiar with, and a good amount of theory on nationalism, but what felt like only the beginning of an anti-national or a-national theory, which it seemed like the author was trying to articulate but which hasn't had enough writers in its area to develop a robust discourse on.
Fundamentally, I think I agree with Mamdani: the nation is a colonial invention, and in post-colonial modernity it is what leads to atrocity and domination. He does a good job of illustrating this, but there were a handful of subjects I felt fell flat or I was surprised to not see him touch on.
Most obviously: borders. Borders themselves are obviously a colonial invention, the entire modern middle east is the result of colonial powers carving states out of existing polities and promising power to the leaders of each to solidify their own influence. Most of today's African states are the same, including south Africa, but while Mamdani argues for a soft sort of abolition of the nation, he advocates no such thing for borders. He praises south africans for forming a unified polity without regards to skin color, but disregards the fact that south africans simply expanded the boundaries of their nationalism, and left colonial era borders in place. He even suggests that a true decolonization of the US could see the native tribes eschew the feaux "sovereignty" given to them by congress and treaties in order to join as an equal player. This disregards the fact that current borders of the US and Canada themselves completely disregard traditional native lands, and also the fact that native tribes are unlikely to prefer being a part of the existing political process of the US, or that native tribes' status as a minority in the US precludes them from truly grabbing substantial power within the US. If human organization is to be reorganized past nationalism, I fail to see how that could be accomplished via democracy, which is a political system that reproduces the will of the majority.
If the majority come to see themselves as constituting an identity rather than a political group, they will constitute a nation. If that nation comes to see themselves as the only constituent of the state, they will wield it to destroy or expel the minority. This cannot be prevented by simply including more groups in a democratic process, which by nature favors the nation and the forming of nationalism.
Fundamentally, I think I agree with Mamdani: the nation is a colonial invention, and in post-colonial modernity it is what leads to atrocity and domination. He does a good job of illustrating this, but there were a handful of subjects I felt fell flat or I was surprised to not see him touch on.
Most obviously: borders. Borders themselves are obviously a colonial invention, the entire modern middle east is the result of colonial powers carving states out of existing polities and promising power to the leaders of each to solidify their own influence. Most of today's African states are the same, including south Africa, but while Mamdani argues for a soft sort of abolition of the nation, he advocates no such thing for borders. He praises south africans for forming a unified polity without regards to skin color, but disregards the fact that south africans simply expanded the boundaries of their nationalism, and left colonial era borders in place. He even suggests that a true decolonization of the US could see the native tribes eschew the feaux "sovereignty" given to them by congress and treaties in order to join as an equal player. This disregards the fact that current borders of the US and Canada themselves completely disregard traditional native lands, and also the fact that native tribes are unlikely to prefer being a part of the existing political process of the US, or that native tribes' status as a minority in the US precludes them from truly grabbing substantial power within the US. If human organization is to be reorganized past nationalism, I fail to see how that could be accomplished via democracy, which is a political system that reproduces the will of the majority.
If the majority come to see themselves as constituting an identity rather than a political group, they will constitute a nation. If that nation comes to see themselves as the only constituent of the state, they will wield it to destroy or expel the minority. This cannot be prevented by simply including more groups in a democratic process, which by nature favors the nation and the forming of nationalism.
November 17, 2025
Woof, the most mind-stretching book I've read in a minute!
While I don't take issue with the main argumentative thrusts of this book-- or at least what I understood them to be: the need to recognize the politicization of racial, tribal, religious, etc identities, particularly indigeneity and settler/immigration status, as a construct to further colonialist projects; and the need to move beyond limited international human rights jurisprudence, which overly relies on individual criminality, in order to reach real political reform-- I did feel pretty unresolved in some regards. Firstly, the assertion that there is no true Native American liberation struggle to refer to (can't find the exact passage again so I might be mincing words here), when I could easily call up AIM and present Land Back efforts was confusing. And, if these had been left out for a particular distinction around what decolonization means, that probably should have been explicitly drawn within the text to better explain the argument itself. Also, maybe predictably, uplifting "nonracial" democracy in South Africa as an example is tough to parse given the disingenuous foothold of post-racial ideology in the U.S; I really wanted to understand better what this materially means, looks like in practice. Furthermore, without maybe a better background in political theory, the call for severing states from nations to do away with the modern nation-state felt a bit like a distinction potentially without a difference if the same governance apparatuses are in place that uphold minorities and majorities formulated not through the political process but preexisting categorizations.
Coming out of this feeling like I need to read more histories of the dissolution of the British Empire and nationhood in Africa. While a lot of what was directly relevant was recapitulated here, I worry that it was probably a bit reductive because that wasn't the main point of this book. It also made me curious about earlier empires and how their programs of colonization differed from modern ones that politicize identity in such a particular way. I also wanted to hear more about other nations not held up as case studies, like Canada, or the U.K., to understand how they fell into this scheme.
While I don't take issue with the main argumentative thrusts of this book-- or at least what I understood them to be: the need to recognize the politicization of racial, tribal, religious, etc identities, particularly indigeneity and settler/immigration status, as a construct to further colonialist projects; and the need to move beyond limited international human rights jurisprudence, which overly relies on individual criminality, in order to reach real political reform-- I did feel pretty unresolved in some regards. Firstly, the assertion that there is no true Native American liberation struggle to refer to (can't find the exact passage again so I might be mincing words here), when I could easily call up AIM and present Land Back efforts was confusing. And, if these had been left out for a particular distinction around what decolonization means, that probably should have been explicitly drawn within the text to better explain the argument itself. Also, maybe predictably, uplifting "nonracial" democracy in South Africa as an example is tough to parse given the disingenuous foothold of post-racial ideology in the U.S; I really wanted to understand better what this materially means, looks like in practice. Furthermore, without maybe a better background in political theory, the call for severing states from nations to do away with the modern nation-state felt a bit like a distinction potentially without a difference if the same governance apparatuses are in place that uphold minorities and majorities formulated not through the political process but preexisting categorizations.
Coming out of this feeling like I need to read more histories of the dissolution of the British Empire and nationhood in Africa. While a lot of what was directly relevant was recapitulated here, I worry that it was probably a bit reductive because that wasn't the main point of this book. It also made me curious about earlier empires and how their programs of colonization differed from modern ones that politicize identity in such a particular way. I also wanted to hear more about other nations not held up as case studies, like Canada, or the U.K., to understand how they fell into this scheme.
April 29, 2024
While I was fascinated by the book, an "original argument" was probably not the best place to be introduced to political theorizing. Still, I could follow the overall arguments. However, I have no background from which to critique the finer points. The book is well ordered: Analyses of four settler colonized countries were well explained and compared/contrasted so that it wasn't only "more of same" as each was introduced, and the conclusion ties the four together with the author's theory. Where I knew some history, it rang true, and that causes me to assume fidelity in the others.
Mamdani explores in detail decolonization, a concept I'd previously heard in passing. I gather it is a contested definition, so will explore more. He rejects mere casting off the control of the colonizer and explores casting off forms of organization that the colonizer created and made seem natural and eternal, claiming rather that they are historical and malleable. His major point there is that colonizers created politicized tribes and decolonizing must not simply continue that politicization. He says that decolonization is not a return to an imagined pre-colony state nor should it perpetuate the colonized patterns.
Further, I have been so used to hearing "nation-state" as a single concept, that it was startling to read a book long argument for separating the two, startling but convincing at first encounter. And I have heard passing references to weaknesses in human-rights defenses, and Mamdani explains some of those weaknesses.
There is much more to be reading on these subjects, and I probably will do so.
Mamdani explores in detail decolonization, a concept I'd previously heard in passing. I gather it is a contested definition, so will explore more. He rejects mere casting off the control of the colonizer and explores casting off forms of organization that the colonizer created and made seem natural and eternal, claiming rather that they are historical and malleable. His major point there is that colonizers created politicized tribes and decolonizing must not simply continue that politicization. He says that decolonization is not a return to an imagined pre-colony state nor should it perpetuate the colonized patterns.
Further, I have been so used to hearing "nation-state" as a single concept, that it was startling to read a book long argument for separating the two, startling but convincing at first encounter. And I have heard passing references to weaknesses in human-rights defenses, and Mamdani explains some of those weaknesses.
There is much more to be reading on these subjects, and I probably will do so.
July 13, 2025
When I picked up this book a few weeks ago, I wasn’t paying attention to Mamdani's son’s NYC mayoral campaign, so I had no idea this was his father’s book. Of course, it doesn’t matter, but the timing makes it appear relevant. In any event, it’s an amazing book, with a multifaceted thesis that, at least to me, was new and thought-provoking.
Unless you’ve read the book, the title is meaningless. In short, it’s about the possibility of getting beyond the settler-native situation (and its postcolonial afterlives) to a place where there are no permanent minorities (because in a democracy, groups enter into changing coalitions) and where everyone is a survivor of past problems trying to create a different, better future (in other words, this is an idealistic thesis, which is refreshing).
The only problem with the book, besides repetition (which, due to the complexity of the thesis, is somewhat necessary), is what isn’t there. Yes, there could be only so many examples, or the book would have become overwhelming. But it would have been helpful to have smaller sections on countries next to the presented examples, so that one could contrast South Africa with, say, Zimbabwe and Namibia, or Israel with, say, Lebanon and Jordan, or the U.S. with Canada. A 4.5.
Unless you’ve read the book, the title is meaningless. In short, it’s about the possibility of getting beyond the settler-native situation (and its postcolonial afterlives) to a place where there are no permanent minorities (because in a democracy, groups enter into changing coalitions) and where everyone is a survivor of past problems trying to create a different, better future (in other words, this is an idealistic thesis, which is refreshing).
The only problem with the book, besides repetition (which, due to the complexity of the thesis, is somewhat necessary), is what isn’t there. Yes, there could be only so many examples, or the book would have become overwhelming. But it would have been helpful to have smaller sections on countries next to the presented examples, so that one could contrast South Africa with, say, Zimbabwe and Namibia, or Israel with, say, Lebanon and Jordan, or the U.S. with Canada. A 4.5.
December 7, 2023
There is a lot of food for thought. I took a long time to read and digest what he was presenting. The contents page reveals the case studies: 1) The Indian Question in the United States 2) Nuremberg: The Failure of Denazification 3) Settlers and Natives in Apartheid South Africa 4) Sudan: Colonialism, Independence and Secession 5) The Israel/Palestine Question 6) Decolonizing the Political Community.
The nation-state is put under the microscope... its origins, who belongs, who doesn't, what is the difference between a settler and an immigrant, the various forms of identities and how they are harnessed for political aims, etc. His main thesis as I understand it is that contrary to the extreme violence we see perpetrated by governments which is often explained away as being aberrations of individual perpetrators, it is in reality coherent political acts. Constituencies that have defined "the nation" to the express detriment of others. This is a book I'll be rereading or referring to many times.
The nation-state is put under the microscope... its origins, who belongs, who doesn't, what is the difference between a settler and an immigrant, the various forms of identities and how they are harnessed for political aims, etc. His main thesis as I understand it is that contrary to the extreme violence we see perpetrated by governments which is often explained away as being aberrations of individual perpetrators, it is in reality coherent political acts. Constituencies that have defined "the nation" to the express detriment of others. This is a book I'll be rereading or referring to many times.
July 5, 2025
Mamdani eloquently explains the failings of neoliberalism in the context of political communities and framing of violence. The depoliticization of events, combined with the insistence on nations or nation-states leads to the minimization of structural crimes for the sake of punishing perpetrators. I think Mamdani’s stance on reframing the issues at hand, not only as issues of political violence, but also ensuring that collectively we move towards states of survivors is critical.
There is much solid history as grounding in this work, and help to centre the critique in context. Given the events of the last 20+ months of the Palestinian genocide, it is however bleak to see how Mamdani views a resolution to Israel/Palestine and how far it seems we have strayed from it.
Being full of context as this work is, it does take some powering through some of the more drawn out historical sections, but none of the historical context is superfluous. That said, this work is critical in understanding the needs of decolonization and the credence we must give to both history and context.
There is much solid history as grounding in this work, and help to centre the critique in context. Given the events of the last 20+ months of the Palestinian genocide, it is however bleak to see how Mamdani views a resolution to Israel/Palestine and how far it seems we have strayed from it.
Being full of context as this work is, it does take some powering through some of the more drawn out historical sections, but none of the historical context is superfluous. That said, this work is critical in understanding the needs of decolonization and the credence we must give to both history and context.
August 15, 2025
Actual Rating 9.5/10
Some say Mahmood Mamdani's work is provocative, others say it's insightful, but one thing he does well is he does his research and cites his sources. Presenting an argument about a unique category of "neither settler nor native," Mamdani observes various cases where these distinct groups have formed and how they came to be. Looking at what worked and what didn't in various instances (and arguing for why he feels that is the way), Mamdani also provides a view forward -- or at least his view forward -- for these case studies. Docking a few points because I don't agree with his sentiments on the Palestine section (in particular around violence/nonviolence and BDS) but I'm holding this as readers prerogative. Overall, well-thought out arguments that will have you questioning the current way that we go about resolving issues surrounding groups such as the ones he looks at in this book.
Some say Mahmood Mamdani's work is provocative, others say it's insightful, but one thing he does well is he does his research and cites his sources. Presenting an argument about a unique category of "neither settler nor native," Mamdani observes various cases where these distinct groups have formed and how they came to be. Looking at what worked and what didn't in various instances (and arguing for why he feels that is the way), Mamdani also provides a view forward -- or at least his view forward -- for these case studies. Docking a few points because I don't agree with his sentiments on the Palestine section (in particular around violence/nonviolence and BDS) but I'm holding this as readers prerogative. Overall, well-thought out arguments that will have you questioning the current way that we go about resolving issues surrounding groups such as the ones he looks at in this book.
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