Worldmaking after empire: the rise and fall of self-determination

TLDR

Recent scholarship has examined empire and imperialism, but the theoretical foundations of post‑war anti‑colonial worldmaking remain underexplored. The study investigates historical examples of anti‑colonial alternatives to empire. The author reconstructs forgotten post‑war attempts to reconstitute the international order using archival sources from three continents. The anti‑colonial struggle for self‑determination demonstrates the conditional nature of the nation‑state both theoretically and in practice within the international sphere.

Abstract

Within the last two decades, there have been numerous publications on empire and imperialism in political theory and the history of political thought. While most scholars of this ‘turn to empire’ have focused on the historical conjunction of empire and liberalism, Adom Getachew's study Worldmaking after empire: the rise and fall of self-determination investigates historical examples of anti-colonial alternatives to empire. Drawing on archival sources from three different continents, this illuminating book reconstructs almost forgotten attempts to reconstitute the international order after the Second World War. Getachew shows that the anti-colonial struggle for self-determination reflected the conditionality of the nation-state theoretically and practically through the international sphere. The first chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for the later journey into the intellectual history of inter- and postwar anti-colonialist ‘worldmaking’. The author's starting-point is the claim that empire is not only a form of alien rule and exclusion from international society, but...