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.

Define and rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine's theories were later translated into "native administration" in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law's legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectualand political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key fi gures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania's first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism's political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

Trade unions, burial societies, students, religious and gender movements, riots and mafias. Not to mention class. The kaleidoscope of African social movements is complex and broad. But their histories have strong common threads - the experience of past oppression and the constant struggle for an identity that will encompass survival. How have they contributed to the nature of African civil society and the formation of democracy? The chapters are a living dialogue on the interpretation of these movements, and a critical and analytical appraisal of the African intellectual heritage itself. The book brings together a vast array of writers and topics from all over Africa - from bread riots in Tunisia, Communist Parties in Sudan, the "Kaduna Mafia" in Nigeria, burial societies in Zimbabwe, and the working class in Algeria.

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy-a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant-apartheid-as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021 British Academy Book Prize Finalist PROSE Award Finalist "Provocative, elegantly written." -Fara Dabhoiwala, New York Review of Books "Demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa." -Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books In case after case around the globe-from Israel to Sudan-the colonial state and the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a permanent native minority. In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and the Allies. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this process. Mahmood Mamdani points to inherent limitations in the legal solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice but a rethinking of the political community to include victims and perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls on us to delink the nation from the state so as to ensure equal political rights for all who live within its boundaries. "A deeply learned account of the origins of our modern world...Mamdani rejects the current focus on human rights as the means to bring justice to the victims of this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a new kind of political imagination...Joining the ranks of Hannah Arendt's Imperialism, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said's Orientalism, this book is destined to become a classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory." -Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? "A masterwork of historical comparison and razor-sharp political analysis, with grave lessons about the pitfalls of forgetting, moralizing, or criminalizing this violence. Mamdani also offers a hopeful rejoinder in a revived politics of decolonization." -Karuna Mantena, Columbia University "A powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future." -Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

From the author of "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim "comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at" "the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world's response to that crisis.
In "Saviors and Survivors," Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987--89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into "native" and "settler" tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency-but not to genocide, as the West has declared.
Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as "humanitarian intervention."
Incisive and authoritative, "Saviors and Survivors "will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

"From the Hardcover edition."

An incisive look at the causes and consequences of the Rwandan genocide "When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement was the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including judges, doctors, priests, and friends. Rejecting easy explanations of the Rwandan genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, When Victims Become Killers situates the tragedy in its proper context. Mahmood Mamdani coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutus to turn so brutally on their neighbors. In so doing, Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa and provides a direction for preventing similar future tragedies.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Collected in one volume for the first time, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy are two of W E. B. Du Bois's most powerful essays on race. He explores how to tell the story of those left out of recorded history, the evils of colonialism worldwide, and Africa's and African's contributions to, and neglect from, world history. More than six decades after W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, they remain worthy guides for the twenty-first century. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and two introductions by top African scholars, this edition is essential for anyone interested in world history.

From the author of "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim "comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at" "the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world's response to that crisis.
In "Saviors and Survivors," Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987--89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into "native" and "settler" tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency-but not to genocide, as the West has declared.
Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as "humanitarian intervention."
Incisive and authoritative, "Saviors and Survivors "will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Bringing together some of the figures most closely associated with Edward Said and his scholarship, Waiting for the Barbarians looks at Said the public intellectual and literary critic, and his political and intellectual legacy: the future through the lens of his work.

Scholars in the Marketplace is a case study of market-based reforms at Uganda's Makerere University. With the World Bank heralding neoliberal reform at Makerere as the model for the transformation of higher education in Africa, it has implications for the whole continent. At the global level, the Makerere case exemplifies the fate of public universities in a market-oriented and capital friendly era. The Makerere reform began in the 1990s and was based on the premise that higher education is more of a private than a public good. Instead of pitting the public against the private, and the state against the market, this book shifts the terms of the debate toward a third alternative than explores different relations between the two. The book distinguishes between privatisation and commercialisation, two processes that drove the Makerere reform. It argues that whereas privatisation (the entry of privately sponsored students) is compatible with a public university where priorities are publicly set, commercialisation (financial and administrative autonomy for each faculty to design a market-responsive curriculum) inevitably leads to a market determination of priorities in a public university. The book warns against commercialisation of public universities as the subversion of public institutions for private purposes.

The Claude Ak lecture delivered by Mahmood Mamdani offers an African perspective on 9/11, arguing that the roots of the terrorism so widely promulgated are in America (the 'democratic empire') and the Cold War. Mamdani underlines the aspect of terrorism he terms 'culture talk' - the language of contemporary globalisation. Samir Amin provides a critical overview and exploration of the alternatives to neoliberal globalisation, imperialism and militarism. Fatou Sow stresses the need to rethink development from positions that have regard for gender, and casts doubt on the slow pace of the integration of women into various spheres, despite women having acquired the 'right to have rights'. The fourth lecture, also delivered by Fatou Sow, is a critical tribute to Lopold Sedar Senghor, the Senegalese 'Poet-President', commenting in particular on his attitudes to African languages and ngritude, and includes the texts of his most beautiful poems dedicated to African women.

In trying to fathom the present crisis in the DRC, Mamdani's study concentrates on the Great Lakes region, particularly the region of Kivu and the Kiyarwanda-speaking population. These people were historically divided into three major groups - the Banyamulenge, the Banyamasisi, and the Banyaruchuru, popularly know as Hutu and Tutsi. The author situates the crisis within the context of local and foreign interests and division, primarly within the context of post- genocide Rwanda, and the citizenship crisis - civic and ethnic - in Kivu. He then presents a programme of action - local and international - for Rwanda and Kivu. For Rwanda, he urges global responsibility, which means coming to terms with the genocide in Rwanda; and a course of action which balances justice, democracy, and reconciliation. For Kivu he sets forth a full research agenda on the crisis of state in the DRC. Mahmood Mamdani is a distinguished professor of anthropology and has published widely on conflict, human rights, the legacy of colonialism and African Studies.

Despite its crucial role in the Ugandan economy, labour power has rarely been studied by social scientists. In particular, the real life experience of workers as they interact with both capital and the state has been ignored. This huge gap is redressed in this study by Ugandan authors at the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala. It provides a detailed analysis of rural Ugandan labour today. The violent imposition of colonial taxes in Uganda at the turn of the nineteenth century changed village life irrevocably by introducing a cash-based economy. Subsistence farming was superseded by the need to generate income. At the same time, the arrival of technology separated villagers into classes and redefined gender roles. Studies range from salt winners inside Katwe National Park, to the degradation and explicit oppression of dairy farmers in Kigezi and the life of fisherpeople near Lake Victoria, giving an in-depth description of the human experience of wage labour. Three village case studies complete the analysis.

Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 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 brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen?
Mamdani dispels the idea of "good" (secular, westernized) and "bad" (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are "good" Muslims readily available to be split off from "bad" Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America's embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America's embrace of the highly ideological politics of "good" against "evil." Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the "moral equivalents" of America's Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation.
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.

"From the Hardcoveredition.

"Define and Rule" focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference.

A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice.

Maine s theories were later translated into native administration in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms."

This volume brings together four lectures given by distinguished scholars at the 2002 Codesria General Assembly, all offering African perspectives on globalisation, terrorism and development. The Claude Ak lecture delivered by Mahmood Mamdani offers an African perspective on 9/11, arguing that the roots of the terrorism so widely promulgated are in America (the 'democratic empire') and the Cold War. Mamdani underlines the aspect of terrorism he terms 'culture talk' - the language of contemporary globalisation. Samir Amin provides a critical overview and exploration of the alternatives to neoliberal globalisation, imperialism and militarism. Fatou Sow stresses the need to rethink development from positions that have regard for gender, and casts doubt on the slow pace of the integration of women into various spheres, despite women having acquired the 'right to have rights'. The fourth lecture, also delivered by Fatou Sow, is a critical tribute to Lopold Sedar Senghor, the Senegalese 'Poet-President', commenting in particular on his attitudes to African languages and ngritude, and includes the texts of his most beautiful poems dedicated to African women. In French.