Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book callsus to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities andminorities.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-stateand the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globefrom the NewWorld to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudanthe colonial state and the nation-statehave been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority atthe expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservationscreated both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in whichnew immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would beused by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by theAllies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europes nation-states, cleansing them of theirminorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as aseparate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionistsettlers 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. Mamdanirejects the criminal solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetratorsresponsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the
nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminaljustice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivorsvictims,perpetrators, bystanders, benefi ciariesbased on common residence and the commitmentto 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 unfi nished project,seeking a state without a nation.
Paperback. English. WITS Press. 2021. NEW.
