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Most studies of Islamism have focused on the role of oppositional forces. Increasingly, states are also important Islamist actors. States pursue Islamization not only in reaction to Islamist challenges but also because in Islamism they see the opportunity to address the inherent weaknesses of the postcolonial state structure, and to significantly increase the power and capacity of the state. This trend is most evident in Pakistan and Malaysia where both the weakness of the postcolonial state and the opportunity inherent in Islamization have been greatest. These cases deviate from other models of state formation in the Muslim world, and provide new insights not only into state formation in the Muslim world but also into the study of the role of religion in state expansion in comparative politics.

This chapter analyzes the ways that anticolonial nationalists responded to an intensified postcolonial predicament with their most ambitious project of worldmaking—the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO constituted a welfare world that sought to enhance the bargaining power of postcolonial states, democratize decision-making, and achieve international redistribution. At the center of this welfare world was a radical recasting of sovereign equality as a demand for an equitable share of the world's wealth. The NIEO envisioned this expansive account of sovereign equality as the economic component of international nondomination. The view that sovereign equality had material implications marked anticolonial nationalists' biggest departure from the postwar international legal order and was quickly rejected and displaced in the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1970s.

The Zia ul‐Haq regime adopted state‐led Islamization to shore up waning state power. It adopted aspects of Islamist ideology to reshape the country's judicial and political structures. This strategy expanded state power after years of domestic strife and at a time when Pakistan was involved in the Afghan War. The policy was also used to legitimate military rule, providing a justification for its continuation as demands for democratization grew. The Islamization strategy firmly entrenched the postcolonial state in Islamic ideology and allowed the military to ally itself with Islamist forces to achieve its goals.

This chapter discusses the litigation over the imposition of a draconian Prohibition regime on Bombay. The Prohibition laws in Bombay and other provinces, brought in to enforce Article 47 of the Constitution, were among the earliest attempts by the postcolonial state to regulate the everyday life of its citizens. The Prohibition policy was a critical aspect of the attempt of the state to fashion a postcolonial identity for itself by freeing its citizens from what it called the foreign practice of drinking. However, it relied on the mechanisms of the colonial state for its implementation, opening up questions about state involvement in private life and the role of the police in a democracy. Given that the majority of litigants were Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), a community with strong links to the liquor trade, the chapter also considers the emerging idea of public interest and the relationship between liberty, property, and community identity.

This chapter examines racial formation in the postcolonial state at independence. It begins with a brief discussion of the shift from indirect colonial rule to independence and the transformation of state racecraft. It then focuses on the negotiations of Nkrumah's government, run by his Convention People's Party, with the postcolonial realities of global politics and the effects of such negotiations on local ideas of race, ethnicity, and governance. The chapter demonstrates how racialization processes directly informed the new postcolonial state where: institutional White power and privilege were structured into the neocolonial relationship with Britain, the United States, and the West in general; while Pan-Africanism and African racial self-determination served as ideological and cultural, but ultimately ineffective, responses. These processes, and the other racial projects that they inevitably spawned, continue to shape the contemporary Ghanaian social, political, and cultural fields.

Chapter 2 examines the prolonged and vehement competition between North and South Korea over the allegiance of colonial-era Korean migrants who remained in Japan in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The divergent transborder nation-building strategies that the two postcolonial states employed to make their own docile citizens out of this opaque and recalcitrant population are identified. North Korea launched a successful repatriation campaign and heavily invested in Korean enclaves, presenting itself as a safe haven in which marginalized Koreans could find an escape. South Korea instead fashioned itself as a broker that could facilitate their integration into the Japanese mainstream, and a gatekeeper that could control their engagement with families and home communities in South Korea. The control of the bureaucratic persona of Koreans in Japan, buttressed by the consensual practices of other states, was critical for South Korea’s eventual ascendancy in this competition.

The Western state system is a unique historical entity that has survived in various forms for almost four hundred years. After independence, postcolonial societies were eager to join this system. States can offer protection to their citizens, but they can also be perpetrators of human rights violations and economic injustices. Feminists claim that in order to fully understand the state in its various manifestations, it is necessary to understand its gendered dynamics. This chapter considers the various ways in which states are gendered. Authors in the volume offer analyses of many forms of states—liberal, postcolonial, and religious—using a variety of methodological perspectives. They demonstrate how gender analysis is necessary for understanding how the state can act both as a buffer against the international system and also as a perpetrator of political, social, and economic inequalities. The conclusion offers a brief overview of each of the subsequent chapters.

If mainstream theorizings on the state have paid little attention to its gendered aspects (how the state demonstrates and constructs gender and how gender determines the character of the state), emotions have been far from everyday concerns of the state and its manifestations. This chapter adopts a feminist perspective to argue that, contrary to mainstream views, the state conscripts gendered emotions in its efforts to seek/retain legitimacy and to police citizens to conform to its ideological and developmental moorings. The chapter draws on the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency in India to highlight the gendered emotional language of the postcolonial state which is in violent conflict with its own citizens challenging its legitimacy and sovereignty.

Al-Nubi and Sunset Oasis re-write the past experiences of Nubian and Amazigh minorities with postcolonial and colonial institutions, respectively, to reveal their unjust policies of “differentiation” and/or eradication of difference. The novels depict critical and dynamic areas of interaction and tension among their racially and culturally diverse characters, on one level, and among the allegedly homogenous Nubian and Amazigh communities, on the other, to disrupt essentialist perceptions of these significant groups. The distinct character of each novel lies in what Walter Benjamin describes as the authors’ “craftsmanship” and ability to draw from experience, theirs or others’, in storytelling. The chapter identifies that ᶜAli treats Nubian subordination from a shaᶜbi/public writer’s position, while Tahir adopts an intellectual’s stance in addressing the Amazigh’s. It examines how ᶜAli’s and Tahir’s commonality of goal and critical perspective, yet difference in treating state marginalization of both Nubians and Amazigh translate in their unique aesthetic choices.

This chapter examines the apparent paradox of the collective identification of the Kashmiri refugee: that the very existence of the Kashmiri refugee as a politico-legal and sociocultural identity both underwrites and challenges the structural foundations of the postcolonial nation-state in South Asia. It first provides a historical background on the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir before turning to the history and historicity of formation of the Kashmiri political subject. In particular, the chapter considers how a highly territorialized definition of political belonging emerged in the greater Kashmir region. It also explores how the historical patterns of displacement in the region between 1947 and 2001 gave rise to a dispersed population of people who became categorized as “refugees from the State of Jammu and Kashmir” living in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It argues that the territorial borders of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir State provide neither the empirical nor analytical language required to express the relationship between being Kashmiri and political activism.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework of Creole indigeneity, arguing that the concept is a way of recovering the excess or remainder of history and identity that shapes both social formations in the postcolonial state and Caribbean intellectual production. It lays the groundwork for the discussion of the topic of the rescripting of indigeneity as a socio-discursive and politico-economic phenomenon. Two arguments seem to represent Creole belonging, both of which engaged regimes of labor that necessarily displace Indigenous Peoples: first in terms of not or no longer being African proposed by Sylvia Wynter, and second, in terms of a relationship to the New World that is an indigenous one, a notion by Richard Burton. It brings focus on how and where in the critical literature being and becoming Creole is elaborated as an indigenizing process.

Chapter 6 carries forward some of Mitchell’s and Epstein’s ideas of networks. The approach extends the network studies method to social mobility, looking at how elites emerge, participate in interlocking directorates, generate convivial subjectivities and sustain long-term friendships. Raised on that basis are further arguments about the importance of elite friendship for the constituting of openness and public trust in postcolonial states. An account is given of a public occasion, the funeral of a prominent cosmopolitan among Botswana’s national elite, Richard Mannathoko, to reveal the actual practice observed among elites. Very broadly, the ethnography seeks through a particular case to illuminate the changeable force that public cosmopolitanism has in civic culture in postcolonial Africa. In part, the agenda is set in opposition to a toxic version of Afro-pessimism that finds Africa doomed by the kleptomania of elites, ungovernable because of the self-seeking of Big Men, and inevitably victimized by liberators who reveal themselves to be tyrants. Against that, the facts show that Botswana does have its share of wider postcolonial conflicts and predicaments, but concern for the public good is forceful. Good governance continues to be advanced through the deliberately developed and well-sustained political structures and practices of a strong state.

This chapter investigates the relationship between the nationalist military revolutions and the downfall of empires in total war and consequently the mass production of postcolonial nation states. Examining the approaches of Randal Collins and Andreas Wimmer, it focuses on three waves of imperial collapse: of dynastic continental empires arising from the First World War; of European overseas empires during and after the Second World War; and of the Soviet Union arising from the Cold War. It assesses the consequences of the sudden formation of new states, often carved violently out of ethnically mixed territories, on their internal and on external politics. It also weighs the disruptive effects of the large-scale entry of such states into the interstate system and considers if in an age of ever greater global interdependence empires might return in new forms.