Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021British Academy Book Prize FinalistPROSE Award FinalistProvocative, elegantly written.Fara Dabhoiwala, New York Review of BooksDemonstrates 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 BooksIn case after case around the globefrom Israel to Sudanthe colonial state and the nationstate 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 nationstate 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 worldMamdani 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 imaginationJoining the ranks of Hannah Arendts Imperialism, Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Saids 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 razorsharp 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 UniversityA powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future.Faisal Devji, University of Oxford