Colonial Legacies in Political Thought

Colonial legacies in political thought encompass the enduring influence of imperial rule on modern concepts of sovereignty, governance and social order. Early formulations of international relations were deeply entangled with colonial justifications for racial hierarchies, economic extraction and cultural domination. In response, anticolonial theorists articulated alternative visions of development and popular agency, challenging Eurocentric trajectories of progress. More recent decolonial scholarship has traced how patterns of power established under colonial rule—often referred to as coloniality—continue to shape contemporary institutions, normative frameworks and policy debates. This field spans from the conceptual interventions of nineteenth-century imperial thinkers to twenty-first-century debates over reparations, public memory and global justice. By interrogating the genealogies of key political concepts such as liberty, equality and democracy, researchers reveal the persistence of asymmetrical power relations and propose pathways for more inclusive and equitable political orders.

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Technical terms

Coloniality: Enduring patterns of power, knowledge and social order established under colonial rule that persist after formal independence.

Developmentalism: Ideological framework positing that societies advance along a universal trajectory of economic growth and political maturity, often used to legitimise state-led strategies.

Popular anticolonial developmentalism: Variant of developmentalism formulated by anticolonial actors emphasising democratically empowered popular subjects as agents of transformative change.

Racial capitalism: Critical concept asserting that capitalist economies are founded on and reproduce racial hierarchies, shaping labour relations and value extraction.

References

1. The Underside of Order: Race in the Constitution of International Order. International Organization (2024).
2. Development in Decolonization: Walter Rodney, Third World Developmentalism, and “Decolonizing Political Theory”. American Political Science Review (2022).
3. Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India. American Political Science Review (2021).