Theory After Gaza: Decolonizing the Political

Aditya Nigam — 2026-06-16T22:00:00Z

I want to make three points at the outset that work as premises or presuppositions for this presentation as well as for the larger work.

My first claim is that while the formal discourse of political theory keeps our gaze resolutely fixed on nation-states and Law, justice and citizenship as embodying modernity's emancipatory promise, Gaza/Palestine direct our attention to the fact that the predominant experience of ordinary people in the global South has been one of dispossession and extermination, ethnic cleansing and capture and the turning, en masse, of those who survive, into refugees and stateless people. Indeed, it is not just ordinary people of the global South who experience mass dispossession but equally millions of them in the West, as seen for instance, in the early centuries of enclosure of the commons and mass dispossession for capitalist development.

Another important case in point are the Jews, whose persecution has long been part of Europe's history and who's extermination in Nazi gas chambers in the twentieth century was no aberration.

It is worth remembering that the Golden Age of Jews when they flourished culturally, economically and intellectually was in the heyday of Islamic/ Muslim rule in Al Andalus, between the 8th to 12th centuries. Following the Alhambra Decree in 1492, post-Reconquista, they fled to the Ottoman Empire and found a safe haven there. The Ottoman Sultanat was perhaps the only other place where they prospered and lived under their own laws, as did others, under the millet system. Political theory lectures on the value of tolerance, eliding this history altogether, referring only to philosophers like John Locke and mainstream Christian-European history.

The genocide in Gaza directs us to undertake a wholesale reexamination of the story of the rise of Western modernity and its blood-soaked gifts to the world in the form of settler colonial genocides, ethnic cleansing and two world wars involving the deaths and misery of millions.

My second claim is that the livestreamed genocide in Gaza marks a turning point – indeed, a rupture with the West's philosophical and theoretical hegemony that made us, in the global South, subjects constituted by that knowledge. For about five centuries, we have heard and read of the history of the world as that of the triumphant march of the modern West, where textbooks described how we “were discovered” by the West – as though we had no life before that. We read of the taking over continents that we were told were terra nullius or vacant lands, where, as a matter of fact, millions of Indigenous inhabitants were simply exterminated. If such gaslighting of the world can take place when the genocide is being livestreamed for anyone to see, can we even imagine what would have happened when the only surviving written accounts were of the victors who colonized? The subjugated and the colonized had no history, no voice.

What is worse, we the colonized and the subjugated learnt to internalize their narrative, popular even in Marxist and radical theory, that spoke of colonialism as the “unconscious tool of history” that ushered us savages into “civilization.” However much we opposed their domination and violence, we too wanted to be like them and build our societies in the image of theirs. National liberation movements in the global South simply wanted to take political power and be “independent” in order to live out the same fantasies of becoming like the West.

The Gaza genocide demands that we awaken from the stupor of this gharbzadeghi or Westoxification, to borrow Jalal Al-e Ahmad's term. The genocide provides us a window to see how the entire project of Western modernity stands on violence and extermination of local populations, even in the continuing present in the global South.

Equally, it directs us to revisit aspects of modern European and US politics with clearer eyes, in order to be able to see that not only settler colonialism and imperialism but also Fascism, Nazism and Zionism – all emerged from the boiling cauldron of late 19th and early 20th century European society and whose consequences were then thrust upon Palestine and West Asia. A break with Western philosophical hegemony at this level implies a complete reappraisal of the colonialism/modernity/ capitalism constellation from the vantage point of the global South.

My third claim has to do with a more general question. For millions of ordinary people, thrown into the vortex of genocidal violence, technologically driven wars, partitions, ethnic cleansing and so on, against their will, politics has meant powerlessness and total loss of control over their own lives. “The political”, whichever way we define it, confronts them as an uncontrollable force that takes over their lives. This is a widespread experience of modern times, dramatically highlighted in the past few decades, in the fact that almost everywhere ordinary people feel they are hostages to their states and that their voice does not matter on anything.

This powerlessness was dramatically highlighted during the Gaza genocide where the voice of millions of people across the world wanting to stand in support of the people of Gaza/Palestine were reduced to nothing. Across the UK, Europe and the USA, as well as in India, protests against the genocide were violently suppressed by these states; after all they were its sponsors.

The story of the emergence of the modern political, therefore, needs to be told from this end as well. I argue, in partial agreement with Mahmood Mamdani, that “the political” itself needs to be decolonized, which is to say, with his argument that at least in postcolonial contexts, it is a colonized domain. As will hopefully become clear, my argument is about the political as such and will veer around to the position that it may very simply not be redeemable; that the idea that “the political” is in some sense the domain of “freedom” (Arendt) and “universal ethical existence” (sittlichkeit) (Hegel) may just be delusional.

Before we enter into a discussion of the question of the coloniality of the political, we need to briefly revisit the history of modernity/coloniality/ capitalism from the standpoint of those who have been at their receiving end.

This counter-narrative calls for a radical overturning of the received wisdom about the modern world; it cannot be an additive exercise where we simply add new details to the picture that already exists. Indeed, the picture itself has to be redrawn.

Colonialism, Modernity, “War Capitalism”

In a recent speech at the Munich Security Conference, held in February 2026, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio recalled the great achievements of Euro-American colonial expansion and lamented that post-World War II decolonization had reversed the process. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings, he had lectured. (Rubio 2026)

Less than a month before Marco Rubio delivered this infamous speech in Munich, the World Economic Forum in Davos ended with a sense of foreboding. Anthropologist David Wengrow described the mood there drawing from Canadian PM Mike Carney's speech, saying that it was ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and the rise of a new global order in which bullies rule like kings, weaker nations are property to be bought and sold by the stronger… (Wengrow 2026) All this must sound extremely odd to the Indigenous people of Canada, America, Australia or Greenland, for whom that old order meant only catastrophe, Wengrow rightly observed.

His observation captures the way in which the global order of power that emerged through the past centuries has been experienced across the colonized world, especially, though not only, by Indigenous peoples. Wengrow goes further to tell us that the rule-based order whose demise is now being mourned had actually originated “in the legal justifications for an act of piracy, motivated by profit.” He refers to “Mare Liberum (‘The Freedom of the Seas'), by the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius”, commonly considered to be a foundational text of modern international relations. “The Grotian tradition,” he underlines, “has often been taken to represent humanity's best hopes for a world order based on the principles of justice, freedom and peace among nations.”

Wengrow gives a little background to this text. The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, was the first modern business corporation that…was also granted the rights of a “corporate sovereign”, which meant it could raise armies, wage wars, maintain garrisons, form binding treaties with rulers overseas and impose governors on defeated populations.

At the start of the 17th century, Wengrow writes, the lucrative spice trade of the Malay Peninsula was a monopoly of Portugal's Estado da Índia. It so happened that on 25 February 1603, a Portuguese cargo ship was ambushed off Singapore by warships under the command of the Dutch admiral Jakob van Heemskerk. Once its cargo had been auctioned off in Amsterdam, the shareholders – nervous of losing their ill-gotten gains – employed Grotius, the Netherlands' top legal mind, to write a treatise defending van Heemskerk's actions. It was perhaps just a coincidence that Grotius happened to be the admiral's cousin. (Ibid)

“Grotius argued that wars between nations may be legally justified if they advance the ‘natural' rights of those nations to engage freely in commerce,” and this argument became the basis of violent wars of domination and control of trade in the Malay-Indonesia region which put an end to the free trade that had actually existed before the “Grotian moment”.

With this began, in what is now Indonesia, a violent implantation of politico-economic domination. Most indigenous growers of mace and nutmeg were killed, the survivors were sold into slavery and their lands were resettled with plantation workers from elsewhere.”

In the context of the “Empire of cotton” Sven Beckert in his magisterial study, talks of what he calls “war capitalism”, to refer precisely to this phenomenon of trading companies that were simultaneously quasi-states, indulging in the most violent acts in order to plant the seeds of capitalism. (Beckert 2014)

“The first momentous event in the recasting of global connections” came with the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492, setting off the world's greatest land grab.”

Expansion to grab land and seize mineral and other wealth from these colonies was one part of the story. But Beckert also tells us that European capitalists and rulers altered global networks through a variety of means, the most important among them, being “the muscle of armed trade [that] enabled the creation of a complex, Eurocentric maritime trade web” and “the forging of a military-fiscal state [that] allowed for the projection of power into the far-flung corners of the world.” (Beckert 2014: 30, emphasis added)

Beckert calls this war capitalism. We know from our own history in the Indian subcontinent that the East India Company did not come as a trading company for commerce. It was a quasi-state, that fought wars and established colonial power long before the British state formally stepped in – in fact, after the Great Uprising of 1857.

It is necessary to make a more general point here about what we call “capitalism” as such. In the course of the above discussion, Beckert refers to the way in which “war capitalism” was characterized not by “secure property rights” but by a wave of expropriation of labor and land,” which, he says, “testifies to capitalism's illiberal origins.” (Beckert 2014: 37) As we shall have the occasion to see, this violence has been integral to capitalism right through the centuries of its existence, down to the present. So, one must recognize that all capitalism is war capitalism.

This story of the birth of capitalism cannot co-exist easily with the narrative/s of the various “transition debates” that draw on Marx to understand the development of capitalism as an internal moment of transformation in European feudalism. In fact, it can even be argued that “petty commodity production” and commerce in general do not really constitute the prehistory of capitalism. Everywhere, for capitalism to be implanted, small commodity production had to be violently uprooted. Indeed, it is the military-fiscal state that constitutes the prehistory of capital.

As it happens, 1492 is also the year of the Reconquista in Spain and Mahmood Mamdani has recently argued that that event ought to be considered “the founding moment of the modern state.” Mamdani goes further to claim that it was the year of the beginning of the nation-state and was defined by two key developments in Iberia – ethnic cleansing within and the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas. (Mamdani 2020: 1) Mamdani is right in taking these as key features of the nation-state but we should perhaps add a third feature here – “internal colonialism”. Anibal Quijano sees this feature to be equally in operation within what became nation-states as in colonial expansion without – as does Eugen Weber in his classic study, Peasants into Frenchmen. I am not entirely convinced that what came into being in 1492 was the nation-state, but we could perhaps see it as the moment when the processes that would later get formalized and embodied in the nation-state, came into being. Nonetheless, looking at the scholarship on the birth of capitalism, modern state and nation-state, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that colonialism, capitalism and modernity were emerging as part of the same constellation of processes.

The Coloniality of the Political

Drawing on his studies of colonialism in Latin America, Quijano suggests that “that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial', ‘ethnic', ‘anthropological' or ‘national', according to the times, agents, and populations involved.” (Quijano 2007: 168) His argument about the “coloniality of power” considers contemporary racial and ethnic divisions as encoding a certain grammar of power, as something that outlasts the actual rule of colonialism in Latin America. But the coloniality of power isn't simply about race or ethnicity. The larger structures of power set in place by colonialism that continue to exist between the ex-colonized and the colonizing powers are integral to it. No less important is the relation between the rise of the nation-state and “internal colonialism” as the other side of the colonial project itself.

There was something else that happened as the world entered the twentieth century, which culminated in the First World War. This process begun in the 19th century “Scramble for Africa”, was given concrete shape in the 1884 Conference of Berlin that formalized the partition of the African continent between seven European powers. “The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done,” argued Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1951: 349). Arendt reads into the rise of imperialism of this period, a parallel decline of the nation-state system of Europe. Thus, she argues, apart from inflation and unemployment all but destroying the social fabric “civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace… were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere.” (Arendt 1951: 349) “Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, scum of the earth.

In retrospect, however, this seems to be not a symptom of the decline but rather the fructification of the inevitable logic of nation-states but Arendt's point needs to be understood. What she was arguing here related to the rise of imperialism in this period. With it, national sovereignty became a mockery, except for a few giant states. (Arendt 1951: 352) Arendt discusses how, with the liquidation of the two “multinational states” – Russia and Austro-Hungary – there emerged two groups of people who had lost those rights “which had been thought of and even defined as inalienable, the Rights of Man.” These two groups were the “stateless” and the “minorities”, who had no governments to represent them and “therefore were forced to live either under the law of exception of the Minority Treaties, which all governments (except Czechoslovakia) had signed under protest and never recognized as law, or under condition of absolute lawlessness.” (Arendt 1951: 351)

Of course, both the mockery of national sovereignty and the production of stateless people, are discussed by Arendt in the context of Europe. Both had been already very much part of the experience of colonized societies, at least for a few centuries before World War I. But what Arendt's discussion brings home powerfully, is the fact that by the beginning of the twentieth century, even within Europe, a logic similar to that which existed in the colonial world was now playing out as far as ordinary people were concerned.

States in colonized societies, of course, had never been sovereign but the situation of ordinary people in these societies was far worse insofar as they had either been dispossessed and made slaves, transported across the seas, or as the native populations in the Americas and Africa, were exterminated.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (in her book Not a Nation of Immigrants), details the genocide of the “Indian” population from the very beginnings of settler colonialism in what is now the United States of America. In a chapter devoted to Alexander Hamilton, the founding father of the USA, Dunbar-Ortiz discusses his role in creating a Constitution that has been characterized as establishing the first ‘fiscal-military state' – that is a state created for making war. (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 11) “The United States was thus founded as the first constitutionalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves and land (real estate).” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 11) Notice that Dunbar-Ortiz too describes the early US state as a fiscal-military state. She cites the work of Stanford law professor and historian Gregory Ablavsky, which “emphasizes the centrality of Indian affairs in creating the Constitution, particularly provisions concerning federalism and the fiscal-military state.” His work highlights how “(T)he Constitution created a people empowered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war of independence was fought for, with great sacrifices…” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 12, emphasis added)

I should also mention here that this is precisely why historian Gerald Horne calls the American War of Independence “the counter-revolution of 1776”. (Horne 2014) Horne, in fact, makes the strong claim that “to the extent that 1776 gave slavery a renewed lease of life, it was truly a lineal ancestor of 1861 [the Civil War and the formation of the Confederacy] and, thus a counter-revolution of slavery.” (Horne 2014: xi)

In other words, this supposedly founding moment of modern democracy, celebrated even by Arendt as superior to all other revolutions, meant both – aggressive dispossession of indigenous peoples and the intensification of slavery.

It is necessary to understand that the entire undertaking of settler colonialism – and of colonialism at large – was undergirded by law. But that law was not meant for either the slaves or the indigenous peoples; rather it was to ensure that slave owners didn't indulge in mutually destructive lawlessness. The constitution of the modern political, regardless of where it was being instituted, at the “national” and the global level, was given a legal form. Dunbar-Ortiz observes, from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most non-European world was colonized under the “Doctrine of Discovery”, which was “one of the first principles of international law that Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to non-Christian peoples outside Europe.” “It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa and enslave the inhabitants, the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 32)

In the 1820s, “the Doctrine of Discovery was engraved in constitutional law by the US Supreme Court under John Marshall in decisions regarding the Cherokee Nation.” In so defining the property rights acquired via discovery, “the court further held that Indigenous ‘rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished. Their status was defined as ‘domestic, dependent nations', which means captive colonies.” (Ibid: 33)

It is this fiscal-military state that later morphed into what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”. Over the twentieth century, this military-industrial has directly intervened in “regime change operations”, overthrowing democratically elected popular governments. Scholars have documented almost a hundred instances of proven US interventions that range from directly supporting military coups to interfering in determining electoral outcomes, not to mention sponsoring armed militias in different parts of the so-called “developing world”. Is it surprising then that in 250 years of its existence, the USA has been at war for almost 230 years?

Decolonizing the Political

Mahmood Mamdani has recently argued in favour of what he calls the need to “decolonize the political”. Decolonizing the political, in his view, is fundamentally about dismantling the imagination of the nation-state that seeks to homogenize national cultures and, in the process, constitutes the political community that is the legitimate bearer of rights and citizenship. But this project of homogenizing national cultures also produces, inevitably, permanent majorities and minorities. It is through the nation-state that the political is constituted as such, as the centre-piece of political modernity itself. Decolonizing the political, therefore, “means upsetting the permanent majority and minority identities that define the contours of the nation-state.” (Mamdani 2020: 19)

The project of “decolonizing the polity,” he argues, must be at once an epistemic and political, for it is not simply a matter of formulating policies but also more importantly about “how we see ourselves in the world.” (Mamdani 2020: 19)

Mamdani's discussion is largely framed by his studies of the constitutive role played by colonialism, especially in the form of “indirect rule”, in defining and reconstituting cultural/ ethnic communities and “tribes” across the African continent. He argues that anticolonial elites who rejected European attempts to foist their idea of the nation-states on African countries, during their liberation struggles, eventually returned to the very definitions of indigenous culture and ethnicity produced by colonizers, as they embarked on their path of nation-building. The only contrary example, he argues, that attempts to decolonize the political is in post-apartheid South Africa, which seeks to constitute a non-racial state. Mamdani draws important and significant connections between the “political technologies of indirect rule” first developed in the United States of America and then applied with some modifications in South Africa and Nazi Germany. This is especially true of the Indian reservations in the USA, which became the model, not just for the Bantustans in apartheid South Africa but also for Hitler's concentration camps.

It is interesting, in this context, to refer to the work of James Whitman (2017), who tracks the influence of American race laws on the Nazis. Nazi interest in the American race laws was no passing curiosity. Indeed, Whitman documents in great detail, how in the run up to the enactment of the notorious Nuremburg Laws in in 1935, important Nazi jurists were seriously studying and discussing American race laws. Hitler's interest in the USA wasn't suddenly awakened in 1933-34 but was already expressed in Mein Kampf, where “he praised America as nothing less than ‘the one state' that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish.” (Whitman 2017) Most of the discussions among these jurists, Whitman tells us, were regarding racial segregation in general and miscegenation laws in particular. In more recent scholarship, says Whitman, “historians have also tracked down American influence on some of the most unambiguously criminal Nazi programs—in particular on Nazi eugenics and the murderous Nazi conquests in Eastern Europe.” (Whitman 2017) Indeed, historians have argued that the US influence went deeper, into the 1940s, to the Holocaust itself.

“Indeed as early as 1928, Hitler was speechifying admiringly about the way Americans had ‘gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage'; and during the years of genocide in the early 1940s Nazi leaders made repeated reference to the American conquest of the West when speaking of their own murderous conquests to their east.” (Whitman 2017)

Even more interestingly, as with immigration and citizenship law, German lawyers and policy makers' “interest in American anti-miscegenation law [that] long predated the Nazi period.” In fact, it is tied closely to pre–World War I German imperialism, when “beginning in 1905, German colonial administrators in South-West Africa and elsewhere instituted anti-miscegenation measures, intended to safeguard the ‘purity' of the German settler population against mixing with the natives.

It should be clear by now how the history of colonialism is deeply entangled with the emergence of “the political” in Europe and America itself and how it is not something that can be understood within the enclosed boundaries of the nation-state.

In conclusion, therefore, while agreeing with the main lines of Mamdani's argument regarding the decolonization of the political, I want to register two points of divergence. First, Mamdani's focus is on technologies of indirect rule and the ways in which definitions of self in the postcolonial era replicate colonial constructions of culture and ethnicity. His focus therefore, remains on the “denationalizing” the postcolonial states by institution of federal structures and insistence on residence-based citizenship rather than identity-based ones. (Mamdani 2020: 36) While this is very important, the state nevertheless remains at the centre of this proposal. My effort on the other hand, has been to tell the story of modernity and politics from the vantage point of the people at the receiving end, ordinary people caught in the vortex of politics. What emerges from the story that I want/ed to tell is that the state and quasi-state elites, and their centrality in modern politics is itself a product of coloniality/ modernity, which suggests that the very enterprise of trying the resuscitate the political might be flawed. Second, related to the first, while Mamdani's focus throughout remains on the political as something confined within the territorial bounds of the nation-state, my interest here, in foregrounding Gaza/Palestine, has centered on the real global structures of power that despite the different institutional forms that it may have acquired from the 1648 Treaty of Versailles to the 1884 Conference of Berlin to the League of Nations and the United Nations Organizations, has remained under the control of leading European powers and in recent times, an invisible cabal of the Euro-American powers and the Zionists. It should, therefore, be clear by now that while it is essential to dismantle the structure of the nation-state, where my argument takes a different route from Mamdani's is that I do not believe this can be done either at the level of a single territorial state or at a purely political level. What decolonization of the political (if that is what we decide to call it) requires is the dismantling of the military-industrial complex and in fact, a very different vision of the economy from the one controlled by corporations and billionaires.

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah. 1951/2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Penguin Books

Beckert, Sven.2014. Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism. Great Britain: Allen Lane, Penguin Random House.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2021. Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion. Boston: Beacon Press

Horne, Gerald. 2014. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York and London: New York University Press

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2020. Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap press of Harvard University Press

Quijano, Anibal.2000. ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America', Nepantla: Views from South, Vol. 1, Issue 3, pp. 533-580

Quijano, Anibal.2007. ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality', Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Nos 2-3, March/May 2007, pp. 168-178

Rubio, Marco. 2026. ‘Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference' (transcript of speech), 14 February 2026, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference accessed on 1 March 2026

Wengrow, David.2026. ‘Against the Grotian Tradition', London Review of Books, 23 January 2026, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/january/against-the-grotian-tradition last accessed on 7 March 2026

Whitman, James Q. 2017. Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press

This is the text of a presentation at the webinar of Indian Diaspora, Washington on 23 May, 2026. I thank the organizers for the opportunity to present it. This presentation is a preliminary part of a much bigger project and some of its claims and arguments are still being developed as the work progresses.

Photo Credit : Teacher Creativity Centre, Gaza, Palestine

Alternatives International

Theory After Gaza: Decolonizing the Political

Colonialism, Modernity, “War Capitalism”

The Coloniality of the Political

Decolonizing the Political