Postcolonial Politics: An Introduction

Core Concepts of Postcolonial Politics

• Impact of Colonial Legacies: Contemporary global politics are fundamentally influenced by the history of colonial rule and imperial administration.
• Intertwined Modern Realities:     * Development and security projects in the Global South mirror the "civilising missions" of the nineteenth century (Paris 2002).     * Multiculturalism in the Global North represents the "empire returning home" (Bhambra and Narayan 2017).

Defining the Postcolonial Heuristic

• Heuristic Device: The term "postcolonial" is used as a tool to identify the multiple, contending, and overlapping legacies of colonial rule shaping current politics.
• The Significance of "Post": Signifies a double re-engagement with global politics as both historically constituted through colonialism and presently delineated by ongoing struggles over those legacies, even after formal colonialism has ended.

Objectives of Postcolonial Critique

• Expansion of Political Imagining: Postcolonial critique challenges and stretches existing understandings of what politics entails.
• Methodological Pluralism: It impels scholars to pluralise and rethink the methods, concepts, actors, and narratives used to make sense of global politics.
• Integration of Perspectives: The goal is to showcase a plurality of approaches to view global politics as, fundamentally, postcolonial politics.

Handbook Structure and Contributions

• Editors: Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam.
• Categorization of Inquiry:     * Part I: Points of departure.     * Part II: Popular postcolonial imaginaries.     * Part III: Struggles over the postcolonial state.     * Part IV: Struggles over land.     * Part V: Alternative global imaginaries.