Political Science in the Afterlife of Empire: New Reckonings with Racism and Racialization
By Sarah Bufkin, University of Birmingham, Anne Wolf, University of Oxford and Kathrin Bachleitner, University of Salzburg
Over the past couple of decades, political scientists have begun to take seriously the question of European imperial dominion and the racialized world order that such colonial projects of extraction, dispossession, and economic dependency produced. This is not to say that all political phenomena are racialized or that they are direct products of imperial formations. But from the postcolonial perspective, “colonization assumes the place and significance of a major, extended, and ruptural world-historical event,” as Stuart Hall argues in his essay, “When Was the Postcolonial?” (re-published in the 2021 Duke University Press volume, Selected Writings on Marxism, p. 302). The age of European empires marks an inflection point that has irrevocably shifted the political, economic, social, and ideological terrain upon which modern nation-states took shape and political actors of all kinds have since moved. Increasingly, political scientists, political theorists, and IR scholars today are exploring whether certain state and interstate institutions, social relations, modes of production and extraction, conflicts, ideas, and identities might be productively situated within the expanded horizon and transnational scope of the (post)colonial frame.