Postcolonial Global Justice (Princeton University Press, 2025)

Decolonization as a historical event is over. As a political project, however, it is far from accomplished. Not only do we live in a world marked by many unaddressed legacies of colonial oppression, but global politics continue to feature hierarchies that resemble colonial relations. While many formerly colonized peoples are now members of independent nation-states, there have been persistent charges of global political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural imperialism against global actors old and new. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but not on empire itself.

This book draws on Third World anticolonial thought to develop a view of global justice aimed at resisting and overcoming the neo-colonial present. The book engages with writings from four influential anticolonial thinkers and activists: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jawaharlal Nehru. In contrast with mainstream understandings of decolonization as attaining national self-determination, I trace within these thinkers a deeper concern with structural hierarchy and a vision of decolonization that emphasizes relations of equality. Based on this reconstruction of decolonization as egalitarian transformation, the book develops a view of global justice that takes social equality as its central value and applies it to three aspects of contemporary world politics: international investment, undemocratic global governance, and global cultural and knowledge production. In each, I demonstrate that racial hierarchies of domination and exploitation ground remedial rights to collective empowerment for marginalized populations across the world.

Bringing together anticolonial political thought and analytic political theory/philosophy, this book shows that addressing today’s pressing global problems requires us to take seriously the legacies of European colonialism and the urgency of resisting neocolonialism—to take on the task of a postcolonial global justice.