Response to Forum on Worldmaking after Empire
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829820936362 |
| Author | Adom Getachew |
| Subject Matter | Book Forum |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829820936362
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2020, Vol. 48(3) 382 –392
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0305829820936362
journals.sagepub.com/home/mil
Response to Forum on
Worldmaking after Empire
Adom Getachew
University of Chicago, USA
Keywords
empire, postcolonialism, self-determination
I want to thank the members of the 2019 Best Theory Book Award committee of the
International Studies Association for selecting Worldmaking after Empire, which has in
turn made this forum possible. In particular, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Jens Bartelson,
as members of the committee, have done me a great service by selecting ideal reviewers,
handling the logistics for this forum, and writing the introduction to the exchange. I am
also grateful to Sandipto Dasgupta, Jenna Marshall, Randolph Persaud, and Lucia
Rafanelli for their incisive reviews. By bringing to bear the theoretical resources of post-
colonial and decolonial perspectives, critical international relations, and contemporary
normative theory, they illuminate the limitations of Worldmaking and offer avenues to
stake out areas for further investigation.
I will organise my response around four themes: (1) the conceptualisation of empire,
(2) the relationship between the domestic and international, (3) the limits of anticolonial
nationalism, and (4) the contributions of a history of decolonisation to contemporary
cosmopolitanism. Readers of Worldmaking will appreciate that this four-part structure
follows the argumentative arc of the book. The book begins by reconceptualising empire,
moving away from a bilateral relationship between metropole and colonised nation to
considering its global structure of unequal integration. Empire had made a world through
legal, political, and economic subordination and the project of decolonisation grew out
of this imperial world, offering a competing vision of worldmaking in response. Tracing
three internationalist projects – the emergence of a right to self-determination, the crea-
tion of regional federations and the demand for a New International Economic Order
(NIEO), I argued that anticolonial nationalists viewed their aspiration for national inde-
pendence as dependent on the transformation of the international order. Nation-building
and worldmaking were necessarily combined. Finally, I suggested that attending to this
Corresponding author:
Adom Getachew, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637-5418, USA.
Email: agetachew@uchicago.edu
936362MIL0010.1177/0305829820936362MillenniumGetachew
research-article2020
Book Forum
To continue reading
Request your trial