Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics

Engagements with the postcolonial world by International Relations (IR) scholars have grown significantly in recent years. The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics will provide a solid reference point for understanding and analysing global politics from a perspective sensitive to the multiple legacies of colonialism and colonial rule.

The Handbook will introduce and develop cutting-edge analytical frameworks that extend but also problematise the postcolonial critique. Alongside empirical issue areas that remain crucial to assessing the impact of European and Western colonialism on global politics, the Handbook will introduce new issue areas wherein the mutating structures of colonial rule are no longer enacted solely or directly by European or Western agents.

This vital resource will be split into six thematic sections, each featuring a short introduction to help introduce the chapters that follow :

• Points of Departure: introduces the reader to diverse, relatable and contested narratives that are currently utilized to make sense of postcolonial politics
• Popular Imaginaries: critically elucidates some of the key contested concepts (both new and emerging) that are popularly deployed both in media, politics and academia to make sense of contemporary global politics
• Spaces and Places of Postcolonial Politics:allows readers to challenge the colonial imaginary of where and when global politics take place
• Movements and Immobilities: the era of globalization has seen people-movement and border building, both socially and physically, this section introduces ways in which both movements and immobilities are derived from colonial legacies
• Old and New Inequalities: discusses the abiding social consequences of the uneven neo-colonial organization of the global economy and addresses new inequalities that have been created by postcolonial states
• Postcolonial Diplomacies: examines the postcolonial coordinates of existing diplomatic relations and alternative diplomacies that cohere and communicate on levels that subvert the postcolonial mainstream.

Providing both a consolidated understanding of the field as it is, and setting an expansive and dynamic research agenda for the future, this Handbook is essential reading for students and scholars alike. 

Robbie Shilliam is a Reader in International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London UK.

Olivia U. Rutazibwa is Lecturer in International Development and European Studies at the University of Portsmouth UK.