Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021
British Academy Book Prize Finalist
PROSE Award Finalist

"Demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa."
--Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books

"Mamdani argues that the colonial 'define and rule' attitude towards ethnic or religious minorities lives on in postcolonial states. Such politicization of identity (you could even call it identity politics) often leads to extreme violence."
--Prospect

"Mamdani has carved out a reputation as a forceful and articulate critic of political modernity's supposed peace-bringing qualities...[His] most comprehensive exploration yet of the subject of majority-minority relations."
--The Baffler

"Mamdani persuasively argues that there will be no decolonization, no democracy, no peace until we de-link the association between the 'nation' and state power."
--Nandita Sharma, The Wire

In case after case around the globe--from Israel and South Africa to Sudan--the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.

The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and by the Allies. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this process. Mamdani rejects the "criminal" solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all--victims and perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls us to reject political violence and move beyond majorities and minorities.