Mahmood Mamdani

• Columbia University

This response seeks to distinguish further between perpetrators and beneficiaries. It links this distinction to two different forms of violence, criminal and political. The overall argument focuses on the relation between political and social justice.

Michael Neocosmos has written Thinking Freedom in Africa (2016) to understand “political agency.” He outlines three imperatives as necessary for a fuller understanding of political agency. The first is to move away from political economy: trapped in a politics of interest, Neocosmos claims that “Marxist politics have remained, along with liberal po...

In 2011, South Sudan seceded from Sudan following a landmark referendum on self-determination. Yet fewer than three years after the historic vote for independence, the world’s newest country descended into a civil war that, since December 2013, has brought killing and bloodshed. In attempts to resolve the conflict and bring the civil war to an end,...

Why would a reading of The Muqaddimah² by teachers and students in the Ph D program at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) be of interest to a wider audience? Alternately, why would a reading of a 14th century North African text be of interest to academics in 21st century Kampala? Both questions belong to a wider reflection on the subject...

The Logic of Nuremberg Does Not Apply in Africa The nations who won World War II made sure the perpetrators of the Holocaust would be punished and their victims protected, and given a voice during a trial. A safe and distant territory, Israel, was provided so that they could escape their oppressors. In Africa, the West pretended to do the same with...

In the twenty-first century, fighting impunity has become both the rallying cry and a metric of progress for human rights. The new emphasis on criminal prosecution represents a fundamental change in the positions and priorities of students and practitioners of human rights and transitional justice: it has become near-unquestionable common sense tha...

Journalism in Conflict and Post-Conflict Conditions: Worldwide Perspectives aims to provide both empirical and theoretical input to the discussions of the role of journalism and media in conflict and post-conflict situations and in the often rather muddy waters between them. Together, the chapters in this book emphasise that discussions about po...

This article focuses on epistemological decolonization, including knowledge production and its institutional locus – the university – in the post-independence African context. The article begins by problematizing both the concept and the institutional history of the university, in its European and African contexts, to underline the specifically mod...

Mamdani introduces this Kitabkhana on Siba Grovogui's book Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy, which is presented for a broader discussion on the tenth anniversary of its publication. Grovogui presents a theoretical critique of IR theory, underlined by the assumption that contrasts “Europe alone as a site of reason” with “other cultures as violent,” t...

This essay draws parallels between the movement for justice in Palestine and the South African experience during the anti-apartheid struggle, engaging critically with supporters and practitioners of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Notwithstanding their very different contexts, the author argues that in the South...

The contemporary human rights movement holds up Nuremberg as a template with which to define responsibility for mass violence. I argue that the negotiations that ended apartheid—the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA)—provide the raw material for a critique of the “lessons of Nuremberg.” Whereas Nuremberg shaped a notion of justice as...

"When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement is the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionarie...

I would like to congratulate you warmly on successfully completing this part of your journey. I know that ceremony should not stand in the way of celebrations. But I promise to be short. I was invited to give a talk at the American University of Cairo in May, 2011. It was the time of Tahrir Square. Others had seen Tahrir Square as a continuation of...

This essay understands the significance of Tahrir Square as a radical shift both n the way of doing politics, from armed struggle to popular struggle, and in the definition of political identity, from religious to territorial. It seeks to understand the historical significance of the shift by placing it in the context of technologies of colonial ru...

Flüchtlinge stehen vor vielen Problemen, die nicht nur in ihren Heimatländern entstehen, sondern häufig durch die Politik anderer Staaten und internationaler Organisationen verursacht werden. Flüchtlinge leben in unentschiedenen Zuständen. Obwohl die Flucht vor kriegerischer Gewalt seit Jahrzehnten prominentes Thema der internationalen Politik ist,...

This essay argues that the new global regime of R2P bifurcates the international system between sovereign states whose citizens have political rights, and de facto trusteeship territories whose populations are seen as wards in need of external protection. Under the direction of the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court has become an...

A colonized population The legal position of Native Americans under US law has been the subject of two key debates. The first revolves around state versus federal claims to sovereignty over Native Americans. The second is over the relationship of Indians to the political community that is the United States. The first debate has been resolved in fav...

Hardly any academic journal that I know of would knowingly invite an employee of an organization under critical scrutiny in a book to be its sole reviewer. Not surprisingly, Sean Brooks's review turns out to be a sophisticated apology for Save Darfur Coalition, the organization he works for. It is both inconsistent and misleading. In a nut-shell, S...

Where do political identities come from, how do they change over time, and what is their impact on political life? This book explores these and related questions in a globalizing world where the nation state is being transformed, definitions of citizenship are evolving in unprecedented ways, and people's interests and identities are taking on new l...

Mahmood Mamdani suggests that we turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. He places cultural debates in their historical and political contexts and in so doing claims that terrorism is not a cultural residue in modern politics but a modern construction. Development (2007) 50, 117–119. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100353

Human history is replete with examples of widespread and gross violations of human rights, which continue to be perpetrated in the present day. Sadly, however, only a tiny fraction of the millions of people whose lives have been shattered by torture, rape, the murder of loved ones, or other forms of gross abuse, may hope to receive any meaningful f...

Scholars in the Marketplace is a case study of market-based reforms at Uganda's Makerere University. With the World Bank heralding neoliberal reform at Makerere as the model for the transformation of higher education in Africa, it has implications for the whole continent. At the global level, the Makerere case exemplifies the fate of public univers...

The paper discusses « race » and « ethnicity » as political identities, imposed through the force of the colonial law, and reproduced in the postcolonial period. In Africa, non-natives were tagged as races, governed under civil law (a discriminating but single law), whereas natives were said to belong to tribes, each of them under its supposedly cu...

In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, [c1952]), Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago political philosopher, analyzed the technique of writing under repression. He discussed medieval philosophers who had written under repression – al-Farabi, Maimonides, and Spinoza – but this was not an esoteric exercise. The col...

Thinking of modern jihad as simply a cultural extension of Islam is a common, and unfortunate, mistake. Two new books by Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy offer better historical and sociological explanations, but they are only a start.

Pour penser la violence politique, affirme Mahmood Mamdani, il est impé-ratif de comprendre le processus de polarisation identitaire aussi bien auprès des victimes que des auteurs de violence. Ces dernier(e)s qui pensent-ils/elles être et qui croient-ils/elles éliminer par la violence? Même si les identités projetées à travers la violence sont puis...

The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating 'good Muslims" from "bad Muslims, rather than terrorists from civilians. The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Pa...

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa was the fruit of a political compromise. The terms of the compromise both made possible the Commission and set the limits within which it would work. These limits, in turn, defined the space available to the Commission to interpret its terms of reference and define its agenda. This chapt...

This article, first given as a talk to a seminar of the Uganda Parliament in 2000, is a reflection on that aspect of the colonial political legacy that passes for common sense in the region of the African Great Lakes. The author takes a fresh look at recent events leading to civil war in Uganda (1981–6), Rwanda (1990–94) and eastern Congo (1997–.)...

Mahmood Mamdani suggests that we turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. He places cultural debates in their historical and political contexts and in so doing claims that terrorism is not a cultural residue in modern politics but a modern construction.Development (2002) 45, 25–27. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1110344

My starting point is the generation that inherited Africa's colonial legacy. Our generation followed on the heels of nationalists. We went to school in the colonial period and to university after independence. We were Africa's first generation of postcolonial intellectuals. Our political consciousness was shaped by a central assumption: we were con...

Seven years after more than 500,000 Tutsi were massacred in Rwanda, the world still cannot explain why. Mahmood Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers is a rich history of Hutu and Tutsi identity, but how it applies to the genocide is unclear.

Transition 10.2 (2001) 126-150 Holland isn't generally known as a center of black culture. Sure, Zwarte Piet, Santa Claus's "Negro" helper, still terrorizes young Nederlanders at Christmastime. And the black soccer sensation Ruud Gullit led screaming Dutch fans to don cardboard dreadlocks in tribute. But in much of the world, Holland still conjures...

Transition 10.3 (2001) 26-47 No one can be sure how many people were slaughtered in Rwanda in 1994. In one hundred days, a group of military and civilian leaders organized the country's Hutu majority to eliminate its Tutsi minority. They killed many Hutu, as well: anyone who showed reluctance to perform what was considered to be his or her national...

THE LATE NINETEENTH century 'scramble for Africa' marks the last great wave of European colonization. The target of the 'scramble' was the land mass between the Sahara and the Limpopo. To these equatorial African colonies late colonialism brought a host of lessons from previous colonizing experiences, particularly those of nineteenth-century Asia....

THE DISTINCTIVE FACE OF APARTHEID. Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa. By IVAN EVANS. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xiii+416. $55. (ISBN 0-520-20651-7). - - Volume 40 Issue 1 - MAHMOOD MAMDANI

Social Text - 60 (Volume 17, Number 3), Fall 1999

"These pages offer the conclusions of a lifetime." So Basil Davidson introduces The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (Times Books: New York and London, 1992). Focused on the period since Africa emerged from colonial rule in the fifties, this "meditation on the nature of the African experience" could not have come at a mo...

Twenty years on, the expulsion of Ugandan Asians provides the writer, himself an expellee, with the opportunity to reflect on the issue of minority rights and majority aspirations. Eschewing simplistic representations of the expulsion in largely racial terms, the paper seeks to recast the episode in its historical context. The roots of relations be...

Are human rights a western invention? Is their very conception, and the accompanying notion of a legal process that sets definite limits on the exercise of political power, an invention of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, and an ideological product of the French and the American Revolutions? And thus, is any talk of human rights...

This critique of the Structural Adjustment Programme in Uganda is argued at three levels. A discussion of the immediate consequences of SAP is based on empirical data on economic performance compiled by the Government of Uganda, IMF and World Bank. Second, information for a longer-term historical analysis is culled from the author's own research. I...

The article presents an analysis of the social relations of production and their contradictions in African peasant agriculture, which combine the ‘dull compulsion’ of market forces on petty commodity producers with various forms of extra‐economic coercion. Two paths of accumulation from below and from above are distinguished, the latter based in po...

I remember hearing a story, during the Sahelian famine of the 1970s, of a fat man and a thin man. Said the fat man to the thin man, "You should be ashamed of yourself. If someone visiting the country saw you before anyone else, he would think there was a famine here." Replied the thin man, "And if he saw you next, he would know the reason for the f...