num_pages: 416
description: Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.In this genealogy of political modernity Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globefrom the New World to South Africa Israel to Germany to Sudanthe 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 by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question and after the fall of the Third Reich by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europes nation-states cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the criminal solution attempted at Nuremberg which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivorsvictims perpetrators bystanders beneficiariesbased on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project seeking a state without a nation.
language: English
title: Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press