Neocolonialism

12 Key excerpts on "Neocolonialism"

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  Mentan: Sustained Terrorism on Africa

  A Study of Slave-ism, Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and Globalism

  • Tatah Mentan(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Langaa RPCIG

    (Publisher)

  Colonialism is a direct control over a subjugated nation whereas Neocolonialism is an indirect involvement. We can no longer see colonialism but many nations in the world are experiencing the Neocolonialism now facilitated by the politico-bureaucratic bourgeoisie or running dogs of capitalist imperialism. In the political aspect, a flawed legacy was left behind. When former colonies emerged as independent states, they found themselves comprised of various tribes, ethnicities, social structures and cultures that were emotionally distant from each other. These were weak political entities, which lacked the muscle to flex their 233 absolute sovereignty because of the complexity in social structures and cultures. Creating nations and states with such a vast array of diverse people proved extremely an uphill task for the nationalists. The citizens of these nations and states were naturally oriented to their sub-groups such that it inevitably led to acrimonious relations between the peoples, often leading to military interventions to overthrow civilians governments. This subsequently also led to many civil wars, some which are still in existence up to this day. The fragmenting impact of colonialism cost Africa dearly in terms of achieving unity. Colonialism in its raw nature was to ensure that the colonialists had vast economic superiority over the Africans. Hence, the negative impacts of colonialism on the continent of Africa are very palpable in every sphere of life. Colonialism created a dual-economic system in Africa, but one was disarticulated and grossly repressive. There was the village subsistence economy which met the local needs and the modern one which met the needs of international commerce. This has had the impact that in contemporary Africa, states produce what they do not consume and consume what they do not produce.

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  Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism, and Anti-Terrorism Law in the Arab World

  • Fatemah Alzubairi(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  On Imperialism, Colonialism, and Neo-Colonialism 21 which can be economic, strategic, or even cultural in nature, with minimal or no military involvement and without claiming sovereignty. It suggests the exercise of the essence of an imperial policy without the direct engagement of the empire’s formal representatives. The elites in the colonized territories often play a significant role in these imbalanced power relations, as they link the imperial power with its indigenous policymakers. 11 This form of control can exist prior to, after, or between periods of colonialism. For example, Juan Cole argues that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in the Middle East, “colonies often existed before colonialism.” 12 This means that imperialism dominated many parts of the world politically and economically whether or not direct colonization took place. 13 Informal empire still exists in our current time where it is described as “neo- colonialism” (discussed below). This book is concerned with imperialism only within a specific timeline: the “new imperialism” 14 that prevailed from the eighteenth century onward, and its major Western players, above all Britain and France, and later the United States. Imperialism paved the way for direct colonialism. Britain and France engaged in direct colonial control all over the world including in the Arab region. The United States, although it did not have colonies in the Arab world, colonized the Philip- pines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. 15 Nonetheless, the United States remains a later colonial player than Britain and France, which were the most influential colonial leaders of their time. Colonialism refers to the direct military and political occupation and expansion overseas by the European powers, which spread widely during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which sought to protect the colonists’ political and eco- nomic interests.

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  Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought

  Historical and Institutional Trajectories

  • Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Marisa Belausteguigoitia(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Like dependency theory, neocolonial- ism called attention to a historical and structural condition of dependency between certain territories. The theory of Neocolonialism posited a quite direct path between colonization and the situation of dependency that it described. Major intellectuals and leaders of the new independent nations did not have to wait much to understand that independence would not lead to development, especially when they observed the same elites that benefited from colonization making sure that they continued to benefit from the new political relation in cohort with local elites. Another reality that contributed to the use of the concept of neocolonial- ism was the new imperial role of the United States. By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States had shifted its strategies for growth from territorial expansion and traditional forms of colonialism, to more indi- rect forms of rule. This led to the emergence of a renewed anti-imperialist discourse. Different from Neocolonialism, anti-imperialism does not point to a continuity of the local structures of power with the colonial reality; rather, it puts the emphasis in the continuity of the challenge to autonomy by foreign forces. Neocolonialism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, and dependency empha- sized political and economic relations between countries or regions. They also tended to rely on the category of class. The theory of internal colonial- ism emerged to show that, in addition to classes, in colonial and formerly colonial societies there are ethnic social divisions that carried on the same principles of affiliation and separation that were implanted by colonizers. Latin American territories with a substantial indigenous population such as México, Peru, and Bolivia, among various others, offer a good example of the continued colonial relations that exist between local criollo and mes- tizo elites on the one hand, and indigenous populations on the other.

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  Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial

  Rethinking North-South Relations

  • David Slater(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In order to pursue the further delineation of colonialism from imperi-alism the following three points can be made. First, the term ‘colonial’ is frequently used metaphorically, as in the example of the Quito protests against further neo-liberal integration in the Americas, which was likened to a new kind of colonialism. This is a widespread contemporary tendency, so that, for example, the recent Plan Puebla-Panama, initiated by the Mexican president Vicente Fox in 2001, has been contextualized as a process of the ‘recolonization’ of the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and Central America (Moro 2002). In an African context, a Ugandan political scientist describes global politics in the mid-1990s as being primarily characterized by a POST-COLONIAL QUESTIONS FOR GLOBAL TIMES 175 ‘recolonization of subject peoples’ (Tandon 1994), and as a final example, a resurgent US imperialism has been linked to a new ‘global colonialism’ (Gonza ´ lez-Casanova 1995) and a new ‘recolonization of the world’ (Maillard 2003). These examples reflect to some extent the com-parative facility of the term in contrast to say the ‘re-imperialization of the world’, but they also signify an attempt to give adequate expression to the strength of opposition to the resurgence of invasive Western power. Second, there is another approach to colonialism, or what is referred to as the ‘coloniality of power’, that originates in Latin America with the work of the Peruvian sociologist Quijano (2000) and the cultural studies and literary theorist Mignolo (2000b and 2000c). According to Quijano, what is referred to as globalization is in fact the culmination of a process that was initiated with the formation of a colonial/modern Euro-centred capitalism as a new global power.

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  Envisioning Human Geographies

  • Paul Cloke, Philip Crang, Mark Goodwin(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City , Jane Jacobs (1996) poses one of the most significant questions for contemporary human geography: ‘Can the spatial discipline of geography move from its positioning of colonial complicity towards producing postcolonial spatial narratives?’ (p163). Here she points both to the intimate relationships between geography as a formal academic discipline and European imperialism that have been explored in recent work on the historiography of geography (Barnett, 1998; Bell, Butlin and Heffernan, 1995; Godlewska and Smith, 1994; McEwan, 1998), and looks to the future direction of human geography informed by postcolonial perspectives. This chapter is written with Jacobs’ question in mind. My response is that yes, geography can move towards producing postcolonial spatial narratives, but not in any simple, easy or uncomplicated way. Postcolonial perspectives are important for human geography and geography is important to questions of postcolonialism, but bringing them together is necessarily challenging as well as productive for both. Postcolonialism, as I will argue, destabilises some of the certainties of geography. At the same time, geography differentiates global perspectives on colonialism and directs attention to the materiality of colonial and postcolonial processes, something that has been relatively neglected in comparison to the analysis of colonial and postcolonial writing and visual representations. While the term postcolonial is sometimes used to mark a time period after the end of colonial rule, or to describe the social, cultural and political characteristics of societies shaped by colonialism, postcolonialism describes a complex and debated set of analytical and theoretical perspectives, variously informed by feminist, Marxist, post-structural and sometimes psychoanalytic theories, which critically explore the histories and geographies of colonial practices, discourses, impacts and legacies. Despite the different theoretical tools and focus of interest within this growing interdisciplinary field, its core concerns are the centrality of colonialism to the patterns of global power from the early modern period to the present, and the construction of the identity of the ‘coloniser’ as well as the ‘colonised’ through often racialised ideas of difference. Postcolonialism is both historical and contemporary in its focus, interrogating the historical geographies of colonisation as well as challenging their continued effects in the present. A critical engagement with colonialism and its continued legacies is central to postcolonialism.

  The impacts of Western imperialism and colonialism have been profound. They include loss of land, livelihoods and lives and the disruption of pre-colonial cultural and social systems. Colonialism involved material processes, knowledges and modes of representation. As Stephen Greenblatt (1988) has written of early modern European encounters with the New World, the ‘possession of weapons and the will to use them on defenceless people are cultural matters that are intimately bound up with discourse: with the stories that a culture tells itself, its conceptions of personal boundary and liability, its whole collective system of rules’ (p64). Colonialism was not just political or economic, but also a cultural process that required legitimation through discourses of difference and superiority, and in which the experiences and identities of colonised people were shaped through damaging forms of cultural as well as political domination (Fanon, 1952, 1967; Nandy, 1983). The histories and identities of colonial powers were also deeply shaped by colonialism. For both former colonies and former colonial powers, the legacies of colonialism live on: in new patterns of ethnicity, racialised inequalities and identity politics shaped by migration from former colonies to former colonial powers; in relationships between indigenous people, descendants of white European settlers and more recent migrants in white settler colonies; in the civil wars and ethnic separatist movements in states brought into being in their modern form through colonialism; in new forms of domination that follow and extend old imperial lines of unequal interconnection. Postcolonialism explores the complex and effective relationships between issues of power, inequality and exploitation and themes of identity, knowledge and representation

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  Handbook of Cultural Geography

  • Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift, Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Imperialism (or neo-imperialism) refers to a phenomenon that originates in the metropolis; what happens in the colonies, as a result of imperial domination and control, is colonialism, or Neocolonialism. Similar variability exists in the literature con-cerning the term’s periodization. Ashcroft et al. state that ‘post-colonialism deals with the effects of colonization [ sic ] on cultures and societies and has generally had a clearly chronological meaning designating the post-independence period’ (1998: 186), the meaning adopted here. However, ‘post-colonialism as it has been employed in recent accounts has been primarily concerned to examine the processes and effects of, and reactions to, European colonialism from the sixteenth century up to and including the neo-colonialism of the present day’ (1998: 188), that is, from the moment colonization began (see also Ashcroft, 2001). The distinction between post-colonial and postimperial can also be ambivalent, according to the positionality and location of the author. Describing London as a (technically) postimperial city (King, 1990) foregrounds its earlier imperial role without necessarily invoking imperial contexts. For postcolonial migrants from Jamaica who live in London, however, it may be seen as postcolonial. As Australian Jane Jacobs points out, ‘in settler dominions like Australia, it is the colonist who is imperialist’ (1996: 37), and historical references to the British colonial empire (Sabine, 1943) are common. As colonialism impacts the metropolitan society and culture as much as it does the colonial (if not in the same ways) it is clear that, while distin-guishable, the phenomena (and their analysis) are inseparable.

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  Geographic Thought

  A Critical Introduction

  • Tim Cresswell(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The first is that it suggests that colonialism is over in its strictest sense when, in fact, many would argue that there are ongoing colonialisms all over the world. Plaid Cymru, the nationalist party of Wales, for instance, might argue that Wales is still being colonized by England. The inhabitants of Puerto Rico might well believe that they are a colony of the United States. Even in places that are no longer formally colonized, there are new forms of international relations that maintain relations of domination and subordination. Persistent inequalities might be referred to as neocolonial and can be traced through the activities of large corporations as much as through the actions of nation‐states. Derek Gregory has made a persuasive case for a “colonial present” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine (Gregory 2004). More conceptually, the continual referrals to colonial and postcolonial worlds make the fact of colonization appear to be the central defining moment in any place's history, thus placing western expansion at the heart of the definition process. This makes the West appear to be the “actor” or “agent” of world history while everywhere else merely has things done to them. This has the ironic effect of intellectually colonizing the world. A further problem lies in the sheer complexity of colonialism on the ground. Not all colonies are remote peripheries to some distant center. There are, for instance, varieties of “internal colonialism” such as the case of Wales in the United Kingdom or Tibet in China. Some places can be thought of as both colonies and colonizers. The most dramatic of these is the United States which started its life as “the colonies” and then became the world power that practices colonialism and Neocolonialism. Consider the case of Canada described by Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan, drawing on the work of Moore‐Gilbert

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  Insatiable

  The Rise and Rise of the Greedocracy

  • Stuart Sim(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  7 FROM COLONIALISM TO Neocolonialism: THE POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS OF GREED N ations are every bit as capable of being self-centred and greedy as individuals are, and we need look no further than the history of colonialism for proof of this contention. Colonization is a well-established fact of human existence, and there have been constant movements of peoples from territory to territory in order to gain control of more resources, agricultural and mineral, throughout recorded history. Europe alone yields a host of examples of this phenomenon in premodern times, with migrations from area to area on a regular basis before the concept of national borders, or national sovereignty as we understand it nowadays, came to be established and respected. Even then, there are examples to be cited, such as the Norman invasion of England in 1066. (The Normans were particularly active in this regard, travelling from their original Scandinavian base to colonize countries throughout Europe, from France and England, down as far as Sicily in the Mediterranean.) In the modern period the activity became institutionalized in the form of colonialism, with the major European powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century competing vigorously with each other to take control of the material resources throughout the lesser developed world that their own rapidly industrializing societies, and national ambitions, demanded. The political motivation in almost every instance was to improve the trading position, and thus the wealth, of the nation, and it was plainly successful in that endeavour until well into the twentieth century. Some colonies exist to this day (if merely a shadow of before). ‘Possessive individualism’ applies to nation states as well, and national self-interest can be just as single-minded as the individual variety, even to the point of going to war to achieve its objectives

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  Key Concepts in Historical Geography

  • John Morrissey, David Nally, Ulf Strohmayer, Yvonne Whelan, Author(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  them. The practices and spaces of colonial violence and anti-colonial resistance in the past not only complicate the story of colonialism but also speak specifically to the current moment of global danger and the dichotomy between its representation and materiality, and the frequent effacement of the latter from mainstream Western media.

  KEY POINTS

  •     Colonialism can be thought of as an intrinsically exploitative and dehumanizing system of control that relied upon a networking of legal, military and political power.

  •     It is important to not only recognize the import of colonial discourse in the justification of colonialism but also to see its connections to colonial governmentality and practice.

  •     A key role that geography can play in studies of colonialism is to demonstrate the import of locating analyses in necessarily grounded and differentiated ways, and to this end, the concept of the contact zone has been fruitful in sifting out the nuances of colonial encounters.

  •     Political, economic and cultural practices of anti-colonialism ensured the materialization of complex new spaces emerging under the shadow of colonialism.

  •     Historical accounts of the practices and spaces of colonial violence and anti-colonial resistance resonate with and illuminate the current moment of global danger in the colonial present.

  •     Recognizing the echoes of the colonial past in the present has enabled geographers to reveal how global power structures today still mirror the exploitative economic and spatial arrangements of the imperial era.

  References

  Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

  Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (eds) (2002) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum.

  Blunt, A. and Rose, G. (eds) (1994) Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford.

  Clayton, D. (2003) ‘Critical imperial and colonial geographies’, in K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography

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  Understanding Third World Politics

  Theories of Political Change and Development

  • Brian Smith(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Political autonomy was found to be something of a facade behind which lurked the continuing pres-ence of powerful Western financial and economic interests. The end of colo-nial government was not seen by leaders such as Nkwame Nkruma, the First Prime Minister of Ghana and author of a book entitled Neo-colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism , and Julius Nyerere, the first President of 54 Tanzania and author of Freedom and Development , as ending economic colonialism. The core of the neo-colonialist argument is that political and economic freedom cannot be separated. Economic power and the political power that flows from it reside elsewhere, even when ‘independence’ has been achieved (O’Connor, 1970). The new rulers of the former colonies found that major economic resources were controlled from metropolitan centres that hitherto had ruled their countries directly. Independence appeared largely symbolic. Subtle and indirect forms of domination were made possible by the structure of the economies bequeathed by the colonial powers at the time of constitutional independence. Colonialism had failed to develop the economies of the colonized territories beyond the small but important sectors needed by the European economies, and for which colonial rule was imposed. The post-colonial economy was characterized by a high level of dependence on foreign loans, technology, foreign investment, and foreign aid which, together, often ‘decapitalized’ the host economy through a net outflow of capital, with more being extracted in excess profits than being invested locally (Rosen and Jones, 1979). For example, Latin America was a net exporter of capital in the form of profits and interest throughout the 1980s, contributing to economic stagnation and declining living standards, with average per capita income shrinking by 11 per cent, and the number in poverty increasing by 60 million to 196 million, or 46 per cent of the total population (Robinson, 1999).

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  Asia as Method

  Toward Deimperialization

  • Kuan-Hsing Chen(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  In this way, the original colonizers use old colonial link-ages to control the former colonies. Predicated on the inside-outside metaphor—or, to use Fanon’s ex-pression, the Manichaean divide—colonialism, driven by the expanding forces of capital, established in the colonies the structure of the nation-state as its mediating agent to unify internal differences. Once the sys-tem of the nation-state was imposed around the globe, the most viable mechanism for colonies to use in evicting the outsiders (colonizers) was, ironically, the nation-building and state-making project. Third-world nationalism, as a response and reaction to colonialism, was therefore seen as an imposed but necessary historical choice, a choice made in order to affirm the new nation-states’ autonomy from the colonizing forces. In territories divided and occupied by colonial powers throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia, colonialist governments saw the rise of nation-alist independence movements not as a threat, but as a moment of re-adjustment, an opportunity to shed their responsibilities and reduce their costs while still maintaining colonial linkages, markets, and political influ-ence. “Self-determination,” a slogan heralded by the younger generation of imperialist powers such as the United States, proved to be not so much a humanist concern, but a political strategy on the part of the imperial-ists to scramble the already occupied territories in order to secure for themselves a larger piece of the cake in the name of “national interests.” J. A. Hobson, as early as 1902, had remarked on the close ties between nationalism and imperialism: the latter, he argued, cannot function with-out the former (Hobson 1965 [1902]). By the 1940s, it had become clear that neoimperial nationalism was in good shape. Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism warned third-world intellectuals not to be deceived by this rising new power.

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  Reparations to Africa

  • Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Anthony P. Lombardo, Anthony P. Lombardo(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 Neocolonialism and Globalization Reparations activists do not generally ask for reparations for the post-colonial period. The three active members of the Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) in 2002 confined their demands to reparations for the slave trade and colonialism. In part, this was because in the postcolonial period African governments were formally independent and made their own decisions. As Geoffrey, an ambassador, told us, postcolonial interna-tional economic relations were determined by contracts made by sover-eign states; however inequitable or unfair the contract might seem, a state could not ask for reparations if things went wrong. Nevertheless, many of our respondents believed that postcolonial economic relations, especially globalization, were a manifestation of con-tinued Western exploitation of Africa. They considered the entire post-independence period to have been one of Neocolonialism, an economic colonialism that granted formal political independence but neverthe-less continued the exploitation begun by the slave trade and continued through formal colonialism. This perception reflects a deep sense of de-spair, a feeling that no matter what Africans do, they will never be able to control their own economies. Rhetoric The official documents of the Durban conference do not specifically mention reparations for the postcolonial period. Nevertheless, the final declaration did refer critically to several features of the world economy. Racism and its related manifestations could, according to the declara-tion, be aggravated by “inequitable distribution of wealth, marginalization and social exclusion.” 1 The declaration also mentioned the possibly detri-mental effects of globalization. The process of globalization constitutes a powerful and dynamic force which should be harnessed for the benefit, development and prosperity of all coun-tries.

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