What happened to neocolonialism? The rise and fall of a critical concept

ABSTRACT

This article is a history of the idea of neocolonialism from its first use in the 1960s to its more recent deployments in the 2010s. During the decolonization period, the concept of neocolonialism was a powerful ideological and analytical tool in the service of the global anti-colonial movement to denounce the persistence of subordinate relations between the former colonizers and the newly independent countries. The article argues that the decline of the concept was the result of the crisis of the postcolonial state in the 1980s and the parallel rise of the theory and ideology of globalization which was based on opposite theoretical premises. The crisis of the popularity of globalization in the 2010s has made room for a return of critical concepts in the analysis of international politics and, among them, neocolonialism. This new wave of literature on neocolonialism remains fragmented, undertheorized, and, unlike its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, disconnected from social and political movements. Moreover, Western-based sources have recently started using the concept to describe China’s activities in the Global South in a problematic way that seems to attribute solely to Beijing the very neocolonial practices that Western powers are normally denounced for.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This article is not a theoretical analysis on the concept of neocolonialism but rather its history and thus the meaning of the term is discussed here in its historical evolution. However, it might be useful to make some clarifications in this regard. Even if remains somewhat undertheorized, the concept of neocolonialism refers – quite straightforwardly and uncontroversially – to the establishment or continuation of colonial relations via indirect means. Even if indirect colonialism existed also in the heyday of colonialism – one can think of China or the Ottoman Empire – neocolonialism only refers to manifestations of indirect colonialism taking place following the mid-twentieth century decolonization. It is, however, a much thornier issue to define its parent term. Colonialism is, in fact, an ancient word with a shifting and shaky meaning whose definition lies outside the scope of this article. For a brief overview of the varieties of colonialism, see Nancy Shoemaker, ‘A Typology of Colonialism’, Perspectives on History, 1 October 2015, https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/october-2015/a-typology-of-colonialism. For a detailed discussion, see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

2. All-African Peoples’ Conference, ‘Resolution on Neocolonialism, Cairo, Egypt, March 25–31, 1961’, All-African People’s Conference News Bulletin, I no. 4 (1961): pp. 1–2.

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27. For an example from the American punditry: Thomas Friedman, ‘Quit the Whining, You Moron. Globalization Isn’t a Choice’, International Herald Tribune, 30 September 1997.

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31. Clapham, 48.

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66. One of this interesting trend is the one working on the concept of ‘racial capitalism’. See for example Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis MN: Minnesota University Press, 2011); Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (Washington DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Ida Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

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