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

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

• 
  Henning

  There is some interesting and worthwhile stuff in here, but the chapter on Nazi Germany is a revisionist travesty. No one deserves more than one star who, whether intentionally or negligently, repeats the right-wing lie about the number of deaths in Dresden just to make the cheap point that the poor poor Germans were really just victims, too.
• 
  Andrew

  What the fuck
• 
  Don

  Mahmood Mamdani has written an ambitious book that seeks to show the unexamined legacy of nation-states and the exclusion of people represented as standing outside ‘civilisation’ and what it has laid down in principles of international law and state formation.
  
  The nation-state, he argues, has invariably involved the violent exclusion of people constructed as the ‘other’. The idea of ‘tolerance’ followed on from the religious wars in Europe during the seventeenth century which tempered the rejection and exclusion to some degree, but this rarely reached the territories which were being governed as colonial possessions. On the contrary, what became in Europe the idea of majority and minority among civilian populations were hardened in the colonies into a permanent division between the ‘civilised’ national and the ‘uncivilised’ native.
  
  This was so profound a distinction it survived the independence of the former territorial
  possessions and remained even when the new polity presented itself, as in the case of the United States of America, as the exemplar of a society founded on the liberty. Mamdani provides a fulsome and poignant account of the genocidal policies directed at the Indian people. (He insists on that term rather than the now more common ‘Native American’ on the grounds that ‘American’ was the very thing that the new state was determined the indigenous people could never be.)
  
  The reduction of the pre-Columbian population of the hemisphere from an estimated 100 million to one-tenth of that number was achieved primarily through the perhaps unintended importation of European disease. But it was added to by quite deliberate policies that ensured the Indians were not permitted to recover from the pandemics that hit them. Expulsion from their traditional lands and forced marches resulting in the deaths of thousands became the lot of the native peoples.
  
  The important part of Mamdani’s argument is that the memories of this holocaust has haunted internal law ever since and has impacted on the ways in which other atrocities in other times have been considered and has also guided the processes which have brought other nation-states into existence. More accurately, not the memories as such, but the need to suppress the memory of a genocide associated with the formation of the United States nation, has limited the capacity of the modern community of nation-states to address the mass murders and associated injustices of their own times.
  
  The book looks at the strange procedures that governed the trial of Nazis at Nuremberg after the second world war. Contrary to what most believe was the heart of the indictment, the murder of millions of Jewish and other people who were despised by the regime did not figure in the charges. American prosecutors resisted efforts to include these deaths on the grounds that it would furnish the defence with an opportunity to argue that the Nazi death machine had its precedents in the population policies of US governments. Keen to hide what would otherwise be revealed as the criminality of an entire system founded on nations organised as states, the victor’s justice at Nuremberg preferred instead to brand individual Nazis as cri
  minals in order to protect the integrity of the state system which had enabled their power.
  Could it have been done differently? Mamdani makes the case that the experience of the South African people in accounting for the legacy of apartheid suggests that it could, even if the pious rigmarole of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission managed to muddy the waters.
  
  In the South African case, the charge sheet was drawn up by a liberation movement that, by the time of the fall of apartheid, was compromised of the ANC, a black consciousness movement that united Africans with mixed-ethnicity ‘coloured’ people together with South Asian Indians, and a radical movement of white students who were refusing the privilege of their skin colour. Together they formulated a view of their collective history which made the apartheid state the criminal entity, with the actions of its people best understood as the adaptions required in order to survive in a political community founded on atrocity. Whilst individual behaviour had to be accounted for, the central task was to change the character of the state to ensure that its crimes could never again be repeated.
  
  Mamdani considers the application of this principle of holding the nationalist component of the state to account in detailed consideration of the situations of Palestine/Israel and the formation of South Sudan as a state independent of Sudan in 2011. There is much profound insight in these reflections that needs to be bought into a much wider conversation about states groundedon the principle of nation rather than democracy.
  
  
• 
  Leila Skinner

  In Neither Settler Nor Native, Mahmood Mamdani widens the historical lens, starting with “political modernity,” which he sees as core to a historical trajectory that produces categories of population and distinctions that historically—and still in the present—determine domination and dispossession through the extremes of violence. I really appreciated how Mamdani rejected the assumed beginning of statehood as Westphalia states which is the beginning of Introduction to International Relations and therefore, the beginning of countless Tufts’ students’ assumptions of the foundations of statehood. Instead, Mamdani began in 1492 when modern colonialism and the nation-state were born at the same time as the European settler colonization of the Americas. In this historical analysis, the focus is on North America and the gradual near extermination and wholesale dispossession and displacement of its Indigenous populations. Mamdani questions conventional understandings of the “revolutionary” founding of the United States by its “immigrants.” Instead, he suggests an alternative reading that recognizes the United States as an on-going settler colonial project. This reading enables us to understand how violence operates in the construction of “permanent minorities” subjected to exclusionary practices, for example, in the reservation system. Mamdani argues that the American model has inspired many nationalist projects that have aimed to create permanent minorities. His case studies include Nazi Germany, Israel and the Palestinians, the breakup of Sudan, and post-apartheid South Africa. South Africa is the one case that has emerged out of the debris of colonial modernity, where settlers and natives became “survivors,” juridically equal citizens in a post-apartheid nonracial democracy.
  
  Mahmood Mamdani articulated in a well-laid out compilation, a sentiment that has been explored throughout my work as an organizer with SJP. Often our work revolves around bringing parallel struggles into Palestinian liberation and particularly, similarities along with being distinctly unique sociopolitical locales, between histories of colonialism and on-going resistance in Kashmir and Palestine. An additional case study that could add depth to Mamdani’s analysis is that of Pakistan, India, and Kashmir and the foundation in British colonialism that has cemented ethnic-national divides between the majority Hindu Indians and minority Muslim Pakistanis with Kashmir as the contested battleground. Further, in more global movements for decolonization, increasing calls for global solidarity are made.
  
  I was fascinated with the idea of “de-Zionization” that Mamdani suggests as a future for occupied Palestine that “would involve the depoliticization of Jewish and Palestinian identity, so that Israel may be a rights-protecting democracy rather than the servant of a permanent national majority” (255). Mamdani presents Israel as a colonial and apartheid state, meaning that the “de-Zionization” of Israel could be applied to other nation-states as a template for de-colonization; however, framing that process within the boundaries of the contemporary state of Israel feels incredibly limiting as those were established through the seizure of the Golan Heights of Syria and the remainder from Palestinians and the very borders of Israel could never be “depoliticized”.
  
  Are there ways of understanding decolonization within Palestine, specifically, beyond the nation-state boundaries of present-day Israel? At what level does decolonization happen ‒ first through building international solidarity or first through overthrowing colonial regimes and reshaping from a national level? In what ways can “Native” be defined outside of settler frameworks, in which Indigenous people are creating meaning for themselves?
• 
  Shireen Rummana

  Mamdani's central thesis is that the birth of the nation-state emerged from colonialism, and that the colonizer (often the British, etc.) worked to politicize and entrench ethnic and religious differences in a divide and conquer strategy that gave new political meaning to difference and led to a more violent order. Each identity, which had been malleable previously, was turned into a hardened political group in competition for the nation-state, and only one identity group could claim the nation-state and wield power over the other minorities. Even after the departure of the colonizer, this logic of the nation-state has remained. This helps explain the outbreak in civil wars, genocide, and other major violence in the post-colonial period.
  The next point in Mamdani's argument is that the human rights framework has failed to find a solution to these outbreaks in violence because it analyzes the problem as one of individuals rather than peoples or ideologies, and criminalizes certain individuals in a very narrow model, that of the Nuremberg model. He shows the South African anti-apartheid movement as an example of the opposite, where anti-apartheid activists redefined race and Blackness.... Mamdani's examples are Germany and failed denazification; Israel as the outcome of this same European nation-state model; the US and its system of reservations and genocide which initially inspired Hitler; South Africa and its anti-apartheid struggle; Sudan and South Sudan where the British artificially separated 'Arab' from 'African' and created politicized tribal homelands, leading to genocide. But the same thesis could apply to, and helps explain, Syria and Lebanon in the ways that colonialism entrenched sectarian differences into political domination, the partition of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, and many more....
  There were a few problems within his chapters, for example he thinks that Israelis need to be convinced of a progressive alternative by Palestinians and that will change the balance of power (not likely, by our measure!); he sees the US as moving to include Black people but not Indigenous/Native Americans (hardly!); and of course a lack of class analysis or focus on anti-fascist efforts or experience.... Still I highly recommend as it helps explain massive violence in countries worldwide in the post-colonial moment.
• 
  Maryam AlHajri

  I really loved how Mamdani pushes toward a political agenda of emancipation, and as he states; this is not a romantic positionality; while he embraces a Foucauldian insight of power permeating agency -only in it’s formative stage- he brings to the forefront the South African story to give us a “glimpse” of other possibilities; of how mobilizing and organizing can break through the parameters of power relations, showing how the relation between power and agency is neither determinative nor irrelevant.
  
  Overall this is a really important book to anyone working on settler-colonialism, de/postcolonialism and the law making/preserving of the status quo of minorities.
• 
  Shameer Ks

  Sampling the history of settler colonial states from the US to Israel, the book reimagines a post-colonial future where all political identities could live together
• 
  Tash Matar

  Essential decolonization reading.
• 
  Gadi

  An ambitious, penetrating book that made some bold claims. It introduced me to the centuries of dispossession of Native Americans, the denazification process in Germany, the emergence and resistance to apartheid in South Africa, and the stranglehold of the British colonial scheme on Sudan and South Sudan.
  
  On the Israel section — I mostly agreed with his argument but had some questions about his phrasing and argumentation. For example, Mamdani argues that Palestinians rebelled against the exclusionary Jewish nature of immigration — what he'd referred to as the "settler" nature — but then they also opposed any immigration, even during WWII, which is sus.
  
  Mamdani sees the nation-state as a driver of ethnic cleansing, rather than as the protective apparatus that the 1648 Westphalia treaty conceived it as. For example, he brings up the ethnic cleansing of Germans after WWII — half a million dead, millions more expelled — as evidence that the desire to make a homogeneous Europe necessitated atrocities, not unlike the Nakba that a homogeneous Jewish state demanded. But that is an obvious observation.
  
  One central formulation — that the nation-state can never truly be democratic since it presupposes a permanent majority — never really grapples with democratic nation-states like Japan, with naturally permanent majorities. Some of the writer's solutions also seemed slapped on or perhaps shortsighted, like apportioning some fixed representation for Native Americans as a political route to decolonization, even a state of their own — precisely the sort of tribalization that happened in South Sudan? A sort of approximation of a nation state?
  
  Denazification to Mamdani was a failed process because it handled "big" Nazis as individual criminals — he thinks the antifascist forces should have led the internal reckoning, rather than the big powers exacting a "victor's justice". But what would that internal reckoning look like? And why were these processes mutually exclusive? There is some element of counterfactual history here.