Article · 2025
What is anticolonial and anti-imperial political thought?
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 9 August 2025
About this article
A review essay on three recent books: Tejas Parasher’s Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought (2023), Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire (2023) and Nazmul Sultan’s Waiting for the People (2024). Taking stock of the ‘turn’ to empire in political theory and international relations, Chang asks what makes political thought anticolonial or anti-imperial, and what these studies of democracy and empire add to the field.