Introduction: Toward a Radical International Thought

Bringing together political theorists of empire with critical scholars of international relations (IR) who have interrogated the methodological nationalism (indeed the fetish of the nation-state) of their disciplines, this special issue examines the multifaceted dimensions (including political, ideological, and psycho-affective) of a radical international thought. Theoretical conceptualizations of imperial domination and violence, processes of racialization, and anti-colonial resistance—such as those of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Sankara, Edward Said, and many others—have been internationalist in their orientation and traveled (both spatially and temporally) across different colonial and postcolonial contexts. Going beyond articulations of anti-colonial struggle at the national level, this issue charts radical theories and praxes of insurgency and revolutionary violence and brings an internationalist framework to bear on historical moments like the Spanish Civil War, the rise of anti-imperial development alternatives, the civil rights movements in the United States, and others. In doing so, we also put the spotlight on thinkers who are rarely read in a global register, such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, Ghassan Kanafani, and Eqbal Ahmad, among others. Furthermore, we track these understudied articulations of radical international thought in the context of the traveling projects of imperial domination to which they responded. These radical figures’ political thought and action, in turn, inspired further imperial responses, such as political assassinations in the Third World, counterrevolutionary tactics, and other modes of violence in the service of empire.

The idea for this special issue grew out of two panels that we co-organized at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association (2021) and the International Studies Association (2022), which brought together researchers on international political thought from both IR and political theory. The encounter between political theory and international relations seeks to work toward a theory of radical internationalism. What this entails is centering both the need for a more systematic theorization of internationalism and a sustained attention to global political processes such as domination, violence, (counter)insurgency, and worldmaking, among others, which shaped (and constrained) the intellectual and ideological contours of internationalism. In other words, we are interested here in exploring internationalism not only as an ideological orientation of the Left (see Ayça Çubukçu's essay in this issue) but also as the circulation of ideas and praxes along colonial and postcolonial spaces.

As political theorists increasingly grapple with the legacies of empire, they have gone beyond earlier efforts to scrutinize the relationship between liberalism and empire (Mehta 1999; Hardt and Negri 2000; Losurdo 2005) and to read canonical figures in light of their colonial contexts and concerns, recovering instead “the critical and reconstructive ambitions” of anti-colonial thought and formulating anti-colonialism as what Adom Getachew and Karuna Mantena (2021: 362) have described as a distinctive genre of political theory. These efforts go hand in hand with a growing interest in documenting imperialist internationalism, on the one hand, and projects of alternative worldmaking, global justice, and transnational cosmopolitanism, on the other hand.¹ In these endeavors, political theorists share a set of motivating concerns and questions with scholars of critical international relations, who have detailed how the field of IR has been complicit with and indeed instrumental to global racism and imperial domination (via its policy practitioners, academics, and theoreticians, particularly in the United States) while removing any meaningful references to empire, colonialism, and race from its analyses and theorizations in recent decades.² Among the fruitful products of these conversations is showing how the fetishization of the state in IR leads to imperialism being exclusively conceptualized as a state-to-state interaction (in IR), and to theorizations of colonialism, race, and capitalist dynamics often lacking a global/international focus (in political theory). Together, critical political theory and international relations accounts have called into question the myths of the Westphalian order (see Siba Grovogui in this issue), showing how the European state system and international law developed within global systems of empire and colonialism, and how the US/Europe-led liberal international order is underpinned by unequal integration and racial hierarchy (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Long and Schmidt 2005; Hobson 2012; Pitts 2018; Getachew 2019). The conventional separations “between theory and IR, domestic and international,” separations that have themselves “masked political science's imperialist scaffolding,” have thus been challenged and more meaningfully engaged (Marwah et al. 2020: 277). This issue brings together this scholarship as a starting point to thinking about an international political thought that reconfigures what counts as political theory (and where we locate it) and that maintains a steady focus on global/international scales (without neglecting their enmeshments with local and translocal contexts). In this endeavor, we are inspired by recent works that systematically seek to document “international thought” as it was crafted and shared by otherwise neglected figures.³ We contribute to these works by identifying additional figures, sites, and genres of radical international thought and praxis.

We use radical in the sense that Ella Baker (cited in Bhandar and Ziadah 2020: 1) used the term, in “its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”⁴ In other words, radical in this context is a commitment to identifying the roots of global oppression and decolonizing the material and ideational structures of our world. We understand internationalism as the ethos and orientation that prevailed and dominated the decades of decolonization (roughly from 1930s through the 1970s): while anti-colonial struggles acquired nationalist aspirations and platforms, the ethos was an unmistakably internationalist one (outward looking in its sources of inspiration and in its concrete forms of solidarity with other similar struggles in different locales).⁵ Anti-imperialist internationalism, in its different iterations, has held together the commitment to the right of nations for self-determination with the collaboration between radicals in different settings working together to overthrow global empire (Mohandesi 2023). Against imperial conceptions of the world, radical internationalism has entailed “pursuing connected struggles and articulating solidarities,” without necessarily “aspiring to capture the entire world” (Esmeir 2018: 111).

Radical theory produces not only various iterations in diverse locales but also the counter-response, as some contributions here explore theories and practices of counterinsurgency and imperial violence (Alina Sajed, in this issue). Indeed, we echo Elleni Zeleke and Arash Davari's (2022: 426) recent provocation that asks us to consider not that “anticolonial revolutions might have failed but that impossible conditions were internalized by postcolonial states.” The challenge, thus, is not simply to index anti-colonial ideas and struggles but also to engage the backlash against them and the internal violence and contradictions that they engendered. Therefore, in this project, we make the case for the stakes of thinking together about empire and internationalism toward building a radical international political thought that is attuned to the global and cross-temporal travels of both structures of domination and struggles of liberation.

Some of the questions that emerge in this volume are the following: How do revolutionary ideas and anti-colonial theorizations circulate globally? How does internationalist revolutionary praxis translate into theory? And how does theory inspire and change revolutionary praxis? We mean these questions in both their temporal and their spatial iterations, as global connections and linkages. More specifically, we are interested here in the theoretical transfigurations that take place in the context of decolonization and postcolonial anomie: for instance, how does Fanon's theory of violent revolution travel across anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggles? What is gained and what is lost? What is incommensurable? What revisions do thick historical contexts produce to a theory engendered in a locale (colonial Algeria) that impresses upon us both its particularism and its universal appeal? How and why do Antonio Gramsci's ideas become the basis of theory and praxis in revolutionary Iran? What are the political stakes entailed in the juxtaposition between Fanon's and King's positions on violence?

While the contributions to this issue explicitly engage varieties of anti-colonial thought through explorations of the life/works (and their reverberations) of thinkers as diverse as Baldwin, Du Bois, Said, Lumumba, Fanon, and King, Gramsci and Jalal-e Ahmad, Eqbal Ahmad, and Kanafani, they also seek to go beyond a reflection on individual figures and sketch the contours of what might be termed a radical international political thought. We are not making claims here about the primacy or paradigmatic character of these figures over others. Rather we engage them as starting points, as productive thought-spaces that open conversations about the politics of radical internationalism (past and present) and about the necessity to rethink our understanding of critical theory.

In its twentieth- and twenty-first-century iterations, empire has worked through territorial and extraterritorial means, such as military outposts, sanctions, embargos, finance capitalism, sovereign debt issuance, regime change, and counterinsurgency tactics and assassinations, among other methods. Against the workings of global empire from above, revolutionary internationalisms have also emerged both from above (as bourgeois elite projects)⁶ and from below, taking the shape of proletarian, anti-colonial, and feminist movements of liberation (Hardt and Negri 2019). In uncovering these movements, the articles in this issue expand the genres, canons, and locations of anti-imperial radical internationalism.

In doing so, they join the recent recovery of anti-colonial thinkers as global figures, going beyond the easy identification of decolonization with nation-building and looking at the world-scale ambitions and imaginaries of various figures (Wilder 2015; Getachew 2019; Elam 2020; Adalet 2022, 2024; Younis 2022). We engage the writings of anti-colonial figures such as Du Bois, Fanon, Baldwin, Kanafani, Jalal-e-Ahmad, and others, and reflect on the modalities through which their political horizons seem to exceed the boundaries of the nation-state, focusing on the possibilities of forging connections with emancipatory struggles across the world. In that sense, their theories and praxes were not confined to a particular location or a set of neatly bounded concepts; rather, they entailed movements, travel, and moments of exchange, as in Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi's account of the uptakes and translations of Gramsci leading up to the Iranian Revolution (in this issue). In turn, empire rested on the curtailment of these movements through tactics of counterinsurgency like assassinations (see Alina Sajed, in this issue).

On the one hand, the essays in this volume take up thinkers who are increasingly accepted as part of the anti-imperialist and internationalist turn within political theory and beyond, such as Du Bois, Fanon, and Said (Valdez 2019; Gordon 2015; Morefield 2022). Du Bois, for instance, called into question the separation between the domestic and international, presenting imperial and racial domination as global phenomena working across national boundaries (Getachew and Pitts 2022: xvii). Fanon saw anti-colonial nationalism as inherently internationalist in character and scope. His chapter “On National Culture” (from The Wretched of the Earth) ends with this startling affirmation: “It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives” (Fanon 2004: 180). This suggests that the connection and articulation between national consciousness and internationalism is a complex one: in the anti-colonial struggle, it indicates a community of experience and action that is intrinsically oriented toward the outside, toward a larger community of common experience (colonialism) and vision (liberation, anti-imperialism). We note here that this internationalist orientation (at the heart of the ethos of anti-colonial struggles) materialized only partially with decolonization and the coming of the postcolonial state. Here the special issue reflects on other modes of connectivity and communication that go beyond the established canon of anti-colonial engagement and solidarity.

We thus seek to expand the genres of radical anti-imperialist internationalism to include poems, speeches, manifestos, constitutions, photographs, petitions, and appeals. This requires mining the archive of past insurgencies, as Isaac Kamola and Asli Calkivik argue in this issue, and thus opening up questions about authorship, address, and positionality: Who are political actors and what are political texts? What are the collective statements and subject positions of radical insurgency if we expand authorship to include revolutionary fighters of the Spanish Civil War, Cubans responding to the Second Havana Declaration, and crowds greeting Thomas Sankara in Harlem? To whom do anti-imperialist theories-in-action (Tomba 2019), such as appeals and abjurations, address themselves? What does radical internationalism teach us about the genre conventions and subversions of documents like petitions and appeals (Adam Dahl, this issue)? How do anti-imperial expressions, like the abjuration of the Quilombos, exceed their formal addressee (the Spanish Crown) and turn into affirmations of autonomy addressing an international community (Siba Grovogui, this issue)?

The question of community emerges here as an essential element in our thinking about internationalism: What type of community, self-emancipation, and world-building is conjured by the language and praxis of radical internationalism (Erin R. Pineda, this issue)? While the national community continues to be salient, especially if one takes the notion of anti-colonial self-determination and Third World sovereignty seriously, it has also emerged as simply insufficient and too parochial in scope to help us make any meaningful sense of current global predicaments. We grapple here with theoretical and practical attempts to push beyond the boundaries of the state to speak to the world. Contributions to this special issue interpellate an insurgent universality that emerges from disparate yet connected struggles against imperialisms both old and new (Kamola and Calkivik, this issue) and reconfigure our understanding of humanity as a politicized community of experience and action that centers structures of oppression and domination (Ayça Çubukçu, this issue). Can a humanity where the experience of subjection and colonialism is directly engaged and acknowledged envision a project of forgiveness (Sam Okoth Opondo, this issue)? Opondo, in particular, prompts us to reflect on whether anti-colonial insurrection, anti-imperialist struggle, and revolutionary movement can unfold alongside forgiveness as an attempt to overcome the colonial structures of our contemporary rage. Perhaps what emerges here is a lingering question of whether we can reclaim essential tools such as humanity and forgiveness for a radical internationalism that goes beyond reversing oppositional binaries such as domestic/international, inside/outside, local/global, East/West, and North/South.

We would like to thank Michael Hardt for his enthusiastic support of this project as the editor of South Atlantic Quarterly and Liz Beasley and Stacy Lavin for their wonderful editorial assistance.

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