Random Quotes

Micere Mugo (born 1942) is a Kenyan author, poet and activist. She had to leave Kenya in 1982 because of her political activism.

Micere Mugo (2010, in German): Die Rolle der Frauen in afrikanischen Befreiungsbewegungen – Ein illustratives Beispiel aus Kenia. In: Africavenir (Hrsg.): 50 Jahre afrikanische Un-Abhängigkeiten – Eine (selbst)kritische Bilanz, p.48-55.

Women have played an important role in resistance movements: in Europe (see Federici 2009 for a historical overview), in Latin America (see Linhard 2005 on the Mexican revolution) and in Asia (rjb & ir 2008: 100f). In West Africa, the combative Dahomey fought in the 18th and 19th centuries, as described by Stanley Alpern in his book “Amazons of Black Sparta” (2011). There are also testimonies of female fighters in the Mau Mau war against German colonial rulers (Mugo 2004), as well as in the independence movements of the second half of the 20th century (on Zimbabwe, see Sinclair, 1996).

*Micere Githae Mugo (2004): Muthoni Wa Kirima: Mau Mau woman field marshal: interrogation of silencing, erasure, and manipulation of female combatants’ texts. Harare: Sapes Books.
*Stanley B. Alpern (2011): Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey. New York: New York University Press.
*Silvia Federici (2009): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.
*Ingrid Sinclair (1996): Flame. (Documentary on female Guerillas in liberation struggle in Zimbabwe).
*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro & recherche international e.V (2008, in German): Die dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte.
*Tabea Alexa Linhard (2005): Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Hendrik Witbooi (ca. 1830-1905) about Curt von François, officer of the German Protection Force in today’s Namibia, the former German colony. Witbooi, actually ǃNanseb ǀGabemab, was from the end of 1888 the captain of the Orlam people, the Witbooi, who were related to the Nama.

Annemarie Heywood, Eben Maasdorp & Brigitte Lau (Hrsg., 1996): The Hendrik Witbooi papers. Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia. p. 151. The year (1893) is an approximation.

The Roman strategy of divide and rule was used by the Germans in Namibia to ensure that they would not confront a united anti-colonial army.
The Witbooi family led the Nama in the resistance against German colonial power. The Nama were attacked by the Germans in 1893 in what became known as the Hornkranz Massacre. During it, most of the women and children were slaughtered, while male warriors escaped. Henrik Witbooi, Moose’s son, then led a guerrilla war. After several attempts, which the exchange of letters also bears witness to, from 1904 onwards, the Herero and Nama united their resistance. Defeated by the colonial power, they were interned in camps where most of the remaining Nama and Herero perished. Overall, it is estimated that between 1904 and 1908, up to 70,000 Nama and Herero died in what was the 20th century’s first genocide (Jorgensen & Markusen 1999: 288).

*Reinhard Koesseler (2007): Genocide, Apology and Reparation –the linkage between images of the past in Namibia and Germany.
*Torben Jorgensen & Eric Markusen (1999): The Genocide of the Hereros. In: Israel W. Charny (Hrsg.): Encyclopedia of Genocide. Band 1, S. 288.

Gusta Dawidsohn-Draenger (1917-1943) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Krakow. In her youth, she joined the Zionist youth group Akiva, for whose newspaper she wrote articles and on whose board she served. After the outbreak of the Second World War, she was instrumental in coordinating the Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Together with others – including her husband Shimshon Draenger – she smuggled weapons, organized hiding places and fought with partisans in the surrounding forests. She and her husband were murdered by the Germans in November 1943. Between January and March 1943, she wrote down her extensive memories on a roll of toilet paper in prison.

Jochen Kast, Bernd Siegler & Peter Zinke (1999): The diary of the partisan Justyna. Jewish resistance in Krakow. Berlin: Elefanten Press. The year (1943) indicates the approximate date of origin of the quotation.

This quote, in which Gusta Draenger-Dawidson quotes her husband Shimshon Draenger, bears witness to the armed resistance against the Nazis in Poland. Jewish resistance against the Nazis, often carried out by individuals and small groups, is rarely mentioned in history books. There were also uprisings and revolts in the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bialystok and Sobibor. The largest resistance group, with around 1,200 members, was the Jewish group of Bielski partisans in Belarus. The resistance was diverse: it ranged from leaflets and newspapers to the operation of theaters and schools to food smuggling and document forgery. An estimated 6 million Jews died during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 in the Shoah, the Nazi genocide.

*Julius H. Schoeps, Dieter Bingen & Gideon Botsch (2016): Jewish Resistance in Europe (1933-1945): Forms and Facets.
*Wolfgang Benz (2002): Lexikon des Holocaust, Munich: Ch. Beck.
*Claude Lanzmann (1985): Shoah. Documentary film.
*Jules Schelvis (2003): Vernichtungslager Sobibór, Münster: Unrast.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English philosopher who engaged primarily with political theory. He is considered one of the most important liberal thinkers in Europe.

Thomas Hobbes (1650): Leviathan. Introduction.

One of the preconditions of capitalist development was the disciplining of bodies so that they could be made into pure labour power. According to this logic, a new kind of individual needed to be produced who would be useful to the rising middle class. As in this quote, the body was also understood as a useful machine. In the thinking of the time, attempts were made to rationally explain nature (including the human body) in order to render it controllable.

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia.

Ludwig Külz (1875-1938) was a doctor and from 1902 head of the Nachtigal Hospital in Togo. The indigenous population was denied access and treatment there. He was also a government doctor in other German colonies. From 1920 onwards he trained so-called emigrants as a professor at the Hamburg Tropical Hygiene Institute. In the quote, Külz referred to the prevailing “motto”, “Black hands, white heads”, which was first postulated by Friedrich Wulffert in a lecture.

Quoted by Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945, S. 59. Original Source: Ludwig Külz (1911): Grundzüge der kolonialen Eingeborenenhygiene, in: Beihefte z. Arch. f. Schiffs- u.Trophyg. 15 (1911) 3, 386-475; Wesen und Ziele (1910).

In the collective memory, German colonial medicine is often associated with “adventure”, dangerous tsetse flies or the self-sacrificing efforts of German doctors “far from home”. At the latest with the “colonial entry” of the German Empire in 1884, many (especially young) doctors took advantage of their assignment in the colonies to advance their medical careers. In this context, they developed dangerous drugs that they tested on the colonized population. This happened primarily in the sleeping sickness concentration camps and leprosy homes in Togo, Cameroon and “German East Africa”. From 1907 onwards there was to be a more “social” colonial policy, based on “humanity, justice and charity”. However, here too, the “effective exploitation of the land and people” – such as the “arms” of the colonized mentioned in the quote, i.e. the labor of the colonized – to maintain and improve the German colonial economy was the actual goal. Ludwig Külz called for a “colonial human economy” that should implement acculturation and the implementation of “colonial racial hygiene” as “sanitary pedagogy”. The task of the “tropical hygienist” is to strengthen the weakening German colonial economy by preserving “valuable” life within the colonized population (e.g. “strong men”). At the same time, it was Külz’s central concern to avoid “bad” or “inferior” lives, especially in the sense of a so-called “mixed-race population”.

*Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh: Paderborn.

Annual report of the Governor General of the Belgian colony of the Congo.

Nzula et al. 1979 quoted in Henry Bernstein (2000): “Colonialism, Capitalism, Development.” In: Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (Eds): Poverty and Development into the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 264.

European colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America economically exploited people and their labour, together with nature and its resources. In addition to direct enslavement and the compulsion to work (e.g. through the introduction of taxes), colonisers always tried to morally justify forced labour, e.g. as character forming. Still today, many people are forced into quasi-slave labour, both in Europe (e.g. 145.000 people in Italy in 2016, GSI) as well as in Asia (e.g. 3, 8 million people in China in 2016, GSI). Conditions in US prisons are also dire. For example, working conditions
for inmates in the former Louisiana plantation known today as “Anglola”
are little better than slave labour (peopeoplesworld.org, May 4th, 2018).

*Henry Bernstein (2000): Colonialism, Capitalism, Development. In: Tim Allen / Alan Thomas (Hrsg.): Poverty and Development into the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, S. 241–270.
*GSI Global Slavery Index (2016): Country reports

Toypurina, 1760-1799, was a Tongva/Gabrieliño medic and leader of a rebellion against Spanish missionaries in what is now California.

Thomas Workman Temple II (1958): Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel,’’ Masterkey 32, no. 5: 136–52.

Toypurina led a rebellion against the San Gabriel Mission in California. The missionaries under Junipero Serra pioneered the Spanish colonisation of California. Serra was canonised in 2015. Across the Americas, indigenous peoples were stripped of their lands by European colonisers or, post-independence, by the countries’ non-indigenous elites. In Argentina, which is almost 8 times the size of Germany, the southern half of the country was independent indigenous territory until the late 19th century. From 1878-1885, the brutal military Conquista del Desierto was carried out. After the sell-off and privatisation of the land that followed, only 12,500 hectares of territory remain today (1 ha ≈ 1 football field). The largest landowner since the land privatisation campaign under neoliberal President Carlos Menem in the 1990s is the Italian fashion group Benetton. A law passed in 2011 by the Cristina Kirchner government (2007-2015) to prevent land sales to foreign companies – but not to Argentine ones – was reversed by President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019).

*Suppressed Histories: The holy woman Toypurina
*Indian Country Today Media Network: Junipero Serra as Indian Killer
*Petition: Urge Pope Francis to abandon the canonization of Junipero Serra 
*Eduardo Galeano (1997): Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York. Monthly Review Press.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was an Afro-Caribbean-French politician and author. He was a co-founder of Négritude and part of the anti-colonial movement.

Quote: Aimé Cesairé (1972): Discourse on Colonialism. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, p. 3.
Picture: Jean Baptiste Devaux, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

The quote comes from Césaire’s published speech “On Colonialism”. He criticizes the self-image of enlightened Europe. He shows that human rights do not apply to everyone in a colonized world. Many people only became aware of human rights violations by Europeans through National Socialism, when they took place within Europe. Césaire’s criticism of colonialism is important, but he fails to recognize the specific nature of racialized anti-Semitism when he turns Jews into white Europeans. To this day, Césaire is an important reference in discussions about the relationship between colonialism and the Shoah. Some see Césaire’s ideas as a way of understanding the relationship between colonialism and the Shoah. Others see him as a pioneer in relativizing the Shoah.

*Amy M Cools (26.06.2019): Happy Birthday, Aimé Césaire!
*Philip Kaisary (2012): Human Rights and Radical Universalism: Aimé Césaire’s and CLR James’s Representations of the Haitian Revolution. Law and Humanities, 6 (2), p. 197–216.

Dr. Stefan Mair (geb. 1964) ist deutscher Ökonom und wird als Afrikaexperte bezeichnet. Er ist seit 2020 Direktor des Deutschen Instituts für Internationale Politik und Sicherheit, Executive Chairman of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP), and member of the executive board of the Federation of German Industries (BDI).

Stefan Mair (2005): Ausbreitung des Kolonialismus.

The quote from the renowned “Africa expert” Mair reflects the endurance of colonial myths into the present. There are many counterexamples one can call up to discredit Mair’s reasoning:
colonial genocides (e.g. in modern-day Namibia) versus the reduction of the mortality rate during colonialism; the use of infrastructure for colonial resource and human exploitation versus the construction of infrastructure during colonialism; the destruction of previously existing, often non-capitalist forms of society or subsistence economy versus social and cultural change. Mair also describes loyalty to the nation as an abstract identity as preferable to other identities. In this way, he uncritically posits European concepts such as the nation as the norm, without naming the problems inherent in these concepts, e.g. nationalism and the resulting wars. The positive reference to ‘political and cultural change in the region’ indicates a positive understanding of colonisation as a civilising mission.

*Monitor (2017): G20-Gipfel: Wer profitiert vom „Marshall-Plan“ für Afrika?
*glokal (2016): Sustaining Inequality – The Neocolonial Politics of Development Education, North-South Volunteering and Fair Trade in Germany. In: darkmatter – in the ruins of imperial culture.

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896) gained fame as a historian and member of the Reichstag. He has published extensively on German history and social science issues.

Heinrich von Treitschke, Our prospects, Berlin 1879, 574

In the essay “Our prospects” published by him in 1879, he denied the Jews any will to assimilate, attacked them as opponents of national unification and let the contribution culminate in the sentence later adopted by the Nazis: “The Jews are our misfortune”. Treitschke’s contribution also triggered the Berlin anti-Semitism dispute, in which various historians debated the so-called “Jewish question”.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?view=detail&mid=B28194D4357502E79534B28194D4357502E79534&q=heinrich von treitschke&shtp=GetUrl&shid=164af482-bcac-48d0-ab9a-3ff8ce476737&shtk=IkRpZSBKdWRlbiBzaW5kIHVuc2VyIFVuZ2zDvGNrISIgLSBIZWlucmljaCBUcmVpdHNjaGtlIC0gRWluZSB0eXBpc2NoIGRldXRzY2hlIEdlc2NoaWNodGUuLi4%3D&shdk=XCJEaWUgSnVkZW4gc2luZCB1bnNlciBVbmdsw7xjayFcIiAtIEhlaW5yaWNoIFRyZWl0c2Noa2UgLSBFaW5lIHR5cGlzY2ggZGV1dHNjaGUgR2VzY2hpY2h0ZS4uLiBNZWhyIEluZm9zOiBodHRwOi8vd3d3LnplaXQuZGUvMjAwMi8yNS8yMDAyMjVfYS10cmVpdHNjaGtlX3htbCBodHRwczovL2RlLndpa2lwZWRpYS5vcmcvd2lraS9IZWlucmljaF92b25fVHJlaXRzY2hrZSNCZXJsaW5lcl9BbnRpc2VtaXRpc211c3N0cmVpdCBNZWluIFRpcHA6IFwiRGFzIFdlbHRlcm9iZXJ1bmdzcHJvZ3JhbW0gZGVyIEp1ZGVuXCIgLSBEaWUgUHJvdG9rb2xsZSBkZXIgV2Vpc2VuIHZvbiBaaW9uIFx1MDAyNiAuLi4%3D&shhk=oaKLxMrg9O5xGVwMGjXJCa9Fz2KuopZ7tB4UgilG4To%3D&form=VDSHOT&shth=OVP.tdzfipnlffECuToq7MhJBQEsCn

Sinthujan Varatharajah (born 1985) is a political geographer based in Berlin.

Sinthujan Varatharajah (2015): Das Selbstgespräch brechen: Perspektiven auf Asyl von ehemaligen Geflüchteten.

In 2015, refugee and migrant movements to Europe reached a peak. The borders remained closed, which led to the deaths of countless people on the dangerous routes of the Mediterranean and in transit countries. Movements from below were formed, which self-organised to provide support at sea, in countries of origin, transit and arrival. Those participating in them included migrant organisations, NGOs, volunteers, church members, doctors and journalists. The strict border regime policy experienced a historic rupture when Angela Merkel briefly opened the borders. The refugee issue became very prominent in the media. In this context, Sinthujan Varatharajah made the charge that the focus was on white people and that the voices of refugees were rarely heard.

Sinthujan Varatharajah (2014): The Walls the West Won’t Tear Down.

Walter Charleton (1616-1707) was an English natural philosopher and doctor.

Walter Charleton (1659): Ephesian Matron. Quotet by Silvia Federici (2004: 163).

Time and again, women are used as scapegoats: from the biblical story in which Eve seduced Adam into taking a bite of the apple, to the witch hunts, where women were held responsible for all the social ills of the time. In this quote, women are accused, amongst other things, of driving men crazy through their sexual attractiveness. This inversion of responsibility is still used today, e.g. when a victim of sexual violence, rather than its perpetrator, is held culpable for the violence inflicted on them.

*Silvia Federici (2004): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German composer, poet and writer. The quote comes from a speech before the Dresden Fatherland Association on the 15th of June, 1848. Amongst other things, he wrote the anti-Semitic book “Judaism and Music”.

Carl Friedrich Glasenapp (1905): Das Leben Richard Wagners in sechs Bänden. 2. Bd. 1843-1853. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, p. 460.

Even before the German Reich became a colonial power, enthusiasm for colonisation extended beyond the conservative circles which Richard Wagner frequented. Before Chancellor Bismarck invited the great European powers to Berlin in 1884 in order to divide up large parts of Africa between themselves, German princes and traders had had private colonies in Latin America, Africa and Asia. As early as 1683, a Kurbrandenburg colony was founded in present-day Ghana, a fortress that was an important settlement for Germans participating in the transatlantic slave trade. From 1528 to 1558, Venezuela was the “house colony” of the Welser banking house (Augsburg/Nuremberg). Other German merchants were also either involved in the slave trade or profited economically from it (Potts 1988: 18). After most of the colonies liberated themselves as a result of long struggles, colonial romanticism lived on in adventure novels and films (e.g., Out of Africa ​from 1985). Traces of these attitudes can also be found today in travel reports by young people from the Global North (glokal 2013).

*Farish Ahmad-Noor (2019): Why is Colonialism (Still) Romanticised? Ted Talk.
*David Spurr (1993): The Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Hungary, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)
Herzl is considered a central figure in modern Zionism. He was born in Pest, today’s Budapest, in 1860 to an assimilated Jewish family. With his work Der Judenstaat, published in 1896.

Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question, Leipzig / Vienna 1896, 12-22.

Attempting to find a modern solution to the Jewish question, Herzl reacted to the apparently anti-Semitic trial against Artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus that had taken place in Paris just two years earlier. Within the Zionist movement, Herzl’s writing advanced to become a pioneering vision of a Jewish state to be created in Palestine.

Theodor_Herzl_-_Der_Judenstaat.pdf (literaturdownload.at)

Theo Sommer (born 1930) is a German journalist who has been editor in chief and publisher of the weekly newspaper Die ZEIT.

Die ZEIT, 09.05.2017.

The term ‘Leitkultur’ was first used in 1998 by Bassam Tibi, a professor of International Relations. In 2000, Theo Sommer, publisher of Die ZEIT newspaper, took it up, calling on people with a migration background, people of colour, Black people and Jews to assimilate and follow dominant German culture, which was left vaguely defined. Leitkultur has been used over and again during election campaigns to stir up a certain climate, most recently in 2000 by Friedrich Merz, the current chairman of the CDU. Above all, these kinds of statement reinforce a feeling of superiority among some white Germans, portraying people marked Muslim as backward, violent and misogynist. The term Leitkultur jumbles together various racist ideologies. These include the AfD’s formulation of a counter-concept to the idea of multiculturalism in its party programme.

*Ayse Tecmen (2020): Debates on German Leitkultur and Multiculturalism.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a philosopher and politician from Florence. In this piece of writing, he advocated for authoritarian power politics.

Niccolò Machiavelli (2016, Original 1513): The Prince, Chapter XVII. Ontario: Devolted Publishing, p. 40

Machiavelli had a strong influence on state philosophy and still represents an authoritarian and ruthless idea of rule. This was based on his image of man: “Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.” (ibid.) Even during his lifetime, Machiavelli was strongly criticised for his authoritarian ideas on state leadership, for example by the English cardinal Reginald Pole (1500-1558). Nevertheless, centuries later, this power politics was still a model for colonisers and warring parties; an example are the retaliatory measures taken by the National Socialists against resistance fighters during World War II.

The Guardian (Erica Brenner), 03.03.2017: Have we got Machiavelli all wrong?

Song about Mary Thomas (ca. 1848-1905), called Queen Mary. She was one of three black leaders of the labor protests in the Virgin Islands, then a Danish colony.

Citation: Jeannette Allis Bastian (2003): Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost its Archives and Found its History. London: Libraries Unlimited, p. 12.
Image: Wikimedia

Although slavery was abolished in 1848, working conditions had not improved much. Together with Queen Agnes and Queen Mathilda, Queen Mary organized the so-called Fireburn protests in 1878. These were the largest workers’ protests in Danish history(The Workers Museum 2018: Fireburn) in terms of participation in the protests, the destruction of infrastructure and, above all, the loss of life, especially on the side of the rebels (conversation by glokal with Gunvor Simonsen, University of Copenhagen 2020). Statues on the islands and in Denmark, songs and theater performances keep the memories of the three “queens” alive.

*Gunvor Simonsen (2017): Slave Stories: Law, Representation, and Gender in the Danish West Indies. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
*Jeannette Allis Bastian (2003): Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. London: Libraries Unlimited.

Lucía Muriel is a psychologist, activist and networker in Berlin who works to ensure that global justice is understood in a way that is decolonial critical of racism.

move global (2017): Versuch eines Paradigmenwechsels, p. 17.

The colonial power to define black and white discourses, politics, culture and the body was denounced by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who advocated decolonisation at several levels. Decolonisation means recognising, challenging and overcoming colonial patterns. It refers not only to the independence of formerly colonised states, but also to social, cultural and individual dimensions of colonisation, e.g. not letting majority society dictate what migration means for a migrant, as Lucía Muriel makes clear in this quote. Decolonisation means empowerment and liberation from domination.

*Ismahan Wayah (2017): Wir schreiben Geschichte. In: glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand. S. 10.
*Raykamal Kahlon (2017): Du hast gesagt, es würde nicht wehtun. Verkörperte Pädagogik. In: glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand. S. 82.

Theodore W. Schultz (1902-1998) was chairman of the University of Chicago Economics Department. He was awarded the Nobel Price for economics in 1979.

Juan Gabriel Valdés (1995): Pinochet‘s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 89

From the 1950s onwards, in the Global South in particular, theories circulated that diverged sharply from Western development ideals. Representatives included the economist Raúl Prebisch (Argentina) and the sociologist Walden Bello (Philippines). They were called “pink-red” economists or dependency theorists. Pink-red denoted an orientation that was left, but not communist (“red”). Many had relationships with heads of state such as Salvador Allende (Chile) and Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran). Because they questioned the general validity of the Western capitalist system, the West tried to change their minds or silence them, which it also attempted through development aid or education (e.g. of Chilean economists at the University of Chicago). Allende was assasinated and Mosaddegh overthrown with the help of Western intelligence agencies.

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Prof. Ranabir Samaddar is the director of the Calcutta Research Group and conducts research on migration and flight, the theory and practice of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control.

*Ranabir Samaddar (2017, in German): Die Krise des Kapitalismus bedeutet nicht das Ende des Kapitalismus. In: glokal e.V. (Hrsg.): Connecting the dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) von Unterdrückung und Widerstand, p. 72.

Samaddar is posing a central question in current debates: how can one grasp the historical and global dimensions of migration? How does the global division of the world relate to neo-colonial relationships of dependency? Does migration only move from the Global South to the Global North, as an attempt to escape from the effects of global patterns of dependency? Does it in this way propel the realities of post-colonial exploitation and oppression into Europe’s “white field of vision”? Wars are mostly take place in the Global South. Poverty, hunger and drought, on the other hand, are not social phenomena that can be explained purely in local and regional terms. Their relationship with global capitalist contexts, in which the Global North continues to be hegemonic, is patent. The wars in the Global South are being waged with weapons made in the Global North. Debt in the Global South leads to profits and economic power in the Global North. Samaddar’s position is key to the argument for a global understanding of responsibility, which perspective is currently insufficiently reflected in debates about migration.

Ranabir Samaddar (2020): The Postcolonial Age of Migration. New Delhi: Routledge.