The body of political thought produced by the struggle against colonial and imperial domination across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, from nineteenth-century independence movements through the twentieth-century wave of decolonization. It theorizes national liberation and self-determination, the psychology and culture of colonization, and the predicament of the state that follows it.
Its strands are genuinely divergent in method. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (1909) rejected not only British rule but the industrial civilization that produced it, and built a politics of mass non-violent refusal. Fanon, writing from Algeria, argued in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that colonization works by installing itself in the mind of the colonized, and that violence could be the means by which a subject people recovers itself — a claim still argued over. Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1950) turned the analysis back on Europe, arguing that fascism was colonial method applied to Europeans. Others synthesized Marxism with nationalism — Ho Chi Minh, Cabral, Sankara — while Mandela's later reconciliation politics took a different road entirely.
It overlaps with Pan-Africanism and the Black radical tradition through Du Bois, Nkrumah and Malcolm X, and found an international form at Bandung in 1955 and in the non-aligned movement. Nkrumah's account of neo-colonialism extended the analysis past formal independence to the economic arrangements that survived it.
The tradition's sharpest criticism has come from inside it. Fanon warned in his own lifetime that the national bourgeoisie would inherit the colonial state and use it as the colonizers had; the record of several post-independence regimes bore him out. That has left the tradition with an unresolved question it takes seriously: whether the nation-state, a European form, was ever the right vessel for liberation from Europe.