Political violence,pedagogy,and the politics of world-making: Reflections on Mahmood Mamdani's Neither Settler nor Native

Abstract

This article reflects upon Mahmood Mamdani's Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities by tracing its contributions as a pedagogic text. In particular, I explore how the book (1) offers crucial insights about the founding of the modern political state and its relationship to settler colonialism, (2) reveals the importance of rethinking how we conceptualize political violence, and (3) traces some of the implications for political organizing that are rendered through a historical retelling of the story of political violence and state making. Ultimately, I argue that Neither Settler nor Native holds important lessons about how we struggle, what it is that we are struggling for, and how we might craft our collective commitments to a better and more just world in a way that more robustly accounts for the political histories from which we have emerged.