Mahmood Mamdani

The nation-state and the colonial state have always been the same thing: the ethnic and religious majorities of the former created only through the violent "minoritization" inherent in the latter. Assessing cases from the United States to Eastern Europe, Israel, and Sudan, Mahmood Mamdani suggests a radical solution: the state without a nation.

The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

Neither Settler Nor Native

Marion

When does a settler become a native? The answer, I believed then and believe now, is never. The native, I argued, is a creation of the settler state. The native is the settler's invented other: the settler claimed not only to be defined by history but to be its maker, at the same time stigmatizing the native as an unthinking captive of unchanging custom and a product of geography. My conclusion was that settler and native are joined; neither can exist in isolation. Should you destroy one, the other would cease to exist.

Settler-colonialism requires no actual settler, just a group defined as settler and another defined as native.

 tribal despotism elects the correct functioning of administrative institutions under the logic of colonial modernity.

The call for de-Zionization is a recognition that, in a democracy. the majority cannot be culturally or biologically determined it cannot be racial, ethnic, or religious. A democratic majority has to be a political ma-jority, an outcome of the political process and not its unchanging starting and ending point. Only a democratic process of majority formation can give every minority the assurance that it can one day hope to persuade enough of those outside its ranks to forge a new majority. Indeed, there cannot be a permanent majority or minority in a democratic state.

Neither Settler Nor Native quotes

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