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In the 19th and early 20th century, the civilising mission through which colonialism was justified was supported by western feminists who spoke in the name of a ‘global sisterhood of women’ and aimed to ‘save’ their brown sisters from the shackles of tradition and barbarity. Today, this imperialist feminism has re-emerged in a new form, but its function remains much the same – to justify war and occupation in the name of ‘women’s rights’ . Unlike before, this imperialist feminist project includes feminists from the ‘Global South’. Take, for example, the case of American feminists, Afghan women and the global war on terror (GWoT).

there was one claim that proved instrumental in securing the consent of the liberals (and, to some extent, of the Left) in the US – the need to rescue Afghan women from the Taliban. This justification for the attack on Afghanistan seemed to have been relegated to the dustbin of history in the years of occupation that followed, reviled for what it was, a shameless attempt to use Afghan women as pawns in a new Great Game.  As the United States draws down its troops in Afghanistan, however, we have begun to see this ‘imperialist feminism’ emerge once again from a variety of constituencies both within the United States and internationally

how easily liberal (and left-liberal) guilt can be used to authorise terrible deeds

The international was a colonial international, as Jabri phrased it, precisely because not all nation states were considered to be sovereign; in fact, the majority were not. Categories such as mandates and protectorates betrayed this linear logic of colonialism, whereby some nations were potential nation states[2] embodying sovereignty, but to reach this stage meant achieving a certain civilizational status. As Antony Anghie notes, “Sovereignty existed in something like a linear continuum, based on its approximation to the ideal of the European nation-state.”[3]

Moments such as the 1955 Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference at Bandung were attempts at carving out a new international—attempts that ultimately failed as we see the return of the colonial international in the late 1960s. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, resistance to colonial rule materialised in varied and intersecting ways, whether through calls for independent industrialisation, cultural renewal, political self-determination, or the nationalisation of assets. In contexts such as Egypt, Nasser’s project was not merely a project of national independence, but an attempt at decolonizing both the national and the international. Resistance meant not only removing Egyptian production from this international sphere that was in and of itself colonial, but also the creation and articulation of new social and political projects that moved beyond binaries of East and West.[5]

the failures of the Nasserist project from an economic perspective were already diagnosed early on by leftist writers and intellectuals,[8] including scholars such as Samir Amin, who had laid out the “traps” inherent in adopting capitalist development—even if led by an anticolonial state.[9] Given that the expansion of capitalism in Egypt was tied to the expansion of imperialism from the very beginning, it becomes difficult to disentangle one from the other.[10] It is this that makes Nasser’s decision to adopt state-led capitalist development contentious. Industrialisation was based on notions of scientific progress, modern planning, and centring the state within capitalist production; it is difficult to ignore the modern telos underwriting industrialisation-as-development