Adom Getachew is a professor who teaches “political science and race diaspora and indigeneity at the University of Chicago. I’m author of ‘Worldmaking After Empire, The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination’. And I recently co-curated an exhibition titled ‘Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica’.”

Chicago, Illinois, USA
Published: May 7, 2025

This interview of Professor Adom Getachew was conducted (and later edited) by Nic Paget-Clarke for In Motion Magazine on March 11, 2025. With follow-up correspondence, further clarification was added to the interview. The interview was conducted through the web on audio/video software with Adom Getachew in Chicago, Illinois, and Nic Paget-Clarke in San Diego, California. The interview was inspired by Dr. Getachew’s book: “Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise And Fall of Self-Determination.”  Download a PDF of the interview.

The History of Decolonization

In Motion Magazine: How did you come to decide to research and write a book, which you describe at the beginning of the book as being about, “the global projects of decolonization black Anglophone anticolonial critics and nationalists spearheaded in the three decades after the end of the Second World War.”?

Adom Getachew: I came to study the politics of decolonization partly because of the context that I found myself in as a relatively recent immigrant to the United States. I arrived in the U.S. in 2001, right before 9/11 and the beginnings of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a period, as it continues to be, in which the various international restrictions on intervention were being cast aside, especially by the United States. I wanted to examine the visions of world order that emerged before that moment of U.S. empire in the early 2000s. And so, I turned back to the history of decolonization and the period of the formation of the international institutions of the post-war period.

Unequal Integration

In Motion Magazine: Thank you.

In the book, you’re not trapped within the confines of modern-day borders, but you rather explore, from the beginning, the perspectives of people on three continents and the Caribbean Islands, on both sides of the Atlantic. As part of this you quote at length the analysis and life experience of a particular group of people, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B. DuBois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, and Eric Williams. You connect the horrors of a commerce in captured people on both sides of the Atlantic with the Color Line, the Pan-African movement, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the anti-colonial occupation movements, and the post-war independence movements — all from a perspective which leads not to what many describe as the completion of a global nation-building project, but to movements for worldmaking based on a desire for a world without dominance. That is, you reframe the post-war independence period within the context of a global diaspora. Can you please talk about that?

Adom Getachew: The premise of the book is that the experience of European colonization, beginning in the 15th century, really did unify the world. It created a way of people understanding each other, of encounters that made the world smaller. It made the world one. But that process of imperial integration was a process that was deeply unequal — economically, politically, legally. It was one that preserved European dominance, that was generated through structures of exploitation and domination. And ultimately, it created what I call this process of unequal integration. From there it proceeds to tell the story about these figures who had that view of how the world came to be integrated through a history of imperialism – and sought to transform that global order towards a vision of international relations that was more egalitarian, that facilitated the independence of new territories. That’s the basic structure and argument of the book.

As you mentioned, I tell that global history through a set of figures. Anglophone, Caribbean, African American, African figures, most of whom end up becoming statesmen and presidents and prime ministers of independent states in Africa and the Caribbean. These figures, like many of their generations, carry that history of empire in their biographical accounts. Many of them study in Great Britain. They come to recognize themselves as part of a global proto-Third Worldist vision in the context of their university studies. They return home and participate in nationalist movements that ultimately lead to independence, but simultaneously are interested in and committed to a vision of decolonization that combines nation building and worldmaking.

Worldmaking is a project of trying to reform and reconstitute those structures of unequal integration produced by empire.

The League of Nations

In Motion Magazine: Thank you.

On the other side of the fence, so to speak, in the context of the very definition of non-sustainability — two world wars and a global depression — two attempts at organizing the world were made and led by the very nations who earlier had created the slave trade, had benefited from its profits, and had systematically invaded people’s homelands around the world — that is, the League of Nations and the United Nations. In your book, you go into how they created these organizations, and why. Could you please talk about this?

Adom Getachew: Yes, the League of Nations was organized to prevent another escalation of global conflict of the kind that had just been witnessed in World War I. It was to create mechanisms of collective security, and it did so by guaranteeing sovereign equality to states that were imagined as independent states. It also generated what is called the mandate system, which was a mechanism for the international governance of the territories that were formerly held by the Ottoman Empire and the German Empire — the defeated nations of World War I.

My particular focus on the League of Nations is about what happens to the independent African states that are members of the League. On the one hand, you can look at the League and say it’s a body that allowed Liberia and Ethiopia to have a seat at the table. It allowed Latin American states, Haiti. It looks like the first opening of a more inclusive vision of international society. But, as I try to show in the chapter, the specific ways in which Ethiopia and Liberia come to be members within the League generated more burdens and obligations on them than rights and privileges.

Every society, every organization involves the granting of rights and the expectation of certain kinds of obligations, and in the case of these particular states there was an unevenness. They were granted a burdened membership where the obligations were more onerous than the rights they had. In particular, as I note, both of these states become the object of a humanitarian crisis around ongoing practices of slavery.

It’s in that context that the League begins to increasingly expect certain reforms, and always with the threat of a possible intervention or the possibility that these states might be included in the mandate system.

Ultimately, this story ends with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which is justified before the League of Nations as a humanitarian intervention and a project of advancing the League’s aspiration to abolish slavery.

The 1935 invasion of Ethiopia is also very significant for anti-colonial actors around the world. It galvanizes various critics. It leads to vast mobilizations, especially across the African diaspora. It’s an important inflection point for anti-colonial agitation.

The United Nations

You also asked about the United Nations. The United Nations is formed after World War II. It’s meant to correct for the various deficiencies of the League of Nations by having a stronger executive function in the Security Council, with the five permanent veto-holding states. But this institution, it doesn’t imagine yet the end of empire, and anti-colonial actors DuBois, Azikiwe and others describe the ways in which its structures perpetuate imperial rule.

You can see this in several respects. Self-determination is not included in the first U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. It’s merely a principle that appears twice in the U.N. Charter. And this is the term that many anti-colonial actors are beginning to use to advance their claims of national independence.

I chart the ways that even though the U.N. isn’t a hospitable forum initially for decolonization, it’s transformed into that forum as new states emerge from colonialism and increasingly become a majority of the U.N. members

Self-Determination and Federation

In Motion Magazine: In the center of the book, you talk about two ways in which the now-independent countries organize among themselves. And, at least in Africa, despite the borders imposed by the various European empires and the decision to keep those colonial borders, two government leaders, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Eric Williams in Trinidad and Tobago, pursued regional cooperation movements which they saw, as you point out, as a central strategy for international non-domination. Later, Michael Manley in Jamaica and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania also worked on strategies of development designed to build non-domination-based governance within their home countries. Could you please talk about that?

Adom Getachew: Yes, the book charts a number of projects that aim to transform the international conditions in which newly independent states would enter. The first one I’ve already mentioned is the championing of a right to self-determination, which emerges in 1960.

Then there’s a chapter on regional federation, and that chapter looks at the West Indies Federation and the attempt to build a United States of Africa. In that chapter, I specifically talk about how for Eric Williams and Kwame Nkrumah there’s an argument that small post-colonial states will remain economically dependent and therefore politically marginal within the international system. Federation, the attempt to build regional federations that bring together a number of post-colonial states, is meant to have the scale one needs for economic development.

They’re thinking about creating larger internal economies that can have a different bargaining power on the international stage. They’re thinking about mechanisms of taxation and redistribution that address imbalances within that new regional federation. And their inspiration for this project is the United States of America and the Federalists of the 18th century. They draw quite clearly on that tradition.

I think there’s a couple of interesting things about this line of thought. One is that it imagines that sovereignty can be delegated so that these newly independent states, even though they’ve just secured sovereignty, would give up some sovereignty to create a regional federation of this kind

The second is that there’s a limitation of this thought. It’s very focused on the scaling up of a federal authority and the creation of a large market and internal economy. But it’s inattentive to what becomes a very important set of questions, especially in the African context, which is about decentralization and devolution of authority – that is, federation that’s more focused on giving people local autonomy and local self-government.

Especially in the writings of Nkrumah there’s a deep skepticism about that form of decentralized federation, but an interest in this centralized form of federation. In many ways the anxieties about what this would mean for local forms of self-government is why these federations ultimately fail in both instances.

The New International Economic Order

This leads to the next chapter, which is about the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which is a project of the 1970s. Here, what state actors are thinking about is how the international economy itself might be restructured to better address the global inequalities that mark trade. They’re thinking about, is it possible to create a welfare world modeled on the redistributive ambitions of the welfare state.

And, of course, there is no kind of mechanism of taxation at the international level. So, much of this focused on very indirect forms of financing, of setting prices for primary goods, the commodities that Third World states sold. Trying to redress imbalances of trade and facilitate international financing to better support the developmental ambitions of Third World states.

In Motion Magazine: Can you talk a little more on what was hoped that the NIEO could do, and how it could function?

Adom Getachew: As I said, it’s largely preoccupied with the question of global trade. It drew on an analogy between the domestic and international economy. It made the claim that on the international stage the Third World states act as if they function like the farmers or the workers within the domestic economy. If the mid-century welfare state had mechanisms for redistribution towards the rural or the working class, we could try to approximate those forms of redistribution on the international stage.

Some of this involved organizations around commodity production and sales modeled on the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries, OPEC. Trying to create associations around coffee or bauxite to be able to set prices at better rates for these goods that Third World states were producing for a global market. There were other kinds of mechanisms also. Say, financing that could compensate states when prices fell for goods that weren’t part of these associations.

I think this project was another failure for many reasons, but a couple are worth noting. One is just the Third World, that global majority of states, among them there was great diversity and difference. So, a state like Brazil, a large economy, a diverse economy, has very different conditions than those faced by a Ghana or another, smaller country, Jamaica, let’s say. Similarly, even within these production associations, say the Bauxite Association, it included Australia and Jamaica. It’s not clear that they had the same ability to organize themselves collectively and politically as had been possible within OPEC in the 1970s.

The internal divergences and distinctions within this global majority played a very important role in the inability to advance this agenda through the U.N. But also, very quickly came a moment of deep crisis within the Third World as oil prices increased and then food prices shortly followed. Many of these states would find themselves by the late 1970s, and certainly by the 1980s, in major debt deficits, and would have to turn to international financial institutions for debt restructuring

In Motion Magazine: How did they find themselves in those debt situations?

Adom Getachew: I think many states depended on borrowing in order to pursue their developmental agendas. The question of international debt was always there. But in this particular moment, as costs outweigh revenues, they find themselves increasingly dependent and unable to make the required payments on that debt. It’s this moment that then leads to a turn to international financial institutions — the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in particular — for some form of debt relief. And oftentimes that debt relief emerged in the context of demands that states spend less, privatize, etc.

External and Internal Crises

In Motion Magazine: So, stepping back a bit, despite their best efforts among the general membership of the U.N., those seeking a world without domination faced, as you point out, unequal integration into the U.N. One, they struggled to overcome the powerful-nation dominance built into the Security Council inside the U.N. Two, outside the U.N., these newly-independent nations had to contend with the spreading influence of transnational corporations and the concerted efforts by the U.S., the British, and the French to undermine them. Examples are the coup which overthrew Nkrumah, and the diplomatic and other efforts to undermine Manley’s programs in Jamaica and Nyerere’s in Tanzania. Three, much of this opposition was framed in Cold War rhetoric. And four, the different worldmaking movements in both the Caribbean and Africa were dealing with internal debates about different modes of governance.

Can you please go into this stage of it all?

Adom Getachew: Yes. I think you can tell the story of the crisis and failure of this moment of anti-colonial visions of worldmaking, both as an external story, a story of the ways in which this vision was always challenged, rejected, or contained by hegemonic states, and, at the same time as a story of not just internal debate, but real internal crises of domination within these countries.

The coup that ousted Nkrumah is a perfect example of how we need to account for both sides of the story. It is true that the coup was in part supported by and facilitated by the United States. We have now incontrovertible evidence of that. And that is a part of the structure of the Cold War in this period. But, at the same time, that coup was popularly embraced by Ghanaians who felt that Nkrumah’s regime had become incredibly authoritarian, resistant to any form of dissent within the country, often deploying the instruments of the colonial state, like preventative detention. Holding people in advance of them doing anything.

But it’s not just that we need both of these perspectives (external and internal). It’s also that while the emphasis of the figures I focus on was the problem of international domination and international hierarchy, they were at the same time less attentive to the domestic dynamics of domination. The threat from external sources became an alibi for the authoritarian turn in these states. There was a way in which dissent could be read always as the actions of nefarious actors from outside. This overwhelming emphasis on international hierarchy, which helped to generate powerful visions of global order, it also informed the increasingly authoritarian and rigid structure of the post-colonial state.

Different imaginations

In Motion Magazine: Okay, thank you.

The subtitle of the book is, “The Rise and Fall of Self-determination,” as you know, and that is the story you tell. But you also give it historical context. On many pages in the text you refer back to the Westphalian Peace Treaties and what is now interpreted as the invention of nation-states with sovereign internal governance and sovereign borders. For example, you point out that the attempts to combine internationalism with nationalism revert by default back to the Westphalian concepts of the nation-state. As such, self-determination, as currently defined, comes with a lot of back history and unavoidable problems. Can you talk about that?

Adom Getachew: Yes, I think what I’m suggesting is that the worldmaking I am charting in the book is one that has taken as its base the nation-state form. It’s a worldmaking project that has accepted that the basic unit of international politics is the nation-state.

In the first decades of the 20th century, increasingly the nation-state becomes the norm of international politics. If we looked at an earlier moment of critique, even in the interwar period, we would see different imaginations of how to resolve the problem of empire. Sometimes visions of equal citizenship within empire, sometimes world federations. There were other ways to think about the structure of the world.

In Motion Magazine: That’s partially why I earlier mentioned the context of diaspora. It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. Maps would look quite different.

Adom Getachew: Yes, I think that is true. Although many diasporas have wanted to create nations. There are debates within diaspora communities, diasporic scholars, about how to address the question of diaspora. Of course, one set of responses has always turned to the production of nation. In the context I study, for instance, the deep investment of certain African American and Caribbean figures in a state like Liberia was a product of the sense that the resolution of the diaspora question had to take the form of constructing a nation. Now, there were always critics of that answer to the question of diaspora, figures who insisted on diaspora as a different kind of orientation, a rejection of the nation. But those two positions exist simultaneously within diasporic politics.

What appropriate gender relations are supposed to be

In Motion Magazine: We’ve talked about the Westphalian Peace Treaties and the economic system which developed simultaneously with it, but I think perhaps it’s also important to note that all the various politicians and leaders mentioned in the League of Nations, the United Nations, and in the Decolonization Movements are men. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on how patriarchy and its own brutal governance has played a role in these processes.

Adom Getachew: Yes. You know, I think there are other scholars who have written, importantly, about the ways in which aspirations for sovereignty among African and African diasporic actors was always connected to a project of recuperating or resurrecting masculinity — an association between the male figure and the aspiration for a certain kind of sovereignty.

A figure that captures that, and a figure that I’m working on now, is Marcus Garvey who in his own self-fashioning, in his imagination, created this metonymic relationship between his body and his construction as emperor of this far flung, black diasporic world which he imagined as his empire.

I think the question of the ways that masculinity is connected to these questions of sovereignty is really important. And one book that addresses this in an African diasporic world is a text by Michelle Stephens, called “Black Empire”.

In Motion Magazine: And from the European perspective, the cosmology that was backing it up was a very patriarchal system — such as their concept of civilization, the way they described it.

Adom Getachew: Yes. I think there is a deep connection between ideas of civilization and imaginations of how the home is supposed to be structured. What appropriate gender relations are supposed to be. And you find some of that in the post-colonial context, as well.

On the one hand, there is a progressivism about, “Women are participants in politics”. It’s a moment in which everyone gets suffrage, for instance, at the same time. It’s not a staggered form of, “Oh, first men and then women”. It’s universal suffrage from the very beginning. There’s a sense in which women ought to participate in the project of nation building, and not only as mothers, but outside in the public sphere.

At the same time, there’s a great anxiety about women’s roles in that nation-building project. There’s a scholar, for instance, of Zimbabwe, Rudo Mudiwa, who has described in the context of independence in Zimbabwe how the policing of women in public and the specter of sex work shaped the imagination of the Zimbabwean nation. There was a deep sense of what the normative citizen was going to be, and how they should comport themselves in the public and private spaces.

In Motion Magazine: Thank you.

Adom Getachew: Well, thank you so much … It’s been a while since I’ve discussed it, so it’s nice to revisit it.

In Motion Magazine: Thank you, once again.