This week we're looking at the unfinished work of decolonization and asking what a just post-colonial world would look like.
In today’s episode, we are joined by the author of a new book published by Princeton University Press. The book offers a bold reimagining of global justice, drawing on anticolonial thought to confront the unfinished work of decolonization. Rather than defending decolonization as a nationalist project, it advances a powerful vision of global social equality.
Our guest is Dr. Shuk Ying Chan, Assistant Professor of Political Theory at UCL Political Science. Regular listeners will recall her previous appearances on the podcast, including episodes on resisting colonialism and the trouble with exporting Hollywood films.
In Postcolonial Global Justice, Shuk Ying Chan proposes a new account of global justice centered on the value of social equality. Drawing on the ideas of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Chan argues that a core commitment of anticolonial thought is the rejection of hierarchy and the embrace of equality. These insights from decolonization, she suggests, give us critical tools for challenging contemporary global hierarchies and for rejecting forms of postcolonial nationalism that are more focused on policing citizens than promoting their freedom and equality.
[00:00:05] Emily McTernan: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at the unfinished work of decolonisation and asking what would a just post-colonial world look like.
Hello, my name is Emily McTernan and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
And I'm delighted to be joined today by the author of a brand new book just published at Princeton University Press. This book offers a reimagined ideal of global justice, drawing on anticolonial thinkers to analyse the unfinished work of decolonisation and to defend, not a nationalist project, as you might have thought decolonisation was, but instead a vision of global social equality.
And the author is Dr. Shuk Ying Chan, an Assistant Professor in Political Theory here in the Department of Political Science. Regular listeners will, of course recall Ying's other episodes with us on resisting colonialism and on the trouble with exporting Hollywood movies and I'll link to those in the show notes in case you'd like to revisit them.
So welcome back to the podcast. It's great to have you with us.
[00:01:12] Shuk Ying Chan: Great. Thanks so much Emily.
[00:01:15] Emily McTernan: So you opened the book with a chapter titled Decolonisation Unfinished, great title. Um, tell us about the state of affairs that moved you to write the book.
[00:01:24] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, so, um, I guess, you know, one obvious state of affairs is that there is still an extreme amount of global inequality. And I'm not just talking about material inequality, though, that's obviously at the backbone of it, but also in terms of, um, political inequality. So, you know, many post-colonial countries are still very much, uh, marginalised actors, um, in, you know, global governance and international lawmaking and, um, just a range of, you know, global political, uh, issues.
And we see this playing out in things like climate change and negotiations and so on and so forth. Um, often because of the power inequality between, uh, you know, Global North and Global South actors, there is, you know, there are a lot of voices that are ignored or, or dismissed. And so, you know, part of the motivation for thinking about this, you know, what a really genuinely post-colonial world order will look like is to respond to these inequalities in power and material, um, wealth.
[00:02:25] Emily McTernan: Great. So let's dive into your theoretical framework and your central argument. And so what you are doing in the book is you take a set of anti-colonial thinkers and you find in them a thread of egalitarianism, and then you use this to create the positive vision. So let's take this in turn.
[00:02:39] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:40] Emily McTernan: So could you tell us first a bit about the anti-colonial thinkers who are shaping your work?
[00:02:43] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, so, so I look mainly at, uh, the work of four quite influential 20th century third world anti-colonial thinkers. So there's Frantz Fanon, um, who's obviously writing from the French Empire. There's uh, his teacher, Césaire who's also writing from the French Empire. Um, and then there's Nehru, who was obviously the first prime minister of, of India and who's writing from the British Empire. And, also, uh, Nkrumah, who was the first prime minister of Ghana, also writing from the first British Empire.
So all four thinkers are kind of writing at the time when decolonise, formal decolonisation had not fully occurred yet, but they were all kind of standing at the threshold of this huge momentous historical change and, you know, thinking about what, uh, a future kind of you know, just world, both in terms of their own society, but also the world order should look like.
[00:03:33] Emily McTernan: And you are suggesting in the book, I take it, you can correct me if I'm wrong
[00:03:37] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:37] Emily McTernan: That it's wrong to take these thinkers primarily to be proposing a nationalist project, so why is that right?
[00:03:42] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. So, despite the fact that, you know, many of these thinkers are known for their nationalism, um, if we take a sort of closer reading at, at their work and also just look at their actual political projects, their proposals, and so on. You know, so here I'm thinking of, for example, Césaire's, uh, initial, um, political campaign was to push for, um, departmentalisation, which would mean that, you know, former colonies become part of France to form a Republic rather than an independent nation state or Nkrumah's idea of an African union, which would transcend national borders within Africa anyway.
If you look at, you know, their work and also, um, their political projects, you see that often for them, the nation state was an instrument to resist the kind of colonial oppression that they were facing at the time, but they already kind of saw the limits of the nation state. So Nkrumah saw that, you know, without, some kind of transnational economic and political union Ghana would be a very small player, economically and politically on the global stage and this would allow for, um, you know, the continuation of relationships of dependency that, you know, like economic dependency that would keep being dependent on the Global North and so on and what he calls, opening the door to neocolonialism.
And, you know, uh, Césaire, on the other hand, felt that if places, like colonies like Martinique just became another quote unquote nation state this would be letting the coloniser off the hook too easily, because now it would be much harder as a separate nation state to demand that the former colony can share in the wealth of the former coloniser, whereas if they became a part of Republic, a genuine Republic of France, um, then through standard redistribution and so on, within, that happens within the nation state, there was hope that, you know, the people that had bore the brunt of creating metropolitan wealth would be able to actually benefit from it.
So, there are many different, uh, ways in which then I think they saw the nation state is limited. Obviously there are different views amongst the four of them, but I think that it's a, it's too simplistic to kind of attribute to them, just because that formal decolonisation did end up in the world of nation states, to attribute them to them retrospectively that was the full vision of what they, the full ambition of decolonisation that they had in mind.
[00:06:00] Emily McTernan: They sort of weren't limited to the thought that this nation state needed to be free of the colonisers. They, they actually wanted something quite different as a future world order beyond that.
[00:06:08] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
[00:06:09] Emily McTernan: Great. So, let's talk a little bit as well about the other thing you say. So you say a little bit about the nation state and then, you know, and that's not the limit of it, but there's another thing you're pulling out of the anti-colonial thinkers that people maybe haven't paid enough attention to in your view yet. So not only are they not nationalists, but they're also egalitarians.
[00:06:26] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:26] Emily McTernan: So tell us about the threads of egalitarianism you pull out of their work.
[00:06:29] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. Great. So, um, so in the book I reconstruct their critique of colonialism as a critique not really of foreign rule, which might sound quite counterintuitive, but, but instead of, racialised hierarchies of different kinds. And you know, one way to understand this is to think about, the fact that first of all, all four thinkers are to different degrees influenced by, socialist thinking, um, and some of them are self-declared socialists.
So for many of them, thinking about oppression as foreign, uh, you know, as the roots of oppression as being someone foreign ethno, has a different ethnocultural identity to you, um, oppressing you is really, insufficient because for them, you know, there could be, and, Fanon and Nkrumah and, you know, and you know, they talk about this as well. Um, there could be, and there are domestic collaborators or even domestic sources of oppression, people like, as Fanon says blacks that are whiter than whites, um, a very controversial way to put it. But there he's not making really a statement about, you know, um, skin color or, you know, racialised identities. He's making a statement about how, some people who share your ethnocultural identity actually occupy a social position that is quite similar to the foreigner.
Um, and so the hierarchies, the political, economic, and social hierarchies are at the centre of their critique of what was wrong with colonialism. And so in order to decolonise fully, it's not enough to kick out the foreigners, it's really what they're after essentially, to dismantle these hierarchies and to create the material and social conditions that would allow for people to relate to each other as equals.
And so this I think is a much more ambitious view because it has implications for how the domestic political economy should be arranged and, sort of like cultural norms and so on, and how those need to be challenged as well. Again, beyond sort of changing the flag and claiming that now we're ruled by our own people.
[00:08:32] Emily McTernan: So self-determination in the sense just isn't gonna be enough to abolish the kinds of hierarchies these thinkers are concerned with.
[00:08:37] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, that's exactly right. Yes.
[00:08:39] Emily McTernan: Before we move to the fascinating way in which you then combine this with contemporary analytic political philosophy.
[00:08:45] Shuk Ying Chan: Right.
[00:08:45] Emily McTernan: Just briefly, why these thinkers?
[00:08:47] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. Um, so I get this question a lot. So, I mean there are different reasons. I think one reason is just that, you know, there are quite geographically varied. They're writing from different parts of the world. And, but then at the same time, in their work, I, at least for me, I can trace overlapping critiques of colonialism and a vision for decolonisation that centres around the value of equality.
So it's interesting, I think, to take them as, not full representatives of the anti-colonial tradition of obviously, but like, pretty convincing uh, you know, kind of, data points as as indicating, a much more, a much richer anti-colonial tradition than the one that we've known.
And also, you know, because I was interested in certain, specific, um, like issue areas. So in the book I talk about international investment as a kind of neo-colonial exploitation, I talk about unequal cultural flows between societies as a form of problematic cultural imperialism.
And these thinkers are the ones that have something to say about, or, you know, at least on my reconstruction, have something helpful I think to say, about these specific issue areas. Um, so yeah, the combination of, I guess, um, you know, the fact that I think I can convincingly, trace the, they're the, the sort of value of equality in their work, the fact that they're quite geographically varied and also the fact that they have something I think, insightful to say about the specific areas I'm interested in.
[00:10:09] Emily McTernan: Are other anticolonial thinkers more nationalists, would you say? Are these like the egalitarian outliers or do you see this as a more general?
[00:10:16] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think that. I think that they'd think that they're outliers, but there are certainly, I think some anti-colonial thinkers that it'd be hard to, reinterpret them as, uh, you know, uh, is moving away from cultural nationalist, so nationalism. So, you know, like being from a Chinese background, initially I wanted to, uh, you know, somehow fit a Chinese thinker in there and I looked a lot at, the work of Liang Qichao, and he's a very influential, um, uh, sort of, you know, I guess you could call him an anti-colonial thinker. But you know, he's much more of a kind of, almost social Darwinian kind of like, you know, our race is superior and therefore we deserve self-determination, kind of figure.
So, there are definitely, influential figures like that too. And, and I exclude them from, from, from my selection. The claim isn't that this is what anti-colonialism is about, but that there is a different way to think about anti-colonialism that's not limited to nationalism, and to me it is independently attractive and that's why I think it's worth thinking about.
[00:11:13] Emily McTernan: Great. So let's get to the positive vision, which we've set up nicely, right? So you're gonna take this egalitarian thread and you're gonna do something with it.
[00:11:18] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:19] Emily McTernan: So let me just ask a little bit about what they're adding to the discussion here. So I, I guess in our field, is this fair to say? I, I think nearly everyone reckons a current global order is unjust.
[00:11:29] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:29] Emily McTernan: And many people think huge redistribution would be required as part of the fixing of that injustice.
[00:11:35] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:35] Emily McTernan: But your book. Makes a fascinating intervention because it tells us that we're getting a bit wrong in our standard way of thinking about global justice within philosophy.
[00:11:42] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm.
[00:11:42] Emily McTernan: So what are we getting wrong before we get to how we're gonna get it right, using these anticolonial thinkers?
[00:11:47] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. A very big question what we're getting wrong, but I mean, one thing is just that well, up until very recently, I think now there's a bit more, diverse work on global justice.
But up until recently, I think a lot of, analytic political theory philosophy on global justice was really, kind of ahistorical, it's, a lot of it is, sort of, okay, there's a poor person, there's a rich person, or there's a rich population, a poor population, what do they owe each other? Or I mean, not even reciprocally, just what do the rich owe the poor?
And you see this in, like very famous kind of standard global justice thought experiments like the rescuing the child in the drowning pond that you just happen across, right? So there's no kind of history there, which I think ends up, you end up having views that are, you know, even when the end result is that the rich owe a lot to the poor and, you know, have to redistribute and, and so on. You take a, you take away the agency of the poor.
First of all, you kind of, treat them as sort of passive recipients, um, of of, of social justice. And also you run into all sorts of problems like for a long time, global justice theorists were stuck in sort of debating between, you know, is our world, does our world have the features of a sort of domestic society such that we owe each other the same things as we would to our fellow citizens?
But I think if you look at the history of empire and you look at how for a long time the world, uh, was set up, was already set up in a way that was, that made a lot of things morally relevant. For example, if you look at the circulation of racist ideology and ideas about status uh, racialised status, then you can see that, this idea of social equality isn't that far fetched.
That, you know, the reason why it's morally relevant is not far fetched. So, I think that, because of the, a historicity of the, of global justice, of political theory, analytic political theory, it's led into these very abstract debates and ultimately misses a lot of, global political life that can better be thought of if we see the world from a perspective of someone who's gone through, I think one of the greatest global injustices in modern history.
[00:13:51] Emily McTernan: That is colonialism in particular.
[00:13:53] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Empire. Yeah.
[00:13:54] Emily McTernan: So the thought is something. So this is the thought that in political philosophy we treat it as if there's just these pools and children have wandered into them.
[00:14:00] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:14:00] Emily McTernan: And you are sort of saying, no, no, no. There was a whole history of the world that set up the equivalent of the pools that the dangers and the issues that people are facing in these countries.
[00:14:10] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah exactly.
[00:14:10] Emily McTernan: And now we just pretend like it's happenstance. That's where we start from.
[00:14:14] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah and then if we see, you know, that there was a lot of those hierarchies and really, you know, like problematic relationships still exist today, then it, sort of, we start from there rather than, um, having to, you know, first making an argument about how globalisation has brought us together in ways that, were previously not true before which I always found very frustrating because, um, you know, again, for most of the world's modern history at least, uh, we lived in empires. People lived in empires, not in nation states.
[00:14:41] Emily McTernan: And so one of the things you're saying here as well is a shift away from thinking about it purely in distribution terms, so handing stuff out or back and into this concern for hierarchy.
[00:14:52] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:14:52] Emily McTernan: So what motivates that focus on hierarchy?
[00:14:55] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:14:56] Emily McTernan: In particular, which is a slight move away from the kind of redistribution or even returning stolen goods.
[00:15:03] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:03] Emily McTernan: And making reparations for the extraction of resources. You are drawing our attention to something slightly different here.
[00:15:10] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:10] Emily McTernan: Is that right?
[00:15:11] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. Well, I think, I think that's goes back to what I was saying about why for these thinkers, like Fanon, uh, is the thinker I rely on the most in chapter two, where I talk about, this vision of global justice, post-colonial, global justice as social equality.
Um, you know, so for someone like him, it's , the fact that there's material inequality itself is, you know, is problematic because it creates these relationships that allow people to dominate, subjugate, humiliate, alienate others. And in so doing creating two classes of human beings where, in his terms, neither of them are really human in the sense that, you know, one of them occupies a space where they think they're superior and they have a kind of distorted vision of the world. And you know, they are always living in fear because they are always worried that the other, that the rest of the majority is going to come back at them and so on. Whereas, and then you have this other category of, people who are living subhuman lives.
It's this, relationship that is deeply problematic and that creates all sorts of things like, constraints on people's freedom and so on and so forth. And, and it's the kind of relationship that I think still exists today in different forms globally. Yeah, so it's not enough to just think about inequality of distributions but to think about the kind of relationships that, that those, distributions create.
And, you know, beyond that as well, there are other things that are less so about material inequality and more about sort of, you know, who is seen, as in recognised as what I call a social agent or someone who is able to contribute to value making. And that also is part of a hierarchy when you have some people consistently or persistently seen as being inferior value makers. And I think that again, like sort of drops out of the picture, but if you only talk about how you know there's the global poor and the global rich and then so on.
[00:17:10] Emily McTernan: So you're look, I guess, to look towards hierarchy and questions of social equality. And so what you're doing here is you're creating a kind of positive vision of social equality that goes global.
[00:17:18] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:18] Emily McTernan: That's one of the major contributions to the book. Is that right?
[00:17:20] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, that's right.
[00:17:21] Emily McTernan: So in political philosophy, we've been talking for a long time about kind of domestic social equality.
[00:17:25] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:25] Emily McTernan: So social equality within a society.
[00:17:27] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:17:27] Emily McTernan: And you are saying go global.
[00:17:29] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:17:29] Emily McTernan: And you have this wonderful sketch of three different kinds of global hierarchies we see that social egalitarians should attend to.
[00:17:36] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:17:36] Emily McTernan: Would you give us a quick run through of the three main types that you highlight?
[00:17:39] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, so there's hierarchies of political power. Um, and so, you know, if you think about the classic examples of, um, global governance institutions I mean, the UN is an obvious example, but you know, I talk about the WTO uh, at length, all these institutions in which, even when sometimes you have formal equality, there's actually, obviously not real equality because some countries just by virtue of their market power or their military power and so on, so forth, um, are able to dominate, to dictate, what happens and so on. So that's one kind of hierarchy.
And then another kind of hierarchy is, what I call hierarchies of esteem or, or, or I guess, uh, status. Um, so this is the idea that that I just briefly talked about. So some people are seen as sort of, uh, more capable of creating what we recognise as value. We think about these narratives. Like, I, I don't, this, this might be a tangent, but like, when Donald Trump visited uh, the UK just, month ago or something, you know, he talked about how the UK is like the country that created democracy that brought to us all this like civilisation and this wonderful literature. So the narrative's like that, right? And whereas obviously he's referred to other countries as shithole places where, you know, there's like, what did they ever do deserve this word? So like this inequality of esteem, which I think is ultimately these hierarchy of esteem, hierarchies of esteem will sort of contribute to legitimising other kinds of hierarchies.
Um, and then there's hierarchies of standing, which is this idea that some people's interest deserve greater consideration than others. So if you think about trade deals that are unfair, or investment deals that are exploitative. Ultimately what that says, that what that kind of arrangement says, is that, you know, um, it matters more that investors are able to enrich themselves than, post-colonial citizens are able to secure their interests in flourishing life, for example. So yeah, those are the three kinds of hierarchies I talk about.
[00:19:33] Emily McTernan: And as it transforms from a nation specific or a domestic vision of justice into a global vision of justice, are we swap swapping from thinking about relations between particular people
[00:19:45] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:45] Emily McTernan: To thinking about relations between peoples
[00:19:47] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:47] Emily McTernan: Or between nations? What are our kind of salient groupings now?
[00:19:51] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah, that's a really good question. So in the book I talk about this, it's a very tricky issue. So. I think, ultimately because the view I come up with assumes that individuals are ultimately the, what I call the, well not what I call, but like, you know, I think what roles or many other philosophers call, uh, units of moral concern. So individuals are what matters essentially. A group only matters insofar as they contribute to individual's freedom and wellbeing.
So ultimately what we want is a world where individuals are able to late as equals, but in order to get there, we obviously need, ignore the fact that individuals are, um, you know, they move around the world in groups and we relate to each other often through each other's group identities.
And so, um, it's important then for peoples, you know, the various groups of which people belong to, you know, either they're ascribed to by others or they, subjectively identify with, for these groups to also be considered seen as equal. And the most obvious, you know, when it come to, comes to global politics, is the sort of your national group, right?
Or sometimes, your racial group can be seen as, uh, a grouping as well, a politically salient grouping. And so that's why I talk about how you know, it's important for for us to think about sort of the racialised hierarchies between, post-colonial, uh, racialised, uh, groups and sort of the white Global North and so on, so forth. And not enough to only talk about what individuals owe to each other.
[00:21:15] Emily McTernan: Yeah, fascinating. Let's turn in the last section of this podcast to what you do in the second half of the book. So we get this wonderful, rich framework up, this new vision of global social equality, which is going to start talking about relations between nations and groups, but as a proxy for thinking about individual relations as social equality, or a way to get at those.
[00:21:34] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:34] Emily McTernan: And then the second half of the book you turn to apply this framework to a whole set of issues, some of which we've talked before before on the podcast.
[00:21:41] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:41] Emily McTernan: So about things like cultural exports economic systems. But today, let's talk about your theories, implications for global governance.
[00:21:48] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:49] Emily McTernan: So what are we doing wrong and how are we gonna make it better from the point of view of global social equality?
[00:21:53] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. Thanks. Um, yeah, so I guess, if you thought an anti-colonial perspective wasn't only a nationalist perspective you might think that the problem of global governance is that it interferes with national self-determination, right?
You have all these international laws that nation states have to comply with and and so on and so forth. But interestingly, and in this chapter, I draw from Nehru, the problem of global governance isn't necessarily that it's interfering. In fact, he actively sought for, and advocated for a, what he called a Democratic World Union.
So he want, he thought that, you know, the problem, with persistent world wars and, the reason why countries are constantly trying to expand in the imperialist fashion is because ultimately, there is such deep global inequality and then, and only by addressing that global inequality in a way that's democratic then we can, you know, one in his words, once and for all resolve the root causes of war.
Um, and so for him, even in the, uh, you know, in the interwar period, he was already arguing for something, like a, a world union. Like a one world is, is another way that he puts it. But of course he was not naive. I mean, he's a statesman after all, and he's, very much, um, a political actor.
He thought that we needed to first of all address the fact that any kind of global institution that we come up with without addressing in some way, without alleviating global power inequality, was just going to be, papering over these, power inequalities and just ultimately going to lead to even more disillusionment for marginalised populations, uh, because, would see that these institutions basically are biased against them, right? So think about standard critiques of many global institutions like the International Criminal Court, you know, as, as only going after politicians of certain countries and so on and so forth.
Um, so, you know, for Nehru it's really important that we hold both things in our mind, in our head, right? On the one hand, the long-term goal is to have some kind of political integration at the global level. But on the other hand, we can't just naively get there by saying, okay, fine, let's have one, one country, one vote in this new newly formed, assembly or whatever.
Or let's have one citizen, one vote. And these are proposals that a lot of contemporary liberal political philosophers working on global constitutionalism have put forth, right? So, people who, who argue for a world assembly or a world constitution and so on. So I think, there someone like Nehru, if you take up anti-colonial perspective of the kind I'm defending here, you know, you might say that those are too quick, right? Too naive.
So for Nehru, the middle ground is, um, that in the here and now before we can get to this union we should, instead of abandoning this whole project, we should form counter hegemonic political alliances. And this is where his lesser known efforts, uh, in the interwar period to form what he called the, what they called the League Against Imperialism comes from, it's a transnational alliance of anti-imperialist activists. And then later on, you know, when he became Prime Minister of India, obviously he, was responsible for the Bandung Movement, Non-aligned Movement, and so on and so forth.
All these counter hegemonic alliances between marginalised actors, actors that were marginalised at that time. You know, and in the aim of, of what he calls instigating a psychological revolution. So like showing people that like, you know, or actually, uh, integration beyond your nation state can actually achieve some important goods.
And then eventually when these alliances are able to win more concessions within global governance structures. Then in the more kind of democratically reformed global governance structure, then there's hope for a more genuine kind of world union. So, the anticolonial perspective, I think is able to show us why on the one hand we shouldn't sort of just give up on this, aspiration of a more democratic kind of global governance, but on the other hand why it's too naive to try to achieve that by just drawing up these blueprints for new kinds of constitutions and world assemblies and so on.
[00:25:51] Emily McTernan: So the thought is first you start to create alternative power structures. Then we go into the centre.
[00:25:56] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:25:57] Emily McTernan: Would you say that if that's all we did, there'd still be a danger of subverting the ultimate democratic government?
[00:26:03] Shuk Ying Chan: How do you mean?
[00:26:04] Emily McTernan: So, so the thought I'm having is, so suppose there are these kind of groundswell movements, counter imperialist projects.
[00:26:10] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:26:10] Emily McTernan: And then. That goes on for a while, these bonds are formed, there are these groupings, and then into the general system go the nations.
[00:26:18] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah.
[00:26:18] Emily McTernan: The thought I'm having is, won't there be enough residual power amongst the superpowers, at least, that you'll still get a similar kind of worry about the global hierarchies, reemerging, very rich, well off powerful nations.
[00:26:31] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:32] Emily McTernan: Doing better on any decision point.
[00:26:34] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's always a, a danger. So I guess, you know, maybe departing from Nehru, I, I don't think that there's gonna be an end point where we think, okay, we've achieved equality, political equality at the global level. So, in the book I talk about how it's really dependent on whether global governance moves towards democracy.
And it's a constant process of moving towards that really depends ultimately on the actors that are marginalised at any given point, and not just states, but also non-state actors, so like, sort of social movements and so on. Whether they're able to mobilise in a way that threatens the material interests of whoever is sitting on top at that given moment.
Today it might still be the US, tomorrow could be China, or some configuration of those actors. And you know, I sort of look to towards some contemporary social movements, um, and how they are able to mobilise globally to subvert the material interest of these powerful actors.
Um, and so ultimately, yeah, I think it really depends on being able to do that. And as political philosophers or theorists, I think we should be turning towards thinking about the questions that arise when we think about political action at the global level. Um, instead of, again, investing our energies in either just being sceptical of global democracy and just, refuting it all together or kind of coming up with more clever institutional designs.
[00:27:58] Emily McTernan: Yeah. Let's sneak in one last question about the method of, of this work.
[00:28:03] Shuk Ying Chan: Yes.
[00:28:03] Emily McTernan: So your work's fascinating, partly because it's bringing anticolonial thinking into contact with analytic political philosophy.
[00:28:09] Shuk Ying Chan: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:10] Emily McTernan: Right? These people who are doing it wrong, who are thinking about ponds who aren't
[00:28:12] Shuk Ying Chan: Right.
[00:28:13] Emily McTernan: Seeing what we should be seeing, what are the pitfalls of doing that?
[00:28:17] Shuk Ying Chan: Yeah. There are many, and you know, I, I, I'm sure that I've stepped into all of them at one point or the other. Um, so in the introduction, I talk, uh, at length about these potential pitfalls. So, I mean, one is just that, you know, these are political actors. It's really hard to reconstruct from, I mean, some of them are more, philosophical than others. You know, Fanon's obviously a philosopher. But, someone like Nehru for example, it's really hard to reconstruct his political philosophies from from his political actions, um, even though he did write extensively, but a lot of that is also very kind of specifically geared towards certain audiences.
So, um, part of it's just interpretive, that's the challenge. But I think a deeper challenge is, and people have said this many times to me, so, um, is the fear that I might end up, sort of, using them as a mouthpiece to talk about, uh, my own views, which is not really true to what they might have thought. So, you know, I hope I haven't done that, um, but it's true that the final view of global justice that I come up with is not recognisably a view that any of them held, but I think is, is consistent or compatible with the most, the best reading of them, I think of their commitments.
So for example, the fact that, my view ultimately adopts, normative individualism. You know, one might think that that's in tension with anti-colonial thinkers, who are often emphasising things like collective empowerment and so on. I don't think that's inconsistent. And in the book I sort of explain why, that we don't have to give up, um, thinking about groups just because we think that, uh, you know, individuals are ultimately what matters, um, morally speaking.
So yeah, I mean, I, I, I think that the danger is that you come up with something that is not true to their core commitments but I hope I haven't done that, even if on the way I've had to depart from some of their, I think, less core commitments. Yeah.
[00:30:11] Emily McTernan: Thank you so much Ying for coming on and for letting us have a taste of some of the arguments that are in this book, which I highly recommend to our listeners to go and have a look at.
So we've been discussing the book Post-Colonial Global Justice by Shuk Ying Chan, just published by Princeton University Press. Full details as ever are in show notes for this episode along with Ying's other discussions with us on other parts of her post-colonial global justice work.
Remember, to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcast or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you are there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of your time to rate or review us too.
I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.