Mahmood Mamdani's Books

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.

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322

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Harmony

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ISBN 10

0385515375

ISBN 13

9780385515375

Citizen and Subject

Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Citizen and Subject

Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

By: Mahmood Mamdani

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

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353

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691011079

ISBN 13

9780691011073

Citizen and Subject

Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Citizen and Subject

Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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372

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691027935

ISBN 13

9780691027937

Saviors and Survivors

Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Saviors and Survivors

Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

From the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world’s response to that crisis. In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency–but not to genocide, as the West has declared. Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.” Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

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418

Publisher

Crown

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307591182

ISBN 13

9780307591180

Neither Settler nor Native

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Neither Settler nor Native

By: Mahmood Mamdani

Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities. In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

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417

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674987322

ISBN 13

9780674987326

When Victims Become Killers

Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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When Victims Become Killers

Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

By: Mahmood Mamdani

An incisive look at the causes and consequences of the Rwandan genocide "When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement was the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including judges, doctors, priests, and friends. Rejecting easy explanations of the Rwandan genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, When Victims Become Killers situates the tragedy in its proper context. Mahmood Mamdani coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutus to turn so brutally on their neighbors. In so doing, Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa and provides a direction for preventing similar future tragedies.

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Page Count

390

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691192340

ISBN 13

9780691192345

Define and Rule

Native as Political Identity

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Define and Rule

Native as Political Identity

By: Mahmood Mamdani

When Britain abandoned its attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance as the definition and management of difference, lines of political identity were drawn between settler and native, and between natives according to tribe. Out of this colonial experience arose a language of pluralism.

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Page Count

165

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674067355

ISBN 13

9780674067356

Saviours and Survivors

Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Saviours and Survivors

Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

Saviours and Survivors is the first account of the Darfur crisis to consider recent events within the broad context of Sudan's history, and to examine the efficacy of the world's response to the ongoing violence. Illuminating the deeply rooted causes of the current conflict, Mamdani works from its colonial and Cold War origins to the war's intensification from the 1990s to the present day. Examining how the conflict has drawn in national, regional, and global forces, Mamdani deconstructs the powerful Western lobby's persistent calls for a military response dressed up as "humanitarian intervention". Incisive and authoritative, Saviours and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

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349

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Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1789604478

ISBN 13

9781789604474

When Victims Become Killers

Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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When Victims Become Killers

Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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390

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691193835

ISBN 13

9780691193830

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Muslims readily available to be split off from “bad” Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of “good” against “evil.” Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.

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322

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Harmony

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ISBN 10

038551591X

ISBN 13

9780385515917

Citizen and Subject

Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Citizen and Subject

Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

By: Mahmood Mamdani

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

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381

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400889715

ISBN 13

9781400889716

Scholars in the Marketplace. The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005

The Dilemmas of Neo-liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Scholars in the Marketplace. The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005

The Dilemmas of Neo-liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005

By: Mahmood Mamdani

Scholars in the Marketplace is a case study of market-based reforms at Uganda's Makerere University. With the World Bank heralding neoliberal reform at Makerere as the model for the transformation of higher education in Africa, it has implications for the whole continent. At the global level, the Makerere case exemplifies the fate of public universities in a market-oriented and capital friendly era. The Makerere reform began in the 1990s and was based on the premise that higher education is more of a private than a public good. Instead of pitting the public against the private, and the state against the market, this book shifts the terms of the debate toward a third alternative than explores different relations between the two. The book distinguishes between privatisation and commercialisation, two processes that drove the Makerere reform. It argues that whereas privatisation (the entry of privately sponsored students) is compatible with a public university where priorities are publicly set, commercialisation (financial and administrative autonomy for each faculty to design a market-responsive curriculum) inevitably leads to a market determination of priorities in a public university. The book warns against commercialisation of public universities as the subversion of public institutions for private purposes.

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Page Count

314

Publisher

African Books Collective

Published Date

ISBN 10

2869782012

ISBN 13

9782869782013

Saviours and Survivors

Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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Saviours and Survivors

Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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349

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Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1789604478

ISBN 13

9781789604474

Crises and Reconstruction-- African Perspectives

Two Lectures

By: Colin Leys,Mahmood Mamdani

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Crises and Reconstruction-- African Perspectives

Two Lectures

By: Colin Leys,Mahmood Mamdani

In this Discussion Paper two leading scholars address the international crisis of development and African attempts at reconstruction.

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Nordic Africa Institute

Published Date

ISBN 10

9171064176

ISBN 13

9789171064172

Muslims in Global Politics

Identities, Interests, and Human Rights

By: Mahmood Monshipouri

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Muslims in Global Politics

Identities, Interests, and Human Rights

By: Mahmood Monshipouri

In Egypt Islamists clash with secularists over religious and national identity, while in Turkey secularist ruling elites have chosen to accommodate Islamists in the name of democracy and reconciliation. As Islam spreads throughout the world, Muslims living in their traditional homelands and in the Western world are grappling with shifting identities. In all cases, understanding the dynamics of identity-based politics is critical to the future of Muslims and their neighbors across the globe. In Muslims in Global Politics, Mahmood Monshipouri examines the role identity plays in political conflicts in six Muslim nations—Egypt, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Iran, and Indonesia—as well as in Muslim diaspora communities in Europe and North America. In each instance, he describes how conservatives, neofundamentalists, reformists, and secularists construct identity in different ways and how these identities play out in the political arena. With globalization, the demand for human rights continues to grow in the Muslim world, and struggles over modernity, authenticity, legitimacy, and rationality become increasingly important. Muslims in Global Politics deepens our understanding of how modern ideas and norms interact with the traditions of the Islamic world and, in turn, shows how human rights advocates can provide an alternative to militant Islamist movements.

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343

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081220283X

ISBN 13

9780812202830

From Citizen to Refugee

Uganda Asians Come to Britain

By: Mahmood Mamdani

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From Citizen to Refugee

Uganda Asians Come to Britain

By: Mahmood Mamdani

Forty years after the 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda, this vivid account interweaves gripping personal stories with an examination of Uganda's colonial history, the evolution of post-independence politics and the politicisation of racial identity.

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114

Publisher

Fahamu/Pambazuka

Published Date

ISBN 10

1906387575

ISBN 13

9781906387570

ONE MORE VOICE!

Perspectives on South Asia

By: Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

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ONE MORE VOICE!

Perspectives on South Asia

By: Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

One More Voice adds the scholarly views of Dr. Cynthia Keppley Mahmood to the chorus of protest for civil and human rights in South Asia today. Looking at the Sikhs of the Punjab, the Muslims of Kashmir, “terrorism” in Mumbai, and the dangers of research in Bihar, Professor Mahmood includes her writings and speeches 2000-2010 in this second XLibris volume. (A Sea of Orange dealt with 1990-2000.) Readers both specialist and general will fi nd these pieces both informative and inspirational, as Mahmood turns her attention to activism in South Asia and the potential for change.

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160

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1477105689

ISBN 13

9781477105689

Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization

By: Mahmood Monshipouri,Neil Englehart,Andrew J. Nathan,Kavita Philip

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Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization

By: Mahmood Monshipouri,Neil Englehart,Andrew J. Nathan,Kavita Philip

Both human rights and globalization are powerful ideas and processes, capable of transforming the world in profound ways. Notwithstanding their universal claims, however, the processes are constructed, and they draw their power from the specific cultural and political contexts in which they are constructed. Far from bringing about a harmonious cosmopolitan order, they have stimulated conflict and opposition. In the context of globalization, as the idea of human rights has become universal, its meaning has become one more terrain of struggle among groups with their own interests and goals. Part I of this volume looks at political and cultural struggles to control the human rights regime -- that is, the power to construct the universal claims that will prevail in a territory -- with respect to property, the state, the environment, and women. Part II examines the dynamics and counterdynamics of transnational networks in their interactions with local actors in Iran, China, and Hong Kong. Part III looks at the prospects for fruitful human rights dialogiue between competing universalisms that by definition are intolerant of conradiction and averse to compromise.

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Page Count

397

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317473892

ISBN 13

9781317473893

Is Critique Secular?

Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

By: Talal Asad,Wendy Brown,Judith Butler,Saba Mahmood

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Is Critique Secular?

Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

By: Talal Asad,Wendy Brown,Judith Butler,Saba Mahmood

This volume interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today. What are the assumptions and resources internal to secular conceptions of critique that help or hinder our understanding of one of the most pressing conflicts of our times? Taking as their point of departure the question of whether critique belongs exclusively to forms of liberal democracy that define themselves in opposition to religion, these authors consider the case of the “Danish cartoon controversy” of 2005. They offer accounts of reading, understanding, and critique for offering a way to rethink conventional oppositions between free speech and religious belief, judgment and violence, reason and prejudice, rationality and embodied life. The book, first published in 2009, has been updated for the present edition with a new Preface by the authors.

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