"The nation state replicates the divisive logic of colonialism."
ASK SOMEONE TO NAME A ONETIME EUROPEAN COLONY that hasn’t experienced extreme violence or suffered under a violently authoritarian regime since independence, and you’re likely to be met with a pause. Malaysia, perhaps, or Tanzania; Madagascar and Botswana. There are few. Even those countries who “made it” have, at times, edged perilously close to ruin. So pervasive has violence been in postcolonial societies that it can seem like the key thread linking their otherwise disparate experiences. To view it another way, civil war and communal bloodletting have been as much features of self-rule as colonial rule, if not more.