Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Dec 31, 2025

Bernard Forjwuor, an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame, challenges conventional thinking about political decolonization in his latest work. He questions the meaning of political independence and its sufficiency as a decolonial claim, particularly through the lens of Ghana's history. Forjwuor connects IMF policies to political instability and introduces innovative methodologies to analyze colonialism’s complex legacy. His arguments extend beyond Ghana, offering insights into broader post-colonial contexts, making a case for how colonialism persists today.

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INSIGHT

A Broader Ontology Of Colonialism

Forjwuor expands colonialism into multiple forms including settler, exploitative, and mixed varieties.
He stresses direct and indirect expressions of colonial power to show colonialism's complexity.

ANECDOTE

Theater Sparked Performativity Idea

Forjwuor recounts seeing a play, A Land of Million Magicians, which critiqued IMF and World Bank impacts in Nima.
The play inspired his use of performativity to analyze how declarations enact political reality.

INSIGHT

UN Rules Narrowed Decolonization

Forjwuor points out the UN's decolonization framework privileged settler colonial cases and excluded apartheid-like situations.
This exclusion allowed some colonial formations to persist because self-determination didn't address them.

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What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved?

In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial accomplishment of political independence or self-determination in Ghana. He argues that political independence is insufficiently a decolonial claim because it is framed within the context of a country, where a permanent colonial settlement was never deemed necessary for the consolidation of future colonial political obligations. So, while territorial dissolution was politically engineered by Ghanaians, the colonial merely reconstitutes itself in different legal and ideological forms.

Forjwuor offers new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to engaging the questions of colonialism, political independence, political decolonization, justice, and freedom, and constructs multiple conceptual bridges between traditional disciplinary fields of inquiry including politics, history, law, African studies, economic history, critical theory, and philosophy and political theory. Using the Ghanaian experience as a rich case study, Forjwuor rethinks what colonialism and decolonization mean, and asserts that decolonization is primarily a question of justice.

Bernard Forjwuor is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a scholar of black political thought, and his research focuses on the philosophical, critical, and theoretical claims advanced by global black political thinkers. His recent work challenges the ways the colonial and the racial are routinely affirmed as extinguished in the liberal democratic affirmation of sovereignty.

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