Date: 08.01.2026

Just a small update. Back in 2021 and 2022 respectively, I wrote two notes – “(Inter)Nationalism, National Liberation & The Global Border/Nation-State Regime” and “Postcolonial Racism(s) & the Mainstreaming of Far Right Ideology”, which I think have mostly held up and stayed highly relevant. However, there are two things I want to address, and I’m gonna do it here in a separate note rather than edit the texts.

First of all the use of the term “postcolonial” is something I’m less favorable to as of today, because there’s nothing postcolonial about what Palestinians and other Indigenous people across the world – from Taiwan to Greenland – living under (settler) colonial regimes go through. Moreover, I partly hinted at this in “Postcolonial Racism(s) & the Mainstreaming of Far Right Ideology”, but the “scientific” and biological racism of the peak era of European colonialism in Asia and Africa never completely died off. Not only did it survive (after the decline of European colonial empires)  in the racial segregation of the USA and South Africa for instance, but with the resurgence of the far right globally coupled with tech-based mass surveillance and the racial profiling of policing and borders, we’re seeing it again in both old and new forms. That doesn’t take away the specific forms of “cultural” and “ethno-differentialist” racism, but I now think it’s better not to pretend one has been replaced by the other.

Secondly, while I still appreciate her contribution for analyzing the global border regime, I’m a bit less enthusiastic about Nandita Sharma’s works than I was in “(Inter)Nationalism, National Liberation & The Global Border/Nation-State Regime” where I praised it a lot. I know she has said she doesn’t oppose things like “Land Back”, but I’m still troubled by how she repeatedly dismisses (including in online discussions on social media) the very idea of settler colonialism or the settler/native distinction as if the concept of settler colonialism was part of the global xenophobic framework of “native vs migrant” she talks about. Nandita also uses the term “Postcolonial New World Order”, see the (first part of the) previous remark for why I’m not a fan of that conception.