Towards a Global Anti-Colonialism: Histories of Struggle Across Palestine, Ireland, South Africa, and the United States

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, socio-political movements against settler colonialism and imperialism simultaneously exploded across the world. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine emerged in response to Zionism’s expansion, the Provisional Irish Republican Army took up the mantle of an eight-hundred year struggle with British colonialism, the South African Communist Party forged an alliance with the African National Congress to combat apartheid, and the Black Panther Party thrusted itself into international prominence as an internal challenge to US-led imperialism and racism. As the first study of its kind, this dissertation reads each organization’s archives to accomplish three interrelated tasks. First, each chapter tracks the historical development of one of these movements to determine how they arrived at a global analysis of settler colonialism. Then, it engages with the archival material to recover a particular vision of the world that each movement sought to achieve. Finally, each chapter makes theoretical contributions by pulling these historical visions together for worldmaking projects in the present. These cases paint a new, global picture of the radicalism of the era useful not just for historical reconstruction but also for intellectual and political pursuits in the present and future.