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The Republic of South Africa was lauded by many in the Global Majority when it took Israel to the International Court of Justice in 2024, accusing it of carrying out actions amounting to the genocide of Palestinians. Supporters of the Palestinian cause rightly celebrated what they saw as a post-apartheid, postcolonial state taking a colonial apartheid state to task for its excesses. However, a week prior to the first hearing at the ICJ, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa quietly met with General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan. Standing in sharp contrast to South Africa’s principled stand against genocide in Palestine, Ramaphosa’s embrace of Hemedti – a man accused of active participation in the Darfur Genocide among other crimes against humanity – indicates that, although nation-states may act in accordance with a humanistic morality with respect to some liberation struggles, such as that of the Palestinians, they remain bound to complicity in extraordinary acts and structures of violence elsewhere through the existential realpolitik that has characterised international relations in the modern era, animated by a globalising transnational capitalism and the state’s quest to continue monopolising the legitimate use of violence domestically. 

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Among the threads that bind these three national actors to one another – South Africa, Palestine, and Sudan – is their concurrent participation in different projects of nation- and state-building to achieve liberation, with the nation-state representing the default framework for doing so. This paper argues against the assumption implicit to this default framework of national liberation struggles aimed at achieving statehood, which is that that the nation-state represents a vehicle by which colonised peoples may achieve liberation. Building on Mahmood Mamdani’s argument that the concept of the nation-state was birthed by ethnic cleansing and colonialism (2020), I demonstrate that the Westphalian state configuration that has “obliged even socialist regimes to make some kind of peace with transnational capitalism” (Shohat 1992: 100) – itself also an evolution from global economic processes birthed within a similar moment – cannot manifest itself as a vehicle for liberation, especially one that considers the intersections of race, nation and class as local and planetary organising principles.

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Among the three actors at the centre of this study, South Africa represents the most advanced example of an entrenched, putatively-postcolonial nation-state. The South African nation-state’s limitations have already been well-explored, particularly in reference to questions of economic justice and the state’s liberatory potential domestically and abroad.[i] These criticisms are compounded even further by the acknowledgement that South Africa’s attempts to present itself as a leader in human rights promotion abroad are hemmed in by the twin frictions of formulating foreign policy in accordance with regional/continental consensus and with “the pursuit of fairer representation in global governance” (Fritz 2018: 112-113). While serving both dynamics, South Africa still accedes to architectures of regional, continental, and global governance that valorise the representative capabilities of the nation-state as the default mechanism for promoting human rights and achieving equality. South Africa’s contrasting approaches to the questions of Palestine and Sudan thus reflects the pitfalls of regarding any nation-states, even if well-intentioned, as being able to promote liberation.  Recalling the Sudanese intellectual Mansour Khalid’s assertion that “unawareness of alternatives is the height of political ignorance” (1992: 3), this paper will thus look towards Sudan and Palestine for alternatives to the idea of nation-state-building as liberatory praxis. Before doing this, however, it will first contextualise the significance of Palestine and Sudan within global politics to further underscore the importance of both cases in guiding liberatory thought for colonised peoples in the Global Majority.

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Sudan and Palestine in the World

Historic Palestine and Sudan do not represent discrete geographies whose problems are limited to its own boundaries, but rather geographies whose conditions are deeply intertwined with global processes and flows that further highlight the perils of parochializing liberation to the borders of a nation-state. The 1948 settler colonisation of Palestine by Israel at the dawn of the Cold War represented the erection of an Israeli state that Maxime Rodinson described as “a beachhead of the industrialized, capitalist world in an underdeveloped world” and “an ally of the imperialist powers” (1973: 89-90). This reality has only become more pronounced in recent years. William Robinson and Hoai-An Nguyen explain that Israel continues, through its besiegement of Gaza and the West Bank, to crack “open new space for transnational accumulation” (2024). The presence of Palestinians in their historic homeland, therefore, represents an obstacle to the current phase of not just Israeli, but transnational, capitalist expansion.

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The Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler colonialism also represents a key node in global anticolonial struggles. John Collins writes that Palestinians “have been test subjects for, and in some cases active agents helping to catalyse, an emerging world of pervasive securitisation and violence acceleration” symbolised by the Global War on Terror while also being “important actors in and symbols of the ongoing struggle for global justice” (2011: 2-3). Olivis Harrison also describes the Palestinian struggle as “the most recognizable symbol of Arab and Muslim unity in Arab state rhetoric for the past half-century” (2016: 1). With specific reference to African anticolonialisms, Yusuf Serunkuma analogises Israel as being to Palestinians what the British, Germans, French, Belgians, and Boers represented to colonised peoples in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Algeria, the Congo and South Africa, as he exhorts African peoples to recognise that events in Palestine undress more latent processes of neocolonial control and exploitation still at play in putatively independent nation-states (2023) – a more comprehensive echo of Nelson Mandela’s historic 1997 statement that the freedom of South Africans from Apartheid is “incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” (in Fayyad 2020). It is worth mentioning here as well that Apartheid South African was a staunch Israeli ally and that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was concurrently a crucial actor within anticolonial alliances in the Global South.

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Sudan, similarly, is deeply embedded within transnational networks of actors that exploit the region’s precarious political and security situation. The Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) Project, for example, highlights that as well as working with the erstwhile Omar al-Bashir regime, the Khartoum Process has allowed Hemedti to present himself to the EU as “Mr Migration”, making himself useful to its objectives by involving the RSF in “in trafficking, ransoming and mistreating migrants”, stopping them from reaching Libya and eventually Europe (2023).The Arab Gulf states have also built relationships resembling neocolonial patronage in Sudan, interweaving it into flows of arms and soldiers that suit their interests. Saudi Arabia, for example, has benefited from the support of RSF fighters during the war its war in Yemen (Al Jazeera 2023), a large part of which involves securing the Bab al-Mandeb Straits as a key maritime logistics choke-point. The UAE and Qatar have also supported the RSF and Abdelfattah Al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces respectively in attempting to secure broader regional influence. The former provides the RSF with arms and securing logistics routes for the transfer of Russian arms by also supporting Field Marshal Khalifah Haftar’s campaign to control Libya (Soufan Centre 2024).

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South Africa also exists as a node within these networks through its arms sales to states who have benefited from warm relations with the RSF. Criticisms of South Africa’s policies toward Sudan have often also overlapped with criticism of its policies toward Palestine, acting as a stick by which to beat those involved in anti-Apartheid activism in both places. The Israeli legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich, for example, wrote in a 2015 Washington Post article entitled “Sudan’s Bashir is the Palestinians’ and Pretoria’s Favourite Genocidal Tyrant” that South Africa is among a small number of countries who “reflect the Palestinians’ warped view of international law”, using South Africa’s non-arrest of Omar al-Bashir while “couching its criticisms [of Israel] in language of law and rights” as evidence. Kontorovich’s article, rife with obfuscations of the realities of Israel’s settler colonisation of Palestine, is illustrative of attempts by actors in the Global Minority to minimise the suffering of Palestinians by invoking the Darfur Genocide – a mirror of speech acts by actors in the Global Majority that co-opt the Palestinian cause to further their own ends while whitewashing the role of their Sudanese allies in Darfur.

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The Nation-State’s Factory Defect

I argue that these inconsistencies are not simply local instances of hypocrisy but are more deeply rooted in the essence of the nation-state. Mahmood Mamdani roots the “founding moment” of the nation-state as emerging from the ethnic cleansing of Moors and Jews to establish a Christian Spanish kingdom and the concurrent the arrival of Iberian colonists in the Americas (2020: 1), thus concluding that nationalism and colonialism were co-constituted through the creation of the nation-state. In the case of postcolonial states, Mamdani argues that efforts by postcolonial nationalists to “consolidate power by transforming society into the home of the nation as they imagined it” led to “an era of blood and terror, ethnic cleansing and civil wars, and, sometimes, genocide” (2020: 3). Therefore, ethnic cleansing and genocide are manifestations of nation-states’ attempts to internally homogenise themselves and manage diversity through concepts such as the tribe, based on cultural and ethnic division. Mamdani uses the leaders of African states such as Sudan and Rwanda, who modelled “their political imagination on the modern European state […] leading to new rounds of nation-building by ethnic cleansing” (2020: 15), as key examples. He therefore offers a socio-political and demographically-rooted argument regarding the limits on a nation-state’s potential to liberate.

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Mamdani presents South Africa as the blueprint of a liberation model, since it included all “survivors” of apartheid, “victims, perpetrators, beneficiaries, bystanders, [and] exiles”, in “an expanded political process and reformed political community” rather than “[individualising] violence as a stand-alone act” (2020: 17). His theoretical argument is powerful: stating that “political reform has to come first because the call for criminal justice within the parameters of the existing political order leaves that order intact” (2020: 17). He calls for “decolonising the political”, a process of “upsetting the permanent majority and minority identities that define the contours of the nation-state” (2020: 19). Practically, however, permanent majority and minority identities persist in South Africa and they are intertwined with race and class identities. An analysis of South Africa’s decolonial scope through the lens of political economy demonstrates that although post-1994 South Africa has not relied on ethnic cleansing domestically to constitute its nationhood, its lack of decolonising the economic has rendered it complicit in ethnic cleansing, genocide and civil war abroad to uphold its neoliberal statehood.

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To understand how this has occurred, it is important to recall that 1492 – Mamdani’s foundational moment – also saw the advent of the Transatlantic trade of enslaved peoples and settler colonialism, both foundational to the emergence of racial capitalism and tied to the birth of the nation-state (Bhandar 2018, Grosfoguel 2013, Lloyd and Wolfe 2016). As Abdelwahab El-Affendi explains, the globalisation of the Westphalian model has also ameliorated its hegemonic capacity, thus forcing all states – even reluctantly – to submit “to the logic of world governmentality” and the capitalist flows implicit within (2023: 98). Under neoliberalism, such submissions also play a role in strengthening state formation (Hanieh 2010: 86). Thus, South Africa’s attempts to adhere to regional and continental consensuses with regards to foreign policy also juxtaposes the economic imperatives of a world capitalist governmentality against those of liberation from the co-constituting structures of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and neocolonialism both locally and transnationally. Rather than presenting a liberatory blueprint, El-Affendi explains that South Africa has mired itself within an indefinite phase of “DIY colonialism” (2023: 100). Significantly, this notion of DIY colonialism also accurately describes the Palestinian project of neoliberal state-building within the 1967 borders (ibid: 100), which assumes a linear template of liberation that entails the adoption of a key assumption drawn from South Africa’s experience of liberation from constitutional apartheid. Based on the ANC’s historic compromise with major South African corporate capitalists, the assumption is that powerful transnational actors will reward a liberation movement that commits itself to the principles of free-market capitalism and the notions of “social, political, and economic ‘progress’” contained therein (Seidel 2014: 91).

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Alternative Nation and State Configurations

In terms of the way forward, Mamdani argues in favour of a twinning of the political and epistemological that he believes “necessitates decolonizing the political” by “not throwing off outside rule but excising the ideology of political modernity internalized under colonialism” (2020: 34). While excusing himself from prescribing the outcome of a process of decolonising the political – a reasonable step given that it is difficult to generalise something for which there is such little empirical basis – Mamdani provides recommendations for how to arrive at such a decolonisation:

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First, to reform the national basis of the state by granting only one kind of citizenship and doing so on the basis of residence rather than identity. Second, to denationalize states through the institution of federal structures in which local autonomy allows diversity to flourish. And third, to loosen the grip of the nationalist imagination by teaching the history of the nation-state, juxtaposing the political model against the criminal, and bolstering democracy in place of neoliberal human rights remedies (36).

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These recommendations are arrived at through an engagement with the work of the Palestinian scholar Raef Zreik, who problematises the notion of equal citizenship by invoking the Palestinian and South African examples. Zreik writes that applying a uniform legal citizenship without penetrating “deeper into more meaningful layers of people’s lives” means that South Africans “are equal in their potentialities not in their actualities” while imposing a uniform category of citizenship upon Palestinians and Israelis would overlook “the way the colonial past has shaped the relationship between the two communities [which] must be tackled and unpacked” (2016: 357). Mamdani’s third recommendation resonates with Zreik’s argument that “the formal abstractness of citizenship must thus be supplemented by a certain visibility and relevance of history; of the past” (357). Zreik adds that in the Palestinian case, the citizenship discourse, even of a one-state solution, reduces Palestinians to “mere” citizens, erasing their status “as the original owner and inheritor of the land”, thus necessitating a decolonising of the economic (358).

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Another Palestinian scholar, Dana El Kurd, draws out a few tensions that Mamdani’s approach to liberation entails. She rejects his assumption that nationalism is a European imposition, arguing that the emergence of nationalism in Palestine and the Arab world more broadly “was not imposed from the outside, but was in fact underway in Arab societies under the Ottoman Empire almost concurrently with the rise of some national identities in Europe” (2021). She adds that Mamdani’s assumption obscures the agency of colonised peoples, who have used nationalism “as a means of demanding self-determination and sovereignty in a world increasingly organized around the nation-state” (2021). She also argues that a South African-style approach to decolonisation would “only cement and reinforce systems of inequality” since the Israeli state, albeit reformed, would still exist as a set of “path-dependent institutions established by colonizers” (2021). Finally, and most significantly, she argues that the Palestinian struggle is very much still about achieving a representative state shrouded by a national Palestinian identity and that a “de-nationalised solution would neither be viable nor just” (2021).

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Sudan offers an alternative example of a liberatory thinking, in the shape of John Garang’s New Sudan Vision, that Mamdani refers to as arguing “for a state without a nation—a state that was home to all its citizens, not to a national majority of Arabs or Muslims or Africans” (2020: 199). Mansour Khalid, a friend of Garang’s and adherent of the New Sudan Vision, regarded Sudan as needing to reject the alien notion of racial purity by accepting Sudan’s anthropological reality as “not a country of Arabs and Africans but that of Arabicized Africans or Africanized Arabs and pure Africans” (1992: 3). Garang’s attempt to cast Sudan as the nation-state of a newly-configured Sudanese nation, united by the Arabic language but staunchly rejecting Arab supremacy (Khalid 1987: xviii), resembles Mamdani’s notion of decolonising the political within a single state. As Garang articulated, “Arabic cannot be said to be the language of the Arabs. No, it is the language of Sudan” (1986: 133). Furthermore, Garang argued that a unified, politically decolonised state under the New Sudan Vision was essential to stop “Sudan from disintegrating into fragments, inviting new recolonisation and deepening crisis” (1986: 123). It would do this by rejecting race, culture, or tribe as being the criteria of inclusion or exclusion, in line with Mamdani’s recommendations for decolonised statehood.  

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Although Garang could argue that the eventual division of the erstwhile territory of Sudan into a northern and southern state was the inevitable outcome of no party fully adhering to his New Sudan Vision, critics of the Vision point out that it lacked substance and largely revolved around Garang’s own personality politics (Young 2005: 538-539). Furthermore, the notion of a unified Sudan was also born out of realpolitik considerations, as Kuir ë Garang points out. He writes that John Garang “knew that making separatism the rallying cry for the rights of Southern Sudanese would not win SPLM/A support, especially from Ethiopia” (2019: 102). Fundamentally, however, Garang’s sidelining of transnational identification, whether Arab or African, in favour of a siloed concept of Sudanism, also foreclosed the liberatory potential of a united Sudanese polity, if not state, that did not also attempt to create a nation within its largely colonially-imposed cartography – despite Mamdani’s framing of Garang’s Vision as nationless. Recalling that the borders of ostensibly Arab and African states, as well as the border between the two identities themselves, are largely subject to a form of neocolonial sabotage enabled by the role of colonial powers in shaping them, a Sudanism detached from transnational identification does little to address this sabotage, and even less to enable forms of organising that enable a process of achieving justice transnationally. While offering some opportunities for imagining subjectivities that may replace more conventional notions of the nation within the state, the New Sudan Vision demonstrates the shortcomings of emphasising the statist element of the Westphalian nation state as being a liberatory vehicle. 

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While not prescribing the exact nature of a Palestinian future, nor one for colonised peoples more generally, I recommend thinking of futures that decouple the nation from the state as a starting point. Collective political imaginations may struggle to see beyond the state as constellation of governance or the final achievement of a nationalist struggle, but a decoupling of the normative assumption of the nation-state allows us to imagine the nation existing not as a necessarily exclusive and gatekept form of identification à la European ideas of nationalism. Nadim Rouhana, for example, drawing from the experiences of Palestinian citizens of Israel theorises Palestinian nationalism as a “homeland nationalism centred on politically reclaiming the homeland, as distinct from other minority nationalisms and legal and political claims of indigenous peoples elsewhere” (2015: 2). He roots this theory in a historical view of Palestinian nationalism as not only focused on “gaining independence from British control”, but primarily in saving “the homeland from being overtaken by the Zionist project” (2015: 5). While the Palestinian National Movement during the British Mandate did indeed seek the establishment of an independent Palestinian nation-state, the second part of Rouhana’s rooting emphasises a coupling of nationhood and land, as opposed to state borders.

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This association remains relevant since normative forms of (settler) colonial, neocolonial, and capitalist state-building necessarily, due to differing combinations of socio-political and economic reasons, entail a rewriting of the relationships between members of a nation and that which exists upon and within their land. Others, such as the Canadian First Nations scholar Glen Coulthard, theorise Indigenous identification around land- and place-based relations and obligations as “grounded normativity”, by which he means “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (2014, 13). This dovetails well with Palestinians’ “translation of their psychological, cultural, and national belonging to their land into political claims to a homeland” (Rouhana 2015, 3) in opening space for post-state forms of nationalist organising and nation-building that are more strongly founded in an identification with a physical land of home as opposed to the structures and institutions of a nation-state.

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To build upon this opening of space, the artist Sophia Azeb notably invites those concerned with postcolonial futures to imagine a “no-state solution” based on the refusal of “recognition of any property on the land and thus, state-sovereignty” (2014a). Recalling that statehood “as it exists in the Western imaginary is merely a structuralised form of violence, an entity that mediates life and death” enables a “radical departure from the state-based logics that govern [colonised people’s] terms for liberation” (2014b). Although Azeb posits that Palestinians can achieve a no-state solution through embodying a “non-linear, placeless freedom” (ibid), Palestinian nationalism’s construction through human and non-human relationships enabled by the land of Palestine suggests that liberation in Palestine involves a decolonising of the political and economic that imagines new structures and systems of exercising sovereignty that are rooted in the collective responsibility towards preserving the homeland in a literal, ecological sense rather than owning it. This is the imperative implicit, for example, in the Palestinian ecologist Vivien Sansour’s equating of being “a person of freedom” and “a person of land” (2023).

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Returning to this essay’s titular question, it is evident that the main obstacles preventing nation-states from being vehicles for liberation are their factory defect of being produced through ethnic cleansing and homogenisation, as Mamdani argues, and also their entanglement into the concurrent construction of a world capitalist order that organises itself around the principles of race, nationality, and class. Both factors entail demands for securitisation and the perpetuation of racist neocolonialism – contained within the commodification and corruption of land relations through capitalist extractivism and regimes of private property. In recommending that contemporary anticolonial struggles prioritise transnational mobilisations and anticonsumerist relationships with land over the achievement of a state, this essay invites imaginings and models of political community and organising that are materially rooted in sustainable and world-systematic visions of justice. Although this should not be understood as an overture towards abandoning nation-states’ responsibilities to act ethically in domestic and foreign policy-making, it is difficult, otherwise, to see how nation-states may liberate themselves from the compulsion towards complicity in the perils of world capitalist governmentality, much less liberate other colonised peoples outside of their borders.