The first chapter, Kofi Awoonor Imagines China: The Longue Durée of Ghana–PRC Relations, maps a cultural history. I begin with the Afro-Asian solidarity of the Cold War and end with the beginning of the period governed by the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC); its first summit occurred at the turn of the millennium. I examine the life-writings and poetry of the Ghanaian poet and diplomat Kofi Awoonor and how he imagines the history of modern China through a series of key geopolitical events in three poems: the Red Army’s Long March in 1935, which Awoonor interpolates into pan-Africanist imaginings of decolonization in “The Black Eagle Awakes” (1965); the Cultural Revolution, which sows the seeds of a disillusionment with Chinese socialism (culminating in the government crackdown on democracy protests in 1989) marked in “The Red Bright Book of History” (1989); and “Xiansi, Pou Tou Dalla,” about an official trip to a rapidly industrializing China during the 1990s. In ironic contrast to the previous poem’s disillusionment with China, the speaker admires the Chinese development miracle even as widespread suspicion emerges about the PRC’s investment in the continent.

Chapter 4, Racialization and Afro-Chinese Identity: Henri Lopes’s Le lys et le flamboyant, argues that race needs to be understood as a complex series of shifting racializations brought about through interactions between Africans and Chinese rather than as only an engagement with its ahistoricity as disseminated out of Western classifications rooted in histories of colonialism and imperialism. I examine how multiracial identity is represented in Henri Lopès’s francophone Le lys et le flamboyant (The Lily and the Flame Tree) (1997). I show how the novel—on the level of both form and content—subverts the rhetoric surrounding Africa–China relations as either a total “win-win” or unavoidably a “new colonialism.” I capture how each respective discourse is a mystification and so exceedingly dangerous for individuals when instrumentalized by the jingoistic discourse surrounding Africa and China.

In this chapter, I briefly analyse the fate of legal reformism. The global financial crisis of 2008 which reverberated in Europe in 2011, the crises of progressive governments in Latin America in the second decade of the millennium, and the economic and social meltdown caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus are all signs of a deeper malaise in the development model that sustained legal reformism for the past hundred years. The end of legal reformism started when the ideal of democracy and the rule of law ceased to be a progressive objective which progressive forces had struggled for in many countries, often at great personal risk, and became an international imposition, a condition of development assistance and structural adjustment policies demanded by the World Bank and the IMF. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, political science invested a great deal of research in identifying conditions for the sustained adoption of liberal democracy in the developing world, which included agrarian reform, a sizeable middle class, and a certain balance between urban and rural areas. From one day to the next, all of this research was consigned to the dustbin of history. Rather than focusing on the conditions for democracy and the rule of law, the “international community” converted democracy and the rule of law into the conditions for everything else, and most importantly for receiving development assistance and financing. Liberal democracy became the most legitimate regime of a weak state confronted with neoliberal global impositions. Under these conditions there was no room for progressive legal reformism. Conversely, there was plenty of room for conservative authoritarian reformism or counter-reformism.

Although the North Atlantic was plunged into crisis in the early 1970s, radicals proved unable to seize the opportunity as they entered a crisis of their own. In France, to a degree unparalleled elsewhere, prominent former radicals not only disavowed anti-imperialist internationalism but rallied behind the rival human rights internationalism. In so doing, they brought with them a set of experiences, which strengthened human rights activism. Despite their fading fortunes, and the growing strength of their rivals, radicals struggled to reinvent anti-imperialist internationalism. But they found themselves trapped in an uphill battle facing one obstacle after another. One of the most devastating blows was the internecine war between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Revolutionaries in all three countries had developed a revolutionary strategy based in Leninism, joined hands in the struggle against imperialism, and claimed they were transitioning to communism together. Now they slaughtered each other in the name of national self-determination. Although the Third Indochina War did not destroy radicalism, it severely destabilized radical politics. While much of this failure can be traced to deeper histories of colonialism, imperialism, and American intervention in the region, revolutionaries, and the ideas that guided them, played a role as well. In this context, the idea of the right of nations to self-determination specifically, and the Leninist problematic more generally, suffered a terrible blow. The horrific events in Southeast Asia deepened the gnawing crisis of Leninism, which would ultimately bring down the project of anti-imperialist internationalism as such, creating a perfect opportunity for the rival human rights internationalism to take the stage.

This chapter presents the historical and ideational background to the eruption of postcolonial violence. It reviews the unfolding of the first-generation liberation wars, the response of the colonial authorities to the challenges and the birth of norms, ideas and practices of liberation, insurgency and counter-insurgency. It also provides a brief background to the wars in Iraqi Kurdistan and Southern Sudan.

Turning to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the starting point for self-determination in international law has become part of the received wisdom of the field. In a 2017 article, Lauri Mälksoo examined the relationship between the liberal-Wilsonian and the socialist-Bolshevik conceptualisations of self-determination, rejecting the idea that the Bolsheviks contributed at all to the international right of self-determination. In his account, the right is an intrinsically liberal one, concerned with the ‘extension of human freedom from individuals to peoples’.