While empires and civic-liberal nations have been seen as opposite and even contradictory political forms, this essay argues that they are similar. Both create and depend upon hierarchical differentiation accompanied by exclusion and subjugation. Furthermore, they are logically related. The hierarchies typically attributed to empires are inscribed into the very theoretical and institutional core of civic-liberal nationhood. Using the American ‘liberal empire-state’ as the example, the essay uncovers these hierarchies and discusses two logics of imperial differentiation: the subjugation of bodies (...) and of territory. It suggests that exploring the shifting lines and principles of hierarchization offers the most fruitful analytic strategy for examining the history of nations and empires. (shrink)

While early theory and research on cosmopolitanism have been criticized for their European focus, a number of works have incorporated non-Eurocentric perspectives. This article contributes to this literature by examining the colonial production of cosmopolitan orientations as evidenced in the writings of Frantz Fanon. Colonialism has been treated as a deviation in the historical sociology of cosmopolitanism, but Fanon helps disclose how colonialism has also contributed to a particular form of cosmopolitanism that has been overlooked in existing theory and research: (...) postcolonial cosmopolitanism. This form of cosmopolitanism, forged from the spaces of colonialism’s contradictions, emphasizes global citizenship and humanism but strives to remember rather than repress the history of modern empire. It seeks to negate colonialism’s contradictions and thus realize the ideals which Europe had initially pronounced but which it failed to institute. (shrink)