After decades of writing about colonialism, state-led violence, and political systems within states in Africa, Asia, and North America, Mahmood Mamdani's newest book expands these themes in a comparative study of the formation and reconstitution of nation-states through extreme violence. In Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, Mamdani contends that violence — and especially settler colonial violence — was fundamental to the founding of the modern state. Rather than treat the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as the state's founding moment, Mamdani instead proffers 1492, when the Castilian monarchy carried out ethnic cleansing to create a Christian, Spanish homeland and simultaneously formed colonies in the Americas. Mamdani argues that extreme violence has underpinned the nation-state from its origins and that the modern state, nationalism, and colonialism are co-constitutive.

After establishing these origins, Mamdani's study begins by mapping the creation of the categories ‘native’ and ‘settler’ in the United States. He traces a history of Indigenous people's geographic exclusion from the (white, European-immigrant derived) nation-state through the US government's creation of reservations, the denial of citizenship, state-led tribalization, and the concomitant development of customary law. Mamdani considers the political and legal technologies of repression, surveillance, and exclusion that the US state developed to control and suppress Indigenous populations, and argues that these provided the blueprint for settler colonial governance globally. In the following four chapters he turns his attention to Germany, South Africa, Sudan, and Israel/Palestine, and explores how these technologies traveled, provoking exclusion maintained by violence in each national context. This review focuses on the chapters addressing Germany and South Africa to elucidate a key intervention in the text: Mamdani contrasts post-conflict histories in the two cases and uses them to argue that states’ responses to extreme violence shape possibilities for decolonization of and within the state.

As his subtitle indicates, Mamdani is interested in the ‘unmaking’ of settler regimes as much as he is in understanding how they work. He argues that in the aftermath of extreme violence, how states conceptualize the nature and causes of what had transpired determined the extent to which they were able either to dismantle or aggravate extreme violence's root causes. Extreme violence here is characterized as politically motivated, orchestrated, and widespread brutality targeted at specific groups of people. He illustrates the argument about responses to violence by juxtaposing denazification in Germany after the Second World War with South Africa's transition to democracy in the early 1990s. Mamdani's comparison hinges on a critical distinction. He contends that Germany's focus on law and punishment centered around individuals and, thus, reinforced the frameworks and categories of difference that catalyzed and justified the German state's extreme violence. In contrast, transitional South Africa opted to treat extreme violence as political, rather than criminal, like in the German case, which created the possibility for ‘rethinking and restructuring the internal political community’ or ‘the decolonization of the political’ (18).

Mamdani's theory of the political holds that in the German case, the focus on individual actors in the Nuremburg Tribunals allowed for the state's role in creating the context for and carrying out exclusionary violence to disappear from view. By considering only individuals and refusing to confront the state's culpability, the tribunals could not interrogate how ‘the nature of the state’ made possible and propelled the violence that had been essential to ‘constructing the [German] political community’ (329). In centering the nation-state in thinking about German violence, Mamdani brings the Allied powers into view. As key drivers of the Nuremberg approach, the United States and its allies favored a framing of justice that ‘absolved the nation-state form they shared with Germany, lest they be forced to account for their own nationalist violence at home and in their colonies’ (103). Rather than transforming the conceptualization of who could belong in the German state, Mamdani argues that the focus on individual perpetrators left intact nationalist ideologies that envisioned ethnic homogeneity, to genocidal effect.

Mamdani's comparison between South Africa and Germany relies on a particular reading of South African history. He focuses on the expression of extreme violence through the lens of racial, tribal, and ethnic identities. Beginning with colonial Natal in the 1840s, he traces how political identities came to define people's relationship to the state. Colonially invented customary law governed Africans as natives, who were subjects to chiefs and restricted to living in reserves. Civil law governed settlers, who enjoyed the rights, protections, and privileges that derived from their exclusive citizenship. Mamdani traces how the state restricted Black people, while increasing white people's privileges, from the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 through the beginning of apartheid in 1948. While acknowledging Black people's constant resistance to white supremacy, he argues that from the 1970s Black people and their allies began also to challenge settler colonial racial categories that defined the state. During this period, Mamdani argues that labor organizers, anti-apartheid student networks, and members of the Black Consciousness Movement ‘overwrote the political identification associated with race . . . [and] encouraged Africans, Coloureds, Indians, and whites to see themselves as capable of inhabiting the same political community’ (148). He marks this ‘epistemological awakening’ as the moment in which possibilities emerged for differently racialized people to ‘see themselves as capable of inhabiting the same political community’ (148). Mamdani sees the seeds for treating identity as political, and therefore changeable, as bearing fruit in the negotiations to end apartheid between 1990 and 1994, during which South Africa redefined citizenship in universally inclusive terms, imagined the state as singular and unified (rather than divided along racial and tribal lines), and introduced a single legal system.

In his praise of South Africa's approach to dismantling the political distinctions between settlers and natives, Mamdani does not interrogate the South African state in the way that he does the German state or the American state. He offers a brief discussion of the Union of South Africa's formation in 1910, but does not engage with how white supremacy was at the center of imaging every part of how the state was structured and how it functioned. The settler colonial logics of white supremacy that guided the conceptualization of South Africa's formation became embedded in the state's core elements. The 1910 state largely remained intact when South Africa became a democracy in 1994, including its geographic boundaries, property regime, economic system, and customary law's territorial boundaries and governance structures. While Mamdani's reading of state formation in the lead-up to democratic South Africa is generative in thinking through conceptualizations of belonging that challenge colonial organizing categories, this approach obscures a reading of the state's central building blocks. Taking seriously the state's historical architecture in South Africa could help explain why even after the political transformations that Mamdani describes, people's material and social realities in the country still largely correspond with the historical categories of settler and native.

A few books ago, Frederick Cooper critiqued Mamdani's Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism for ‘leapfrogging’ and arguing ‘something at time A caused something in time C without considering time B’.Footnote ¹ Yet while historians such as Cooper called for greater historical specificity in Mamdani's work, Citizen and Subject became a significant text among scholars in legal studies and activists working on customary law, because of its mapping of how colonial administrations distorted African historically rooted governance and legal systems to produce customary law that advanced colonial interests. In court cases and campaigns, lawyers, legal studies scholars, and activists continue to use Citizen and Subject's framework to challenge the centralization of power in chiefs and the state forcing Black people under customary law, as remnants of indirect rule.Footnote ² Neither Settler nor Native, is vulnerable to similar critiques as Cooper's around historical specificity and selective reading of and engagement with historical events. Its theorizing of the relationship between violence, political identity, and the nation-state provides a challenging and engaging framework for conceptualizing political violence in contemporary states that were formerly colonized and that were formerly colonizers, and that like Citizen and Subject will likely make it a text that moves between civil society work around political organizing and critical academic work on the state.