ed note: as part of a new initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process. This interview, with Stephen Campbell (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) about his article “In defence of ideological struggle against neocolonial self-justifications”  (2023), is the third of these interviews.

1. Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests?

I didn’t intend to pursue an academic career. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I worked in human rights documentation with several Thailand-based organisations. The most significant of these was the Karen Human Rights Group, where I worked for three-and-a-half years. The organisation documents conditions in primarily ethnic Karen areas of rural southeast Burma/Myanmar. It’s heavily influenced by James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak and takes a narrative approach to documenting the views and concerns of villagers affected by armed conflict. The aim is to support villagers’ own responses to violence and abuse. My experience working with this organisation significantly influenced my subsequent research concerns.

I started my PhD in 2010 under Tania Murray Li at the University of Toronto. For research, I returned to Mae Sot, an industrial zone on the Thai side of the Myanmar border. By then, I’d lived in Mae Sot for about five years. My doctoral research looked at the collective and everyday struggles of Burmese migrant workers. For theory, I drew on arguments by the Italian operaista Mario Tronti, according to which workers’ struggles catalyse and shape capitalist transformation. That research was published in 2018 as Border Capitalism, Disrupted. Since then, I’ve continued to focus in my ethnographic work on the challenges and possibilities for workers’ struggles, as well as on migration, borders, and labour more generally.

In my first book, I employed a theoretical framework based on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage. But in an article I subsequently wrote for Anthropological Theory, I distanced myself from that framework. Deleuze positions himself as an explicitly anti-Hegelian thinker. And in the Deleuzoguattarian conception, elements of an assemblage retain a stable existence independent of the relations in which they are embedded. I see this as atomistic. It prevents us from grasping how elements are relationally constituted, and how phenomena can “become their opposite,” as Hegel theorised. So, I proposed a dialectical approach that recognizes how phenomena are constantly transformed by the shifting relations in which they’re embedded. This approach informs my more recent Anthropological Theory article as well.

For example, Kwame Nkrumah argued that imperialist political and economic relations can endure under a veneer of formal independence. Under these conditions, privileging a cultural-epistemological conception of decolonisation risks obscuring entrenched neocolonial political economy. Colonial and neocolonial powers have historically co-opted demands for “cultural” decolonisation to facilitate ongoing imperialist extraction and exploitation. When this happens, “decolonisation” becomes its opposite—a means to enable neocolonial political domination and economic exploitation under a veneer of formal independence and cultural difference. European colonial powers did this when they responded to mass anticolonial revolts by introducing a system of indirect rule through native elites. Indirect colonial rule was at once a concession to and co-optation of decolonial demands. It was ultimately a strategy to stave off a threat to the imperial order.

Lastly, I have a side interest in the role of workers and peasants in Myanmar’s anticolonial movement. I translated into English a 1938 book, The Strike War, by a prominent colonial-era Burmese labour organiser, Thakin Po Hla Gyi. Po Hla Gyi saw the struggle against imperialism and the struggle against capitalism as inseparable, and as requiring mass participation by workers and peasants. Po Hla Gyi’s perspective continues to inform my own, including in my recent Anthropological Theory article.

2. What drove you to write this specific article?

Over the past decade-plus, there’s been a surge in writing on decolonisation. Leon Moosavi calls it “the decolonial bandwagon.” A prominent line of argument has been concerned with asserting cultural-epistemological difference. In some cases, “decolonisation” is treated as though it were a synonym for cultural relativism. The problem is that, in countries where colonial powers enacted indirect rule, the institutionalisation of cultural relativism was itself a means to bolster imperialism against the threat of popular anti-colonial struggles. Mamood Mamdani has similarly remarked in an interview that much recent writing on decolonisation has neglected the historical lessons of indirect colonial rule. That’s the reason I revisited, in this recent Anthropological Theory article, Talal Asad’s 1973 volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Asad’s book is centrally concerned with the resonances between indirect colonial rule and a certain notion of bounded cultural wholes found in inter-war British structural functionalism. I wanted to bring the critiques in Asad’s book to bear on contemporary discussions about decolonisation.

3. In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions does the article engage and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

In his 2022 book, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, Olúfemi Táíwò argues that, in calling for a cultural-epistemological delinking from “Western” thought, contemporary decolonial tendencies assert fetishised notions of cultural difference at odds with the actual epistemological dynamism and cultural hybridity present across the colonised and formerly colonised world. That argument’s fine. But Táíwò then rejects the very possibility of neocolonialism and argues that decolonisation as a political and economic project is fully achieved with formal independence.

So, on the one hand, there’s this call by people like Walter Mignolo for decolonisation as a project of delinking from “Western” epistemology. On the other hand, there’s Táíwò arguing that decolonisation and anti-imperialist struggle are irrelevant in any country that has achieved formal independence. So, despite their opposition, both scholars turn away from the enduring political economy of neocolonialism.

My Anthropological Theory article is intervening in this debate by arguing that, first, neocolonialism as a political economic arrangement akin to indirect colonial rule endures in much of the Global South, and second, “decolonisation” at an ideational level remains necessary, not as a project of epistemological delinking, but as an ideological struggle aimed at mobilising populations against an entrenched neocolonial political economy. With this argument, I align my understanding of decolonisation with that of Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among others.

4. Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

Theory matters, and it’s important to state theory explicitly, because when theoretical presuppositions remain undeclared, they tend to smuggle into new analyses concepts and ideas that have been proven to be untenable. The notion of a bounded cultural whole, for example, was long ago shown to be implausible in the face of variegated, dynamic, and relational cultural processes. (Recall Eric Wolf’s critique in the introduction to Europe and the People Without History.) And yet, a notion of bounded cultural wholes continuously reappears in anthropological writing in new garb, including in certain writing on decolonisation. So, theory matter. But what also matters is an awareness of anthropological theory’s contested historical development.