Introduction: Language, Memory, and the Architecture of Empire:
Let me begin by acknowledging a discomfort I carry. I am delivering this talk in English – a language I was not born into, but one I have had to adopt. A language that educated me and exiled me. A language that grants me professional credibility and, at the same time, complicates my sense of belonging. I often wonder, when I speak in English of empire, whether I am narrating resistance or reproducing it. That question lives inside me like an unresolved chord.
What I offer today, in this discussion, is not a definitive argument, but a reflection. It is part memory, part critique. And I am not here to perform the rituals of academic neutrality. I am not here to argue international relations as if they unfold on a level playing field, where norms and states are equal actors. I am here to speak of empire: not as metaphor, but as structure. Not as an event of the past, but as the operating logic of the present.
Empire lives. It lives in syllabi, in visa forms and in border walls. It lives in the bureaucratic polish of the United Nations and in the blood-stained reports of arms sales. It lives in the teaching building’s names of my city where I reside, and the surveillance infrastructure of Gaza. It lives in what gets funded, what gets forgotten, who gets heard and who gets shot.
I. Empire Begins at Home: Bangladesh, the Classroom, and Inherited Ruins
Empire began for me in textbooks, but not as something distant or abstract. In Bangladesh, our schoolbooks did not hide the violence. Lord Clive, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Canning, Lord Lytton – their names entered the page not as builders of civilisation, but as men who looted, annexed, and ruled through calculated brutality. We read of the famines they engineered, the kingdoms they swallowed, the uprisings they crushed. Even as children, we saw through the page. These were not administrators. Their faces, if we ever saw them, carried no trace of justice or wisdom. Only cold distance. Their rule was not enlightened. The railways, so often celebrated, were built to extract raw materials and dispatch troops – not to connect our people. And the telegraph lines were laid not for communication, but for control.
I recall vividly during my college days Nuruldiner Sarajibon (Nurul Din’s Life): a play about peasant resistance to colonial tax regimes in Bengal. There’s a scene in which the colonial clerk proclaims, “Decree jari! Decree jari! “Decree issued!”– as he confiscates land, displaces families, and imposes impossible levies. The absurdity of bureaucratic violence was rendered with haunting humour. I was a teenager. I did not yet have the words for postcolonial critique. But I understood power when I saw it.
At home, my father spoke of Partition. Of violence that erupted not from cultural difference, but from political engineering. I share this not to romanticise trauma, but to say: empire is not theory for me. It is inheritance.
II. Australia: Initiation into the Canon and the Codification of the Other
In the late 1990s, I moved to Australia to pursue postgraduate studies in public policy and international relations. I arrived eager to learn, but also unprepared for the ideological project I was about to be inducted into.
One of the first texts we were assigned was Samuel Huntington’s infamous article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” The question mark, of course, was quickly dropped in the book version. Huntington argued that the post-Cold War world would not be shaped by ideology or economics, but by civilisational conflict, particularly between the West and Islam.
The argument was simple, coherent, and wrong.
What Huntington offered was not analysis. It was a call to arms. A reframing of the world that positioned the West as rational, secular, and democratic and Islam as irrational, fanatical, and violent. It was not new. It was a repackaged version of Orientalist anxiety dressed up in policy language.
Behind Huntington stood Bernard Lewis, the veteran Orientalist scholar whose 1990 article, The Roots of Muslim Rage, essentially wrote the script for the War on Terror. Lewis pathologised Muslims as eternally angry, incapable of reform, and obsessed with victimhood. His language was seductive to policymakers: it simplified, decontextualised, and justified intervention. At the time, I did not have the theoretical tools to rebut them. But something in me recoiled.
That something later found voice in Edward Said.
When I finally read Orientalism, it was like hearing someone articulate what I had sensed for years but could not express. Said revealed how Western scholarship had invented the East, not discovered it. How knowledge was produced not to understand, but to govern. The “Orient” was not a place. It was a construct – a mirror in which the West defined itself as superior.
What Lewis and Huntington offered were not insights. They were narratives of dominance. And what disturbed me most was how eagerly these narratives were accepted.
III. The Authority of Experts: From James Mill to Bernard Lewis
The West’s expertise on the East has always been suspect. Consider James Mill, the father of liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. James Mill wrote a multi-volume History of British India without ever setting foot in India. He constructed an entire civilisation’s image from British colonial records – records already shaped by power, by suspicion, by the need to govern.
And yet, Mill’s work was taken seriously. His books became reference material for colonial administrators. He produced not just scholarship, but policy. His pen enabled domination.
Fast forward to the 21st century: Bernard Lewis advised the Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War. He had little engagement with actual Iraqis. But his credentials – his tenure at Princeton – gave him authority. His claims were not questioned. They were cited.
Edward Said warned of this in his final interviews. As he battled cancer, he said he feared most for the Iraqi people – not because of Saddam Hussein, but because of what the U.S. was about to unleash in their name.
We know now what happened: Shock and awe. Torture. Sectarian war. And silence.
Lewis, of course, was never held accountable. Mill wasn’t either. That is the privilege of the imperial scholar. To be wrong with prestige.
IV. Bureaucracy, Buildings, and the Burden of Memory
By the time I moved to the UK for my doctoral work, I was already suspicious of the structures I once revered. The UN, the academy, the diplomatic world – they all wore the garments of global governance, but underneath, I saw familiar threads of domination.
My doctoral research focused on United Nations peacekeeping, initially out of curiosity, later out of confrontation. I had grown up seeing Bangladeshi troops proudly don the blue helmet. In Dhaka, the sight of peacekeepers returning from their missions: UNIIMOG in Iraq and UNTAG in Namibia, was a moment of national pride. We were told Bangladesh was serving the world. But the more I examined the data, the deployments, and the institutional logic of peacekeeping, the more I saw something darker.
The global South supplies the soldiers. The global North supplies the mandates, the funding, and the definition of crisis.
Consider this: the UN’s peacekeeping budget fluctuates around $6 billion annually. Missions in Mali, DR Congo, and South Sudan dominate the landscape. But peacekeeping gets complicated where power is concentrated – Israel, the U.S., NATO theatres.
Look specifically at Israel. Since 1948, three major peacekeeping missions have been established in its vicinity:
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UNTSO (1948): The first ever UN peacekeeping mission.
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UNDOF (1974): To monitor disengagement between Syria and Israel.
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UNIFIL (1978): Established after Israeli invasions of Lebanon.
UNIFIL alone costs about half a billion dollars per year. It does not stop violence. It does not protect civilians. Its mandate is restricted, and its personnel are often seen as ornamental. They exist not to intervene, but to witness.
Why?
Because Israel, as a close U.S. ally, operates in a zone of geopolitical immunity. The UN’s presence there is less about justice and more about optics. So peacekeeping becomes theatre. A stage on which international legitimacy is performed.
V. The Dalhousie Building: Architecture as Archive
I had completed my PhD, survived the migration bureaucracy, and was ready to contribute. But then I was shown my teaching room – located in the Dalhousie Building.
I paused. “Dalhousie,” I asked? “As in Lord Dalhousie or connected to him?”
Yes. The same Dalhousie dynasty whose members presided over British India, Nova Scotia and Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
This was not coincidence. It was heritage. British universities are filled with names like this: statues of slave traders, portraits of colonial governors, buildings honouring men who built fortunes on the backs of others. The empire lives on, not just in textbooks, but in brick and mortar.
We asked: how can a university committed to decolonisation celebrate the name of a colonial administrator? The decision to preserve Dalhousie’s name is not neutral. It is political. This was my second realisation about empire: it persists through symbols. It does not need to march with bayonets. It survives in ceremonies, in titles, in the bureaucratic refusal to confront history honestly.
VI. Black History Month and the Empire of Inclusion
October comes. Universities erupt in performances of inclusion. Posters go up. Committees are formed. Banners declare: Celebrating Black Excellence. The events are often well-meaning. But they reveal the limits of what institutions will allow.
Guest speakers are frequently titled: Sir this, Lord that. Recipients of MBEs and OBEs. Speakers who carry the literal stamp of the empire we claim to critique.
Their speeches are polite. They speak of success, overcoming odds, inspiration. Rarely do they speak of slavery, reparations, imperial loot, or ongoing structural racism. And when they do, it is carefully framed – as history, not as present.
One time, I asked why we couldn’t invite those who disturb the peace – abolitionists, anti-colonial voices, scholars who name whiteness not as identity but as structure. I asked why we couldn’t make space for those who speak of liberation without asking permission. It didn’t take long to learn the rules. The institution, this quiet architecture of empire, will welcome you, as long as you don’t make them uncomfortable. It will include you, profile you, promote you. It will call you “diverse” and place your image on the brochure. It will celebrate your face – but not your dissent. This is the deal: Inclusion, without insubordination. Diversity, without rebellion. And so you learn to navigate, to nod, to compromise. But somewhere inside, you know: this isn’t justice.
VII. Teaching Palestine
One of the most profound teaching moments I’ve experienced came through a student from Northern Ireland. She came from a Protestant loyalist background, pro-Union, pro-monarchy, pro-Britain. She viewed the Palestinian flag as akin to the Irish tricolour – symbols of “terrorism” and “trouble.”
She enrolled in my Middle East politics course with caution. I could feel her scepticism. We covered the Balfour Declaration, the Nakba, the Oslo Accords. We examined legal definitions of occupation. We read Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Adam Shatz and Joseph Massad. We discussed settler colonialism, surveillance, and the criminalisation of dissent.
She said little in class. But she submitted every assignment. She asked for extra readings.
Six months after her graduation, she added me on Facebook. I noticed her profile banner. It was the Palestinian flag. That moment meant more to me than any citation. Because what had occurred was not just academic. It was revelation. An unlearning. A shedding of inherited ideology. A shift from inherited loyalty to ethical clarity. It reminded me of what Fanon called “the birth of a new humanity.” That is what teaching can do, when we stop pretending it is neutral.
VIII. Trump, the Gulf, and the Spectacle of Transactional Empire
There is a moment when empire stops pretending. When the velvet glove slips, and what remains is the fist – bare, unapologetic, proud. In the previous section, I spoke of the classroom as a site of rupture. But the empire is not confined to curriculum or campus. It also flies in Air Force One, lands with entourages, signs contracts over sword dances, and smiles for billboards in foreign capitals. It survives not just in knowledge, but in deals. Not just in what is taught, but in what is bought.
This is where Edward Said’s Orientalism meets Fanon’s explanation of violence within the “colonial situation.” Where the archive of scholarly power merges with the choreography of global extraction. If the 19th century coloniser arrived with maps and manifestos, the 21st century imperialist arrives with a delegation of CEOs. This is not diplomacy. It is direct debit geopolitics.
In 2025, Donald Trump returned to the Gulf. The welcome was imperial in everything but name. Billboards lit up Riyadh. Swords danced. Thrones were dusted. And Trump, flanked not by diplomats but by defence contractors, announced his arrival—not as a guest, but as a vendor.
Within 48 hours, $142 billion in arms deals were signed. Later, $96 billion in aviation contracts with Qatar. The message was simple: buy our weapons, buy our favour. There was no talk of democracy, no theatre of human rights. Not a word about Yemen, where U.S.-backed bombs were reducing cities to rubble.
If Fanon taught us that colonial violence fractures the psyche, and if Said showed us that imperialism endures through language and knowledge, then Trump revealed what empire looks like once it stops pretending. The transition from covert control to overt commodification did not emerge overnight. It is the logical conclusion of decades of empire cloaked in diplomacy, enforced by arms, and justified by Orientalist narratives.
Unlike previous presidents, he didn’t dress imperialism in the language of liberalism. He dropped the mask. “We’re getting paid,” he said. “They’re buying American.”
It was empire, but now shameless, transactional, vulgar.
He praised autocrats. And his approval ratings stayed strong.
Why? Because he understood what empire had become: not a project of enlightenment, but a mechanism of extraction.
And many people, it seems, are fine with that – so long as they believe they are on the winning side.
IX. Orientalism Reloaded: From Napoleon to the War on Terror
Empire does not merely conquer territory. It manufactures knowledge. It produces explanations of the world that justify its domination. This is why, as Edward Said reminded us in Orientalism, empire does not merely conquer with guns, it arrives with grammar. Scholarship has always marched in step with imperial power.
When Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798, he did not come alone. He came with an army of knowledge: 150 scholars, these were philologists, botanists, geographers, linguists – the intellectual infantry of conquest.
The result was a sprawling Description de l’Égypte, a massive encyclopaedia that claimed to “objectively” catalogue Egypt’s people, terrain, and culture. But of course, it was not objective. It was imperial. It told the French what they wanted to believe: that Egypt was ancient, mystical, stagnant, and in need of modern rule.
This template of conquest paired with knowledge production has never disappeared.
In the 20th century, Bernard Lewis recycled these logics. His essays and books presented the “Muslim mind” as static, emotional, and hostile to modernity. He advised U.S. policymakers on the Middle East, framing the region not as politically complex, but as culturally pathological. Edward Said challenged this entire tradition. In Orientalism, he demonstrated how “the Orient” was invented by western scholars, novelists, generals, and administrators constructed the East as a mirror image of the West: irrational, lazy, despotic – so that the West could see itself as rational, industrious, and democratic. This process is not incidental. It is essential. Empire needs the Other in order to define itself.
And Orientalism, far from ending in the colonial era, simply adapted. It now lives in think tanks, counterterrorism manuals, media coverage, and even academic curricula.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it was not just Abrams tanks and Tomahawk cruise missiles that entered. It was maps. PowerPoint slides. Pre-packaged narratives of liberation. Experts like Lewis wrote columns predicting gratitude. History, it turned out, repeated itself. But with better branding.
X. Frantz Fanon and the Inner Lives of the Colonised
Frantz Fanon, more than any other thinker, forces us to confront the psychic violence of empire.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explored how colonialism deforms identity. The colonised subject learns to speak the coloniser’s language. To wear their clothes. To internalise their superiority. This is not mimicry. It is survival. But it leaves wounds – silent, buried, and corrosive.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon pushes further. He argues that decolonisation is not reform. It is revolution. Because colonialism is not just an economic system. It is a totality – a structure that governs space, language, desire, and even time. Fanon’s most controversial claim is that violence is necessary—not because it is moral, but because it is cathartic. Because colonialism is violence, and therefore cannot be undone politely. The colonised must reclaim their subjectivity by destroying the world that dehumanised them.
This is not an endorsement of cruelty. Fanon writes of the colonised mind as a “zone of non-being.” A space where the self is fractured. Where existence is conditional. Fanon helps me understand that contradiction. That I can critique empire while also carrying its scars. And most importantly, that survival is not the same as liberation.
XI. The Athenian Problem: IR Theory and the Collapse of Legitimacy
International Relations theory loves the Westphalian myth. It teaches that the modern world order began in 1648, with the Treaty of Westphalia. That sovereign states emerged. That war became regulated. That diplomacy, balance of power, and legal frameworks began to govern an otherwise anarchic system.
But this is a fable.
What really happened in 1648 was the consolidation of European power, soon to be exported violently across the globe. While Europe preached sovereignty, it practiced colonisation. While it wrote legal doctrines, it stole land and enslaved people.
The IR canon, dominated by realism and liberalism, rarely confronts this.
Realism says the world is anarchic, so states seek power. Liberalism says institutions can mitigate conflict. Constructivism says norms matter. But none of them seriously asks: what about empire? What about race? What about how the international system was born through genocide and slavery?
There is a deeper problem here – what scholars have called the Athenian problem.
Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire. It gave voice to citizens and silence to slaves. It held elections and launched conquests. And it could not resolve the contradiction. Today, the United States faces the same dilemma.
It claims to be the beacon of freedom while maintaining 800 military bases abroad. It lectures others on human rights while funding illegal occupation. It invades countries to “restore democracy” and then installs puppet regimes.
When Donald Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still win votes, he was not joking. He was revealing the truth of empire: it does not need consent. It needs only impunity.
And that impunity, for decades, was managed through liberal theatre, through institutions like the UN, through vague invocations of international law. But the theatre is collapsing.
The invasion of Iraq shattered the illusion. So did Afghanistan. So does Gaza.
Now we see an order not of consensus, but of coercion. And the world is watching.
XII. Empire’s Endgame: Crisis, Climate, and the Spectre of Collapse
We are now in a moment of convergence. Empire is not just unjust – it is unsustainable. The climate crisis exposes the myth of endless growth. Rising seas threaten entire nations. Heatwaves devastate the poor. And yet, carbon markets expand.
Militarism continues to rise. Surveillance capitalism invades every aspect of life. Border regimes become ever more violent, even as the conditions forcing migration intensify.
This is not chaos. It is design.
The international system, as it exists, cannot survive this. It was built for extraction, not repair. For control, not care.
After World War I, we got the League of Nations. After World War II, the United Nations. But what comes after the next collapse?
There may not be a “next time.” There may only be aftermath.
This is why decolonisation is urgent. Not just for moral reasons – but for survival.
We cannot confront climate change, displacement, or war unless we confront the system that produced them. That means confronting empire, not as history, but as habit.
XIII. Refusal as Method: Naming, Memory, and Everyday Resistance
What does it mean to resist empire, not as a political abstraction, but as a daily practice?
In my experience, resistance does not always arrive as revolution. It arrives in quieter acts. In refusals. In choices to name what others insist is forgotten. Refusal is the act of not accepting inherited terms. It is what I do when I question the university’s celebration of Dalhousie dynasty. It is what I do when I refuse to celebrate Black History Month events that are designed more to flatter the institution than to confront its legacies.
It is what I do when I insist that Palestine is not a “conflict,” but an occupation. When I teach about the Nakba not as an unfortunate moment, but as an ongoing structure of erasure. When I assign Edward Said and explain to my students that objectivity can be a mask for complicity.
It is what I do when I remind my students that inclusion is not liberation. That getting a scholarship or a passport – these are not freedom if the conditions that produced inequality remain untouched.
Refusal is not rejection for its own sake. It is the beginning of something else.
XIV. Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor
There is a growing trend in academia to speak of decolonisation as metaphor. Decolonising the syllabus. Decolonising the workplace. Decolonising the museum.
But what does this really mean?
Tuck and Yang warned us years ago: Decolonisation is not a metaphor. It is not about making institutions more “inclusive” or “diverse.” It is about unsettling colonial structures, materially, epistemologically, and institutionally.
To decolonise is to return land. To rethink sovereignty. To restructure power. To acknowledge that modernity was built on theft – and to do something about it.
But universities, especially in the West, prefer metaphors to materiality. They host panels. They form committees. They update reading lists. But they rarely ask: To hire differently, fund differently, teach differently? This is where refusal returns. Because sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is to say: this language is not enough.
XV. A Palestinian Flag on a Wall
I want to return to the student I mentioned earlier—the one from Northern Ireland who had inherited a suspicion of Palestinian identity, shaped by her community’s deep loyalty to the British ruling class.
After taking my class, she changed. Not in loud ways. Not through dramatic gestures. But through attention, through curiosity, through the slow unravelling of assumptions.
When she posted the Palestinian flag as her Facebook banner, it was a small act. But it was also enormous.
It meant that she had listened. That she had doubted what she’d been told. That she had read differently, seen differently, thought differently.
I do not believe in pedagogical miracles. But I believe in what Paulo Freire called in his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed “education as the practice of freedom.” Not freedom in the abstract. Freedom to see the Other as human. Freedom to be uncomfortable. Freedom to change. That flag, on that profile, in that digital space was decolonisation. That was revolutionary.
XVI. Against Despair: The World Is Still Being Made
We are living through terrifying times. Fascism is no longer creeping. It is marching. War crimes are livestreamed. Surveillance is automated. Borders are militarised. Climate change accelerates.
And yet, I refuse despair. Because alongside these horrors, there are cracks.
There are students who ask hard questions. There are campaigns to dismantle empire’s statues. There are farmers in India who brought a government to its knees. There are Black and Indigenous movements that will not be quiet. There are young Jews saying “Not in our name.” There are migrants crossing oceans who still believe in dignity.
And there is us.
Here. Talking. Thinking. Refusing.
The world is not fixed. It is still being made.
And if empire is shameless, so too must our defiance be shameless.
We must not apologise for calling injustice by its name. We must not apologise for demanding a different world.
We owe it to the dead. But more than that, we owe it to the living.
Final Words: Power, Knowledge, and the Unfinished Struggle
Let me end where I began: with language. With the fact that I am speaking to you in English. That I have earned degrees in imperial universities. That I teach in a building named after a colonial governor. These are contradictions I carry. They are uncomfortable. But I do not believe that purity is the goal. Clarity is.
I use this language because I must. But I use it to name what it tried to erase. I teach IR because I must. But I teach it as critique, not celebration. I live in empire, but I do not belong to it.
And neither do you. We are heirs to struggle – not victims of inevitability.
Power, knowledge, and the Other: these are not just concepts. They are coordinates in the map of empire. But they are also starting points for resistance.
Dr Abdullah Yusuf
Dundee, UK
May 2025
