Welcome to the 55th issue of The Funambulist. After an issue dedicated to the persistent structures of colonial domination and racialization in western and northern European societies, this issue intends to decenter Europe, and examine historical and present processes of imperial and/or colonial domination by seven arguably ethnocratic Asian states, namely, Japan (and the Japanese Empire), the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation (and the Soviet Union), the Republic of India, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Republic of Turkey (alongside the Republic of Azerbaijan). The term “Asian” might appear odd to some readers: should we really be using a word that claims a sort of commonality between nations that are as far away from each other than Japan and Turkey? However the porosity between them might be greater than one suspects – for instance, we can evoke the fact that the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz who live under Chinese domination in Xinjiang, and Yakut, Shor, and Tatar under Russian domination are all Turkik peoples. But more importantly, this “Asian” denomination chosen for this issue’s title follows historic examples of solidarity at this massive continental scale, the most famous one being the 1955 Afro–Asian Conference in Bandung, to which I will return at the end of this text.
This editorial effort to center the political conditions of millions of people who live under and struggle against (mainly) non-western forms of imperialism is in continuation of numerous past articles published in the magazine, as well as our 45th issue (edited by Shivangi Mariam Raj and I) dedicated to the Subcontinent. This impetus is also built on our common refusal to consider that the West in general, and the United States in particular, would be so central to all political structures globally, so much so that the very idea of associating the notion of imperialism or colonialism to non-European or non-Euro-settler states should be considered as negligible or disregarded altogether.
Some may argue that making political arguments and organizing against states (Iran, Syria, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, North Korea…) that are deemed enemies of the “western civilization,” serves the political forces of global racial capitalism and western imperialism. In the very short term, it might not be untrue. However, the adage “the enemy of our enemy is our friend” couldn’t possibly be a roadmap, as it crowns intellectual laziness and political shortsightedness. Furthermore, to which “We” would this “our” be referring to?
If we are to think of an internationalist Left at the global scale, doesn’t this “We” include our Uyghur, Kazakh, Kashmiri, Baloch, Hazara, Syrian, Armenian, Kurdish, Chechen, Ukrainian comrades, as well as so many more whose political struggles do not revolve around (or are not limited to) the fight against western imperialism?
On a longer scale of time, it is crucial that solidarity with movements – such as the Syrian revolution, the Iranian and Kurdish women’s resistance, or the Uyghur struggle against disappearance, mass incarceration, and forced labor – be not co-opted by the western and diaspora right wing. We can think for instance, of the Iranian monarchists, who were particularly visible during the protests supposedly in solidarity with the Woman Life Freedom movement, or the Chinese advocates of a new imperial dynasty coalesced around the cult Falun Gong, their publication Epoch Times, and their performing arts company Shen Yun. The Armenian post-genocide fight for existence against neo-Ottomanist forces (coming from the Turkish state or the Azeri one) is particularly at risk of such co-optation. The right wing narrative put forward here is that Christianity is attacked when Armenians are subjected to genocide or ethnic cleansing by states associated with Islam (conveniently forgetting that the Armenian Genocide was designed by Ottoman secularist ideologues). This is in turn well spread in the European and North American contexts, encouraged partially by bourgeois members of the diaspora (in France for instance), who are oblivious to the solidarities between the Armenian struggle and other liberation movements, such as the Palestinian one.
What is at stake in this refusal of co-optation is twofold: the first (which I had already tried to articulate in my introduction to our 46th issue, Questioning Our Solidarities) is the necessity for us to define ourselves politically based on consistent principles, rather than in reaction to the positioning of western states, or according to a campist vision of the world. The second reason is that if we do not succeed in avoiding this cooptation, we will fail our comrades involved in these movements, and leave them in the hands of opportunistic imperialists. Some will accept (some more or less eagerly than others) to make faustian alliances with them; others will refuse and, without our solidarity, will be left alone facing crushing repression, incarceration, or death.
I wrote “more or less eagerly” above as it would be naive to think that all people who live under the colonial and/or imperial structure of these states share the political principles and visions of an internationalist Left. We’ve seen it during the massive 2019-20 movement in Hong Kong, where some protesters waved US flags. We’ve also seen it also in pro-Kuomintang Taiwanese advocates, and when various (Iranian, Uyghur…) activists condition their solidarity with Palestine to the centering of their own struggle first… This issue does not seek to provide an excuse for or a dissimulation of such flaws, but rather, seeks to strengthen the standards of our own commitment to internationalist solidarity.
Sometimes these flaws are more complicated too. In April 2024, the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) signed a cooperation agreement with the state of Azerbaijan as part of the so-called “Baku Initiative Group,” which attempts to gather other political organizations against French colonialism. This recent initiative came after the French state verbally denounced (although certainly did not prevent in any way) the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Armenians from Artsakh by the Azeri state in September 2023. Compartmentalizing struggles would allow us to justify such an alliance, despite the clear opportunistic role played by Azerbaijan here – there is no doubt that the Azeri state has no interest in Kanak liberation beyond the blow it inflicts to France. After all, aren’t colonized peoples in their own right to choose their allies, without being held accountable for the murderous violence deployed by these same allies in their own context? During the 1984-88 Kanak uprising, a similar alliance had existed with Gaddafi’s Libya for instance. Not living under colonial conditions myself, I am certainly not the most appropriate person to answer this question, but I take my cue from the many colonized people who answer this with a determined and resounding “No.” The liberation of Kanaky is central to my own political engagement, but like a good amount of activists from/in Kanaky, I cannot see this liberation in the normalization of the Azeri invasion and ethnic cleansing (a process that the Kanak people is all too familiar with), itself being part of the genocidal history against Armenians in Anatolia and the Caucasus. The path forward is unclear but it certainly has to do with the commonality of the Kanak and Armenian experiences, and the formation of internationalist dialogue and solidarity.
As for every issue, there will be readers (or more often, social media commentators) who will be unsatisfied with the non-exhaustiveness of this issue’s contents, resulting in a well-known game of “what aboutism.” I want them to know that I do also indulge in this game and often have regrets with my own editorial omissions (whether by lack of luck, lack of space, lack of knowledge…). In the context of this issue, this regret revolves around the absence of contributions about the states of Indonesia and Sri Lanka are not part of it – as a result of a happy coincidence, Burma is somewhat present within Nasrynn Chowdhury’s research presented just before this introduction. Subscribers will be able to find numerous articles about the Eelam Tamil fight against the ethnosupremacist structures of the Sri Lankan state; as well as a good amount of writing on the West Papuan struggle against Indonesian colonialism. Thankfully, Indonesia, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and Burma are at least mobilized by the reflections that follow.
On April 18-24, 1955, twenty-nine states (including the above three) gathered in the Javanese city of Bandung for the Afro–Asian Conference, more often designated as the “Bandung Conference.” Among them are six states analyzed in this issue. Four of them (Japan, China, India, and Turkey) already had the institutional form they still embody today. Iran, on the other hand, was still the Imperial State of Iran, toppled by the 1979 Revolution, and Pakistan was still split between West and East, before the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. The Conference remains today as one of the key moments of internationalist state-based solidarity against European colonialism and neocolonialism. Representatives of the Tunisian, Moroccan, and Algerian national liberation struggles were also present, while back home, the French murderous counterrevolution was raging. Future President of independent Ghana and leader of Pan-Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah, was prevented by British authorities from traveling to Bandung despite being invited to speak. Richard Wright wrote a report collecting his observations of the Conference for a Black audience in the United States, while in the following years, Malcom X explicitly referred to it as an example of the “dark nations” coming together.
In a seminal text titled “Blinded by Bandung? Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific” (2018), Quito Swan recognizes the anti-colonial spirit of the Conference, while urging us to observe how Sukarno’s Indonesia used its position as a host to solidify its occupation of the Melanesian lands of East Timor and West Papua:
“These voices of dissent were silenced at Bandung. Attended by twenty-nine countries, the talks declared that colonialism was evil. It affirmed that the ‘subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation’ was a denial of human rights contrary to the United Nations Charter. However, West Papua was the exception. Surkano framed his claims to West Papua as a struggle against Dutch imperialism. As such, Bandung officially resolved to support Indonesia’s position on West Papua.”
Can we take Quito’s critique of the Conference and apply it further, to how many of the states involved have been, since then, able to normalize their domination over lands and peoples in the name of fighting against European colonialism?
We can start addressing this question by pointing out the most obvious and questionable presence at the Conference, namely Japan, like Kweku Ampiah does in a text provocatively titled “Japan at the Bandung Conference: The Cat Goes to the Mice’s Convention” (1995). No less than eight countries represented in Bandung must have had a fresh memory of the Japanese occupation of their lands during World War II or prior to it – an occupation that lasted four decades in the case of Chinese Manchuria. Would the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement (in its genesis at Bandung) be really destroyed by carefully pointing out the tensions between anti-colonial solidarity and the imperial formations displayed by the states already discussed here, as well as the Ethiopian Empire, Nasser’s Egypt, and Saudi Arabia?
This issue draws from these tensions, and insists on the necessity to always practice forms of suspicion towards states. On the contrary to states’ evident incapacity to do so, we should not doubt people’s capacity to hold multiple things to be true at the same time, namely an uncompromising commitment against the many embodiments of western imperialism, alongside a recognition of similar (despite being more “regional”) structures of violence deployed by non-Western actors. This delicate balance, in opposition to a campist vision of the world, is at the core of this magazine’s editorial line. Sometimes it is an easy balance to find; sometimes it is harder, and sometimes searching for it might lead to some errors, but ultimately, it is my conviction that this is the only way internationalism can be practiced. I invite you to keep this in mind while reading the seven following contributions, and thank you for your time reading this introduction. ■