The boundaries of the political community are usually imagined as congruent with the territorial boundaries of the state understood in national terms. This idea of the political community as a national political order has been central to European self-understanding and to standard social scientific accounts more broadly. Yet, most European states were imperial states and even those that did not explicitly have empires were involved through the migration of their populations in the emigrationist European colonial project. In the talk, I propose that effective social science in the present requires taking into account the historical processes of exclusion and domination that have come to configure our contemporary times. This further requires us to understand how our social scientific categories and frameworks are bound up in equivalent processes.

Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is author of the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination and Connected Sociologies. She is also co-editor of Decolonising the University and set up the Global Social Theory website (globalsocialtheory.org).