To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
Nationalism is frequently described as a “wave” that swept the colonized world in the wake of WWII, a ubiquitous force that characterized politics and identity in places ruled by empires. The resonance of nationalism in the context of imperial rule is often taken for granted, yet nationalist mobilization in the colonial world was not omnipresent, nor was it particularly easy to organize given the existence of a powerful imperial state. This project advances a theory to explain why nationalist mobilization erupted in specific times and places. When do people living under imperial rule participate in nationalist movements? Why did nationalist resistance erupt earlier in some places and later in others?
Drawing on evidence from the French Empire and from a sub-national study of Morocco, the speaker illustrates the problems with some of the most common explanations for nationalist mobilization and argues instead that disruptions in imperial authority provided opportunities for political opponents to act and prompted nationalist mobilization in favor of independent statehood.
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