Decolonization at 100: Centenary Reflections, 1926-2026

Please Note: Registration for this event is now closed. However, it will be live streamed in an adjacent seminar room in Robinson Hall (Warren Center Conference Room B21), or you can follow the discussion live on Zoom. More information to follow.

Decolonization at 100: Centenary Reflections, 1926-2026

Workshop, 23 April 2026

Harvard University, Department of History, Robinson Hall 125
 

In April 1926, the term ‘decolonization’ entered the modern political lexicon, making its first appearance in German in the work of a now largely forgotten political economist. Moritz Julius Bonn’s conviction that “the era of welding large areas into empires has come to an end” seems unremarkable in retrospect. More surprising is the way he included Germany among the places to be decolonized. With the confiscation of its colonial empire as the price of peace, Germany had forfeited its own right to self-determination in Bonn’s eyes (Ward, 2016). 

By the 1960s this expansive logic had given way to an altogether narrower definition that aligned decolonization squarely with the liquidation of Europe’s empires overseas. With clear binaries and neat chronologies, it heralded successive waves of newly independent states across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Historians and social scientists could not only be confident about when and where decolonization was to be found, but also that they knew “the end of the story” (Cooper, 1996).

That conceptual clarity has been challenged in recent years with the proliferation of “decolonization talk” across the humanities and social sciences (Roy and Kundnani, 2025). Both the temporal and geographical scope of decolonization, as well as the range of social phenomena it might plausibly describe, have expanded exponentially – so much so that critics have raised objections to its “promiscuous application” (Tàìwo, 2022). According to this view, decolonization risks becoming “freighted with so many elements that it loses coherence” (Thomas, 2024).

Paradoxically, this widening of decolonization’s semantic range has occurred at a time when its moral imperatives are widely flouted in the international system. The expansionary policies of all three major powers have acquired a distinctly unapologetic edge since Russia’s capture of the Crimea in 2014 – from Ukraine to Panama, Greenland, the South China Sea and Taiwan. On the face of it, these matter-of-fact territorial designs run directly counter to the presumption of irreversibility that was hard-wired into decolonization from its very inception. 

Where does this leave decolonization as it enters its second century? Can it still furnish a useful category for analysis? And what purposes does it serve in settler societies like Australia, where successive attempts to refashion the constitution to realign the country with a decolonized world have been defeated at the ballot box. No longer, it seems, can decolonization assume that it has history on its side. 

This workshop marks the centenary of decolonization by considering the prevailing uncertainty about its enduring critical purchase – not just among scholars but also in contemporary social and political disputes. It will consider a range of contemporary contexts where decolonization’s everyday uses have multiplied – from Australia to the Pacific to the Global South; from former imperial powers to global superpowers – even as its reach and resonance remain hotly contested.

Format: The workshop will be held over a single day on Thursday 23 April 2026, with a series of discussion panels featuring short presentations from panelists followed by discussion. 
 

Program 

9.00-9.20: Welcome and Introduction

Stuart Ward (Harvard/Copenhagen)

Hans Kundnani (LSE/Göttingen)


9.20-11.10: Panel 1. Decolonization: reflections on a disputed term

Linda Colley (Princeton)

Lisa Ford (GWU)

Frederick Cooper (NYU)

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Cornell)

Moderator: Kris Manjapra (Northeastern)


11.10-11.30: Coffee


11.30-13.00: Panel 2. Decolonizing Australia, the US and the Pacific

Patricia O’Brien (Georgetown)

Kristin Oberiano (Wesleyan)

Christina Twomey (Monash)

Moderator: Joan Beaumont (Australian National University)


13.00-14.00: Lunch


14.00-15.30: Panel 3. Decolonizing Colonizers

Britain: Erik Linstrum (UVA)

France: Mary Lewis (Harvard)

Australia: Jon Piccini (Australian Catholic University)

Moderator: Hans Kundnani (LSE/Göttingen)


15.30-16.00: Coffee


16.00-17.30: Panel 4. Decolonization Deferred: Global superpowers

The United States: Elisabeth Leake (Tufts)

China: Rana Mitter (Harvard)

Russia: Jane Burbank (NYU)

Moderator: Stuart Ward (Harvard/Copenhagen)


17.30-18.30: Keynote: The checkered career of an elusive subject 

Dane Kennedy (GWU)

Moderator: Heather Salter (Northeastern)


18.30-20.00: Reception

Please Note: Registration for this event is now closed. However, it will be live streamed in an adjacent seminar room in Robinson Hall (Warren Center Conference Room B21), or you can follow the discussion live on Zoom. More information to follow.