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Dissent from regnant ideologies and discourses is, of course, never in and of itself marginal; it emerges as (often, constitutively) marginalized discourse that must articulate itself against the grain of the dominant.

— Insurgent Empire by Priyamvada Gopal (Page 31)

[Walter] Mignolo is right to suggest that ‘emancipation’, as it was figured in European liberal discourse, is different from ‘liberation’ as it is conceived of in ‘decolonial’ discourse[…] At the same time, a disproportionate emphasis on radically different ‘categories of thought’ obscures the extent to which many ‘liberation’ struggles were committed to universalism — and not only because they were part of the dominant language or the colonizer’s categories of thought. Indeed, rather than offer sutured, self-contained alternatives to the idea of universal freedom, resistance often deliberately showed up the colonizer’s version of universalism to be anything but universal. Universals had to be embodied through experience and resistance, not refused as ‘European’. This often entailed working with the ‘logic of modernity’, decolonizing rather than repudiating it, teasing out its revolutionary promises.

— Insurgent Empire by Priyamvada Gopal (Page 26)

Both abolition and decolonization — twin outcomes of Britain’s expansionary colonial project over three centuries — are all too frequently regarded as deriving chiefly from the campaigning consciences of white British reformers or as the logical outcome of the liberal and liberalizing project that empire ostensibly always was, conquering in order to free.

— Insurgent Empire by Priyamvada Gopal (Page 3)

But is it anachronistic to subject the Empire to searching criticism? This book is in part a response to that question and in part a very different take on the history of the British Empire to what is generally available in the British public sphere. In academia, a retrograde strain of making the so-called case for colonialism is now resurgent. As a scholar whose previous work had been on dissident writing in the Indian subcontinent as it transitioned to independence, I was aware that all societies and cultures have radical and liberationist currents woven into their social fabric as well as people who spoke up against what was being done in their name: why would Britain in the centuries of imperial rule be an exception? At the same time, I also wanted to probe the tenacious mythology that ideas of ‘freedom’ are uniquely British in conception and that independence itself was a British ‘gift’ to the colonies along with the railways and the English language. The result is a study which looks at the relationship between British critics of empire and the great movements of resistance to British rule which emerged across colonial contexts. The case against colonialism, it will be seen, was made repeatedly over the last couple of centuries and it emerged through an understanding of resistance to empire.

— Insurgent Empire by Priyamvada Gopal

[…] those who are most attentive to environmental change are, more often than not, people who are at the margins, people whose relationships to the soil, or the forest, or the water are minimally mediated by technology. The farmer who is most likely to pay attention to a prolonged drought is one who cannot afford an electric pump or chemical inputs; the fisher who is most likely to observe changes in the marine environment is one who does not have sonar equipment to locate schools of fish; the woman who is most likely to notice rainfall deficits is one who does not have access to piped water and must walk to ever more distant wells. But such people are generally poor and do not have access to the networks through which information is disseminated; they are, in fact, located at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the majority of the world’s scientists and academics.

Experts are not at fault, of course, for the skewed way in which the world gathers information; they can hardly be held responsible for the social contexts in which they work. But it is nonetheless important to recognize that the reason our first messages about climate change came from scientists, rather than from marginal farmers, or women who fetch water, is not that scientists were the only people to notice what was under way; it was because scientists were more visible within the circles that wield power in the world. Sadly, they were themselves too much on the margins of those circles to be visible enough.

— The Nutmeg's Curse by Amitav Ghosh

Following the war in 1999, Serbs in Kosovo established parallel structures within the sectors of security, education, health and public services, which were supported by and relied heavily on the Belgrade authorities. Created initially to boycott the UN administration of Kosovo, their main function became to resist UN-created, Albanian-led, self-governing local institutions. Belgrade uses these structures to influence local Serbs, to manipulate and destabilize processes in Kosovo, and to retain bargaining incentives for Serbia’s own interests. This creates a volatile environment; the mayor of Mitrovica Municipality (South), Avni Kastrati, described northern Kosovo as a place where the lack of rule of law and the activities of parallel structures and criminal groups result in frequent violent incidents; bombings, attacks against non-Serb citizens and even murder (Gazeta Express, 2010).

As a predominantly Serb area, northern Kosovo is therefore under the de facto control of these Serb parallel structures, which substantially limits the capacity of Kosovar institutions to extend their authority in this part of the country. These structures also constitute a significant obstacle to the representation and participation of Serbs in Kosovar institutions; they constrain the functioning of these institutions within Serb-populated areas and therefore threaten the overall territorial integrity and internal security of Kosovo. In some respects the Serb parallel structures in Kosovo have the attributes of ‘states within states’; micro-entities that can emerge from a secession, protracted civil war or state collapse, which perform revenue collection and extraction, public and service-oriented activities, and challenge the legitimacy and authority of the central government (Kingston and Spears, 2004: 3–7).

— Peacebuilding and Reconciliation by Marwan Darweish, Carol Rank

The distribution of development aid is another vital component of the liberal peace model, and in Afghanistan another example of where external concerns, including military priorities, have taken precedence over longer-term development goals with dangerous consequences. Significant disparities exist in the geographical distribution of aid, often because aid is being used to achieve military or political objectives – rewarding allegiance or complementing the ‘hearts and minds’ campaigning of international troops in the area.[4] With insecure or strategic areas awarded far higher amounts of aid, these disparities have resulted in increased inter-ethnic tension, resentment and negative incentives for peaceful approaches. The establishment of military teams tasked with humanitarian or development activities and funding of ‘quick impact projects’ in key military areas compounds the problem.[5] Aid distribution according to security priorities has actively undermined progress towards achieving security, with communities outside the conflict areas seeing armed violence rewarded with resources.

— Peacebuilding and Reconciliation by Marwan Darweish, Carol Rank

Mac Ginty describes the ‘near hegemony’ of the ‘liberal democratic peace model’ applied to post-conflict states, arguing that the dominance of this model has had ‘a profound impact on the management of contemporary violent ethnonational conflict in standardising the core elements of peace initiatives and accords and reducing the space available for alternative (non-Western) approaches to peacemaking’ (2006: 33). In his review of the United Nations as one of the key institutions of liberal peace, Chesterman makes further references to colonialism, describing UN transitional administrations as ‘benevolent autocracy’ and post-conflict transformation projects as ‘modern colonial enterprise’. He argues that greater honesty about the motivation behind the international community’s state-building projects would be beneficial for all parties (2004: 47, 127).

— Peacebuilding and Reconciliation by Marwan Darweish, Carol Rank

If you gather together twenty copies of a sixteenth‐century book, or an eighteenth‐century one, from different libraries and collections, the chances are that every one will have a different binding, with its own set of historical messages. Multiple copies of a twentieth‐century book will probably be uniform as regards bindings (subject to wear and tear and the possible loss of the dust jacket), but twenty copies of a nineteenth‐century book are likely to show some variety. Until quite late in the century, books were still commonly issued in a range of binding choices, including different grades of quality and various colours and patterns of cloth.

— Books as History by David Pearson (Page 152)

Author’s own copies of the books they publish can be particularly interesting if they use them to record their later thoughts on the texts which become frozen and unchangeable once the printing press has done its work (unlike texts we write today and hold in electronic form). They may note corrections, additions, or changes of their ideas, or they may mark them up to become the copy text for later editions which may or may not have come to publication.

— Books as History by David Pearson (Page 121)

Annotations in books may be important not only because of what they can tell us about the annotator and his views on the world, but also because they may contain significant information about the text and its publication, which may not be available elsewhere. George Thomason (1600?–66), a bookseller in London during the Civil War, assembled a unique collection of about 23,000 of the pamphlets, tracts, handbills and news‐sheets which poured from the press during that period of political upheaval. Their value as texts for historians is enhanced by Thomason’s habit of noting the actual day of publication on each item, so the exact sequence of squib and counter‐squib can be established.

— Books as History by David Pearson (Page 121)