Scholarship is increasingly linking colonialism and fascism, however we should not be viewing them as simple sequential stages, nor as simply colonial violence returning to Europe. Equating the two obscures the specific historical conditions, political and institutional forms, constituencies, and ideological projects that defined each regime. This essay advances a genealogical and relational perspective: Colonialism helped foster practices of classification, segregation, exceptional law, forced labour, surveillance and differential views of human worth that could travel outside the colonies and be adapted into later authoritarian configurations. Colonialism and fascism should therefore not be seen as the same system, or as totally distinct history, but as part of histories of different historical moments bound together in the circuitries, modifications and radicalisations of the techniques of rule.
Political modernity was introduced by colonial rule through a toolkit of practices such as collective punishment aimed at dangerous populations, their confinement, territorial segregation, forced labour, surveillance, and practices of racial classification. Colonial rule contributed to the formation of political modernity by systematising practices of racial classification, collective punishment, confinement, territorial segregation, forced labour, and surveillance. Colonialism did not ‘become’ fascism, but rather provided a series of transitional processes, where certain colonial discourses that surfaced in different projects of war ended in racialised rule, and assumed new political connotations.
It is equally crucial to examine how anti-colonial resistance brought to light the racial restrictions of an apparently universal European political modernity. Aimé Césaire articulated this position in his foundational work.1 Fascism, he insisted, was not a catalogue of European misfortunes for which it is hard to explain the cause. European communities had permitted foreign practices before this which conflicted with their stated principles of civilisation, law, and humanity. It was a return of a part of the dehumanisation that had been unleashed on colonised peoples, which became intolerable. By demonstrating this, Césaire shifted the geographical lines between colonial violence and authoritarianism practised in Europe.
Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the relationship differs: she looks for imperialism, racism, statelessness, and bureaucratic domination in the genealogy of totalitarian politics.2 Her work did not reduce totalitarianism directly to colonial violence; rather, she identified how imperial bureaucracy, race-thinking, and statelessness laid the groundwork for European political collapse. Recent scholarship has significantly expanded this problem. Fascism has been explored by Enzo Traverso as a phenomenon in a European setting already changed by imperial violence and total war,3 and by Michael Mann as a phenomenon in the connections between authoritarian nationalism, ethnic purification, and organised political violence.4 As Robert Paxton notes, fascism must be approached as an active political movement rather than merely a static doctrine.5
Colonialism did, however, play a significant role in this genealogy, one that took an important step towards making differences in humanity an administrative possibility. Colonial power played other dynamics besides force. It classified. It enumerated. It mapped. It created ethnographic descriptions, censuses, criminal categories, typologies of race, medical differences, and exceptions to the law. Colonial knowledge was brought to bear and made Indian society significantly readable, as the latter evolved into a variety of administratively legible castes, as was argued by Bernard Cohn,6 and Nicholas Dirks argued that colonial rule was reconstituted through the classificatory demands of colonial governance.7 As Ann Laura Stoler shows, empire depended on policing racialised distinctions between European/native and civilised/primitive – an epistemic ordering that also illuminates genealogies of fascist power.8
Often, before a population is expelled, confined, dispossessed, subjected to exceptional violence, a politics constructs it as a certain type of population, alien, criminal, primitive, contaminating, disloyal, dangerous. Any classification is, therefore, not antecedent to violence. It creates the conceptual framework that liberalises and makes violence politically possible under specific conditions. Of course, biopolitics and racism can also be read in the light of Michel Foucault’s reflections, but a purely European genealogy of modern power is challenged by a history of colonialism. The notion of necropolitics further propounded by Achille Mbembe places colonial occupation at the heart of contemporary regimes of exposure to death, with racial sovereignty serving as the crux of the argument.9 Colonial territories were places where sovereignty could be expressed in terms of extreme inequalities of vulnerability.
The connection between colonialism and fascism, however, poses an important methodological issue. It is not possible to simply rebrand colonialism as fascism, nor fascism as colonialism returning to Europe. Imperial regimes were subjectively different and bound together by conquest, extraction, race, and rule over subjugated peoples, while fascist movements were born out of specific situations of mass politics, nationalism, war, and the modern nation-state. They come from two different backgrounds, and do not necessarily share all their experiences. What they share is instead less a categorical sameness and more the movement and transformation of political repertoires, racial enumerations, states of exception, technologies of confinement and surveillance, fantasies of demographic threat, and practices by which particular populations might consistently be pushed outside of the sphere of everyday political protection. A more productive analysis maps how these repertoires moved through colonial and metropolitan spaces, tracing their alterations and new political uses.
Resistance provides the other half of this history
Anti-colonial thinkers were able to see, as conventional European political history failed to, relationships that often were overlooked. W. E. B. Du Bois framed his understanding of fascism according to the world’s colour line.10 The struggle against fascism was viewed by C. L. R. James in terms of slavery, capitalism, and the emancipation of the colonised.11 Frantz Fanon demonstrated that decolonisation entailed far more than the transfer of political power from European rulers to the colonised. Space, knowledge, subjectivity, and even humanity itself had been set in place by colonialism; resistance had to be made to the existing political subject, which was humanity itself.
This redefines anti-fascism. It cannot only be described through the history of European movements of resistance, popular fronts, underground groups, and wartime resistance, but must also cover the larger histories of the state and resistance at the global level. An anti-colonial struggle was also underway in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean attacking political systems based on white supremacy, racism, dispossession, exceptional law, forced labour, and unequal humanity.
But anti-colonialism should not be confused with anti-fascism. As Fanon noted, political independence does not imply dismantling the structures of domination in its wake; a national bourgeoisie can be established to replace colonial rule, and yet continue the practice of economic dependency, centralised rule, and coercive organisations.12 Decolonisation does not automatically lead to a transition from anti-colonial resistance to an anti-fascist state.
This connection is not an identity or a marriage of equals, but rather a relationship of critical solidarity. Anti-colonialism is an extension of anti-fascism, uncovering race relations as imperial structures and differential humanity, but the post-colonial state is an open entity that can be criticised for reproducing inherited race relations and differential humanity. The central question is not who will rule post-imperium, but whether the institutions of governance are fundamentally transformed.
The link between colonialism, fascism, and resistance thus tends not to be an identity, nor a straightforward progression; it is a historically ongoing process of circulation and transformation. For Césaire, fascism’s colonial origins were revealed; for Arendt, it was a history of totalitarian power and the presence of imperialism and racism. But Fanon’s analysis of the national bourgeoisie also signals that the struggle for liberation from colonialism does not automatically result in struggles against all kinds of authority or regimes. These exclusions, processes of hierarchy, and institutions can be reproduced after political independence. Thus, anti-colonialism and anti-fascism cannot be taken as synonymous entities, but rather as traditions of criticism and resistance that intersect. The relationship between these traditions is not defined by total overlap, but by shared strategies to resist racial normativity, exceptional law, and institutionalised inequality.
References
- Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. Introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. ↩︎
- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951. ↩︎
- Traverso, Enzo. The Origins of Nazi Violence. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 2003. ↩︎
- Mann, Michael. Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ↩︎
- Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. ↩︎
- Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ↩︎
- Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ↩︎
- Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. ↩︎
- Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. ↩︎
- Du Bois, W. E. B. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: Viking Press, 1947. ↩︎
- James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938. ↩︎
- Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963 [original French edition, 1961]. ↩︎
To cite this article:
Pravat Rajan Sethi, ‘Colonial Laboratories of Fascism: Knowledge, Racial Rule, and the Politics of Resistance,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 19 (17 September 2026).
Colonial Laboratories of Fascism: Knowledge, Racial Rule, and the Politics of Resistance © 2026 by Pravat Rajan Sethi is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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