Mahmood Mamdani’s 'Slow Poison' centers politics of belonging in postcolonial Uganda

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explores the phenomenon of nationalism. His core insight is that the concept of “the nation” has no basis in empirical reality, but is instead a purely political innovation that constructs a shared identity binding strangers from different communities together—usually on the basis of a shared language, history, culture, religion, or ethnicity. Thus, although a nation may consist of tens of millions of people—nearly all of whom will never personally know or even meet one another—nationalism allows each individual to think of themselves as a member of a singular community with a shared identity.

In this guide, we’ve added alternative viewpoints on the basis of nationalism, including psychological and anthropological perspectives. We've also added more historical context for Anderson's theories.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explores the phenomenon of nationalism. His core insight is that the concept of “the nation” has no basis in empirical reality, but is instead a purely political innovation that constructs a shared identity binding strangers from different communities together—usually on the basis of a shared language, history, culture, religion, or ethnicity. Thus, although a nation may consist of tens of millions of people—nearly all of whom will never personally know or even meet one another—nationalism allows each individual to think of themselves as a member of a singular community with a shared identity.

In this guide, we’ve added alternative viewpoints on the basis of nationalism, including psychological and anthropological perspectives. We've also added more historical context for Anderson's theories.

In The White Man’s Burden, economist, NYU professor, and Brookings Institution senior fellow William Easterly argues that the global humanitarian aid system is fundamentally flawed. His main critique is that the international aid system prioritizes top-down, centralized, and tightly directed aid distribution—all controlled by people in rich countries (primarily the United States and those in Western Europe), far away from the developing world that they're meant to be serving. Because the aid community is so disconnected, it creates big plans and sweeping missions that are overly ambitious and completely unsuited for the reality on the ground, it overlooks local needs and concerns, and it rarely holds itself accountable for its failures.

In this guide, we’ve updated some of Easterly’s statistics, supplemented his ideas with more recent examples, and incorporated alternative and opposing viewpoints from leading experts in the fields of economics, political theory, and business.

Today, many experts claim that life for humans has never been better. However, in The Divide, Jason Hickel argues that today’s Western-led world order causes massive global inequality while simultaneously trying to cover it up. Western elites amass wealth and power while billions remain trapped in poverty and hunger. This “divide,” he says, arose through centuries of violent and exploitative European colonization that devastated the Global South while enriching the West.

Hickel, an economic anthropologist from Eswatini, saw this divide firsthand while growing up in a poor Global South nation. Today, he studies the structural injustices of the global economy and the politics that enable it. The Divide is for anyone who wants to know more about these complex global issues—and about the lesser-known world history that explains them. It’s also for anyone eager to think about solutions to these problems. In our commentary, we’ll explore related perspectives on economics, inequality, and development, including those from Doughnut Economics and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explores the phenomenon of nationalism. His core insight is that the concept of “the nation” has no basis in empirical reality, but is instead a purely political innovation that constructs a shared identity binding strangers from different communities together—usually on the basis of a shared language, history, culture, religion, or ethnicity. Thus, although a nation may consist of tens of millions of people—nearly all of whom will never personally know or even meet one another—nationalism allows each individual to think of themselves as a member of a singular community with a shared identity.

In this guide, we’ve added alternative viewpoints on the basis of nationalism, including psychological and anthropological perspectives. We've also added more historical context for Anderson's theories.