Intellectual Origins of the Postcolonial State

What questions was the postcolonial state meant to answer? We're used to thinking that decolonization emerged from an anticolonial demand for democracy, but I think this story gets the order wrong. My work shows how it was decolonization that came first: democratic theory followed. The postcolonial state was established for a range of reasons, and only once it was established did the elite who took office begin to ask in a sustained way what a democratic kind of state was. Getting this order right, I think, helps us to understand the places where democratic thought came to justify the creation of strong, centralized states and to place significant constraints on dissent in public life. 

In my dissertation and book project, I demonstrate this by examining elite theories of the state and democracy in Indonesia, Malaya, and Singapore between the mid-1920s and the 1960s.