This chapter explores how the conceptual shift from ‘tribes’ to ‘ethnic groups’ contributed to the dismantling of the standard of civilisation. Whereas the binary distinction between civilised nations and primitive tribes reinforced the imperial hierarchy between European and non-European peoples, the concept of ethnicity is characterised by a cultural relativism that acknowledges the formal equality of all peoples. The chapter also shows how these conceptual changes enabled the reimagining of the international order as an ‘anarchical’ system populated by sovereign nation-states: at the very moment that anthropologists were moving away from colonial notions of ‘primitive society’ and ‘ordered anarchy’, IR theorists were adopting this vocabulary to conceptualise their own object. In this way, IR effectively accumulated the functions of colonial anthropology as the scientific vehicle for the study of the modern state’s primitive ‘other’. The chapter wraps up with a discussion of indigenous rights and their relationship to minority rights.

In a flurry of activity that peaked in the late 1950s, a cohort of activists from the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania participated in a global landscape of anticolonial activism. They travelled to hubs like Delhi, London, Cairo and Accra, navigating Cold War internationalisms as students, exiles and political representatives. They formed committees, manned offices, published pamphlets, launched newsletters and corresponded with international organisations. And yet, often, their committees collapsed, they struggled with stationery shortages, their pamphlet manuscripts were rejected, their newsletters were prevented from reaching readers and they were let down by organisations. The introduction asks how to understand this story against a historiographical backdrop that narrates global anticolonialism through the violent hotspots of international decolonisation. It proposes a microspatial perspective and the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, arguing that this regional cohort, by some measures marginal, can help us understand the limits of transnational activism in the unfolding of decolonisation.