A framing case study examines a debt dispute between a Wall Street investor and Argentina that resulted in the seizure of an Argentine warship in Ghana. Then the chapter tackles the topic of upholding international law. The chapter discusses: (1) international legal enforcement, including major bodies, when these bodies refuse to rule, and access to non-state actors; (2) domestic legal enforcement, including jurisdiction and various forms of immunity; and (3) political enforcement via coercion and persuasion.

Chapter 2 scrutinizes the period from 1954 to 1957, illuminating King’s evolving perspective on Africa and the cause of African liberation from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to his pivotal journey to Ghana. During these transformative years, King waged parallel struggles for freedom on American and African fronts, confronting a relentless campaign by US authorities – including the FBI – against civil rights leaders and organizations. This chapter explores King’s emergence as a formidable advocate for racial justice, a burgeoning Africanist, and a Pan-African thinker. It highlights his insistence on connecting the African American freedom movement with the broader struggles of African peoples, and his conviction that African Americans should boldly support the global quest for African independence. King’s analysis of the reciprocal influences between African liberation movements and Black American activism is given particular emphasis.

Chapter 3 delves into King’s deepening engagement with the international liberation of African-descended peoples from March 1957 through early 1961. Central to this discussion is King’s sermon “The Birth of a New Nation,” delivered after his return from Ghana’s independence celebrations – a moment that profoundly shaped his worldview. The chapter chronicles King’s subsequent travels to Nigeria at the invitation of Governor-General Nnamdi Azikiwe, further solidifying his identity as an “Africanist.” His active participation in the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and collaboration with prominent activists such as George Houser and Bayard Rustin are examined as pivotal to his organizational and ideological maturation. This period marks the crystallization of King’s Beloved Pan-Africanism, as he forged powerful connections between domestic and international struggles for justice.

This chapter explores the impact that war victories and war defeats have on the character of dominant nationalist discourses. Scholars of nationalism have extensively analysed how military defeats shaped the collective memories of different nations. However, there has not been much comparative analysis of the relationship between nationalisms that transpire in the context of war victories and those that emerge in the environment of war defeats. This chapter zooms in on both phenomena. It argues that the scale and direction of nationalist narratives is rarely determined by war winning or losing but by the ability of social organisations to institutionalise a particular interpretation of war. Instead of victories or defeats, it is the coercive-organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional grounding that shapes the character of nationalism. This key argument is illustrated with a paired analysis of Croatia’s memorialisation of the war victory in the 1991–1995 War of Independence and Ghana’s commemoration of the war defeat in the 1900 War of the Golden Stool.

The Ghanaian employment space prioritizes procedural fairness, the basis on which the Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651) and the National Labour Commission were established. Other regulations govern certification and employment testing to uphold professional standards and worker rights. For instance, the Ghana Psychology Council regulates the certification and practice of psychologists who are also mindful of other guidelines such as the American Psychological Association (APA) Standards and Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Principles. The 1992 Constitution and the Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651) of Ghana further guarantee equality, prohibit employment discrimination based on race, sex, disability, religion, and age, with specific protection for children, the disabled, and women. For instance, women in Ghana are under-represented in the workplace, in response to which the Affirmative Action Law (Act 2024) was passed, aimed at improving equality and participation of women in decision making positions. With the increasing use of artificial intelligence in employment testing worldwide, Ghana has yet to establish formal regulations for the utilization of artificial intelligence in employee selection to ensure ethical standards and data protection.

Chapter 4 adds another intellectual dimension and genealogy to Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy by arguing that he was aware of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and that the Ghanaian economy existed and functioned within this state capitalist, mixed economic framework. Moreover, this chapter examines how people within and outside Ghana understood the duality of Ghana’s socialist and capitalist economy – its socialist state capitalist project – and its applicability to Ghana’s conditions and the postcolonial world. It demonstrates that the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, Socialist De-Colony merges the nonoverlapping intellectual and geographic spaces of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” and Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” with Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain.” It shows how the cultural and intellectual interchange of ideas between and amongst Black thinkers moved beyond the Atlantic circuit and were simultaneously heavily mediated and impacted by ideas from the East.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

Chapter 6 examines the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who were supposed to build socialism in postindependent Africa. Workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions the state and its leftist supporters imagined. Despite the state and leftist intellectuals championing themselves as a worker’s party and embodying workers’ rights, laws were passed to handicap workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial, socialist African government that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands. The workers used ingenious techniques to resist and negotiate the power of the state and capital. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation was only possible in coordination and conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair. For workers, they believed that their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would prove them right. The chapter complements histories highlighting African workers’ centrality – through their letters and feet – in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states and socialism.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

Chapter 5 excavates the debates leftist and socialist thinkers in Ghana had about the brand of socialism they were building and its relationship to religion, morality, Black freedom, and precolonial African history. The chapter argues that debates surrounding how to define and historicize socialism in the African context were not simply intellectual exercises and disputes over labeling rights but central to reclaiming Africans and African history within global history. It was a deliberate critique of white supremacist paradigms that situated ideas, histories, and societies emanating from Africa as operating outside the continuum and space of human history. By rethinking and (re)historicizing histories of exploitation and violence in Africa, socialists in Ghana were simultaneously decolonizing and rescuing socialism from itself. The chapter demonstrates that socialism then was more than a fashionable lexicon or moniker to curry favor with certain geopolitical groups. Instead, it also offered a tangible way, a theoretical analytic, for Africans to revisit, debate, and offer a critical appraisal of African historiography and societies and Africa’s place in world history. Not only were the socialist theorists in Ghana domesticating socialism, they were remaking it globally. They were Marxist-Socialist worldmakers.