Internal Colonialism: From Maritime to Land Empires

The theory of internal colonialism was originally developed during the 1960s and 1970s, representing a radical critique of the separation between core and periphery, metropole and colony, and nation and state. The theory was first applied to explain the persistence of coloniality in the countries who had gained independence from Europe in the Western hemisphere. The theory has not been applied systematically to the successor states of the Eurasian land empires, such as Russia and China. This article fills this gap by applying the theory through a comparative analysis of Chechnya in Russia and Xinjiang in China.