The study of decolonization has boomed in recent decades, even if scholars have often struggled to identify the importance of the term itself. Was decolonization the moment at which official sovereignty was handed over to a formerly colonized population, or a process by which economic, political, and social structures were reoriented to reflect the desires of the autochthone population? Is the term merely a veneer that obscures the establishment of neocolonial relationships? These issues are related to a second tendency in the field, which is a prevailing concern with the relationship between colony and metropole, or between the global south and the global north more broadly. Byrne’s work addresses both of these lacunae successfully, documenting not only how Algeria’s experience of decolonization reconstituted the global political order but also interrogating the very meaning of the term “Third World.”
Byrne’s argument that the modes of international collaboration ultimately “legitimized and zealously...