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Please join the Comparative and International Relations Workshops as they host Emerson Murray, with discussant Ana Vedovato.

Since its withdrawal from the European Union, the United Kingdom has embarked on a series of policy reforms with the express aim of restoring ‘national sovereignty,’ encompassing immigration, borders, trade, and security, among other areas. Curiously, while this language of national sovereignty might be seen to reflect a fundamentally ‘inward-looking’ turn in British politics, many post-Brexit reforms appear to have drawn inspiration from places far beyond Britain’s shores, with the the so-called ‘Anglosphere’ – that community of states whose core is typically understood to include Britain and its former settler colonies, namely Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States – figuring prominently. For instance, the Johnson Conservatives branded the post-Brexit skilled migration visa as an ‘Australian points-based system’ while celebrating the EU free trade agreement as a “Canada-style” deal (which they had promoted alongside an ‘Australia-style’ alternative in the preceding negotiations). More controversially, prior to the election of Starmer’s Labour in July 2024, successive Conservative governments had been working to establish an offshore asylum regime in Rwanda, mirroring longstanding – and widely condemned – Australian practices in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. My dissertation proceeds from the suspicion that these post-Brexit policy convergences between Britain and its former settler colonies have a longer historical provenance. I explore how, from post-war decolonization to the present, British policy-makers have recurringly looked to the settler Anglosphere for models, templates, and exemplars of independent British ‘nationhood’ after empire, motivating various forms of policy transfer ‘from settler colony to metropole’ in such domains as immigration, borders, and citizenship. I take interest, moreover, in the racialized imaginaries that have inspired these transfers, locating their roots in imperial visions of the Anglophone settler colonies as White utopias and more ‘pure’ versions of the British metropole. In tracing the continuing entanglement of postcolonial Britain with its former settler colonies, I contribute to the historical sociology of nationalism and the nation-state in international relations, and I complicate dominant chronologies of the nation-state in political science and sociology that portray this political form as having originated in Europe and diffused unidirectionally to the postcolonial world. And, building on critical scholarship in international relations and adjacent fields on the “colonial boomerang,” I draw attention to the transnational reverberations of settler colonialism and its cultural worlds in global politics.

This project is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Ce projet est en partie financé par le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada.

Please use the "Registration" link for both in-person and virtual attendance.