This volume brings together anthropologists, historians and political scientists from around the world to reflect on how to build up empirical and juridical statehood, how to forge a nation after colonial divide-and-rule, and how to position themselves in an international order not of their making.

1. 'What is to be done?' Rethinking socialism(s) and socialist legacies in a postcolonial world 2. Indonesian socialism of the 1950s: from ideology to rhetoric 3. Trade union education in former French Africa (1959-1965): ideological transmission and the role of French and Italian communists 4. Arab encounters with Maoist China: transnational journeys, diasporic lives and intellectual discourses 5. Left turn to legalism: fact-finding inquiries as political critique in 1970s India 6. Free to decide their destiny? Indigenous resistance to external forms of socialist modernity in Siad Barre's Somalia 7. The party and the gun: African liberation, Asian comrades and socialist political technologies 8. 'Just another African country': socialism, capitalism and temporality in Mozambique 9. Indonesia's missing Left and the Islamisation of dissent 10. The legacies of Marx and Lenin in Vietnam: a historical and regional perspective 11. Ambivalent successes, magnificent failures and historical afterlives: a postscript to Marx and Lenin in Africa and Asia