ABSTRACT
The argument for sidestepping state and nation is that nation-states and calcified core-periphery distinctions no longer help people understand development and maldevelopment. The history of radical Arab developmental thought is a lens through which people can reexamine the state, nationalism and internationalism, and the horizons and afterlives of national liberation. National liberation continues to receive a bad rap, perhaps in part because in some ways, it was never achieved. National liberation was never reducible to the veneer of formal state sovereignty. It was a vision partially dashed on the shoals of neocolonialism. Cabral brought nationalism and the national question to the fore, not as transhistorical romantic belonging or blood-and-soil organic communities but in material terms, a kind of parenthesis or parameter around a given set of productive forces and a way of reorganizing who was to benefit from them.
