ABSTRACT
Peace studies unrelated to general sociology and politology are an absurdity because peace is the absence of war and the other way round; and therefore it is impossible to say anything useful about one without making all kinds of implications about the other because cooperation and conflict are the two poles between which all human actions fluctuate. The widest sense in which the word imperialism is used is to described the striving towards an enlargement of its living space on the part of a social unit, which need not be the state. Commonly people employ ‘imperialism’ in a narrower sense than the foregoing; and whereas the subjugation of parts of Africa by the British and the French is universally called ‘imperialism’, the territorial expansion of the United States is not so labelled. The concept of decolonisation presents no problems as it is legitimate to interpret it as meaning simply the process of giving up of authority over the colonies.
