This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on the decolonisation of nation-states through acts of subversion, mimicry and criminality in the colonial and postcolonial world. Since the birth of nation-states, emerging in conjunction with the first wave of globalisation and the height of European colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, avant-gardists have problematised the role of the nation-state. With the split between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin in the First International in 1872, anarchism’s challenge to parliamentary politics and the nation-state rapidly spread across the colonial world.Footnote1 For instance, during the 1870s, Jewish, Italian and Spanish labour migrants to Egypt brought with them discourses of radical social emancipation, merging with local labour movements and promoting internationalist activism that resisted the nation-state as an organising principle