Fredrik Petersson

is a historian based at Åbo Akademi University. He is the author of Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925 – 1933 (2 vols., 2013) and The Dark International. The League Against Imperialism, Anti-Colonialism, and International Communism, 1927 – 1937 (2016).

“Why We Appear”: The Brief Revival of The Anti-Imperialist Review

“Why We Appear”: The Brief Revival of The Anti-Imperialist Review

The LAI’s theoretical organ The Anti-Imperialist Review and its editorial history represent a constituent source of militant reportage on global anti-imperialism between the two World Wars, as well as a rigorous effort to construct a conceptual framework within which the international communist movement could politically analyze how these phenomena were articulated within the broader international relations of force. The dead-ends and contradictory ideological and political shifts that the LAI had to navigate also point to the insurmountable problems of the anti-imperialist practice of Comintern-linked organizations.