The historical process whereby countries under colonial rule by foreign (usually European) powers transitioned to self-rule. The term is very broad in its sweep and encompasses both a vast geographical territory (the majority of the global South or former Third World) and a complicated timeline (it didn’t take place all at once), but also significant differences in how it was achieved (violent or peaceful) as well as divergent outcomes (relative prosperity and crushing poverty). Decolonization began in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in part because European powers like Britain and France were no longer capable of holding on to their empires, but also because (in the case of India at least) independence had been promised in return for assistance during the war. But as the Vietnam War demonstrates, the colonial empires were not always given up without a fight. And as often as not it led to bloody wars, sometimes with the colonial power, but just as frequently internal civil wars erupted in the wake of the departing colonial power as factions fought to control the newly decolonized nation’s future. Not all decolonizing nations decolonized to the same extent, indeed in many cases the nations endeavoured to preserve the basic civic structure the colonial powers had created but with all the key positions of government placed into indigenous hands. The Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah designated this kind of change in government without change in the way government is conceived neocolonialism. Decolonization is a foundational moment for Postcolonial Studies. It brings together a variety of questions, too, about nationalism, national identity, nativism, and the transcultural. Further Reading: R. Betts Decolonization (2004). D. Brydon and H. Tiffin Decolonising Fictions. I. Szeman Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation (2003).