Challenging empire is possible because it contains internal contradictions.

Evidence

Consternations among those who governed were reactions to quiet and sustained assaults on the warped logic of “European” supremacy. Challenges took unexpected forms that showed imperial principles were not, and could not be, consistent with themselves. Inlandsche kinderen embodied and exposed hypocrisies that stretched beyond the native population— that only some Europeans had rights, that rights and race were not always aligned, and that awareness of those inconsistencies were evident to, and expressed among, empire’s practitioners themselves. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 59 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Empire is a mutable structure that keeps reconfiguring race.; Orientalism was internally contradictory rather than a monolithic colonial tool.; Historical conjunctures are overdetermined accumulations of heterogeneous contradictions (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Imperial principles could not remain internally consistent when confronted by mixed-race subjects #exemplifies (0.90) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 59
• Orientalism was internally contradictory rather than a monolithic colonial tool. #exemplifies (0.85)
• Historical conjunctures are overdetermined accumulations of heterogeneous contradictions #expands (0.85)
• Liberal democratic ideology internally generates the contradictions that let alternatives through #exemplifies (0.85)
• Empire must keep reworking itself and can fail to secure racial regimes #corroborates (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 105
• Revolutionary conjunctures arise from accumulated overdetermined contradictions, not the economy alone #expands (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 534
• Colonial action is entangled in self-concealing contradictory motives #corroborates (0.80)