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The recent debates within and beyond Marxism around empire and imperialism focus on deterritorialization, but fail to see non-Western states as anything other than collaborators or victims. Highlighting the importance of center-periphery relations within the territorially bounded political space of the nation-state, this paper puts forward a new concept of the Postcolonial Informal Empire (PIE) to characterize the emerging powers of China and India. The greatest paradox of PIEs is that a postcolonial impulse—to critically appropriate Western ideas and technologies such as sovereignty, nationalism, and the free market to build the multinational state and combine it with an affirmation of stories of historical greatness and long existing, pre-Westernized, civilizational-national cultures—enables the political entities to consolidate and discipline their borderlands and reduce diverse inhabiting peoples to culturally different but politically subservient subjects. It is predominantly a nationalist politics, and not economic calculability or financial interests, that shapes PIEs’ center-borderlands relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]