Vijay Prashad

Career

Prashad was the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and a professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1996 to 2017.

Prashad has provided political commentary for Monthly Review. and Salon. He has had three articles published in The Nation.

He is an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and co-founder of the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL).

Prashad said that Noam Chomsky was "a great mentor to me", having co-authored two books with the well-known linguist. When details of Chomsky's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in the Epstein files, Prashad said he was "disgusted by Epstein’s paedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him", adding that "[t]here is no defence for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage."

Political views

Vijay Prashad is a proponent of democracy, Marxism, socialism, and communism.

Criticism of capitalism is a recurrent theme throughout his work, in addition to criticisms of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism.

U.S. foreign policy

Prashad is a critic of American hegemony and imperialism.

He debated historian Juan Cole on the 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya, which Cole supported. Prashad argued that the genuine Libyan uprising had been "usurped" by various malicious actors, including some with CIA connections. Prashad wrote the 2012 book Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, released through AK Press, on the topic.

Mother Teresa and Western charity

Prashad analyzed Mother Teresa's missionary work in Kolkata as representative of the collective "bourgeois guilt" of Western nations. For example, he states that the Bhopal disaster, which was caused by Union Carbide, was a flagrant example of a transnational corporation's disregard for human life in defence of its own profit. After the disaster, Mother Teresa flew into Bhopal and, escorted in two government cars, offered Bhopal's victims small aluminium medals of St. Mary. "This could have been an accident," she told the survivors, and "it is important to forgive." Prashad argued that people like Mother Teresa obscure the inherent tragedies of capitalism.

He also commented on Mother Teresa's alleged links with the American businessman Charles Keating and Michèle Bennett, the wife of the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. He also wrote that the communists of Calcutta were the "real nameless Mother Teresas who conduct the necessary work towards socialism, for the elimination of poverty forever."

Resignation of Evo Morales

Prashad has written extensively about the 2019 Bolivian political crisis and the 2020 Bolivian general election. He described Evo Morales' removal from the presidency as a coup d'état and said the Organization of American States had legitimized the coup through unsubstantiated conclusions in its preliminary report. In March 2020, he wrote that Morales' removal from office was the result of his government's "socialist policy toward Bolivia's resources" which required that returns from mining resources such as lithium "be properly shared with the Bolivian people." He said that the government of Jeanine Áñez extended a "welcome mat" to Tesla to establish a factory in Bolivia for the manufacturing of lithium batteries from Bolivia's reserves.

Boycott of Israeli universities

In 2010, when Prashad was appointed to head the newly formed Trinity Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Trinity College, a group of professors wrote a letter protesting the appointment based on "the prominent role he has played in promoting a boycott of Israeli universities and of study abroad in Israel." After initially refusing to meet with them, college president James Jones eventually met with representatives from the Connecticut Jewish Federation, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford on 14 September 2010. The university backed Prashad and rejected attempts to rescind his appointment.

Persecution of Uyghurs

In April 2021, Prashad authored an article for Globetrotter in which he wrote that the diplomatic boycott of China based on the persecution of Uyghurs was an American disinformation campaign designed to create hostilities between the two nations: "The U.S. government's information warfare against China has produced the 'fact' that there is genocide in Xinjiang [...] Once this has been established, it helps develop diplomatic and economic warfare." On an episode of The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, Prashad stated there was no evidence that the Chinese government's actions constituted genocide.

In response to a New Lines Magazine article's accusation of genocide denial, Prashad wrote that he had never written about China's treatment of ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim populations in Xinjiang. He said he had only commented on The Zero Hour that he "did not believe there was reliable evidence or investigation to meet the high legal burden of genocide under international law" and that his remarks corresponded with similar statements by figures such as former UN advisor Jeffrey Sachs and the former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars William Schabas, as well as the US State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser.

In April 2026, Prashad co-authored an article in Monthly Review contending that the Uyghurs were not victims of genocide. According to Australian historian David Brophy, the article whitewashed Chinese government crimes and contained "fake sourcing" from the use of AI.

Reception

Historian Paul Buhle has described Prashad as "a literary phenomenon." Writer and journalist Amitava Kumar wrote: "Prashad is our own Frantz Fanon. His writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope."

Prashad has come under scrutiny for his association with Neville Roy Singham, who has been accused of funding and promoting pro-Chinese government messaging and causes via a network of organizations (including the Tricontinental Institute, The People's Forum, BreakThrough News and NewsClick). Prashad has responded to the criticism, characterizing it as an attempt "to conjure a conspiracy from something that is no secret at all" as well as a pretended "scoop based on public statements that I – and others – have made."