Decolonising Political Concepts

This book presents a transdisciplinary and transnational challenge to the enduring coloniality of political concepts, discussing the need to decolonise both their theoretical constructions as well as their substantive translations into practices.

Despite the acclaimed twentieth-century decolonisation waves, coloniality still remains in subtle and obvious practices, in visible and invisible mechanisms of power, and in the privileging of certain knowledges and the dismissing of others. Decolonising Political Concepts critically addresses the role political concepts play in the continuing legacies of colonialism and ongoing coloniality. This book, building on postcolonial and decolonial thinkers and ideas, demonstrates how concepts may be used as oppressing political and epistemological tools. By presenting efforts to decolonise political concepts, the book signals the potential for genuinely postcolonial academic and political contexts. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and engaging with a wide array of geographical contexts, the chapters examine concepts such as agency, violence, freedom, or sovereignty. This book enables readers to critically engage with concepts used in political discourse and allows them to reflect on their impact and alternatives.

It will appeal to graduate students and scholars from international relations, social sciences, or philosophy, as well as to socio-political actors engaged in decolonisation agendas.

Editors

Valentin Clavé-Mercier is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Complutense Institute for International Studies (ICEI) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). His overall research interest lies in how non-Western and decolonial political ontologies and praxis contribute to the rearticulation of contemporary political thought and political imaginaries. His most recent research focuses on discourses and practices of Indigenous sovereignty, more specifically on their deployment by Māori in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. His areas of interest include decolonial/postcolonial studies, Indigenous politics, contentious politics, sovereignty studies, political geography, and identity politics. He is the author of “Politics of Sovereignty: Settler Resonance and Māori Resistance in Aotearoa/New Zealand” (2022).

Marie Wuth is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Hamburg. She is a political and moral philosopher specialising in social and political ontology, environmental ethics, democratic theory, early modern philosophy, French theory, and decolonial and feminist theory. Her research focuses on the question of the political, agency, identity, and the power of affects and images in politics. Additionally, she is interested in the impact of relations of power and societal structures for conceptualisations and the relation of nature and politics. Her most recent publications include “Hate. Imaginary Roots and Fatal Dynamics of a Complex Relations” (2022) and “Circular Politics. Potentials, Limits and Boundaries of an Arendtian Nature-Politics” (2021).