Decolonizing Political Concepts

Despite the waves of decolonization in the twentieth century, coloniality still remains in subtle and obvious practices, in visible and invisible mechanisms of power, in the privileging of certain knowledges and the dismissing of others. This becomes drastically apparent with regard to political concepts, which, contrary to their frequent claims to neutrality and universality, are nodes of power, knowledge and coloniality. Political concepts crystallize past and present histories of violence and structures of oppression, but also struggles for freedom and the promise of change.

Decolonising Political Concepts is a collective work articulating a transdisciplinary and transnational challenge to the prevailing coloniality of contemporary political thought and its central categories. It presents the need to decolonise both the theoretical constructs by which we understand the political world and the political practice that derives from them.

Editors and organisers Marie Wuth and Valentin Clavé-Mercier will discuss the project Decolonising Political Conceptstogether with Sambojang Sullyman Ceesay, Katerina Genidogan, Henrike Kohpeiß, and Ana María Miranda Mora.