Decolonising Political Concepts

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).

Preface: We Shall Dance Better

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

At the Crossroads of Coloniality, Power, and Knowledge: It is Time to Decolonise Political Concepts

Valentin Clavé-Mercier and Marie Wuth

Part I: Decolonial Horizons - Revealing the Coloniality of Knowledge and Power



Historicising History: A Critique Enabling View of History

Karim Barakat



The Recalcitrance of White Ignorance

Laurencia Sáenz Benavides



The Idealised Subject of Freedom and the Refugee

Shahin Nasiri

Part II: Feeling Coloniality - Bodies, Sexuality and Agency



Politics Without a Proper Locus. Political Agency between Action and Practice

Henrike Kohpeiß and Marie Wuth



Enfleshed Political Violences. Rethinking Sexual Violence from a Decolonial Critique to the Political Construction of the Body as Flesh

Cecilia Cienfuegos

Part III: Subverting Coloniality - Decolonising the Language of Resistance



On Translation, the Politics of Language, and Anti-authoritarian Political Practice in the Southern Mediterranean

Laura Galián



Decolonising Sovereignty and Reimagining Autonomy: Adivasi Assertions and Interpretations of Law

Astha Saxena and Radhika Chitkara



Indigeneity, Autochthony, and Belonging: Conceptual Ambiguity as an Impediment to Decolonisation in South Africa

Rafael Verbuyst

Afterword

Ritu Vij