terrorism, coloniality, abolition, race, counter-terrorism
“Terrorism” continues to dominate headlines, stirs a wide range of emotions in the general public, and the fear of it informs numerous domestic and foreign policies worldwide, many of which have cost countless and many more innocent lives than those acts of violence which have been labelled as “terrorism” in the first place. But what exactly is “terrorism” and should we care to locate or identify an accurate definition for it?
Source: Oren Ziv / ActiveStills: “A section of the Israeli separation wall, sprayed with a graffiti inspired by Actviestills photos, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem during the 4th Palestine Marathon calling for the Right of Movement to Palestinians, on April 1, 2016.”
Rabea is a lecturer in International Relations at Liverpool John Moores University and co-convenor of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working group. Her research interests include but are not limited to critical terrorism studies, critical religion, post- and decolonial theory, abolitionist thought, as well as gender and race.
Upcoming
abstract
In recent years the call for decolonisation has been hard to miss, resonating with social movements and, increasingly, with those in the higher echelons of power. While the terminology of decoloniality had long existed only in certain niches of the social sciences, the last decade has witnessed what is often described as the beginning of a ‘decolonial turn’. Since ‘coloniality’ denotes the afterlives of Western racial colonialism, broadly speaking, the ambition of decolonisation is to break the spell in terms of knowledge, power and being (Maldonado-Torres, ). The ‘decolonial turn’ hence describes the growing scholarly trend in favour of employing epistemic critiques (on how knowledge is produced and accepted) to embark on decolonisation as a ‘necessary task that remains unfinished’ (ibid.; also Grosfoguel, ).
In the targets for their critique decolonial scholars explicitly include postcolonial studies, which has evolved since the 1980s from a strand in English cultural and literature studies to a global body of scholarship on the postcolony as the spatial and temporal aftermath of Western colonialism. As such, postcolonial studies claim to ‘persistently critique a structure that one cannot not (wish to) inhabit’ (Spivak, , p. 320). Despite the serious allegation that postcolonial studies itself needs decolonisation (cf. Grosfoguel, ), there has been very little overt contention, which is also due to the rather reconciliatory rejoinders offered by postcolonial authors who tend to refrain from engaging in overt controversies (Colpani et al., , pp. 7–8). Constructed formulations such as ‘post-/decolonial’, often found in scholarly writings, however, cannot distract from looming questions about whether the decolonial turn supersedes postcolonial studies and consigns it to mere intellectual history, whether both scholarships can co-exist productively, or whether we should separate the positions at all, despite the contentious rhetoric.
While the lemma’s emphasis lies on the first part, I will also briefly illustrate the constructive differences between postcolonial and decolonial writings related to peace and conflict studies. Much critical research has deplored the idea of liberal peace as colonial, but giving up on the basic liberal notion of human rights for everyone altogether causes equal unease. I submit that deconstructionist and reconstructionist strategies, dominant in postcolonial and decolonial contributions respectively, offer different ways to deal with this conundrum. Ultimately a diversity of critical practice is essential to confront the many ways of (ab-)using and undermining liberal orders for oppressive ends.
Introduction
One may ask what is at stake in exploring the differences between postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. In peace and conflict studies, can we not take these as two sides of the same coin? Mignolo, himself a pioneer of the ‘decolonial option’, has acknowledged the complementarity of both perspectives that would only take different paths in the same direction (Mignolo, , p. 55). In addition, post- and decolonial approaches claim a common intellectual and political ancestry defined by, among others, anticolonial struggles and their ideological representations, Black radical tradition or intersectional feminisms (Colpani, ). On the other side, Mignolo, Quijano, Dussel and others formulated the decolonial option as a radical alternative based in part on their fierce criticism of the influence of postcolonial studies in Latin America.
In the first part of this lemma I examine how decolonial scholars have argued for a ‘radical difference’ (Mignolo, , p. 163) grounded in three lines of criticism, which together sustain the provocative call for decolonising postcolonial studies (Grosfoguel, ). Then, I gauge these criticisms in light of potential counterarguments. In the second part I briefly illustrate how attending to what I deem constructive instead of radical differences can enrich critical debates in peace and conflict studies.
“Bhabha teaches us that ‘pure’ cultures of the colonised and the coloniser are illusions…. By contrast, decolonial thinking aspires to de-modernisation, which requires rejecting, or ‘de-linking’ from, all traditions of European modern thought “
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How to cite this entry:
Georgi, R. 2024: “Postcolonial and decolonial differences: Do prefixes matter?”. Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. 04.07.2024. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/2024/03/01/postcolonial-and-decolonial-differences/.
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