Alumni of CISRUL’s Political Concepts in the World (POLITICO) Early-Stage Researcher project Dr Valentin Clavé-Mercier and Dr Marie Wuth, have jointly edited a volume titled Decolonising Political Concepts (Routledge 2024). As part of their time in the POLITICO project, Clavé-Mercier and Wuth co-organised an interdisciplinary conference of the same name in late 2019, with some of the conference’s participants going on to contribute to the volume.
As Clavé-Mercier and Wuth note in the volume introduction, the role of political concepts, as part of broader Western modern political thought, in colonisation processes, has rarely been properly analysed. This is despite the ongoing consequences for political concerns and struggles today that many of these concepts have.
Decolonising Political Concepts was thus ‘born of an interest to contribute to the decolonisation of modern political thoughts’ (Clavé-Mercier and Wuth, 2024: 2).
The volume does this in two ways; firstly, though demonstrating how political concepts may ‘be used as oppressing political and epistemological tools’ (ibid), and secondly, through ‘presenting efforts to decolonise political concepts’ (ibid).
The volume is divided into three main parts, Decolonial Horizons: Revealing the Coloniality of Knowledge and Power; Feeling Coloniality: Bodies, Sexuality, and Agency, and Subverting Coloniality: Decolonising the Language of Resistance. It features contributions by Karim Bakarat, Radhika Chitkara, Cecilia Cienfuegos Martínez, Laura Galián, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Henrike Kohpeiß, Shahin Nasiri, Laurencia Sáenz Benavides, Astha Saxena, Rafael Verbuyst, and Ritu Vij.
As Clavé-Mercier and Wuth acknowledge, the Westernised university itself has been central to colonisation efforts, and the depreciation of the ‘cultures and knowledges of colonised and Indigenous peoples’ (2024: 12). During their time in the POLITICO project, a project explicitly centred around how political concepts have been fostered and transmitted politically and philosophically, including in social movements, law, education and the media, Clavé-Mercier and Wuth felt it important to ‘bring decolonial and critical race insights into our research and thinking in order to confront the still too often unquestioned colonial genealogies, legacies, and loads of political concepts’ (ibid).
In addition to the conference they organised at CISRUL in late 2019, they have presented and discussed the volume in events at Traficantes de Sueños bookshop in Madrid (March 2024), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (March 2024), the University of Hamburg (April 2024), and the Centre for Theoretical Periphery in Berlin (April 2024).
Valentin is a Lecturer in Political Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and Marie is postdoctoral researcher at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. To read more about their work, see their CISRUL alumni profiles here.
References: Clavé-Mercier, V., & Wuth, M. (Eds.). (2024). Decolonising Political Concepts (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003293460
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