Debating Development Research

By Kibui Edwin Rwigi / Second post in a mini-series on large grant-funded research centres: read the first one here)

In November 2019, I sat across the table from an older African professor — a well accomplished intellectual, the quintessential renaissance man: poet, philosopher, scholar-activist. “How is decolonisation different from what my generation was doing through post-colonial work?” he asked, after I had too exuberantly recounted work I had been part of in a North-South research consortium with a Dutch university as lead partner.

By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

At a moment when the United States has recently kidnapped the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, assassinated the Iranian supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, is plotting regime change in Cuba, and is continuing to support genocide and colonial oppression in Palestine, the question of how to understand empire, capitalism, and possibilities for resistance is as pressing as ever. In a new article, I argue that any radical decolonization agenda must be aligned with critique of and resistance to contemporary oppression. I also posit that the most dominant form of decolonial theory – the one that is now pervasive across global North universities as well as many institutions across the global South – does not lend itself to such radical critique and resistance.