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.
Today, “Eurocentrism” tends to be equated with the study of Europe or studies by Europeans, and the process of intellectual decolonization tends to be equated with elevating indigenous or global South voices and perspectives as well as the inclusion of case studies from the global South. When liberal institutions use the term ‘decolonization’, a very particular, arguably essentialising and epistemic-oriented, worldview is often underlying the approach taken. When academics use it, a particular understanding of a decolonial framework is very often assumed, if not explicit. In fact, the decolonial framework has become so prominent and dominant that it is difficult to present arguments about decolonization and Eurocentrism without being automatically associated with this specific decolonial tradition. The consumption of decolonial theory in the global North and beyond thus serves to water down the radical core of decolonization and anti-imperialist projects.
It was in the early 2000s that a large and diverse group of Latin American scholars formally organized themselves into the Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality (MCD) group. By the 2010s that tradition had started to become a misinterpreted artifact of consumption in Northern academia. This is not the first time global North audiences misinterpret, flatten and distort traditions that have primarily emerged in the global South. Just as the original debate about dependency theory became distorted to fit a global North audience’s worldview, rendering dependency theory ‘a strawman easy to destroy’, the debates about decolonisation and decoloniality have been shoehorned into the frameworks and politics of global North academia. As André Gunder Frank became the representative of dependency theory in the global North – papering over rich discussions and nuance within Latin America and beyond – the decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo has, arguably, to a large degree become the spokesperson for decolonisation efforts, representing a similar kind of distortion and simplification. And as with dependency theory, decolonial theory was also twisted to serve a political function for global North academia, which became increasingly concerned with discrimination, identity, epistemology, and critiques of grand structural narratives in the 2010s.
A radical decolonization agenda and critical dimensions of decoloniality
The alternative to Eurocentric social science which I have called elsewhere, with co-authors, a radical decolonization agenda, draws on a range of radical traditions and builds on the early decolonization debates that emerged in the 1960s. The agenda involves exposing the vantage point of theorization, situating theorization within the global capitalist order and building a radical critique of and challenge to power in all its forms. I argue that for the decolonization agenda to be radical it needs to take the form of the critique of political economy. This involves analysing dominant theories of political economy and the relationship between social relations and ideology and critiquing the global capitalist system itself through uncovering its inner workings.
Marxist understandings of Eurocentrism emphasize how Eurocentrism emerged with capitalism to offer an understanding of capitalist development as a progressive force, camouflaging its structurally violent foundations. Samir Amin is a well-known as an early Marxist critic to systematically make this link between Eurocentrism and capitalism. Eurocentrism here is not conceived of as a way of thinking particular to Europeans, but rather an ideology that emerges in European bourgeoise society and then proceeds to spread globally, yet unevenly. Critical decolonial scholars of the MCD tradition, like Aníbal Quijano, also emphasise that Eurocentrism is a ‘specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally hegemonic [and] colonizing, as much in Europe as in the rest of the world.’
Inverted eurocentrism in decolonial theory
A less well-known aspect of Samir Amin’s work is his analysis of inverted Eurocentrism. He argues that Eurocentrism is likely to develop a particular, related, form in some parts of the world, which entails a romanticisation of cultures and institutions that are pre-modern, non-European, pre-capitalist or pre-colonial. According to Amin, such inverted Eurocentrism can take two forms: religious fundamentalism and provincialism. Given that inverted Eurocentric views follow the same logic as Eurocentrism in focusing on a few unique traits of a society, they fall short of linking these with the contradictions inherent to the global capitalist system more broadly and the uneven development central to it.
What has become the dominant understanding of decolonial theory in the global North – as represented by the work of Mignolo – is arguably an example of inverted Eurocentrism. For Mignolo, Eurocentrism is related primarily to location and to the epistemic, as he dismisses anything that has come out of Europe as Eurocentric, including Marxist critique of political economy. Consequently, for him, decolonisation requires epistemic delinking from European ways of knowing.
There are two ways in which inverted Eurocentrism plays out in this strand of decoloniality.
The first is the essentialisation of the Indigenous, local, and the longing for a seemingly pristine past. In fact, some critics have traced the genealogy of decolonial theory’s essentialisation of identity to the German philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, who constructed a conception of authenticity by appealing to a past freed from modern constraints. Heidegger rejected universalizing rationalities and proposed instead a counter-myth of rootedness in place and environmentally bound traditions as ‘the only secure foundation for political and social action’. It is this reasoning that led Heidegger to reach his accommodation with Nazism, and such reasoning continues to inform nativist rhetoric, including in its decolonial guise.
The second form of inverted eurocentrism shows up as co-optation by authoritarian regimes of decolonial language and concepts to reinforce policies that serve to marginalize minority groups. For example, decolonial scholarship has been used to support both Indian and Russian authoritarianism.
Implications of the epistemic turn away from capitalist critique
Starting from a radical decolonization agenda and the critique of political economy, understanding the economy in a way that does not reproduce Eurocentrism entails starting from social relations and class formation and analysing them in the context of global capitalism. As such, while we can acknowledge that the development of capitalism involved a change in social relations creating a proletariat and ‘free’ labourers in Europe, we must also recognize that this transformation was ultimately a global one that was part of a unified network of commodity production and exchange on a global scale, involving many different forms of labour. What’s more, recognizing value as a universal relation requires a radical universalism. This entails moving beyond the universal/particular binary to rather analyse situations or struggles through the prism of their material conditions.
Some of the critical decolonial scholars of the MCD tradition also focused centrally on how capitalism arose as a global system that incorporated diverse and heterogeneous histories into a single world system dominated by European capital, thus explicitly challenging the diffusionist and evolutionist Eurocentric story of mainstream social science. These strands of decolonial scholarship share theoretical ground with the Marxist critique of political economy. Rather than provincializing or rejecting European thought, they wanted to ‘globalize the periphery’.
While these arguments stand in stark contrast to Mignolo’s anti-Marxism and can, arguably, contribute positively to a radical decolonization agenda, there are also crucial tensions to consider. Although several of the MCD members contributed to Marxist theorisation and scholarship in the 1970s to 1990s, many of them shifted away from Marxism and the critique of political economy later on as they turned towards studying coloniality. There are at least three implications of this shift.
First, with the emergence of the debates about coloniality, many of the MCD group members demonstrated less interest in capital accumulation and the social formations that emerge from it. Instead, the coloniality of power became more of a background for analysing knowledge systems. Second, a general vagueness about the system is introduced in some MCD work that sometimes served to obscure analysis, critique and action. For example, although Quijano names capitalism much more explicitly than Mignolo ever does, he is nonetheless, in many of his texts, quite evasive about the internal relations of the system. Third, and finally, with the neglect of social relations and material conditions, the MCD members also become increasingly preoccupied with epistemology, moving away from considering modes of production in capitalism to focusing on modes of production of knowledge. This opened the door for Mignolo’s framework to become enormously influential in communicating decoloniality as a primarily epistemic project, rather than a political or territorial one.
The implications of inverted Eurocentrism
The consumption of decolonization in elite universities has been heavily tainted by inverted Eurocentrism, limiting critique to identity and knowledge systems, which fits neatly with the neoliberalisation of academia more generally. A more fruitful approach would be to recover, advance, develop and engage with the wealth of anti-Eurocentric critiques of political economy that have come out of both the global North and South, and to connect these to the material realities of the universities themselves and broader struggles in society.
The universalizing forces of capital continue to have devastating consequences for people across the globe, and especially for marginalized groups in the global South. As such, dividing people into social groups and focusing exclusively on difference and identity, with disregard for forces that bind us, albeit in uneven ways, is not just a problem for understanding connections in the world, but also for building internationalist movements of solidarity and resistance.
Thinking back to the US imperialist intervention in Latin America, the Middle East and its support for the occupation of Palestine – it becomes evident that a radical decolonization agenda looks for structural, rather than epistemic-based or liberal analysis of the current geopolitical moment. This means linking US interventions and resistance to it to material relations of empire and capital, rather than the more superficial focus on racist discourse, interests of lobby groups, or the competence of US President Donald Trump.
This blog post is based on a recent article in Development and Change’s debate section. Read the full article here.
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven (ingrid.kvangraven@kcl.ac.uk) is a Senior Lecturer in International Development at King’s College, London. Her work focuses on money, finance, empire, economic development and the decolonization of the economics discipline. She is co-author of the book Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction (Polity Press, 2025).
Image: Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes