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It seems that the first to use the term “decolonising the mind” was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan novelist (Citation1986), though only in connection with the language of African fiction. The “decolonial turn” in social sciences began in the early 2000s with the emergence of decolonisation theory or “decolonising” and “decoloniality” thinking in Latin America, in the power structure studies. Decolonial theory deals with the origins and nature of coloniality of power in the modern world, and, by definition, its scope is sociological and structural, rather than discursive. Yet, as with Afrocentrism and postcolonialism, it, too, rebels against Eurocentric modernity by uncovering the “dark side” of its history which, it is thought, will move this modernity away from the Eurocentric narrative, which, in the protagonists’ view, still dominates academic minds (Tlostanova Citation2009, Citation2019).

Whatever the main academic field of the proponents of these (and many other) decolonising theories or philosophies, one of their main preoccupations is often history. They believe that modernity was created exclusively by Europeans, that it is “white,” “Western,” and consequently “colonial.” Many are convinced that neither a particular vision of the world, nor the ways of understanding and rationalising it have been or can be – or even should be – shared across civilisations, races, nations, ethnicities and cultures. Apart from everything else, this means denying the universality of epistemology. According to the predominant tendency in decolonial thought, the existing epistemology has been imposed on the colonised world by colonisers through their education. In the process it has been killing off local, native epistemologies. “The colonial conquest of Africans – body, mind and soul – has led to real or attempted epistemicide – the decimation or near complete killing and replacement of endogenous epistemologies with the epistemological paradigm of the conqueror,” writes Nyamnjoh (Citation2012, 129).

Interestingly, in its formative phase, postcolonialism similarly homogenised the West as a stereotype – to the extent, as Aijaz Ahmad (Citation2000) reminds us, that its leading scholars took no responsibility for any offences committed (whether contemporaneously or historically) by non-Western societies, either in the form of the religious nationalism of the massacre during the partitioning of India and Pakistan, or when it came to caste-driven communalism as a racist social construct and even, as I shall demonstrate, conspiratorial readings of the transatlantic slave trade. Homogenising the West enabled the erasure of class or political responsibility from the new Left’s critical lexicon, but it invited a host of critical responses. Following the reception of Edward Said’s Orientalism in the 1980s, postcolonialism went through a process of theoretical contestation and revision, which climaxed with the infamous Salman Rushdie affair. At that point, Ahmad documents, a change of perspective commenced because it became untenable to hold onto the necessary anticolonial, strategic fiction of an essentially good black subject (Citation2000, 198–202). Faced with the call for Rushdie’s death and witnessing the burning of the books in Bradford, uncannily reminiscent of Nazi book burning half a century earlier, signified that the contemporary Wretched of the Earth may not be inherently ethical after all (Hall Citation1996, 144–145; Said Citation1994). Within this malaise, colonial discourse analysts problematised the values of the anticolonial societies, as well as their historical trajectories. Colonial discourse analysts argued that Africa, the East and the West do not signify natural or metaphysical entities. Instead, they designate discursively constructed stereotypes, “essentialising representations,” that operate as complex and partial points of identification, producing racial subjects (Goldberg Citation1993, 45–51). Deconstructing and diagnosing pathological racial subjects from postcolonial societies, characterised by exclusionary nativism, violent patriarchy and a predatory cult of venality necessitated drawing on the theoretical resources of poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and other radical intellectual sources. I will demonstrate that – at their most radical – these traditions bequeathed a constructivism and nominalism to postcolonialism which enabled it to demonstrate how the strategic essentialism of the anticolonial struggle often devolved into the stereotypical, regressive nationalism of the Postcolony.

Similarly, Decolonial theory’s conceptualisation of colonisation as epistemic violence as a metaphysical rendering of colonialisation performs the same homogenising function. One of the contentious claims made by Decolonial theory is that because the practice of decolonisation was not epistemological in its liberation of indigenous knowledge, it ought to be considered a failure. This reading, I argue, ignores that the “ambiguities and richness of the moment of decolonisation were never exhausted by antinomies set up” between global culture as either subjugation or liberation (Chakrabarty Citation2009, 280). It is important to remember that anticolonial modernisers did not differentiate between the pursuit of science and technology to develop their countries to catch up with the economic position of the West (secular, universal knowledge), and the restructuring of local education and cultural systems around indigenous values (particular traditions) in the way contemporary decolonial thinkers do. As highly educated elites trained in the colonial metropolis, they were very aware (there were exceptions of course) that there is an unbridgeable epistemological gap between the idea of formal scientific knowledge of an immanent post-Copernican world and Western religious traditions, that is, the dualistic Christian theological metaphysics that decolonial criticism has identified as characteristic of modernity. Consequently, the contemporary decolonial critique of anticolonial secular epistemology collapses the foundational epistemological distinction between faith and knowledge. What is interesting, and worth interrogating, is how contemporary decolonial thinkers have collapsed this distinction, come to endorse an incoherent relativistic epistemology in the process undergirded by an uncritical moralising impulse, reducing Western epistemology to a singular intention (the ego conquiro), thereby conflating religious faith with scientific knowledge, which was not a mistake made by their forebears. Ultimately, the discourse of decolonisation was conditioned by two concerns: Development (of the universal) and dialogue (of particular cultures) in constituting a cosmopolitan world.

On this basis, I think it is mistaken to imply that these intertwined material and ideological practices can profitably be subsumed into, or made a consequence of, “coloniality of knowledge.” In short, Mignolo's account misapprehends the fact that it is these constitutive material practices—not simply the world of the colonial/modern “imaginary” that they birthed—that extend into the present (Mignolo, 2012, p. 6). The more compelling interpretation presented by scholars of Indigenous and settler-colonial studies is that there is in fact no clear “event” of rupture (see Wolfe, 2006) or sharp distinction in the Americas between the formal colonization and occupation of Indigenous societies’ lands and a subsequently more informal, diffuse set of colonial practices to be labeled as coloniality. Mignolo is certainly right that imperial and national narratives are entangled. Yet, this intertwinement is only plausible if interpreted as a statement about the material structures through which these narratives help to constitute (and do ideological work in service of the reproduction of) hierarchically stratified collective subjectivities.

To be sure, my own account of settler-colonial formations should not be overgeneralized nor isolated from other axes of power (Vimalassery et al., 2016). Moreover, marking the end of formal colonial rule is crucial for some contexts in which the imperial power and/or colonizer society is forced out but creates intermediary structures of unequal relations mediated through bilateral and international institutions. The latter are properly the subject of an analysis akin to forms of “neo-colonialism,” dating back to Nkrumah's (1966) classic work. Note, however, that account would mischaracterize a significant aspect of the situation of Latin America. Indeed, Mignolo's claim that the “conditions have changed. Colonizers were no longer occupying countries” obscures the ongoing settler-colonial dynamics of the very geographies where Mignolo situates his own thinking (Ybarra, 2017).

In conclusion, I briefly suggest an alternative to Mignolo's epistemic politics, which I refer to as worldly anticolonialism. What I call worldly anticolonialism addresses epistemic challenges to colonial categories such as dominant universalisms with an eye targeted to their identifiable historically situated political effects. Accordingly, an analysis based on worldly anticolonialism would ask how such categories of thought take material form, in relation to specific terrains of anticolonial political struggle that have been shaped by variable colonial relations of power. One analogous approach can be found in recent work by Mamdani (2020), who analyzes how continued investments in the category of the “nation” in settler and postcolonial societies alike have themselves been generated through the politically mediated fashioning of specific collective constituencies. The political identities and imaginaries of these constituencies are deeply bound to the colonial past not only as pure epistemology but through constitutive political and historical processes.7 To illustrate some more specific benefits of worldly anticolonialism as a point of departure, I turn to the complex relationship between organized labor struggles and Indigenous peoples’ struggles.

Consider that leadership of major trade unions throughout North America largely continues to believe that extracting more fossil fuels on Indigenous lands will furnish some of the few remaining good jobs in an environment of radical austerity and upward redistribution (Sanicola & Williams, 2021). This framing of worker interests makes it far easier for fossil fuel corporations to create a profoundly antagonized field of political contest pitting “workers’ interests” (jobs) against those of “Indigenous peoples” and environmental movements (keeping oil in the ground) (Walia, 2015).8

Finally, our use of labels such as ‘West’ or ‘Western’ throughout the volume warrants a final introductory consideration. First of all, ‘Western political thought’ is here understood as a “body of political, legal and social theory developed by European, American, Australian and New Zealand authors and practitioners from the beginning of the modern period in Europe to the pres- ent” (Ivison et al., 2000: 2). While it seems undeniable that Western political thought has been dominated by some form or variation of modern liberalism for some centuries now, it is however a varied and contested body. Neither is it diametrically opposed to non-Western forms of thought. The development of both Western and non-Western political thought has rarely – if ever – been hermetically sealed processes, especially in contexts where colonisation processes led (or forced) to mutual influence. The aim of this volume is definitely not to condemn theories and authors that can be considered ‘Western’, but to critically question them and to profitably introduce them into decolonisation debates. Some of our contributors’ chapters actually advance a decolonisation of political concepts through discussions of theories and scholars that shaped the so-called ‘Western’ canon. In doing so, the contributions draw on different theoretical strands emerging from/within it, such as French Theory, the Frank- furt School or US-American Critical Race scholarship. In their discussion, it is shown that the particular theoretical frameworks developed by Western authors may also provide productive and emancipatory answers to the prevailing power structures. Thus, Western political thought should not be treated as a homogeneous corpus.

The same occurs with the ‘West’. Throughout this introduction and this collection, our use of such a label does not stand for a particular geographical place or a specific site of knowledge production. Instead, it encapsulates a set of particular ontologies, epistemologies, worldviews, and subjectivities that are deeply intertwined with modernity/coloniality. The ideological West can thus be challenged from inside the geographical West or instead be predominant and defended outside of it. Borrowing from Yarimar Bonilla, the West is a project, not a place (2017: 334). A project in that it pursues the actualisation of a particular mode of being, of knowing, of deciding, of living collectively, etc. But also a project in the sense that it has never been totally and purely realised, it remains an aspiration. Much of this continued incompleteness rises from its constitutive relation with what would be the non-West, and from the continued existence of alternative modes of existence to those of the West. Indeed, as Hesse points out, “we should […] consider the West as always already creolized by virtue of its modernity and coloniality” (2011: 41). However, ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ are still useful “short-hand for constellations of sources, issues, and methods of argumentation that […] produce family resemblances and recognizable attributes” and thus “cannot be dispensed with, since they are forms of representation embedded in mythologies that anchor our understandings” (Gordon, 2014: 205). They are nonetheless terminologies to be adopted critically. The very least, as we did here, is to maintain an explicit acknowledgement of their intrinsic limitations, the main one being their obfuscation of the often intertwined constitution of what falls under these denominations.

What does decolonization entail? Does it mean reverting to the status quo applied in pre-colonial times? That would be a gross oversimplification. Africa intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and others have all contributed to this discourse. Contemporary interpretations of this concept range from the moderate to the radical feminist. An example of the former is Kwasi Wiredu’s notion of “conceptual decolonization”:

It consists in an African’s divesting of his thought of all modes of conceptualization emanating from the colonial past that cannot stand the test of due reflection. This divesture does not mean automatically repudiating every mode of thought having a colonial providence. That would be absurd beyond description.24

First, the creation of new forms of property rights is likely to interfere with the operation of the existing local systems in a variety of problematic ways. The narrow economic focus that the global intellectual property regime brings to bear on the regulation of traditional knowledge creates the risk that the real benefits of local knowledge and innovation for development may fail to eventuate for the same reasons that the economic focus of the development project itself has not resulted in the anticipated benefits for the global South (see Collier 2007; Easterly 2006; Escobar 1995). In particular, it glosses over key issues about distribution of benefits and ensuring equitable access to resources. The establishment of new market-based regulatory systems over tangible resources, such as land, has a history of enabling resources that were once of broad benefit to large numbers of people to be effectively captured by a small and closed group of people. This small group is often comprised of male elites and then of foreign corporate interests at the last stage of the commodification process.12 Similar consequences are likely to flow from a market-based approach to traditional knowledge regulation.

In this respect, there are real lessons to be learnt from the work of those who have investigated the problems created by the transformation of customary tenure into western-style property regimes (Fitzpatrick et al. 2012; Platteau 1996, 2000) and also the breakdown in social relationships caused by the transformation of labour into a market-based paradigm in Melanesia (see, for example, Curry and Koczberski 2012). The expanding bodies of literature in these fields demonstrate that the social tensions caused by disputes over how to calculate and distribute resource rents have led to the phenomena known as the ‘resource curse’, whereby developing countries that are resource rich often struggle to translate their wealth into broad-based development and social conflict eventuates (see Bainton 2010; Filer and Macintyre 2006; Regan 1998). However, although generally pessimistic, there are a number of hopeful directions emerging from this literature—for example, the diverse economics approach that rejects what J.K. Gibson-Graham has termed ‘capitalocentricism’ and explores alternative economic models that coexist with capitalism in a variety of contexts (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). These demonstrate the possibilities and benefits of experimenting with ways to adapt global or western regulatory schemes in ways that are more congruent with existing regulatory structures, and which take into account a relational perspective, as developed below.

The power of concepts cannot be underestimated insofar as they simultaneously enable us to interrogate the world and take action to unsettle colonial, racist, capitalist and heteropatriarchal structures. Theories and concepts can either serve as behaviour-regulating discursive systems (Wynter, 2003) that maintain the modern/colonial order of things or they can serve as catalysts for collective action seeking to dismantle said order. When concepts are imposed on others, however, they have the pedagogical ability to distort the understanding of social reality; justify material dispossession, domination and exploitation; and prevent collective action. When concepts emerge within sites of struggle, they find their theoretical validity in their praxis orientation towards radical social transformation. González Casanova (1987) claims that it is impossible to wage a collective struggle without concepts, that is, without conceptual tools to read, interrogate and comprehend the world in which our actions unfold. Take, for instance, decolonial theories and their concomitant concepts, which are not problematic in and of themselves, as some critics like to claim, but are rather problematic when concepts are abstracted from the material contexts from which they emerge. In other words, when the symbolic (cultural) is underscored over the material (political–economic) and when both are understood as ontologically separate domains, this tends to obfuscate how they are entangled in everyday practices.

In the context of intellectual property law, decoloniality is useful in advancing critiques of the area of law’s consistent inability and refusal to recognize the full personhood, therefore creatorship and citizenship, of people of color, and building models of engagement that recognize multiverses of knowledge production, knowledge making, and indigenous wisdom, apart from their commodity value. It is also useful in thinking about policymaking as a practice of working from the bottom up instead of the top down. Deconstructing the racial logics of intellectual property law creates space for new ideas that are grounded in Otherness. Such ideas are not, by definition, emancipatory ones. However, they are prerequisites to building knowledge futures that are emancipatory.

While Mignolo sketches the importance of epistemic delinking from modernity, the specifics of his project are not always clear. Given the embeddedness of the nation-state, including its management of normative citizenship, with (neo)coloniality certainly requires moving away from inclusionary politics as a strategy for gaining full intellectual property citizenship. As Mignolo writes, “The emergence of ‘modern nation-states’ in Europe, means two things: that the state became the new central authority of imperial/colonial domination and that the ‘nation’ in Europe was mainly constituted of one ethnicity, articulated as ‘whiteness.’”30 White colonial nation-states became the arbiters of citizenship, in part through the creation of hierarchies through which they deemed themselves superior to (neo)colonial states and in part through the legal manipulation of the category itself.31 They also became arbiters of the legitimacy of knowledge, specifically who has and does not have the capacity to create.

The steady march of IP regimes across the global South has not been without resistance. We see the use of countervailing strategies and the application of IP law as a legal vehicle for ‘facilitating (or thwarting) recognition of diverse contributors to social discourse’ (Sunder Citation2006). The linking of identity politics (issues of recognition) with intellectual property (issues of redistribution) highlight the efforts of individuals from marginalized communities to resist appropriation and benefit materially from their own cultural production. Intellectual property law thus becomes more than a tool for incentivizing creativity and emerges as a terrain of struggle for social relations. The language of this struggle is voiced in terms of human rights, as both the Universal Declaration for Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights affirm the right of all peoples to be recognized for and materially benefit from their cultural creations.

However, the struggle of marginalized communities to benefit from their own production is not an even or fair one: the field is tilted. Their IP claims often do not succeed, not only because of the way the law is constructed, but equally because of their unequal bargaining capacities and resources (Sunder Citation2006). Consider how in India, Brahmin supremacy was sustained by their monopoly over education and the learning of English, and enforced by a violent system of intra – and inter-caste social restrictions and punishments (Chandra Citation2012). Even today, the upper-castes perceive themselves to be the natural inheritors of scientific research and practice in India; there is an appalling under-representation of Dalits, indigenous, and lower-caste groups in India’s leading scientific and technical institutions despite the fact they far outnumber the Brahmin minority. Access to knowledge production systems and to the markets that value this knowledge continue to be blocked by compounded access barriers. More pertinently, it is worthwhile to ask whether those long excluded from particular types of knowledge can truly be empowered upon the terrain of an alien epistemology built in tandem with social and political hierarchies whose very existence relied on scientific and moral justifications of inequality.

Definitions of renewability and extractivism are established above, but the question persists: How can industrial capitalist operations not be extractivism? Based on institutional structure and development priority, academics— and people generally—have become accustomed to and enamoured by the products of extractivism. This normalised—everyday—infrastructural reality of roads, individualized automobility, utilitarian architecture, pipes and power lines, to name a few, have consumed people wilfully, begrudgingly or somewhere in between and beyond. Remembering how Walter Rostow weaponized capitalist consumerism to win the Cold War (Cullather, 2013, 161), we might understand convenience and entertainment as capitalist ‘weapons of mass destruction’ against the planet. Modernist infrastructural regimes allow us to ignore, or even to forget, how we accommodate capitalism, industrialisation and our (forced or voluntary) servitude to the development of computational technologies. As the Mining Association of Canada (mac, 2021) exclaims: ‘Before it’s yours, its mined’.7 Thus, this bounded definition of extractivism, put forward by Gudynas (2021) and many others (Mckay, 2020; Ye et al., 2020), is accused of ignoring the complex financial and material supply webs of monocultures, research labs, schools, hospitals, police, prisons and all the rest that depends on plundering habitats for either materials or energy production (Dunlap, 2021b). In order for agro-extractivism to be possible in the first place, there needs to be an entire political-economic regime—the structure of conquest—in place to create the means, scale and intensity that allows agro-extractivism: chemical factories—extracting, dividing and synthesising nature—to produce pesticides and/or fertilisers; the scientific expertise and laboratories to research, develop and create genetically modified organisms (gmo s); and, now, the existing supply webs behind the application of digital technologies in agriculture, which ‘appropriate decision-making based on the flow of data from individual farms and farmers’ (Stone, 2022, 3). While Glenn Stone (2022) refers to this as ‘surveillance agriculture’, indicating how agriculture is becoming digitalized, automated and eroding control from farmers, the purpose here is to emphasises how extractive processes, or extractivism(s), are connected at various intensities through production supply webs, violent histories, economic and financial actors, and/or institutions. Agro-extractivism requires mining, and more of it as it digitalises and intensifies. The ‘innovation economy’, Antti Tarvainen (2022, 2) reminds us, depends on, emerges from, and systematically affirms settler colonialism, meanwhile refining ‘the violence of technocapitalism’ and ‘data colonialism’. The relevance of ‘global extractivism’ as an organising concept (Nygren, Kröger and Gills, 2022; Chagnon et al., 2022), affirms its relevance, as extractivism, infrastructural colonisation, and economic forces proliferate, transcend borders, intersect, and depend on multiple extractive companies and trajectories.

Coming to terms with the reality that ‘everything is extractivism’ within the dominant development paradigm is important to any effort to resituate the present planetary situation—and the action that should follow. This extractive reality should also allow people to resituate how they conceive of politics, conflict, political organisation and, consequently, ‘justice’ the last of which is discussed in the next section. Academically, if not practically, the imperative exists to take the socio-ecological damage and harm created by industrial, bureaucratic and capitalist systems seriously. Non-humans, the Indigenous, the marginalised, peoples that consume little materials and energy, moreover, are the least responsible for this socio-ecological catastrophe (Bolger et al., 2021), which is not to forget the psychosocial decay and discontent emanating from modernist affluence of high-income countries and neighborhoods (Lane, 2000; Alexander, 2008). Properly recognising the scope of this problem is the first step. Technologies and infrastructures, however, can be appropriated. This appropriation indicates the importance of taking the ‘best’ innovations from this global development process. If socio-ecological transformation is to take place, it will require serious and committed efforts to redress the violence done by technocapitalism and to build new types of (post)developmental infrastructures.

In Carceral Humanitarianism (2017), I argue against utilitarian risk-benefit calculations as a principle of ethics. There, I argue that the utilitarian calculus used by both humanitarian aid organizations and so-called humanitarian military operations (with its surgical strikes and statistical modelling) reduces human life to statistical calculations of risk or benefit—and not just risk or benefit in the absolute, but rather risk or benefit as defined by the organization or government doing the calculations. Risks and benefits are always defined with certain goals in mind. They are never without context, and therefore purely “objective” or free from politics or bias. Thus, any utilitarian calculus assumes some good or goal beyond calculation such as pain or pleasure, suffering or quality of life. Even survival—life and death—are valued relative to particular goals that defy the calculations of risk-benefit analysis. In other words, employing risk-benefit and utilitarian calculations, requires making assumptions about end goals and values that defy those very calculations. It is not just that there are always factors beyond our control and variables we do not know, as the deadly coronavirus makes painfully clear, but also that risk-benefit and utilitarian calculations do not operate in a vacuum but necessarily make assumptions about the good.

In the West, risk-benefit analysis or utilitarian calculative reasoning has become the dominant mode of addressing social issues, economic issues, and health issues. For example, Doctors without Borders uses complex risk-benefit computer modeling to set policies about where to send medical aid (Neuman, 2016).Footnote 9 And too many hospitals dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic have had to resort to triage medicine that uses risk-benefit analysis to distribute scarce resources such as ICU beds, oxygen, and ventilators.

Decolonial thought, however, does not create an epistemic hierarchy on the basis of geographical essentialisms, and neither does it advocate a simple turning to the non-West. In fact, the project decolonial theory embraces—that of border thinking—is incredibly akin to what Go describes when he refers to how anticolonial sociology is developed from relational positions “of experience, of subordination and of erasure”.

Border thinking necessitates that we engage with those epistemologies that may have been “affected by genocide/epistemicide but not fully destroyed” (Grosfoguel, 2013, p. 87). However, the “borders” from where we are thinking are not simply geographical spaces that others may simply refer to as the Global South or non-West. The border, as outlined by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), can certainly be a geographical space, but it also refers to a metaphorical space of exteriority in the world system. These border perspectives, importantly, are themselves created as “border” perspectives in virtue of extant power relations (what the decolonials would refer to as the colonial matrix of power); they are epistemologies that exist on “(the) outside invented by the rhetoric of modernity in the process of creating the inside” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 472). The border, in this sense, is not a physical space inasmuch as a relational position in the colonial world order.

First, as we’ll see in the case-studies, extractivist projects tend to assume that values can be identified in an objective and universal way.Footnote2 Plural and competing conceptualizations of the value of an artifact or of a river or mountain challenge extractivist projects; thus it becomes necessary to dismiss alternative views from other parties. When museum curators are seen as stewards who protect universal values, it becomes easier to accept the claim that they are the final arbiters of the value of Native American artifacts. Archaeologists likewise are often presented as working with superior epistemic methods, such as objectivity, traditionally defined, so that their assessments outrank others. Tribal group claims are often labeled particularistic and subjective, neither objective nor universal, and thus defeasible (Wylie Citation2002). They may also be defined as “resistance to science” (Fine-Dare Citation2002, 167). The important point to understand is that the process by which a value is defined is an interpretive practice for all parties. Allowing plural approaches to the definition of value disrupts the hegemony of academically trained experts. Thus accepting pluralist approaches to value determination will involve accepting not only a pluralism of metaphysical commitments but also pluralist approaches to the knowledge processes that identify values subject to extraction.

Second, extractivist projects have an interest in defining the value that is extracted in a non-relational way. This is a way of externalizing costs, as capitalists put it. The cost of cleaning up what has been made toxic in the process of extraction, the cost of the effects of extraction on infrastructure, the cost of regenerating raw materials when that is possible, none of these need to be addressed when the value of what is extracted can be portrayed as distinct and non-relational (see, e.g. Wallerstein Citation2006, 57). Thus the assumption that values can be transported to a new domain without being diminished assumes a non-relational, decontextualized conceptualization of values as discrete and independent of their relations to adjacent entities. Resources that are separated from their original context are not assumed to lose value in the process of removal unless they deteriorate in some material way. Further, those values that may be destroyed (such as arable land or animal habitats) in the process of extracting other values (such as mineral resources) are not co-determining or co-constitutive but merely adjacent and do not need to be factored into the quantification of the value achieved in the extraction. The belief that the values that have been destroyed in the process of extraction can be fairly paid for in a one-time payment also makes assumptions that values can be measured quantitatively and transformed into monetized elements that can then be calculated as a fair exchange.

Like the environment, knowledge is a public and common good of societies. How is such a good to be governed? Cognitive capitalism has built institutions that enable the appropriation of the surplus value generated by social knowledge and by the information produced in daily life through the use of new communication technologies and the institutional structures of intellectual property that govern international commerce today, producing what Michael Heller (1998) called the tragedy of the anticommons. In the realm of knowledge, this tragedy means the underuse of scientific knowledge as a result of the excessive use of intellectual property rights and over-patenting.

An alternative method must seek to build knowledge/ creativity systems that are free from social appropriation, i.e. cognitive systems built as shared resources (Ostrom and Hess 2011) and social public goods, not only for ethical coherence but also for economic efficiency. This construction implies a theoretical and political shift from the underlying assumptions of the tragedy of the commons (and anticommons) to rethink alternatives that enable the implementation of a cognitive rule that is pro/common of humanity and ecosystems.

Alternatively, decoloniality encompasses the efforts to challenge and overcome such a framework and to undo the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivity that is coloniality. Decoloniality thus pursues the profound decolonisation of social, political, and cultural relations beyond the mere achievement of factual independence that is often associated with ‘decolonisation’. It is therefore not only a project of critique but also a generative endeavour aiming at the actualisation of an alternative constitutively grounded in the recovery of plurality against the imposition of modernity/coloniality. As per Maldonado-Torres’ seminal definition:

decoloniality refers to efforts at rehumanizing the world, to breaking hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities and that destroy nature, and to the production of counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts, and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up multiple other forms of being in the world. (2016: 10)

Decolonisation/decoloniality is an act of refusal transformed into a life-affirming (geo)political act (Simpson, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2014). As Mbembe (2021) suggests, it is ‘a struggle by the colonized to reconquer the surface, horizons, depths, and heights of their lives…an act of rebellion turned into an act of refoundation’ (p. 44). The problem with decolonisation or decoloniality, however, is that these terms have become the property of academics who tend to empty these concepts of their geopolitical and liberatory content, including collective modes of resisting, organising and producing knowledge from below. To reclaim our histories, stories and memories implies situating the curriculum in sites of struggle. A counter-curriculum is needed to challenge the modern/colonial system of signification maintained by coloniality. Students collectively challenging modern/colonial (dis)courses are usually those who are punished, silenced and disappeared in Latin America and the Caribbean, for instance, yet these acts of rebellion have created small cracks in a system that appears unbreakable. As Wynter (1992) observes, we must refuse or ‘fail to stay the course by violating the central interdiction’ of modernity that configures our subjectivities according to colonial and colonising desires (p. 64).

Despite systematic erasures, there exists a paradox in any system of domination. In other words, resistance often appears in spaces we least expect. Schools and universities, for instance, became places of molecular resistance for Indigenous and Pan-African movements linked to decolonisation. As la paperson (2017) so clearly demonstrated, the paradox of coloniality is that symbolic and material resistance emerges within colonial spaces, namely in colonial institutions such as schools and universities (e.g. Indigenous students resisting in boarding schools and Pan-Africanist student intellectuals in universities situated in the Global North). Although the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum is a ‘behaviour-regulatory inferential system of meanings’ that constitutes the modern/colonial world symbolically and materially (Wynter, 1990, p. 358), there are moments of resistance and re-existence revealing the limitations of imposed systems. While the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum depend on the metaphysical and pedagogical imperative of negating others the right to live with dignity, is it not also true that students, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, peasant and Afro-Indigenous communities (among others) have always resisted their dehumanisation by articulating counter-discourses and practices? Is it not also true that resistance is also accompanied by re-existence, that is, by affirming reciprocal ways of being and relating? Decolonial theory, as advanced by Quijano, happens to be one of many counter-discourses and interpretive lenses that enable us to interrogate and unlearn the many ‘truths’ taught to us by educational institutions while uncovering and reclaiming other truths hidden by the curriculum.

Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite writes, “That moment of utter disaster, the very moment when it seems almost hopeless, too difficult to proceed, you begin to glimpse a kind of radiance on the other end of the maelstrom” (McSweeney n.d.). This capacity to see possibility through the depths of catastrophe and to do so from a place of investment is exquisite and humbling. Estes crafts a similar path through the crisis of settler colonial infrastructure. Estes (2019) writes that “new pipelines are creeping across the continent like a spiderweb, with frightening speed, but in the process, they are also connecting and inciting to action disparate communities of the exploited and dispossessed.”

The catastrophe of current times is clear. Across these three entangled stories of expanded reproduction, I have lingered in the violence: the necropolitics of contemporary supply chains, the colonial afterlives of its infrastructures, and the destruction of planetary ecologies that have us hurtling toward apocalypse. But what marks this moment is not just crisis but the movements creating possibility for substantial and sustained transformation. At each of the many sites we have encountered, fierce struggle confronts efforts to expand imperial reproduction. From Amazon workers to the Amazon, from the streets of Montreal to the central plains, these “disparate communities of the exploited and dispossessed” are saying no and investing instead in motion's fugitive forms. In their refusal of the status quo, these movements make possible other forms of motion.

Debora Halbert writes, “The work of asserting alternatives to intellectual property is an interpretive battle. Intellectual property remains in the process of definition—there is a struggle to define the scope and meaning of the law.”1 Examining the particularities of the struggle is useful for both imagining new ways of relating to intellectual property law and mapping new strategies for activism. The question of how resistance to intellectual property’s racial scripts works is an important one—and one upon which Lawrence Liang’s concept of porous legalities sheds light.2 Liang contends that (racial) capitalism produces residual humans—including migrants, squatters, and pirates—whose labor value is rendered obsolete. In doing so, it creates space for seepages, “the action of many currents of fluid material leaching on to a stable structure, entering and spreading through it by way of pores.”3

Seepages, by way of performative acts of resistance, erode (racial) capitalism and “gradually disaggregate its solidity.”4 The romantic academic ideal of willful resistance from a conscious understanding of politics and culture is far less common than unintentional transgressions that produce anti-racist and anti-colonial effects. The latter acts, when extrapolated across urban spaces, “[create] new conditions in which structures become fragile and are rendered difficult to sustain.”5

Both types of IP regimes – copyright and patent – use legal devices to transform knowledge into something amenable to commodification. Copyright law specifies a fixation standard: it protects the expression of ideas fixed in mediums from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated. Patent law demands non-obviousness, an inventive step from the prior art. The historical processes which configured IP law, have inextricable roots in processes of colonialism. Indigenous knowledge and practices did not receive the status of science and were not deemed worthy of protection. Instead, they have been deemed obvious or not valuable, placed within the realm of ‘public domain’ and coded as available for taking. The Western scientist takes a ‘non-novel’ and ‘obvious’ piece of traditional knowledge and converts it into something capable of industrial application: something useful, finished and patentable. As ecofeminist Vandana Shiva notes:

Under the colonial influence, the biological and intellectual heritage of non-Western societies was devalued. The priorities of scientific development and R&D efforts, guided by a Western bias, transformed the plurality of knowledge systems into a hierarchy of knowledge systems.