No link! Terms like “Western” and “the West” are shorthand, not complete theories.

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.