Epistemic consequences matter just as much as instrumental ones and should be evaluated on their own terms. Their interp is not a neutral middle ground.

This entanglement means that many of the conceptual and analytical tools that were developed through European modernity, and that we still use today to access and understand reality, have colonial foundations and implications. An uncritical use of the central categories and concepts of modernity is thus often bound to a reproduction of coloniality. If we are to question and undo coloniality, we need to interrogate how we understand the world we live in, how we perceive it, through which analytical constructs, and what impact these have on our realities. Thought constructs are never left entirely to theory. They have practical foundations and consequences. How we articulate and deploy them may enable and/or prevent certain interventions in the world. The organisation of our socio-political subjectivities and lives is influenced by the concepts and underlying knowledge we use. As Bonaventura de Sousa Santos pointed out: “There is no knowledge that is not known by someone for some purpose. All forms of knowledge uphold practices and constitute subjects” (2014: 201). As such, the overarching question behind a possible decolonial rearticulation of political concepts, be it from academia or from movements politics, is what kind of practices and subjects do we want to create and foster through our use of language?

This is precisely why language has received significant attention in decolonial thinking. Indeed, recognising the entanglement of modernity and coloniality unavoidably poses the question of possible tensions and even contradictions between the task of decolonisation and the use of certain political categories in their inherited modern forms. Using the language of the coloniser – the language of European modernity – to express and understand the experience of the colonised and to articulate the decolonial seems problematic. As a consequence, Gloria Anzaldúa (2009) called women of colour to “speak in tongues”, in a language of the subaltern different from the predominant white male language that would properly encapsulate their own experiences, culture, and thinking. In the same vein, Kwasi Wiredu (1995, 1996) advanced a recentring of African (and especially Akan) political philosophy as a theoretical repertoire better equipped to articulate practical resolutions to some of the continent’s pressing challenges. Indeed, the language we use defines the contours of reality and possibility and thus circumscribes political imagination and praxis in potentially limiting ways. Audre Lorde’s (2007) famous assertion that “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house” comes to mind. Even when Western political thought and its categories are not necessarily the language of expression used by colonised peoples, the latter have often been historically forced to use them in order to be heard and/or understood.

However, several decolonial thinkers have argued for a politically emancipatory use of the coloniser’s oppressive language. For instance, Frantz Fanon (1967) and Aimé Césaire (2001) defended the use of French as a means to create a new language capable of articulating and communicating the experiences of the colonised. New means of expression forged out of a colonially loaded point of departure. Similarly, proponents of creolisation have defended the possibility to hijack existing languages and categories through the radical encounter between different cultures resulting in the formation of something new out of something pre-existing (Bernabé et al., 1990; Gordon, 2014; Monahan, 2011; Sealey, 2020). Creolisation is thus an empowering appropriative movement consisting in “the strategic, unauthorised appropriation of symbols of power […] which become empowering against their initial purpose” (Romberg, 2002). Indigenous scholarship also provides many examples of how Indigenous politics are actually appropriating key Western political concepts and their associated practices to imbue them with their own worldviews and make them work for their aspirations, thus gradually performing a conceptual decolonisation that can permeate the societies they live in as well as broader intellectual geographies (Coulthard, 2014; Lightfoot, 2021; Turner, 2006). Therefore, two main paths appear to open up in the task of decolonising political concepts. One pursues the reinstatement of erased languages and concepts different from those of the Western modern apparatus. Another focuses on re-signifying existing concepts in order to transform their conceptualisation and thus their impact on the world. Both are potentially complementary.

Naming is thus key in decoloniality. To name what has been excluded and negated. To adequately name what exists in order to reveal the coloniality of power and knowledge. Who gets to do the naming may be even more crucial. The Western modern rationality defining most of the concepts of predominant contemporary political thought constrains our thinking and forecloses the conditions of possibility. “Terminologies demarcate a field, politically and epistemologically. Names set up a field of power” (Trouillot, 1995: 115). When used uncritically, such terminologies may even condition and orient the cognition of anti-colonial or anti-racist discourses because of their underlying socio-political and structural implications. They may allow and reify a distortion of reality to comply with the matrix of coloniality, thus functioning as self-validating devices. This is why we need to lay bare how some conceptual tools are inadequately representing diverse experiences of reality and how they reproduce the conditions of coloniality. Adopting a decolonial attitude is to “critically review the entire arrangement of basic philosophical areas and concepts” (Maldonado-Torres, 2018: 124). It is also to articulate an alternative thinking starting from somewhere else than modernity/coloniality, from other ideas and imaginaries (whether or not we use the same tools). Therefore, in this volume and beyond, we aim to have an interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue to challenge what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls “research through imperial eyes” (1999: 42). We want to tackle the assumption that Western ideas and notions are the only rational ones, the only ones making sense of the world, of reality, of social life, and of human beings. This has to come hand in hand with a reversal of “hermeneutic injustice” (Alcoff, 2017) by which non-Western voices have been excluded from participating in the construction of the predominant concepts and terms that frame our collective world. The aim here is not only to include but to learn from these marginalised and silenced perspectives. Given the reciprocal incompleteness of cultures and knowledges (Santos, 2014), such an epistemological dialogue appears as the only possible path. Decolonising political concepts is precisely about birthing new constellations of meaning that acknowledge and embrace epistemological plurality and thus work against the illusion of objectivity and universality in Western conceptions.

At this point, the significance of addressing and re-thinking from a decolonial perspective the political concepts that make up contemporary political discourse should be palpable. They constitute windows through which we see the world, but whose frames can and do foreclose our possibilities and imaginaries. Some considerations on how ‘political concepts’ are generally understood throughout the volume seem necessary, especially in relation to the specificities of a decolonial endeavour. It is our collective understanding here that concepts are not merely political due to the fact that they are used to encapsulate, describe, or analyse matters concerning political life. What makes a concept ‘political’ is also the fact that it is deployed in political life itself in order to pursue and hopefully actualise particular agendas (Norberg, 2015). Conceptions thus can be – and often are – multiple in relation to the same concept. These differences in conceptualisation are oftentimes the result of either explicit or implicit diverging political ontologies, of attempts to influence and direct the ‘reality-shaping’ function that concepts perform, or of both. Contestation over the definition of political concepts is thus rarely the result of a purely intellectual exercise happening in a political vacuum. Their meanings are politicised and deeply embedded in the political realities in which they are produced and deployed.

A variety of actors, from academics to politicians or activists, mobilise the same concepts in diverging ways. Each of them advances a slightly to significantly different version of the same core idea in order to support their own claims and aspirations. This is how the same concepts have historically been articulated in progressive, conservative, democratic, authoritative, colonial, decolonial, oppressive, and emancipatory projects. Democracy stands as the banner of different political factions with radical variations in the values and institutions they ascribe to such an idea (Connolly, 1993; Skaaning, 2021). Sovereignty is claimed by both settler states and by some Indigenous communities in settler colonial contexts, although their conceptualisations are at times radically dissonant (Clavé-Mercier, 2022). Opposing sides have often faced – and even killed – each other due to their respective understandings of justice (Heywood, 2013). In the United States, the existence of two distinct views of freedom based on diverging moral and political beliefs has been argued to be one of the reasons for the existing profound social division (Lakoff, 2006). Political concepts thus appear contingent and historical. Active contestation around their definitions – as the ones illustrated in the volume’s chapters in the case of ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, or ‘indigeneity’, for instance, is a testimony of their lack of universal, fixed, and intrinsic essences. In fact, most – if not all – political concepts are “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie, 1956) by the very fact that they deal with politics, a characteristic apparently heightened in the 20th and 21st centuries (Boromisza-Habashi, 2010). Analysing and conceptualising political life is thus, intrinsically, participating in it as well.

However, the deployment of political concepts in daily political discourse and practice and their analysis in academic fields are both marked by the same recurring trend towards depoliticisation:

A problem that all political concepts share, and which the study of political concepts faces, is the urge to depoliticise. Political concepts are ( relatively) settled meanings, and in studying political concepts there is an urge to set out a neutral (impartial, shared) language of political discourse, even or especially when dealing as politics does with contestability and deeply held differences. In addition there is a tendency to think that the study of political concepts has greater legitimacy and so trumps uses of political concepts by engaged practitioners. (Prokhovnik, 2007: 27)

In decolonising political concepts, we precisely seek to run counter to these depoliticisation efforts that more often than not enshrine Western conceptualisations as the universal and neutral essence of concepts that crucially define and shape our political realities. Such a task also requires us to question and re-configure our understanding of ‘the political’ or of ‘political concepts’ as the semantic field they open up is neither clearly delimited nor are the genealogical lines simple or unambiguous. If we are to engage in a genuine epistemological dialogue with political ontologies that may significantly differ from those that have so far constituted the centre of contemporary political thought, this means that the borders of what is political may need to be pushed or blurred. Finally, decolonising political concepts is also impossible if we limit ourselves to the confines of the academic and intellectual spheres. As Raia Prokhovnik rightly stresses above, practitioners engaged in daily political practices are also key in conceptual definition and transformation. Given the considerable limitations placed on colonised peoples to access the well-guarded academic positions, as well as the significant weight that praxis has in the decolonial projects, the theoretical and conceptual agency of ‘on-the-ground’ practitioners needs to be adequately acknowledged and embraced if we are to decolonise political concepts.

As it stands, our collective endeavour thus joins in the efforts of conceptual history in that it similarly takes aim at the idea of clearly bounded, static, and stable concepts (Koselleck, 2002; Pernau & Sachsenmaier, 2016). We do agree with conceptual historians that concepts have histories and that their meanings mutate through time. However, we take these efforts further as we engage with voices and knowledges that are mainly side-lined in the resulting “histories of concepts”. We do not mean here to adapt or implement Koselleck’s theory of conceptual history, but rather to focus on and open a dialogue with conceptualisations that have been dismissed by a history largely written, understood, and conceptualised as European. To decolonise political concepts means to disrupt Western understandings, knowledge, and socio-political practices by unsettling embedded colonial relations. It means to give special attention to how coloniality has featured in the histories of different concepts and to make contributions to these histories made by equally valid theorising and practising subjects located beyond European modernity front and centre.