Decolonization is a horizon, not an attainable goal. The impossibility is the point.

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)

Such a genuine and profound decolonisation – in the sense of decoloniality – is thus an “unfinished project” (Maldonado-Torres, 2011). Unfinished because it is open-ended and because it is inherently plural and heterogeneous. Decoloniality has no definition of purity or perfection, nor an exact ideal to aspire to or a specific and defined plan of action to get there. It is an attitude based on a questioning of the existing coloniality and aimed at the generation of alternatives characterised by plurality and interconnections. “Diversality” (Bernabé et al., 1990), “transmodernity” (Dussel, 1995), or “pluriversality” (Escobar, 2020) are diverse articulations of decoloniality in action. They all point towards a decolonial horizon based on the recovery of the multiplicity of modes of existence and on the elimination of practices of hierarchisation and exclusion characteristic of coloniality.