Essentialism claims are wrong.

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.

Within this context of border thinking, importantly, decolonial thought does not reify essentialisms between the geographies nor the epistemologies of the North (the center), and the South (the border). In fact, decoloniality is presented as being a third option that transcends the two options of Western modernity and dewesternization (Mignolo, 2011). Dewesternization, it is argued, is not on its own sufficient to delink from the colonial matrix of power. This is precisely the point Mignolo (2011), for instance, makes against the decolonization movements of the mid-20th century: they may have advocated for a dewesternization of culture, politics, and economy, but they did not necessarily detach themselves from the coloniality of knowledge and power, as seen in the cases of the Soviet empire, China, and India. In other words, within decolonial thought there is a suspicion of socio-political movements which argue that because something is based in the Global South it is inherently superior to the West, and that any knowledge system that exists in the Global South is inherently anti-colonial. Instead, there is a recognition that this West/non-West binary occludes how—as Satnam Virdee (2019, p. 6) puts it—there has always been “an East within the West and a South within the North” (and indeed, a West in the East and North in the South).

The border thinking which decolonial theory advocates, therefore, seems very similar to what Go describes at the end of his paper when he claims that “the space of the anticolonial does not mark an essential position of geography (or race, for that matter) but a relational position of experience, of subordination and of erasure”. Rather than embracing an essentialist West/non-West binary—what Go refers to as a geo-epistemic essentialism—decolonial theory merely analyses the geopolitics of knowledge. Just like Go's argument, decolonial thought holds that all knowledge is enunciated from particular positions in the colonial world order. Within this colonial world order, the positions from which we find more critical theorizing are those border perspectives—those relational position in the world system, much like what Go describes.