What Is Anti‐Colonial Global Social Theory?

Abstract

Anti‐colonial social theory is a set of ideas, assessments and practices of metatheoretical nature that have originated within anti‐colonial thought. As a methodology it theorises and interrogates the ideological within the empirical, the theoretical, and the ‘scientific unconscious’ of fields/disciplines. While criticising late 19th Euro‐American theories as universal set of propositions, it locates its limitations and presents ways to unravel the ideological‐political elements that structure thought and scholarship. It also presents ways through which new global theories may be conceptualised and researched. The paper engages, analyses, compares and assesses various methodological interventions made by anti‐colonial social theorists regarding colonialism, its origin and its continuities; its pasts and presents in distinct times and epochs and in its varied spatial geographies and suggests that these can become tools to define global social theory.