I promised that the next news letter would be the second part of “Decolonial Shocking Surprises,” but instead, I am reproducing here an interview from 2013 in Spanish on the topic of the title. The reasons for this change are twofold and interconnected. My participation in the World Decolonization Forum conference held in Istanbul on May 11 and 12, prompted me to write something about this conference.

Among the interesting topics addressed my leitmotif in the two plenary panels in which I participated, in the interviews, as well as in conversations in the lobby of the Attaturk Cultural Center, with students and interested people who approached to ask questions, was the distinction between decolonization and de-westernization.

This distinction seems to me a key one for me at presen and, at the same time, is what has not been understood by Harald Kümmerle. Althoug the his misunderstanding is more general. A recent approach can be found here.

Consequently, in this issue of the newsletter, i reproduce an interview in Spanish from 2013 that you can find here. I will use it as a reference point for reflections in the near future. Since 2011 i have been thinking and saying that de-westernization does not question the colonial matrix of power but rather disputes its control.

Today, after Ukraine, Gaza, and the war declared by Israel and the United States against Iran, I think that de-westernization not only disputes the control of the colonial matrix of power but also projects the construction of a matrix of power in international relations that would not be colonial but relacional.

The dilemma to resolve in the future will be whether the multipolarity aimed for at by dewesternization can build a relational matrix of power instead of a colonial matrix of power among states (whether nation-states or civilization-states)

This is an open question that I will address it in future newsletters: whether democracy as a horizon for domestic governance, though not applicable to the international or interstate sphere, could be displaced by decoloniacy as a horizon for relational equity domestically and of the relational power equity in the relational matrix of power regulating. the global state order which would be the multipolar global order.

The colonial matrix of power has governed the international order since 1500 in favor of unipolaritity. The relational matrix of power should be the open horizon favoring multipolarity. In the relational matrix of power all the states will be the indispensable. This does not imply equality, but rather equity. In the relational matrix of power differences should be managed to the benefits of all rather than to the benefit of a selected group of states.

The English translation of the interview bellow, after the Spanish version of the English introduction.

Prometí la segunda parte del boletín, “Asombrosas sorpresas decoloniales”, pero, en lugar de eso, reproduzco aquí una entrevista de 2013, en español. La traducción al inglés viene a continuación. Las razones de este cambio son dos, y están interrelacionadas.

Sin embargo, la participación en la conferencia World Decolonization Forum que tuvo lugar en Estambul el 11 y 12 de mayo me incitó a escribir algo sobre esta conferencia, un tema que abordé en dos paneles en los cuales participé, en las entrevistas y en las conversaciones en el vestíbulo del Attaturk Cultural Center, con estudiantes y personas interesadas que se acercaban a preguntar, fue el de la distinción entre descolonización y des occidentalización.

Una distinción clave para mí en el presente que al mismo tiempo es, a mi juicio, lo que no se entiende en la nota de Harald Kümmerle, aunque no sólo él. Una aproximación reciente se encuentra aquí.

Esta entrega del boletín entonces consiste en la reproducción de una entrevista del 2013 que usaré como punto de referencia para varias de las reflexiones que vendrán en el futuro próximo. En aquel momento pensaba —y decía— que la desoccidentalización no cuestiona el patrón colonial de poder, sino que disputa su control.

Hoy, después de Ucrania, Gaza y la guerra declarada por Israel y Estados Unidos a Irán, pienso que no la des occidentalización no solo disputa el control del patrón colonial de poder, sino que proyecta la construcción de un patrón de poder en las relaciones internacionales que no sea colonial.

El dilema para resolver en el futuro será si la multipolaridad ambicionada por los procesos de descentralización podrá construir un patrón relacional de poder en vez de un patrón colonial de poder entre estados (sean estados-nación o estados-civilización.

Esta es una pregunta abierta que trataré en próximos boletines: la democracia como horizonte de gobernabilidad doméstica, aunque no aplicable al ámbito internacional o interestatal podría, ser desplazada por la decolonacia como horizonte de equidad relacional doméstica del patrón relacional de poder. En el orden global inter-estatal este sería el horizonte del orden global multipolar.

El patrón colonial de poder gobernó las relaciones internacionales desde 1500 en pro de un orden unilateral controlado por occidente. El patrón relacional de poder es el horizonte abierto en pro de un orden multipolar en el que ninguno de los estados será el estado imprescindible.

En un orden global multipolar, todos los estados serán imprescindibles. Lo cual no implica igualdad sino equidad. La equidad interestatal contemplará lo que corresponda, dando a cada estado lo que necesita según sus características y necesidades.

Se basa en la imparcialidad y el mutuo respeto de necesidades adaptando las normas y recursos para evitar que un estado aproveche de otro. Por ejemplo, no será posible contemplar la seguridad y soberanía de un estado en desmedro de otro.

De-Westernizing Is Not the Same as Decolonizing

Document | Biodiversity in Latin America, previously published in Otra América.By: Otra América Team

Had you heard of de-Westernization before? It’s about the struggle over control of the colonial matrix. This process is not the same as the end of colonial structures, nor does it mean dismantling the capitalist economy, but it is one of the possible paths within this tension between de-Westernization and the re-Westernization of states.

Thanks to good friends at Otra América, we got hold of Mignolo’s answers to some key questions asked during his presentation at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, which we had already reviewed here.

Maybe one of the strongest arenas of struggle is the bourgeois, secular, liberal, Euro-Western “nation-state.” The very idea of the “state” is one of the lasting inheritances of colonialism—what we call coloniality—and it is now being questioned.

Mignolo, an Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, digs deeper into this process and places it within the analytical perspective of decoloniality.

Western absolutes are beginning to crack. Both processes involve detachment, but de-Westernization is an unstoppable process that does not directly lead to decolonization. De-Westernization points toward a multipolar interstate world order, while decoloniality points toward cognitive, political, and ethical pluriversality in the public sphere.

The first breaks away from unipolarity; the second breaks away from cognitive universality in all its dimensions. Walter Mignolo’s analysis helps us avoid confusion in these turbulent times and understand what is happening in countries as far apart as Brazil, Bolivia, Syria, China, Russia, and Turkey, as well as what is happening in the public sphere of each nation-state, including the Gulf monarchies.

Both de-Westernization and decolonization are acts of disobedient response to the Western colonial order imposed on the planet, but they are not the same thing.

Q. What role does the state play in de-Westernization? How can we even talk about de-Westernization if the state itself is a Western institution?

A. First, let’s distinguish between forms of government and the “state.” There are many forms of government; all known civilizations and cultures had and still have forms of government—that is, forms of organization.

If we call every form of government a “state” (Aztec, Chinese, Muslim, Bantu, and so on), then we are preserving the universality of Western vocabulary. It would offend many people if, for example, we referred to the government of France as a “sultanate” instead of the “French state.”

In the short, regional history of Western civilization (since the Renaissance), there have been two forms of “state”: the monarchical-theological state, and the secular states that emerged from the independence movements in the Americas (independence from England, France, Spain, and Portugal) beginning in 1776, as well as the secular bourgeois states in Europe that followed the French Revolution.

The form of the “state” that became a key instrument of Westernization is the modern, secular, bourgeois state.

That is the problem today. And that is exactly what is being debated in Bolivia around the “decolonization of the state,” and also in the conversations already underway in China and Turkey about de-Westernizing the state.

Different local histories, same problem: how do you get around a form of government that became the political instrument of Westernization and modernization from the nineteenth century onward?

In Bolivia there are two debates around the decolonization of the state. One takes place within the state itself, promoted from the vice presidency and led by Bolivian intellectuals of European descent. The other, in contrast, comes from the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) and from debates led by Indigenous-Bolivian intellectuals.

In the first case, we are dealing with a decolonial discourse tied to Marxism. In the second, with a decolonial discourse rooted in ancestral forms of knowledge that predate Marxism by centuries, and even predate the emergence of Europeans and their descendants in the Americas. In both cases, the form of government known as the modern-colonial state is under debate. The fact that it is under debate is already an important step, both from a Marxist perspective and from an Indigenous one.

In China and Turkey, the local history is different. Neither of these civilizations was dismantled in the way the Inca civilization was, which covered what is now Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and northern Chile and Argentina. China was not colonized, but it did not escape coloniality.

The Opium War, beginning in 1838, destabilized China’s history, and it took more than a century to recover. In that long process of recovering from the blow of coloniality, Deng Xiaoping reoriented economic policy and managed to free China from Western dictates. In that sense, de-Westernization means taking over the economy of accumulation for the benefit of consolidating the “state” (the form of the state entered China with the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-sen). Today, the “state form,” as it entered with the 1911 Revolution—that is, the European bourgeois state displacing traditional forms of government in the name of “modernity” and “modernization”—is itself under question.

Something similar happened in Turkey. The Ottoman sultanate was not colonized. It was dismantled commercially and politically. Out of that came the modern-colonial, liberal Turkish state, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Today, in both China and Turkey, there is an awareness that the modern-colonial state in their territories was an imperial move by the West—and a source of confusion for local leaders who believed, or wanted to believe, that the modern European state would guarantee the modernization of Turkey and the Republic of China. Now they know that is not the case.

So the modern European state is under question. In Bolivia, both in the decolonization of state discourse and in the decolonization taking place in the discourse of political society (CONAMAQ). And in China, the de-Westernization of the state is being redirected toward the idea of a “civilizational state” instead of a “nation-state.”

None of these possibilities takes us to paradise. They simply show that the decolonization and de-Westernization of the state are irreversible processes. Where they will lead is not yet clear, but what is clear is that they no longer point toward the homogenization of the “modern, secular, bourgeois European state” across the whole planet.

Which means that, right now, the decolonization and de-Westernization of the state are processes, not a “coup d’état,” to be ironic, that would suddenly install de-Westernization and decoloniality overnight. Two processes, both in conflict and confrontation with re-Westernization—that is, the effort to preserve Western leadership and impose the “modern, secular, liberal state” across the planet.

Re-Westernization is the reaction to the growing presence of disobedient processes: de-Westernization and decoloniality. De-Westernization disputes control of the colonial matrix of power, while the decolonial conception of the world promotes dismantling that matrix and, therefore, dismantling both re-Westernization and de-Westernization as well.

Syria shows us very clearly the conflicts between re-Westernization (the United States and its allies) and de-Westernization (Russia, China, and their allies). Decoloniality is absent from the conflict itself, but very present in global debates, providing decolonial interpretations: neither re-Westernizing nor de-Westernizing.

That means promoting interpretations of events that reveal the dead end modernity/coloniality has led us into.

The “way out” or the “solution” no longer belongs to a single decolonial vision of the world, but to the proliferation of decolonial conceptions forged in the many local histories that Westernization has repressed and that re-Westernization continues to repress. De-Westernization contributes to these processes while also, in part, preserving a worldview in which the economy protects the economic gains of elites in their various forms, and of middle classes that find happiness in consumption.

De-Westernization stands halfway between re-Westernization and decoloniality.

Q. Could the inclusion of decolonial thought in academia, turning it into a kind of trend, cause it to lose its critical edge?

A. The worst thing that could happen to decolonial thought is not that it enters academia, but that it turns into a kind of policing and wastes energy trying to keep decolonial thought out of academia. When that happens—and it is happening—the issue is not to stop it, which would be a losing battle, but to make use of the fact that it has entered academia. Once that happens, some people will use decoloniality as a trend for personal gain, whatever that may be.

Others will use the institution to spread decolonial debate in classes and seminars, in publications, and in discussions between academia and the public sphere. I don’t think the “academization” of decolonial thought weakens it, because these processes are still restricted and minoritarian. And if it loses its critical power, it will be because decolonial thought itself has failed—and at that point, whether or not it is in academia matters very little.

Q. If decolonial thought argues that countries like Brazil or China have appropriated capitalism, but in practice they differ from neoliberal postulates… does decolonial thought take a critical position toward these “other” forms of capitalism?

These countries still show deep inequalities and injustices among their populations.

A. This is a common misunderstanding. I would even say it comes from assumptions rooted in modern epistemology. Modern epistemology tends to see everything in binary oppositions: you must either be for something or against it. Decolonial thought does not defend the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa; today, after its expansion since 2024, people often speak of BRICS+), nor does it defend de-Westernization in China or Brazil.

What decolonial thought says is that this is a response to Westernization, just as re-Westernization is a response to de-Westernization. That addresses the first point: the confusion between analysis and defense. Without defending anything, decolonial thought points out—and I have not seen this said in other possible disciplinary or ideological frameworks, such as Marxism, Islamism, or liberation theology—that for the first time in five hundred years, capital and knowledge are being controlled by “people of color” (to use Sukarno’s expression in Bandung, 1955).

That is a decolonial analysis—not a defense. So the “critical position” is explicit and firmly grounded when we say that de-Westernization “disputes control of the colonial matrix of power.” In other words, we do not say that it “questions the colonial matrix of power”; we say only that it disputes who gets to make the decisions. The 2013 episode—when Russia proposed chemical disarmament in Syria while the United States was debating in Congress an intervention announced by Obama—is a good example of what de-Westernization means, both in its grandeur and in its misery.

In the years that followed, that dispute has also played out through economic, diplomatic, and technological instruments and realignments, which function as terrains of re-Westernization and de-Westernization.

Inequalities within nation-states continue and worsen (since they now also affect “developed” states), even as interstate relations become more level. Inequalities between developed and emerging countries shrink. Inequalities within both developed and emerging states grow.

It is no longer possible to think about the world through dichotomies like imperialism or revolution. In other words: de-Westernization is not equivalent to socialism. We are not in a “new” Cold War. Thinking through the complexity of the current global order—which is neither liberal nor neoliberal, neither Marxist nor neo-Marxist, neither theological nor neo-theological—is one of the contributions of decolonial thought.

Q. The economy of accumulation (capitalism, for both liberals and Marxists) is no longer imposed by Western financial institutions, but governments and their populations still end up embracing it under a kind of seduction that, in the end, leads us to development models very similar to Western ones—or at least ones that do not seem to contribute to truly alternative visions.

A. Well, that is precisely de-Westernization. And in some way it is an “alternative vision.” For those who lead and benefit from de-Westernization, it is a major shift. For example: the growth of the middle class; the fact that the material benefits of modernity are no longer the privilege of the middle class in Western Europe, the United States, and a few semi-developed countries with low-intensity middle classes, but are now benefiting growing middle classes: the Indigenous middle class in Bolivia, the Black middle class in South Africa, the middle class in China and Singapore, in India and Indonesia, and so on.

It is not an alternative vision in the decolonizing sense, but it is an alternative vision in the sense of de-Westernization: independence from the West through capitalism and through strong states that the West would rather eliminate so that the “free market” can benefit Western corporations and states. That is what happened for five hundred years. De-Westernization keeps the economy of accumulation in place but introduces enormous changes into the world order. Ignoring those changes while waiting for a uniform, redemptive vision for everyone is an illusion that decolonial thought breaks away from, just as it breaks away from both re-Westernization and de-Westernization.