Online event organized on September 8th, 2023.
The enduring problem of extractivism remains at the center of decolonial critique and action: Rejecting and fighting the extraction of habitatspeople and ideas in the service of imperialist societies. This, moreover, entails fighting and negotiating the forced imposition of ideologies and relationships that condition, if not shape, how people live, work and relate with their habitats, ecologies and the peoples within them.
How people identify the ‘colonial model’ will determine how terms like “decolonization” and “decolonality” are used. Is it possible to decolonize ‘state institutions,’ ‘international relations,’ ‘national security’ and ‘extractive industries’ or are these claims a symptom of “an insidious conciliatory process of decolonial recuperation rooted in cultural and symbolic change primarily fixated on transforming social stature” (IAM, 2017: 3)? Decolonization implies anti-colonial warfare, combating statist counterinsurgency and neoliberalism, which the Zapatista’s acknowledge the latter, as “a new war to conquer territories” (Marcos, 2001: 559). Is “the decolonial current just an academic trend” (Esteve, 2023 [2018]: 134) spreading political divisions, essentialized identities and rudimentary binaries? Is the state an evolution of the colonial model and, if so, what does this mean for representative democracies and the social democratic ‘Nordic model’?
This Exalt Dialogue seeks to look at these questions and more with Amanda Lickers, Kiran Asher, Usman Ashraf, and Japhy Wilson, theorists challenging and fighting extractivism and (neo)colonialism.
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