Decolonize or Form an Alliance?

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**Decolonize or Form Alliances?**
**Authors (in alphabetical order):**

Yousra Abourabi¹, Xavier Anglaret², Baudoin Dupret³, Jean-Noël Ferrie³, Sophie Karcher², Raoul Moh⁴, Zineb Omary¹.
¹International University of Rabat; ²University of Bordeaux; ³Sciences Po Bordeaux; ⁴Félix Houphouët-Boigny University.

In a world subject to multiple crises—energy, climate, environmental, and economic—the struggle for increasingly scarce natural resources exacerbates international practices aimed at predation (1). These practices can be of a colonial type (direct political control supported by military coercion) or neocolonial (indirect domination primarily through economic or cultural means) (2). Academic networks that bring together teams from countries with asymmetric resources are caught within this reality, subjecting them to external pressures and internal tensions (3).

We are currently establishing an international interdisciplinary research network to study the challenges that the African continent will face in the coming years in health, urbanization, food, work, and environment. Founded by academic teams from universities in Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and France, this network is open to researchers from all countries and institutions without restriction, provided they adhere to the founding charter. This charter commits to: applying the highest ethical standards in research; identifying research questions with concerned populations; utilizing local expertise whenever possible; balancing governance, distribution of credits, and visibility of each contribution to the network; ensuring fairness in authorship rules; limit equitable use of air travel; and, finally, clear-eyed analysis of the asymmetric geopolitical strategies of the members’ countries.This last point stems from a reflection on the concept of decolonization, yet the word decolonize does not appear in the charter. This requires explanation.

The concept of decolonization poses no problem for us. The production of science, like many other activities, has indeed been colonized by one part of the world dominating another (4). This colonization was not only quantitative, favored by economic domination, but it has also durably corrupted knowledge to the point of creating qualitative injustices known as epistemic injustices. To correct these injustices, we need to decolonize knowledge.

However, decolonizing knowledge is not synonymous with decolonizing. If a discipline is engaged in a decolonization of knowledge, its invited to collectively evolve its methods. In contrast, asking a professional environment to decolonize implies that its practices are deemed colonialist. This defamatory term, besides potentially bringing exchanges between partners to their Godwin point (5), introduces an ambiguity that undermines the cause it wants to serve: correcting injustices.

Injustices exist in scientific research, as in any profession. They can be epistemic but also non-epistemic. They might be linked to the history of colonization of the global North over the global South, but also be intra-North (with linguistic dominance by English sometimes perceived as a source of injustices) or interdisciplinary (with so-called hard sciences potentially believing themselves in a dominant position over human and social sciences). They can have colonialist overtones referring to recent history, but also operate through universal interhuman domination mechanisms as old as humanity itself (6, 7).The tendency to use the term decolonize to label the fight against all types of injustices (sexism, racism, abuse of economic or sociocultural power, etc.) thus creates confusion. Our intuition is that, in a world under growing tension, this confusion may paradoxically benefit new colonizers.

A portion of living species, including the human species, is now threatened with extinction after being exposed to extreme suffering (8-10). The emerging world is unfortunately not one of collective efforts to emerge together: it is one of every man for himself and exacerbation of struggles for resource appropriation (11, 12). Powerful entities, whether leading predatory institutions or merely occupying positions that allow them to exert domination in their environment, have always managed to make altruistic declarations contrasting with their actions. They will therefore know how to commend the decolonization movement within their institutions, providing them with a cheap certificate of good morality. Meanwhile, they can continue to make the academic research environment increasingly dependent on economic interests, thus transforming it into a scientific endorsement of policies exacerbating inequalities (13).

Simply put, when non-dominants are occupied with decolonizing, the dominants dominate better (14). The injunction to decolonize thus becomes paradoxical, paralyzing, and frustrating.To break free, we must develop transnational networks whose members are aware of both the weight of colonial history and contemporary threats that urgently require unity. It is within transnational networks that researchers from different backgrounds, cultures, and trainings can find the most appropriate level to decolonize knowledge, define balanced partnership rules, analyze predatory international relations and their toxic consequences, and produce the transdisciplinary knowledge the world will need to illuminate difficult decisions. Transnational interdisciplinary networks have the advantage of being polycentric (15), providing horizontal support that eases the vertical pressure of each members home institutions and environments. They not only encourage exiting coloniality—the asymmetry established by colonization that persists beyond it (16)—but also help transcend the concepts of post-coloniality and post-occidentalism, which mask the hegemonic powers of scientific knowledge under a cultural label. They eventually create a multilateral dynamic where local epistemes can interact while preserving their predicates (17).

The word transnational is not magic. It does not solve everything, does not eliminate funding asymmetries, does not erase mutual interests (18), nor does it rewrite a history of injustice and domination (19, 20). But when members of a transnational collective succeed in recognizing each other not as mere partners but as allies, they handle the resentments linked to history more easily and unite more effectively to achieve the same goal (21, 22).The main objective of humanity should be to limit climatic and environmental upheavals (23). We will not achieve this objective without combating all injustices, whether economic, social, racial, gender-based, energy-related, political, health-related, climatic, or epistemic—the list is not exhaustive (11, 24-27). This struggle must happen at all levels: local, national, and transnational. Decolonize knowledge is an excellent call to arms, but it is partial. One could complement it with this: Scientists of the world, unite! 

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