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How have intellectuals from around the world thought about inequality in the world? In light of the call for a less Eurocentric history of ideas as well as recent debates about global inequality, this article introduces a special issue on the global intellectual history of an unequal world. The issue supplements the already available scholarship in at least four ways: it delves further into other kinds of inequalities than first and foremost economic inequality; it historicises key concepts in the intellectual history of an unequal world; it incorporates fine-grained analysis of indigenous languages and concepts; it extends the analysis of historical inequality vocabularies to how inequalities were critiqued. Moreover, this introduction sheds lights on possible methodological approaches for an intellectual history of global inequality. There is a need to go against a modular approach to the history of ideas to embrace the dialectic between the specific situatedness of our topics of research and ‘global’ contexts. Questions of transfer, circulation, connections, or diffusion of ideas need to be asked on an empirical case to case basis. We therefore propose location, temporality and legitimisation/critique as key analytical concepts when exploring historical thinking on an unequal world

We live in an era that normalized absurdism and abnormality. From successive devastating economic and environmental havoc, the world is now before a pandemic with a lethal footprint throughout the ...

The paper offers literature review of the three suggested approaches that answer the question of ancient Egyptian meter. These theories reflect the constant contradictions between the dominant Euro...

The traditional industrial relations approach – focused on the state, employers and unions as main actors – faces severe limits in its capacity to analyse labour conflict in the face of the specifi...

This paper interrogates how the two major competing frameworks in the debates over framing our geological epoch – the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene – are unified in the reproduction of a Euroce...

This introductory text frames the contributions of this forum, bringing together, scholars who have been working for a long time to dismantle knowledge systems that sustain whiteness, Eurocentrism,...

Cultural Europeanisation in Peru has been an aspiration since its independence in 1821. Until 2010 the only institution of higher musical education in Peru had classical European music on a pedesta...

Coined by Christoph Martin Wieland and promoted by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Weltliteratur/‘world literature’ has gained extraordinary traction in comparative literature, post-colonial studies, and G...

Scholars exhibit a general self-reflexive tendency to purge Eurocentrism from UCD in order to strengthen the concept. Yet, unless the role of the cultural in UCD is adequately theorized, UCD cannot...

Classical Eurasianism (yevraziystvo, 1921-late 1930s, not including Nikolai Gumilev) is a multifaceted set of teachings centered around ideas introduced by Nikolai S. Trubetskoy (1890-1938). Out of...

Deep K. Datta-Ray has written a difficult but highly rewarding book which raises fascinating questions not just about Indian diplomacy and diplomacy in general, but also about the very idea of mode...

Gavan Titley’s book Racism and Media (2019) is a much needed and compelling intervention on this enduring topic. One of the many significant contributions of the book is to develop an account of ra...

Although eurocentrism in fashion studies has been contested for nearly four decades, the topic is as timely and urgent as ever. While critiques focus on symptoms such as discrimination, inequality ...

The most vulnerable students in the USA's public education system are young African American children. They are vulnerable to developmental abuse or spirit molestation. This article focuses on earl...

In a critical introduction to the concept and theory of Eurocentrism, Samir Amin, the Marxist political economist has argued that Eurocentrism should be comprehended as a key element of capitalism’...

The article discusses cultural festivals organised in the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) and their ideological implications on the national identity of Greek-Cypriots from Independence (1960) until the c...

This paper is broadly concerned with the question of what epistemic decolonization might involve. It is divided into two parts. The first part begins by explaining the specifically epistemic proble...

More than any other object of historical and anthropological study, Islamicate occult science cuts to the quick of what it means to be modern, to be Western, to be scientific. Yet nowhere else are ...

It has become expected of policy-makers, pundits, and scholars to refer to a whole raft of global dilemmas—from the economic downturn to climate change—as complex. The complexity of these challenges intimates a pattern of interactions marked by sharp discontinuities and exponential transformations triggered by incremental changes. How can one act ethically and politically in such a turbulent environment? Proponents of Complexity Thinking (CT) have responded to this query by drawing attention to the radical relationality of global life, which contests the Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism informing the IR mainstream. The study demonstrates that the ethical models inherent in such a “complexified” outlook are relational. Therefore, the ethical understanding of political action on the world stage—both cognitively and affectively—is simultaneously shaped and mediated by ethical obligations and commitments to others, the structure and content of which is acquired through the very relationships by which ethical obligations and commitments are formed and justified. Such relational ethics simultaneously critiques the atomistic individualism dominating the IR mainstream and reimagine the international as a dynamic space for dialogical learning, which promises a world that is less hegemonic, more democratic, and equitable.

The opening of the twentieth-first century has been a time of uncertainty. Despite many visions of the future, a Eurocentric bias is still at heart of the discourse about world order. For instance,...

Beyond the discussion of such so-called ‘urban problems,’ it is worth paying attention to the question as to whether cities, notably large cities, would themselves be part of the solution or rather...

This article responds to Miguel De La Torre's essay, “Embracing the Hopelessness of Those Seeking Pastoral Care,” which argues that the use of hope as a core concept in pastoral theology reinforces...

In an increasingly diverse U.S. society, schools maintain Eurocentrism and White supremacy through curriculum, failing to give marginalized populations (and students of color in particular) space t...

In commemoration of the first anniversary of Samir Amin’s passing, I present the following collated review of the three volumes of Amin’s memoirs, which were only just completed with the posthumous...

In this article, I undertake an investigation into the political significance of Islam and Muslimness. By doing so, I aim to underscore the primacy of Islam's ontological (constitutive) nature and its irreducibility to any of its ontic (empirical) articulations. This project necessitates the recovery of the political as the moment of the formation of a collective order and community, irreducible to any of its material expressions (e.g. territorial or institutional unity). Thus, the article renounces the objectivity of the secular grammar which fixes, essentializes, and reduces Muslimness to being merely 'religious' as opposed to 'political'. By contrast, it attempts to retrieve Islam's basic condition of existence and hence emancipate it from the confines of the Western epistemic structure. Toward that end, the article presents a deconstructive analysis of Islam as an autonomous universe of meaning inaugurated by the event of the Divine Revelation to Prophet Muhammad as its originary moment. By doing so, I also emphasize the primacy of Muslimness as a political subjectivity, whose unity and autonomy is contingent upon the drawing of its most universal boundaries and the exclusion of an outside-a function, I argue, which had historically been fulfilled by the mechanism of the caliphate. Finally, the article discusses an alternative conceptualization of diaspora in order to come to grips with the political implications of Muslimness in the post-caliphate world order. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In the contemporary world, resistance in translation is no longer restricted to cultural interventions that strive to counterbalance Eurocentrism and English hegemony. Beyond this, translation also...

Claims regarding Western neo-colonial domination over scholarship in Comparative and International Education (CIE) have recently commanded much attention – for example in a 2017 special iss...

Based on V. E. Klochko’s transspective analysis, three interconnected trends in current psychology are explored: the shift from Kuhn paradigms, which do not play an instrumental role in psychology,...

The present poses challenges, coping with which requires a revision of our thought process-an un-worlding, if one may. On the other hand, critiquing Eurocentrism alone does not guarantee a more jus...

Based on conversations with and publications of Samir Amin, the article explores connections between his ideas on global political strategy and sexual self-determination. One of the questions is about struggles related to homosexuality in Africa. To what extent did he believe that some of the demands for sexual self-determination, including certain forms of feminism and LGBT rights, were so overly embedded in Eurocentrism that they were not fully suitable for popular struggles in many parts of the Global South? The question is framed in the context of state-centric conceptions of the political. Even if some of the analysis includes a critical tone toward his strategical options, it also highlights the continuing importance of Samir Amin as a point of reference for future struggles to create transnational and global instruments for democratic transformations.

The main narratives that explain the development of the modern international order fall short of incorporating the historical peculiarities of processes of state-formation in non-European contexts....

The recent surge in studies of Japanese film theory can be seen as an aspect of efforts to counter Eurocentrism in film studies and the aversion to theory in Japan studies. It could also help schol...

In spite of Jung’s encounter with the spirit of the depths that he describes in The Red Book and his reverence for other cultures, he remained, in some ways, very much a man held by the spirit of the times in which he lived. Eurocentrism, even unconscious patronizing racism, is evident in Jung’s writings. This article asks how, due to the impact of the spirit of the times on us, do we unconsciously express attitudes, writings, and actions that are offensive to the other? There are embedded forms of racism and thereby oppression that members of the dominant group learn not to see, to keep in the shadows. What forces keep unconscious racial bias alive and active in our societies? One answer lies in a culture’s shadow. This article utilizes writings of Jung and post-Jungians, such as Kimbles, Singer, and Brewster, as well as examples from philosophy, relational psychoanalysis, film, and literature that depict culture’s shadow. The relationship of culture’s shadow to Jung’s “geology” of the personalit...

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s status as a Holocaust prophet emerges in a new light. Kafka’s archival trail connects his lifelong attention to African enslavement and New World plantation economies to his nightmarish vision of murderous bureaucracies – a connection that crystallizes concretely in his 1919 short story “In the Penal Colony.” The archival and aesthetic connections direct us to a historiographical one, namely the increasingly excavated genealogical linkages between the Holocaust and anterior genocidal depredations in Africa and the New World under the auspices of European colonialism. This historiographical reorientation allows us to recast, in a global frame, the debate over Kafka’s status as a prophet of world history, a debate that has heretofore operated through the exclusion of the transatlantic slave trade. Kafka’s extensively documented attunement to colonial political economies provides formal, figural mechanisms that not only link the juridical–economic worlds of Caribbean slavery and Hitler’s Third Reich, but also anticipate, and disable, the dehistoricized, Eurocentric appropriation of his textual archive as a premonition of Auschwitz.

Critical theorists and scholars in Asian cultural studies have challenged the political legitimacy and analytical validity of the cross-disciplinary enterprise of Area Studies. Area Studies has bee...

The visibility of globalization as a bundle of social, economic, political, cultural, ideological, and epistemological processes as well as military practices has not only recalibrated postcolonial...

This article offers a critique of the Eurocentric nature of postmodernism and argues that it is necessary for non-Western peoples and cultures to go beyond postmodernism in their quest for their ow...

By reflecting on new and emerging perspectives and trends in the contemporary humanities and social sciences, including the critique of anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism and secularism, the questionin...

In Europe ‘homoemancipation’ has played a significant role in legitimating anti-multiculturalism and broader Islamophobia. Similarly, political homophobia in Russia plays a significant role in (re...

This paper critiques the relativist and post-colonialist view that blames the under-representation from peripheral cultures in international translation studies on Eurocentric biases. Western schol...

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project that we have underway at University of Western Cape, to rethink Political Theory and Philosophy. It is a project par...

As the year 2019 marks the centenary of the foundation of International Relations as a formal discipline, both the field of study and some of its fundamental aspects and/or flaws, e.g. ahistoricism...

Madoline “Nina” Murdoch (1890–1976) was an Australian journalist, broadcaster, and writer. Among her other works, Murdoch wrote several travel books about her trips to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Travel to Europe from Australia was becoming increasingly accessible in the early twentieth century, and Murdoch’s books contributed to a popular discourse about Australia’s relationship both to Britain and to European civilisation more generally, as well as reflecting anxieties about women’s role in society and about industrialisation. This essay discusses the travel writing of Nina Murdoch in the context of the nature and meaning of travel to Europe – Spain in particular – for Australians in the early twentieth century, analysing how Mucrdoch’s equivocal Eurocentrism and her feminine authorial voice are inflected by changing discourses of modernity and of women’s lives.

Samir Amin is best known for his 1989 book, Eurocentrism, a seminal entry in critical theory on the Middle East which remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the political and ec...

Mainstream political science treats China as an anomaly that has not followed the “right” path of development, that is, a path that confirms the worldview, normative values, knowledge, and expectations of a Euromodern origin. This essay identifies inherent biases in the discipline and shows how the dominant disciplinary approach to Chinese politics has largely remained focused on validating questionable political-scientific tenets. A tentative proposal is offered for intellectual steps toward more openness and efficacy in disciplinary knowledge production and consumption. The argument is not about overcoming Eurocentrism by promoting Chinese exceptionalism. On the contrary, it is political, and challenges the power of current organizing principles of knowledge in search of a more accurate and cogent understanding of Chinese and global politics.

Il y a une maniere de defendre les cultures opprimees qui ne leur rend service qu’en apparence parce qu’elle revient, somme toute, a les enfermer dans leur particularite. Le plaidoyer habituel en f...

Constructions of the Jihadist threat in the West African sub-region have been dominated by knowledge preferences around the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWoT). Analysis of political response to terroris...

International audience; The internationalisation of the social sciences, understood as the increasing circulation of people, ideas and materials, has been accompanied by critiques of material and power differentials and of theoretical and epistemological Eurocentrism. Within this context of debate, Islamization of knowledge (IOK) appears as an alternative epistemology. After a brief historical account of IOK’s international institutionalization, the paper focusses on one key institution, the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM), where interviews were conducted with key protagonists of IOK. Analyses of these interviews reveal that IOK has been symptomatic of the failed aspects of the internationalization of the social sciences. In order to overcome the present state of affairs, proponents suggest three different projects for universalisation of the social sciences. The paper concludes with a critical appraisal of these projects’ significance for sociology and hints to potential epistemological fractures within the discipline.

In this paper I address the questions posed to me by Bret Davis, Zeynep Direk, and Charles Mills, by focusing on, first, the eurocentrism of academic philosophy in the West and strategies to overco...

This article examines the critique of philosophical Eurocentrism developed over the past two-and-a-half decades by Robert Bernasconi. The restriction of the moniker “philosophy” to the Western tradition, and the exclusion of non-Western traditions from the field, became the standard view only after the late eighteenth century. Bernasconi critically analyzes this restriction and exclusion and makes a compelling case for its philosophical illegitimacy. After showing how Bernasconi convincingly repudiates the identification of philosophy with Europe – asserted most explicitly by Continental philosophers such as Hegel, Husserl, Levinas, and most recently Rodolphe Gasche – the present article critically reflects on both the significance and the limits of Bernasconi’s own predominantly “immanent critique” of philosophical Eurocentrism, and ends by calling on philosophers to engage more thoroughly in studies of and dialogues with non-Western traditions of philosophy.