By Yasmin Carpenter
Coloniality of knowledge is not a relic of the past — it is the invisible architecture that continues to shape how the world defines truth, reason, and intellectual value. While formal colonialism ended, the hierarchies of knowledge and ways of knowing it created persist in the institutions that regulate knowledge production today: universities, academic journals, research funding bodies, and even digital platforms. Eurocentrism, the belief that Europe is the primary locus of rationality and progress, remains the organizing principle of the global system of knowledge.
The Colonial Inheritance of Modern Knowledge
As Walter Mignolo (2000) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) argue, modernity produced a monopoly on knowledge parallel to its monopoly on power. The Enlightenment’s ideal of universal reason was built upon colonial conquest, slavery, and the extraction of resources and ideas from the Global South. European science and philosophy presented themselves as the culmination of human progress, while other epistemologies — Indigenous, African, Asian, and popular — were rendered “primitive” or “non-scientific.”
This worldview remains embedded in the global academic order. The most influential universities, journals, and research funding institutions are concentrated in North America and Western Europe. Their frameworks — the languages they privilege, the citation systems they enforce, and the standards of “rigor” they impose — continue to dictate what counts as legitimate knowledge. Scholars from Latin America, Africa, and Asia often find themselves compelled to write in English, cite European theorists, and conform to Western paradigms to be taken seriously in the international academic community (Connell 2007; Grosfoguel 2011).
The University as a Colonial Institution
Universities across the world reproduce this Eurocentric order through their curricula. In the social and political sciences, syllabi from São Paulo to Delhi, from Nairobi to Seoul, are dominated almost entirely by European and North American authors — Descartes, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Smith, Mill, and others — as if the rest of the world had never produced any thought worthy of recognition throughout human history.
This exclusion is not incidental; it is structural. It reflects what Aníbal Quijano (2000) called the colonial matrix: the enduring link between race, labor, and knowledge that positions Europe as both the subject and the arbiter of world history. Within this epistemic order, Europe is the birthplace of theory, and the rest of the world is relegated to providing “data,” “cases,” or “culture.” As Ochy Curiel (2014) observes, social science often treats non-European societies not as producers of knowledge but as objects to be studied — sites where theories invented elsewhere can be tested.
This hierarchy is reinforced by global ranking systems, funding criteria, and publishing gatekeepers that privilege Western institutions. Even when non-Western thinkers are included, they are often absorbed into the canon through translation or reinterpretation that neutralizes their epistemic difference — what Santos (2014) calls epistemic assimilation.
The Geopolitics of Validation
The coloniality of knowledge also operates through the mechanisms of recognition. Prizes, fellowships, and scientific honors — from the Nobel Prizes to the Fields Medal — overwhelmingly reward knowledge produced within Western institutions and categories of thought. As Mignolo (2011) argues, this global hierarchy of validation maintains the illusion that excellence and objectivity are culturally neutral, when in reality they are grounded in a particular Western epistemic tradition.
This asymmetry extends beyond academia. Global media, think tanks, and policy institutions reproduce Eurocentric perspectives as “expert opinion,” shaping public debate and international agendas. Knowledge that originates outside this framework often needs Western endorsement — through translation, citation, or institutional affiliation — to be heard or considered credible.
Digital Colonialism and the New Frontier of Knowledge
In the twenty-first century, coloniality of knowledge is amplified by digital colonialism. Algorithms, search engines, and artificial intelligence systems are trained on datasets overwhelmingly produced in the Global North, reproducing Eurocentric perspectives at the level of code (Couldry & Mejías 2019). English dominates as the language of digital knowledge, while Indigenous and local knowledges are rendered invisible in online environments.
The geopolitics of data mirrors the geopolitics of knowledge: who controls information, whose stories are archived, and whose epistemologies are rendered obsolete. The result is a world where even the digital space — seemingly open and universal — replicates the same hierarchies established by colonial modernity.
Decolonizing Knowledge
Challenging Eurocentrism and the coloniality of knowledge requires more than diversifying the canon or adding new authors to existing syllabi. It demands a transformation of the criteria by which knowledge is defined and valued. As Santos (2014) insists, there can be no global justice without cognitive justice. This means creating institutional and intellectual conditions where different epistemologies — oral, spiritual, communal, Indigenous, and subaltern — can coexist and inform one another without being subordinated to the logic of Western modernity.
For Mignolo (2018), this is the task of the pluriversal academy: a space where the world’s many histories and knowledges can engage on equal footing, beyond the universal pretensions of Europe. The decolonial project, therefore, is not a rejection of knowledge but its reorientation — from a single, universal narrative to a plurality of epistemic worlds.
—
This entry is part of an ongoing series exploring the core concepts of decolonial thought within the DCC Encyclopedia. To continue reading, click here to explore related entries on coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and decoloniality.
—
References
- Connell, Raewyn. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Polity Press, 2007.
- Couldry, Nick & Mejías, Ulises A. The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2019.
- Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy.” Transmodernity, 1(1), 2011.
- Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking.Princeton University Press, 2000.
- Mignolo, Walter D. “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option.” Transmodernity, 2011.
- Mignolo, Walter D. The Politics of Decolonial Investigations. Duke University Press, 2018.
- Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 2000.
- Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge, 2014.
- Curiel, Ochy. “Building Feminist Methodologies from Decolonial Feminism.” Presented at the Conference on Feminist Research Methodology and Its Application in the Fields of Human Rights, Violence, and Peace, San Sebastián–Donostia, Basque Country (Spain), June 19–20, 2014.
