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Decolonization is a historical term referring to the expulsion of European colonial powers from (mainly) Africa and Asia in the 1950s-60s. There's a clear conceptual structure here: the countries were colonies, the coloniser was removed. These days it's become a buzzword with unclear reference: there's epistemic decolonisation, economic decolonisation, decolonisation of anarchism, decolonisation of universities, health systems, law, subjectivity, the mind, etc etc. It all leaves me rather confused. What's decolonization in a settler-colony anyway? The expulsion of settlers? The integration of settlers into the host society? The subordination of settlers to indigenous minority rule? The general adoption of an "indigenous" perspective, whatever we take that to be? There's a lot of population movements and invasions in history, at what point does a settler stop being a settler? Are the Finns settlers? What about the non-Dravidic Indians, the Turks, the Iranians? If a settler group successfully assimilates an indigenous group, does the latter become "settlers" too? Given that indigenous cultures are not unchanging and there are disagreements within indigenous communities regarding (e.g.) development, capitalism, bureaucracy, etc., which perspectives count as "indigenous"? How does anyone (indigenous or settler) tell an authentic indigenous perspective from a coloniser's perspective which happens to be held by a person of indigenous origin?

I know people sometimes take "decolonization" as a synonym for disalienation or rewilding. Some people also use it as a power-move, meaning "decentering white people" or "decentering white perspectives". Often it's tied up with making race or the North/South binary into the principal contradiction, so that "decolonization" is to race what "revolution" is to capitalism. It's all rather unclear and often looks like a buzzword. Some of the things it covers are progressive or even anarchist - such as anti-extractivism and prison abolition. Often what's taken as "the indigenous perspective" is actually a kind of cybernetic or postmodernist relationality which treats individuals as worthless or nonexistent because they are "really" nodes in external socio-linguistic or ecological/behavioural systems. This is a type of reactionary collectivism complicit in the current cybernetic recomposition of capitalism. Social and ecological relations are real but so are desire and meaning and the unconscious, and a lot of indigenous cultures also recognise this. Behaviourism is incompatible with anarchism. Sometimes "decolonization" is taken to mean turning off our crap detectors and critical faculties and personal ethics, and acting as pawns for middle-class indigenous/black/POC/designated group members' upward mobility. This is also completely reactionary and authoritarian. Let's not lose our heads and our principles to guilt-tripping please.