Coloniality of power

The Coloniality of Power is regarded by many critical and decolonial scholars as a pioneering concept that broke away from negative dialectics understanding of the world at a time of epistemic stagnation during the 1980s/90s whereby global capitalism appeared as the only viable option. The concept encompasses a range of alternative critical discourses originating from Latin America that refers to the continuing power dynamics originating in colonialism that dictate and impose a hegemonic, violent system under the principles of modernity/coloniality. In this entry, a brief overview of the theory is presented looking at its key characteristic as understood by Quijano (2000a; 2000b; 2007) including the totality of capitalism under the coloniality of power that is sustained under a double process of social classification and the control of the production/labour process; and its cognitive basis grounded on rationality that reproduces Eurocentric dualist epistemologies under the coloniality of knowledge (Lander, 2000). Some criticisms to the theory are presented a) as critiques to seek to expand the concept as originally proposed by Quijano (Lugones, 2010); b) authors that highlight the controversies surrounding the theory’s foundations through accusations of ontological extractivism (Grosfoguel, 2016; Cusicanqui, 2012); c) and scholars that fully reject the theory stressing a series of historical (in)accuracies (Barriga, 2021).