Decolonising Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism has recently become a topic on the global agenda of epistemic decolonisation. Cosmopolitanism, with its Greek etymology, is a term of art originating with Western moral and political philosophy. Yet, the term is now widely used across the humanities and social sciences, opening cosmopolitanism as theory and practice up to conceptual contestation and the revision of its political and intellectual history – both from within by internal critics and from without by Indigenous, Muslim, non-Western, postcolonial, and decolonial scholars, and critical race theorists. This thesis contributes to the double task of decolonial deconstruction and reconstruction necessary for a viable cosmopolitanism in the context of the global transition to a post-Western, post-secular order. It intervenes in the humanities and social sciences where the “global”, “cosmopolitan”, “imperial”, “postcolonial”, and “decolonial” turns intersect. My focus is on contemporary debates in historical sociology, international relations/international political economy, and philosophy, and across the spectrum of approaches and methodologies called “critical theory”. In the first part of the thesis, I continue and intervene in the existing dialogue between decoloniality and critical social theory. In the second part of the thesis, I fill a significant gap in the literature by entering Anglo- American analytic liberal cosmopolitanism into dialogue with decoloniality. Eurocentrism is embedded in the core assumptions, categories, normative foundations, and analytical frameworks of Western cosmopolitanism – above all, in the disciplinary narrative of Western origins/cosmopolitan ends and its agent/patient binary. Cosmopolitanism will remain Eurocentric so long as non-Western thinkers and thought are marginalised; ideal-theoretical, ahistorical liberal presuppositions predominate debates about global justice; and approaches to cosmopolitanism as an historical, political-economic, or sociological category and as a set of embedded political and ethical practices exhibit colonial amnesia, and fail to theoretically integrate global coloniality and the competing memories of world history, order, and politics. Following the lead of, and having learnt from, diverse thinkers from across the globe and across the disciplines, my decolonial reconstruction of cosmopolitanism is historical (prospective and retrospective), transdisciplinary, critical, and normative. By overcoming the empirical and normative deficiencies of dominant Eurocentric paradigms, Decolonising Cosmopolitanism equips us with tools to explain, and to identify potentials to transform ourselves and our world. My main argument is that injustice in our world involves backward-looking and forward-looking problems of interactional, structural, and, primarily, epistemic injustice. My intervention highlights the pervasive relevance of colonialism for the diagnosis of social crises and problems of justice and the prescription of policies and practices of transformative justice in transitional contexts. I argue that decoloniality can sharpen the diagnostic and prescriptive functions of cosmopolitan critical social theory and of analytic cosmopolitan accounts of justice, truth, and reconciliation in world politics.