Insurgent Decoloniality

Insurgency is an exigency of life and of survival

—Khatibi

What does it mean for decolonial thought to be radically situated in insurrectional movement? To begin to answer this question, I could very well start with the etymological meaning ascribed to the term radical, that is, the root, situatedness, and material grounding of thought. But what does it really mean to be an engaged intellectual or a guerilla intellectual (Rodney, 1990) who not only wages decolonial resistance with pen and paper in hand but also through collective action? How about an insurgent sentipensante who uses theory as a weapon (Cabral, 1979; Lao-Montes, 2007; Fals-Borda, 2009; Lozano Lerma, 2019)? What is an ethically and (geo)politically and ethically committed thinker who challenges intellectual colonialism (Fals-Borda, 1970; Dussel, 1980; Restrepo, 2001)? What does it mean to militantly engage the sign (theory) and the stone (praxis) in our everyday knowledge practices (Peña-Pincheira and Allweiss, 2022)? Is it not true that alternative modes of reading and theorizing the world emerge from historically specific material contexts, like the flower that springs from the rubble in Gaza despite the incredible odds to do so? What does this all have to do with the science of the word (Césaire, 1982), the poetics of relation (Glissant, 1997), and the sociopoeisis (Wynter, 2001, 2003) of radical decolonial thought? Like the seed that germinates and breaks through the cold, lifeless world designed by modernity/coloniality, radical thought too spreads its roots (if I were a Deleuzian scholars I perhaps would say rhizomes) to crack open systems of domination that previously seemed indestructible. The worldliness and materiality of the text (Said, 1983) point to the saliency of reading and theorizing the world anew, which hence becomes a radical, transgressive, decolonial hermeneutic act (Fúnez-Flores, 2021) that engraves in stone every spoken and written word by working with and alongside those taking collective action.

In the midst of a genocide, to speak and write truth to power while so many remain silent and complicit is indeed a radical act. The emerging sites of struggle seeking to delink universities from their material and symbolic investments in colonial projects of death and destruction reveal their decolonial potential. Student encampments, for instance, are one of many movements seeking to dismantle the colonial and capitalist foundations of universities. They have made more visible that universities not only justify colonial domination through Eurocentric epistemologies, the geopolitics of knowledge, and the coloniality of curriculum, but also produce the technologies of violence tested on colonized peoples, such as Palestinians. While decolonial scholars have done brilliant work to examine the former’s epistemological concerns, the latter is not always made as explicit as one would like in terms of thinking about universities as active participants of coloniality rather than mere knowledge producing institutions legitimating coloniality. Certainly, knowledge underpins the production of technologies of violence used to maintain coloniality, but it is nonetheless important to shed light on the material dimensions of these institutions in order to sever the colonial links or at the very least sabotage the production of signs (symbolic power) and stones (material power) that, in the last instance, respectively become the canons and cannons used to reproduce coloniality. The cultural and physical bombs, as Thiong’o (1986)would put it, are equally destructive.

In a recent post, I explored the various ways the intellectual committed to liberation and decolonization has been represented and how combative and insurgent decolonial modes of theorizing contribute to this radical tradition. In this piece, I propose an insurgent decolonial theory that makes connections between texts and contexts, between sign and stone, between theory and praxis, and between the symbolic and material dimensions of coloniality and decoloniality.

Insurgent Decolonial Thought, Praxis, and Situated Concepts

Now that I have discussed combative decolonial thought, I want to end this article with what I call insurgent decolonial thought^[1]. What is an insurgent decolonial though and how is this similar and/or different from the combative decolonial thought? To begin, my preference for insurgent decolonial thought over combative decolonial thought boils down to the subversive, transgressive, revolutionary, and countervailing connotations of insurgency, where contestation may take various forms: manifest and latent, macro and micro, militant and subtle, tactical and strategic. Insurgency maintains Rodney’s (1990) guerilla intellectualism and its ability to permanently ground and militantly articulate insurrectional work in multimodal forms. To be an insurgent decolonial intellectual here refers to someone who collectively rises in revolt and insurrection from below, like a spring of water (surge) that can no longer be contained as it bursts out to bring life and new modes of co-existence in a modern/colonial world that only knows how to effectively design projects of death and destruction. The insurgence and resurgence of decolonial movements and struggles affirm life^[2] and create the conditions of possibility to think and build a world otherwise. Insurgent decolonial thought is “the practice of theory [that] is informed by struggle” (Robinson, 1983) and not the other way around, whereby the ivory tower dictates the terms and conditions of decolonization, decoloniality, and liberation. An insurgent, though combating against domination and exploitation, is not necessarily a combatant who enters into a battlefield with clear objectives against a known enemy. An insurgent decolonial intellectual also moves subversively and unpredictably within dominant institutions, such as universities, while working with the insurgencies unfolding beyond. An insurgent is not only someone with a clearly defined enemy insofar as the “enemy” may also reside in us and in those with whom we may very well identify socially and culturally. In other words, no one is immune to upholding and reproducing coloniality.

Insurgency, as Khatibi (2019, 32) addresses, entails “subversion, the power of speech against the speech of power that seizes all society”, including all the spheres of social existence in which we participate. Transgressing exclusive spaces while maintaining and strengthening connections with sites of insurrection is one of the tactics employed as a means to sustain the decolonial strategies that require a longer commitment and that will certainly outlive us. Being an insurgent means being the dissident voice that speaks out when it is most urgent, even when the majority remain silent. It means not conforming to normalized silence and complicity^[3]; it means unsettling the “unseen power wherever and whenever possible” (Said 2002, 31), even if that means risking one’s career in the process. While the concept of combativity points to the militancy required to think and act, insurgent decolonial thought and praxis may add other layers in terms of rethinking agency beyond reaction and resistance between two opposing forces, as alluded by the term of combativity. Although this is not what Maldonado-Torres proposes, I am simply adding clarity to terms to show their politico-epistemic affordances to avoid future misappropriation and co-optation of radical concepts and theories.

There is a positive meaning to insurgency that proposes or affirms^[4] other modes of relating, being, and knowing with one another. Insurgency hence transcends defensive resistance. To be an insurgent should not be reduced to a reaction against something or limited to mere opposition. As Betty Lozano (2019) proposes, insurgency “is neither opposition nor the capacity to endure an oppressive effort or situation for a long time. Nor does it imply challenging; rather, it involves building. It is more about forms of thought, self-representation, relationships, and knowledge that promote the construction of other worlds that prioritize life and do not assume the State as the main interlocutor. Therefore, it is not limited to political practice in relation to the State. It is a profound questioning of everything that exists, paving the way for a completely different world” (p. 23). Insurgent decoloniality is a world-making praxis that extends far beyond academia. Being an insurgent decolonial intellectual thus entails being able to recognize that collective struggles tend to be ahead of academia in terms of theorizing the world and acting upon it to change it. As Lao-Montes (2007) points out, Black Panthers used terms such as internal colonialism to understand their reality before obtained currency in academia. The same thing could be said about decolonial thought situated in sites of struggle.

Catherine Walsh writes in the introduction to Betty Lozano’s (2019) book that insurgency underscores Black women’s “unceasing social, cultural, political, epistemic, and existential insurgency that continues to fight and to sow life where there is death. Hopes that crack the wall of despair” (p. 17, my translation). Insurgent decolonial thought can be considered “senti-pensacción” (feeling-thinking-action), which means that insurgency is embodied, corporal, and politico-epistemic-exitential that not only resists interconnected systems of domination and exploitation but also affirms the existence of all life positioned in the zone of non-being, as Fanon (1967) would put it. Insurgent decolonial thought and praxis is a politico-epistemic-existential project that simultaneously resists against and reexists within and beyond the heteropatriarchal, racist, Christian-centric, and capitalist modern-colonial world.

Lozano (2019) states that insurgency corresponds to a notion that etymologically alludes to rejection of authority, uprising and rebellion, and to revolutionary struggle. Those who take up arms as guerrilla fighters are usually referred to as insurgents. The insurgent, however, can also engage in subversive actions that are not always visibly violent, but which can nonetheless disrupt, unsettle, and sabotage what seems indestructible. Drawing on Catherine Walsh’s (2008), work, Lozano points out that insurgency aims to transgress all spheres of social existence, including the cultural, political, economic, and epistemic domains. Insurgency hence goes further than direct confrontation in terms of proposing and affirming relational modes of co-existing in the present while collectively taking action to dismantle coloniality by any means necessary.

Insurgent decoloniality also addresses the feminist praxes that have always formed part of liberation struggles yet are erased from the histories of decolonization. It reconstitutes life where death seems to only prevail. Insurgency proposes, projects, and affirms what modernity/coloniality systematically denies—the right to dignity, land, and existence. Perhaps insurgency, in comparison to combativity, enables one to think of alternative forms to resist and re-exist beyond conventional masculinist visions of liberation that tend to downplay the crucial role women play, not only as armed combatants but also as revolutionary decolonial thinkers and insurgent agents that transgress institutional norms and practices.

Along these lines, insurgent resistance and re-existence entail maintaining collective memories, narratives, histories, knowledges, and experiences alive in order to create the conditions to militantly think and act in the present, without which we would otherwise be unable to think and enact an alternative political-epistemic-existential horizon within and against the totalizing project of modernity/coloniality. Maintaining the conditions of possibility for transgression, subversion, and insurgency to exist within a modern/colonial world that seeks to violently erase difference thus becomes a radical revolutionary act.

Insurgent epistemology and radically situated concepts: Re-signifying discursive spaces

The radical aim of decolonial movements is liberation from all systems of domination and exploitation but this cannot be achieved without reclaiming the ability to articulate concepts that assist in thinking, interrogating, and constituting the world anew. The politico-epistemic act of creating concepts is ethical and geopolitical insofar as these concepts seek to show the complicity of discourses that uphold concrete structures of power—systems we are seeking to dismantle and transition from. After all, concepts are windows through which we can view and interrogate reality.

The value of concepts is based on their ability to seriously interrogate the problems generated in the social world. Concepts enable the search for solutions, although they are not solutions in and of themselves, which tends to be the case in neoliberal academies where concepts are co-opted, commodified, and emptied of their political content. Concepts nonetheless open up alternatives to the present and enable the imagining of possibilities (Pratt, 2022). This resonates with Stuart Hall’s (2018) situated approach to theorizing political conjunctures whereby political moments create the conditions for theoretical movements to emerge. This means that anticolonial, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-heteropatriarchal struggles create the conditions of possibility to imagine and build a world otherwise, a world where many worlds can fit, as the Zapatista’s dictum illustrates with so much clarity.

Struggles have thus radically changed the knowledge, histories, and stories we have access to today. Ethnic studies, Black Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, and Decolonial Studies would not exist if it were not for concrete movements. The Zapatistas (Marcos, 2023), Landless Workers Movement, Via Campesina (Barbosa, 2022), the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonial dispossession (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2023; Molavi, 2024; Abu Zuluf, Kilani and O’Rourke, 2025), student and feminist movements (Fúnez-Flores, 2020), and a multiplicity of Indigenous territorial struggles have also created the conditions of possibility to think and do otherwise. Indeed, they have initiated a theoretical insurrection and revolution (Mignolo 2002). These movements remind us that radical theories are always derivative rather than the result of the genius of an individual intellectual. Ultimately, radical thought derives from the “true genius” that emerges from sites of struggle where, whereby thought is much “more than words or ideas but life itself” (Robinson 1983, 184)

Although I recognize that concepts are not solutions to the dominant structures we are trying to dismantle, they are nonetheless indispensable insofar as they correspond to the problematics we are trying to address. Concepts make more visible what has been systematically made invisible through the myths of modernity, such as salvation, progress, development, globalization, and liberal democracy. Radically and insurgently situated concepts are not only epistemically disobedient but are also methodologically subversive as they enable one to think in relational, planetary terms that unsettle the methodological nationalism and individualism of dominant knowledge practices and social movements (or methodological obsession and inhibition as Fals Borda (1970) and Mills (1959) referred to it respectively).

Thinking seriously about concepts not only makes more visible how capitalism restructures itself according to the logic of coloniality, but it carries the potential to inform our collective praxes across geographical boundaries. By thinking with social and territorial movements, for instance, our concepts regain the geopolitical and ethical content they were meant to have initially. This will assist in refusing the academic tendency to decontextualize radical thought from sites of struggle. Epistemological critique or deconstruction is without a doubt necessary but insufficient when praxis is ignored. It is insufficient when we are incapable of learning from and committing to collective action and actually existing communities resisting colonial domination, dispossession, and, in the case of Palestine, the annihilation of an entire people.

As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) reminds us, deconstruction and critique is great and all, but it does not stop people from dying. Or, as Freire (1970) taught us, praxis is indispensable whereby thought informs collective action and collective action dialectically informs thought and reflection. Important to consider is that we must also avoid the vanguard positions of the past where intellectuals prescribed the best paths forward for social movements. Today, social and territorial movements are teaching us that they are not passively waiting for the intellegentisia to show them the path forward. They, too, are producing knowledges, theories, and concepts that unsettle the hierarchical vanguard position of the past. It is perhaps best to take a rearguard theoretical position as we listen to, learn from, and work alongside those who are resisting domination while affirming another possible world.

To conclude, I want to say that a radical critique of the Eurocentered modern/colonial capitalist world must seek to dismantle the symbolic and material structures of power—that is to say, the dominant epistemologies, histories, narratives, subjectivities, as well as the institutions and structures of domination and exploitation in which we participate. In the end, our struggles are epistemic and world-making projects moving toward a decolonial present and future. In the words of the late Anibal Quijano (2000, p. 574), “it is time to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror”. In other words, we must shatter the theoretical lenses and subjectivities that have reflected a distorted image of ourselves for over five centuries. It is time to stop aspiring to become what we are not and what we will never become so that we can reconstitute ourselves and our worlds. Ultimately, the insurgent decolonial intellectual, who writes for the dominated and dispossessed and for all life, ‘ought to use the past with the intention of opening up the future’, which consists of ‘an invitation to an action and a basis of hope’ (Fanon (1967) as cited by Hall (1996, p. 14)). In the end, decolonization is not a project seeking to create a seemingly postcolonial society that maintains and indeed fortifies coloniality in all other spheres of social existence. Instead, decolonization and insurgent decoloniality are global projects that dismantle domination in all its forms, while insurrectionally affirming life by any means necessary.

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^[1] Although I am advancing the notion of insurgent decoloniality, the content, ideas, and politico-epistemic projects belong to a myriad of scholars who think with and from their communities. I use this term to serious consider the affordances of this term.

^[2] When Palestinians cook for one another, play music and sing, or when children take care of other living things, including cats, dogs, birds, and plants, they are affirming life in the face of death. They are teaching the world that, despite the attempts to annihilate them, they will continue to resist and re-exist. Joy becomes a means through which resistance endures despite the overwhelming exhaustion liberation movements face. Palestinians teach us every day that smiling in the face of oppression in the ruins of colonialism is a form of insurgency that cannot be so easily destroyed. This is not in any way an attempt to romanticize resilience (Bonilla, 2020) but rather a way to show how collective subjectivities give us a glimpse of what this world could become if it was not for modernity/coloniality project of death—solo queremos vivir bien, vivir dignamente, y vivir sabroso.

^[3] As Said discussed the complicit intellectual: “Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take… Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, and muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual” (p. 100).

^[4] Lao-Montes writes: “The notion of insurgencies, in contrast to that of resistance, combines oppositional elements with propositional dimensions that serve as a counter-current to the established order. It includes focal points of struggle, new actors on the stage, and redefinitions of the political and how to engage in politics. It involves knowledge liberated from its subordinate condition, new discourses, and different horizons. Among these are the new feminist movements, homosexual and lesbian movements, ethno-racial and ecological movements that emerged since the 1960s, wielding demands for being and subjectivity and discourses of radical democracy. Insurgencies are also spaces, zones, territories: barter economies, local governments, experiments in solidarity-based coexistence, and community survival strategies. They can take the form of alternative institutions and diverse alternative structures: educational projects, indigenous governments, radical city governments (such as the Zapatista caracoles), and dissident states (such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia).”