Global Student Movements Against Coloniality: Entangled Praxis of Hope, Resistance, and Solidarity
Proposal for an Edited Book Project under the Routledge Series:
Decolonial Entanglements: Praxis, Pedagogy and Social Theory
Student movements from and for the global souths have long occupied pivotal roles in ongoing struggles against apartheid, capitalism, ecocide, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy (e.g., Altbach 1984; Hefernan et al. 2016; Hodgkinson & Melchiorre 2019; Chimurenga 2020; Dong & Chen 2020; Moreno 2020; Sirreyeh et al. 2021; Fúnez-Flores 2022; YOUNGO 2025). They/We are awake: from the student encampments in solidarity with Palestine in universities across the world to youth protests against rampant corruption by political and economic elites in so-called “postcolonial” societies; from Indigenous student mobilizations fighting for alternatives to university education to the Rhodes Must Fall Movement. Yet rarely are such subversive acts read and enfolded together in the context of our shared struggles against persistent colonial/modern modes of exploitation.
Our collective book project explicates how global student-led collectives are entangled with decolonial/anticolonial theory and praxis. In particular, we engage with contemporary student movements in relation to global struggles against coloniality (Quijano 2000), not only in the classroom but also in concrete political, social, economic sites of struggle (Ahmed 2020; Fúnez-Flores 2022). We hope to foster South-to-South and South-to-North dialogical crossings between distinct movements and collectives. We urge our contributors to engage with three overarching themes and related questions, including but not limited to:
Praxis of hope
- What does a politics of hope mean to student collectives in today’s geopolitical conjuncture beyond the liberal and institutionally co-opted politics of “defending academic freedom”?
- How do student mobilizations and theories of liberation and pluriversal possibilities inform each other?
- In the face of epistemic violence in/of the neoliberal university, how have student collectives dreamed of, and claimed, alternative spaces of (extra)curricular thought and praxis?
Praxis of resistance
- How do youth activists and student collectives contest colonial/modern relations within and beyond the ivory tower?
- What do the student encampments in solidarity with Palestine teach us in resisting settler colonialism and genocide?
- How are youth protests against corruption and nepotism (not least in Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines) linked together in the context of global capitalism?
Praxis of solidarity
- How do we build solidarities and communities of care amidst scholasticide and genocide?
- What does a global climate justice movement look like when it is entangled with struggles against coloniality and capitalism?
- In what ways do youth activism and queer liberation intersect?
- How do student collectives build transnational solidarities in contesting multiple (non)western oppressors in different geopolitical contexts?
These questions compel us to interrogate the role of academia and the university within student movements, and how such mobilizations disrupt and reframe the very foundations of educational institutions and the politics of knowledge production. The institutional repression in the face of these student mobilizations reveals deep contradictions in the promise of academic freedom, calling into question whose freedom is being protected, and by whom? This tension exposes academic freedom not as a universal right, but as a contested space – often withheld from those who disrupt power beholden to colonial/modern interests. Within universities that claim to be equalizing institutions, race and class continue to shape which voices are legitimized, whose activism is sanctioned, and who faces surveillance or exclusion. In this context, we also invite critical reflections on the limits and possibilities of academic freedom, and on the role of student and youth activism in redefining the political terrain of the university and beyond.
Contributing to ongoing conversations on global student movements and “decolonizing the university” (e.g., Hodgkinson & Melchiorre 2019; Gopal 2021; Bhambra et al. 2022), we take our experience building South/South Movement as an alternative point of departure to contesting coloniality and the university’s complicity in sustaining it. Initially emplaced within the geopolitical context of an elite Euro-American university in Central Europe feted for its diverse student body and liberal internationalist mission in defense of academic freedom, but differently entangled with(in) the global souths, we write as an autonomous transnational student-led collective invested in questioning and overcoming Eurocentric knowledge regimes in the social and political sciences. Unlike existing initiatives that circumscribe the politics of “decolonizing” principally within the academic world, we stress the incommensurability of countering coloniality with liberal notions of protecting academic freedom in the confines of the university. In doing so, we aim to clarify the stakes of, and provoke deeper dialogues on, the necessity of strategically delinking from the university in pursuit of alternative modes of inquiry that defy epistemic whiteness and challenge formal curricular structures for their refusal/inability to genuinely engage with ways of knowing from and for the global souths.
From our perspective as South/South Movement, we especially welcome submissions by minoritized students, independent researchers, Indigenous peoples, collectives, artists, activists, and those whose positionalities, like ours, are entangled with(in) the global souths. Refraining from interpretive closure, we have deliberately chosen not to embrace a common definition of ‘global souths’. Instead, we encourage our fellow travellers to critically negotiate their own sense-making of how this amorphous, contentious and historically charged concept matters in their own geopolitical contexts.
Co-editors: Taraf Abu Hamdan and Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III
Notes for Contributors
We are accepting submissions via organize@southsouthmovement.org until 27 February 2026 (18:00 Amman / 23:00 Manila). Submissions must include a completed abstract proposal form and a short CV (maximum two pages). For editorial purposes, please use US English spelling and, if applicable, the Chicago Manual of Style (author-date system). To aid our proposal writing, please prepare your proposal and CV using 12-pt. Times New Roman in .odt or .docx format.
Indicative timeline
Submission deadline: 27 February 2026
Notification of submission results: 20 March 2026
Book proposal submission to Routledge Co-editors: end of April 2026
Full manuscript submission: end of July 2026
Manuscript workshop (1st peer review): August 2026
Manuscript revisions: September to November 2026
Manuscript workshop (2nd peer review): December 2026
Manuscript revisions: January to March 2027
Final manuscript submission: April 2027
Submission of final manuscripts to Routledge: May 2027
Note: The expected length for each chapter is between 7,000 to 8,000 words, including references and endnotes.
References
Ahmed, A. Kayum. “#RhodesMustFall: How a Decolonial Student Movement in the Global South Inspired Epistemic Disobedience at the University of Oxford.” African Studies Review 63, no. 2 (2020): 281–303. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2019.49.
Altbach, Philip G. “Student politics in the third world.” Higher Education 13 (1984): 635–655 . https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00137017
Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. 2018. Eds. Decolonising the University. Pluto Press. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/decolonising-the-university/
Chimurenga. 2020. How Third World Students Liberated the West. https://chimurengachronic.co.za/how-third-world-students-liberated-the-west/
Dong, Harvey, and Janie Chen. 2020. Eds. Power of the People Won’t Stop: Legacy of the TWLF at UC Berkeley. Eastwind Books of Berkeley.
Fúnez-Flores, Jairo I. “Toward Decolonial Globalisation Studies.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 21, no. 2 (2022): 166–86. doi:10.1080/14767724.2022.2048796.
Gopal, Priyamvada. “On Decolonisation and the University.” Textual Practice 35, no. 6 (2021): 873–899. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2021.1929561.
Heffernan, Ann, Noor Nieftagodien, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, and Bhekizizwe Peterson. 2016. Eds. Students Must Rise: Youth struggle in South Africa before and beyond Soweto ‘76. New York University Press.
Hodgkinson, Dan, and Luke Melchiorre. “Introduction: Student Activism in an Era of Decolonization.” Africa 89, no. S1 (2019): S1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972018000888.
Moreno, José G. “Third World Radicalism: The Chicana/o Studies Movement at The University of California, Berkeley, 1968–1975.” Ethnic Studies Review 43, no 3. (2020): 73–85. https://doi.org/10.1525/esr.2020.43.3.73
Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”. Nepanta: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580.
Sirriyeh, Ala, Meleisa Ono-George, Tasnim Al-ahdal, Jaspal Singh Gharu, Racheal Alake, and Hannah Jones. “Decolonial and Anti-Racist Student Activism.” The Sociological Review (2021). https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/february-2021/decolonial-and-anti-racist-student-activism/
YOUNGO. 2025. Global Youth Statement. https://www.stopecocide.earth/bn-2025/global-youth-demand-ecocide-law-ahead-of-cop30