Call for Contributions

Repair, Resistance, Reworlding:
Coloniality and the European Union’s Relations with the Global Souths

Co-editors: Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III & Rahel W. Sebhatu

Open Competition for the Autumn 2027 Special Issue by 
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies
Daniela Ortiz, The Rebellion of Roots, acrylic on wood 20cm x 30cm, 2021.





The decolonial turn has crossed European Studies. Recent scholarship has critiqued how the European Union (EU) circumscribes the Global Souths in coloniality.1 Yet, as María Lugones reminds us, ‘we are also other than what the hegemon makes us to be’ under the modern, capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchal, racialised interlocking matrix of global relations.2 We call to move the ‘decolonial turn’ in European Studies beyond critique towards praxis3 as a pluriversal, relational and socially engaged call to action enacting all manners of breaks, ruptures, and subversions that agitate, and (aspire to) exist outside, colonial/modern power structures.





In conversation with decolonial thought and praxis from Abya Yala (Latin America and the Caribbean) and other Souths, our proposed project asks: How do we repair, resist, and reworld the EU’s colonial/modern relations with the Global Souths? We prioritise thinking and doing ‘at and from the colonial difference, with a strong emphasis on a [grounded], historicized, incarnate intersubjectivity’.4 Beyond the eurocentred disciplinary boundaries of European Studies and its geopolitical proximity to EU power, we locate our scholar/activist commitments with(in) collective struggles for liberation from the coloniality of power, being, knowledge, gender, and nature.5 Our praxis takes up the task of ‘carefully and critically consider[ing] from where and with whom our story of politics starts, what imaginaries are implicated in popular narratives of global politics, how these imaginaries are complicit in various scaled struggles over resources and the modern state, and what alternative imaginaries might be embedded in political projects that have sought—and still seek—to put an end to colonial legacies’.6





We urge our contributors to engage with three overarching themes and related prompts, including but not limited to:





Repair





    

  • How do we (even begin to) repair Global Souths–EU relations scarred by colonial/modern exploitation for centuries and centuries?
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  • In what ways have the Global Souths demanded reparations from EU powers? Who is claiming to do this reparative work, and why?
    • 




  • Confronted by ongoing colonially constituted injustices (epistemic or otherwise), how do we, as students of liberation, refrain from reproducing the injustices that we are writing against, when we engage with ways of knowing from the Global Souths?
    • 




  • In claiming to do epistemically reparative scholarship on Global Souths–EU relations, how do we ensure our engagement with decolonial, anticolonial, neocolonial and postcolonial schools of thought coheres with the particular geopolitical contexts we are studying? Why must we take greater care in recognising the possible (in)commensurabilities between these epistemologies in terms of critique and praxis? What is at stake when we don’t?
    • 






Resistance





    

  • How have the supposed ‘others’ of the EU in world politics resisted the EU’s many interventions in the realms of trade, law, climate, development, gender, security, migration, and so on?
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  • In what ways does resistance take shape not only in epistemic terms but also in material sites of struggle where EU powers are implicated, not least in Congo, Myanmar, Palestine, and the Sudan?
    • 




  • How are inter-imperial geopolitics aimed at exerting power over the Global Souths linked together? Without resorting to campist logics, is it possible to oppose the EU and its Global North counterparts as well as other global powers like China and Russia—all enacting their respective projects of death, hegemony, domination, and exploitation?
    • 




  • How do liberatory collectives and social movements navigate and resist multiple oppressors in different geopolitical contexts?
    • 






Reworlding





    

  • How do we envision Global Souths–EU relations in a world with pluriversal and more-than-human possibilities in place of a single, anthropocentric, eurocentred global order?
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  • In shifting the geography of thought and praxis towards the Global Souths, how have we enunciated and enacted our ‘freedom dreams, self-definition initiatives, critiques of the asymmetrically structured modern world and struggles and visions of re-membering and re-humanisation of the dismembered and dehumanised’?7
    • 




  • In this geopolitics of reworlding, why and how do we reconstitute encounters between the Global Souths and the EU without a perpetual return to eurocentricity, liberal international reformism, and methodological nationalism?
    • 






We especially welcome submissions by minoritised scholars, independent researchers, Indigenous peoples, collectives, artists, activists, and those whose positionalities 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.





Notes for contributors:





We are accepting submissions via organize@southsouthmovement.org until 15 October 2025 (17:00 Asmara / 22:00 Manila). Submissions must include an abstract (max. 250 words) and an abbreviated CV (max. two pages). Abstracts should have the following information:





    

  • Title
    • 




  • Full name
    • 




  • Position and institutional affiliation (unless you are an independent scholar)
    • 




  • Email address
    • 




  • Key words (up to five)
    • 




  • Section where you think your contribution may fit best (e.g., Repair, Resistance, or Reworlding)
    • 




  • Main text
    • 






Please use 12-pt. Times New Roman (justified) and .odt or .docx format.





In your email, please note how far advanced your proposed contribution is and whether it exists in a draft version.





Indicative timeline:





Notification of submission results: 30 October 2025
Deadline for SI proposal submission to JCMS: 1 November 2025
Announcement of the Open Competition outcome: middle of December 2025
Full manuscript submission: April 2026
Manuscript workshop: May 2026
Peer review: June to November 2026
Final manuscript submission: January 2027
Submission of final manuscripts to JCMS: early February 2027





You can find this call for contributions in pdf format here.









  1. E.g., Robbie Shilliam, ‘Intervention and Colonial-Modernity: Decolonising the Italy/Ethiopia Conflict through Psalms 68:31’, Review of International Studies 39, no. 5 (2013): 1131–47;  Ueli Staeger, ‘Africa–EU Relations and Normative Power Europe: A Decolonial Pan‐African Critique’, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 981–98;  Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, ‘Conceptualizing the Coloniality of Migration: On European Settler Colonialism-Migration, Racism, and Migration Policies’, in Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches, edited by Doris Bachmann-Medick and Jens Kugele (De Gruyter, 2018), 193–210; Toni Haastrup, ‘Critical Perspectives on Africa’s Relationship with the European Union’, in The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Studies, edited by Didier Bigo, Thomas Diez, Evangelos Fanoulis, Ben Rosamond, and Yannis A. Stivachtis (Routledge, 2020), 511–22; Rahel W. Sebhatu, ‘Applying Postcolonial Approaches to Studies of Africa-EU Relations’, in The Routledge Handbook of EU-Africa Relations, edited by Toni Haastrup, Luís Mah, and Niall Duggan (Routledge, 2020), 38–50; Iyiola Solanke, ‘Conclusion: Embedding Decoloniality in Empirical EU Studies’, in Researching the European Court of Justice, edited by Mikael Rask Madsen, Fernanda Nicola, and Antoine Vauchez (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 343–53; Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III, Camille Nessel, and Jan Orbie, ‘Decolonising EU Trade Relations with the Global Souths?’ Journal of Contemporary European Research 19, no. 2 (2023): 181–206; Jan Orbie et al., ‘Editorial: Decolonizing Rather than Decentring “Europe”’, European Foreign Affairs Review 28, no. 1 (2023): 1–8; Alvaro Oleart, Democracy Without Politics in EU Citizen Participation: From European Demoi to Decolonial Multitude (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III, ‘Brussels’s burden: (Un)making the global souths in the European Union’s preferential trade policy’ (PhD dissertation, Central European University, 2024); Alvaro Oleart and Juan Roch, ‘The Colonial Imaginary of ‘Europe’ in the EU’s Asymmetrical Response to the Russian and Israeli Aggressions: Ukraine as a Member of the ‘Family’ Whilst ‘Othering’ Palestine’, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies (2024). ↩︎
  2. María Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 746. ↩︎
  3. Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, ‘Decolonial Thought & Praxis: Building a World Where Many Worlds Fit’, 19 November 2022, https://jairofunez.substack.com/p/decolonial-thought-and-praxis. ↩︎
  4. Lugones, ‘Decolonial Feminism’, 746. ↩︎
  5. E.g., Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepanta: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000a): 533–80; Aníbal Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social’, Journal of World-Systems Research 11, no. 2 (2000b): 342–86; Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (2007): 168–78; Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument’, The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337; María Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’. Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 186–219; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (2007): 240–70; Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘THE EPISTEMIC DECOLONIAL TURN’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (2007): 211–23; Lugones, ‘Decolonial Feminism’; Héctor Alimonda, ‘La Colonialidad de La Naturaleza: Una Aproximación a La Ecología Política Latinoamericana’, in La Naturaleza colonizada: Ecología política y minería en América Latina, edited by Héctor Alimonda (CLACSO, 2011): 21–58; Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Global Coloniality and the Challenges of Creating African Futures’, Strategic Review for Southern Africa 36, no. 2 (2014): 181–202; Rosalba Icaza, ‘Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a Knowing Otherwise’, in Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics, edited by Marc Woons and Sebastian Weier (Bristol: E-INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 2017), 26–45; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘El Caribe, La Colonialidad, y El Giro Decolonial’, Latin American Research Review 55, no. 3 (2020): 560–73; Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán, and James Jupp, ‘Decolonial Discourses and Practices: Geopolitical Contexts, Intellectual Genealogies, and Situated Pedagogies’, Educational Studies 58, no. 5/6 (2022): 596–619; Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, ‘Toward Decolonial Globalisation Studies’, Globalisation, Societies and Education 21, no. 2 (2023): 166–86. ↩︎
  6. Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam, ‘Postcolonial Politics: An Introduction’, in: The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, edited by Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam (Routledge, 2018), 2. ↩︎
  7. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Beyond the coloniser’s model of the world: towards reworlding from the Global South’, Third World Quarterly 44, no. 10 (2023), 2246–62. ↩︎