Just Economies? Some Critical Supplements to Decolonial Development Debates

Decolonial approaches are becoming established and institutionalized in development scholarship and curricula. Among their important contributions to critical development thinking are the reminders to strive for epistemic justice and to foreground the heretofore marginalized knowledge of Indigenous and Black people, the ‘feminine’, non‐Western people and other Others. However, scholars who take decolonial politics seriously must engage with prior anti‐colonial work in development studies and past critiques of political economy. This article provides an overview of the long trajectory of this critical work and discusses earlier and current critical works that offer analytically sharper and politically more astute ways of thinking about colonialism, race, gender and power than many current decolonial approaches.