There is no outside: on the impossibility of non-Eurocentrism

This article argues that there is no fully non-Eurocentric standpoint available after colonialism. The Western symbolic order – institutional, epistemic, juridical, and political-economic – has become globally hegemonic, structuring not only liberal international institutions but also the grammar of their critique. Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has powerfully exposed the violence of Eurocentrism, yet the desire for an uncontaminated ‘outside’ risks reproducing the very logic it opposes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that the fantasy of epistemic purity functions as an inverted mirror of colonial universality. The problem is not merely ideological error but also libidinal investment in wholeness, authenticity, and moral innocence. Engaging debates in International Relations theory on hegemony, sovereignty, and global order, the article contends that Eurocentrism persists not only discursively but through the political economy of global capitalism and international law. Decolonization, therefore, cannot mean epistemic exit; it must instead involve traversing ambivalence, contradiction, and complicity from within a shared symbolic terrain.