Decolonization as an Epistemic Effort Means Treating Empire as a Category of Analysis

to participate in this important discussion about ways of reimagining our field in light of the current epistemological and ideological crisis produced by Russia's war in Ukraine.We share the call of Andy Byford, Connor Doak and Stephen Hutchings for a 're-examination of one's own worldview, biases and epistemologies and even a commitment to and the imperative of decolonizing oneself '. 1 Likewise, it is hard to disagree with their questioning of the direct correlation between language or culture and essentialized groups such as Russians or Ukrainians.It is less obvious to us why one should feel constrained by the framework of current postcolonial and, more so, decolonial studies and specifically by their understanding of political activism and Western epistemological domination.'The decolonial paradigm ::: emphasizes the unequal power relations that exist between states, languages, peoples and cultures in the imperial and post-imperial contexts, as well as how knowledge generated within that context forms part of a power hierarchy', the authors write. 2 But was this not the main contribution of the earlier postcolonial critique -the exposure of structures of epistemological domination as more enduring than political colonialism?This exposure generated at least two distinct reactions: one pessimistic, denying the existence of subaltern versions of modernity, speech, history and so on; and another, more optimistic, focused on rethinking the very categories of 'the West' or 'Western modernity'. 3They were reconsidered as the products of entangled global developments, which 'the West' had appropriated in a specific historical moment (recall, among many others, Sanjay Subrahmanyam's reading of modernity as 'historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon' that 'is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact' the roots of which must be sought 'in a set of diverse phenomena'; or Jane Burbank and Frederic Cooper's take on empires as political formations that dominated most of human history and developed a repertoire of rule and diversity management that is not reducible to simplistic binaries). 4