‘Decolonising’ is everywhere — in funding calls, conference titles and job descriptions. Used loosely it becomes a slogan that changes nothing. This course treats it as a serious analytical project: naming how colonial power still shapes who develops whom, with whose knowledge, in whose interest.

South Asia was both a laboratory of empire and a cradle of anti-colonial thought — from the drain of wealth debates to Gandhi’s swaraj. Yet much of its development sector still imports frameworks, metrics and ‘best practice’ designed elsewhere.

We talk of development as if it were a timeless, neutral goal. But the modern idea — some countries are ‘developed’, others must catch up — is a twentieth-century invention with deep colonial roots.

Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education openly aimed to form ‘a class… Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ — dismissing Indian and Arabic learning wholesale.

On 20 January 1949, in his inaugural address, US President Harry Truman announced Point Four: a programme of technical aid for ‘underdeveloped areas’. With that word, half the world was re-described overnight.

Arturo Escobar argues that ‘underdevelopment’ was not discovered but invented — the moment diverse societies were lumped together as a deficient mass, defined by what they lacked relative to the United States.

The decades after 1949 institutionalised development: the World Bank and IMF (Bretton Woods, 1944), bilateral aid agencies, five-year plans, the ‘Decade of Development’ (the 1960s) and an emerging class of international experts.

A central decolonial insight, drawn from Michel Foucault and radicalised by postcolonial thinkers: knowledge and power produce each other. To define and describe a people is already to exercise power over them.

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said showed how Western scholarship constructed ‘the Orient’ as exotic, irrational and unchanging — a mirror that flattered the West as rational and modern, and justified ruling over it.

In Encountering Development (1995), Arturo Escobar applied a Foucauldian lens to development itself, treating it as a discourse: a whole system of knowledge, institutions and practices that produces its own objects — ‘the poor’, ‘the Third World’.

Markets, the rational individual, linear progress, the nuclear household, the modern state — presented as universal, these are in fact a particular European history dressed up as everyone’s future.

The post-war orthodoxy, crystallised in W. W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (1960), held that all societies climb the same ladder — from ‘traditional’ to ‘high mass consumption’ — if they adopt Western institutions and values.

From Latin America in the 1960s–70s, dependency theory argued the opposite: poor countries are not ‘behind’ but actively underdeveloped — their poverty produced by the same global system that enriched the ‘core’.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis scaled the argument up: since the ‘long sixteenth century’, there has been a single capitalist world-economy divided into core, periphery and semi-periphery.

Dependency and world-systems brilliantly diagnosed economic structure — but mostly within a Western, economistic, Marxist frame. They said little about knowledge, race, gender and the coloniality of being.

The decolonial school’s founding move is to separate two things usually merged. Colonialism was a political event — rule by a foreign power — that mostly ended. Coloniality is the deeper pattern of power it left behind, and which lives on.

Walter Mignolo names the underside of modernity: there is no modernity without coloniality. Europe’s self-image as rational and progressive was built on, and required, the domination of others.

Knowledge is presented as placeless and universal, yet it is produced from somewhere — overwhelmingly a handful of institutions in the global North. Theory comes from there; the South supplies data and case studies.

Not all knowledge is treated equally. A randomised trial counts as ‘evidence’; a farmer’s reading of the monsoon or an elder’s account of a forest is filed under ‘belief’, ‘anecdote’ or ‘folklore’.

In her 1988 essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks whether the most marginalised — the ‘subaltern’ — can be heard at all within structures built by colonial and patriarchal power.

Spivak’s warning cuts at well-meaning development too. Even those who claim to give voice to the oppressed may, in the act of representing them, talk over them — translating their reality into the expert’s terms.

In Decolonising the Mind (1986), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues that the deepest colonial weapon was control of culture and language — making the colonised see themselves through the coloniser’s eyes. He renounced English for Gikuyu in his own creative work.

When proposals, logframes, training and evaluation all happen in English (or in technical jargon), communities are made into clients of their own development — able to receive, rarely to author.

Modern aid runs along a chain: donor governments and foundations → international NGOs → national NGOs → community groups. Money, accountability and prestige concentrate at the top; risk and delivery sink to the bottom.

Localisation is the pledge to shift more funding, decision-making and leadership to local and national actors. The 2016 humanitarian Grand Bargain set a much-cited target of 25% of funding ‘as directly as possible’ to local responders.

The #ShiftThePower movement pushes beyond localisation-as-subcontracting toward genuinely shifting power, resources and trust to communities — community philanthropy, untied core funding, Southern-led agendas.

There is a structural awkwardness: organisations are being asked to give away the very money, contracts and visibility that sustain them. Turkeys rarely vote for an early Christmas.

Who funds the study, frames the questions, holds the data and signs the paper are all expressions of power. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), ‘research’ is one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous vocabulary — for good historical reason.

Post-development thinkers — Escobar, Wolfgang Sachs, Gustavo Esteva, Majid Rahnema — go further than reform. They argue the whole project should be abandoned, not improved: it homogenises diverse ways of living into a single, Western blueprint.

From Andean Indigenous thought, buen vivir (sumak kawsay in Kichwa) means ‘good living’ or ‘living well together’ — a life in balance with community and nature, not the endless accumulation of more.

From Southern Africa, ubuntu — ‘a person is a person through other persons’ — centres relationship, dignity and the collective over the isolated, maximising individual of mainstream economics.

Degrowth, largely a Northern critique, argues that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is neither possible nor desirable — and that rich economies must shrink their material throughput so all can live well.

Critique without practice is just sophistication. Decolonising is finally a set of concrete shifts in how programmes are funded, designed, staffed, spoken and judged — small choices that move power, repeated at scale.

If donors alone set the indicators, ‘success’ means ‘what the donor values’. Decolonising evaluation asks communities to define what a good outcome is — and weighs their judgement seriously.

An intellectually honest course turns the lens on itself. Decolonial thought has real tensions and blind spots — naming them protects the project from becoming the dogma it set out to challenge.

Celebrating indigenous and traditional ways can slide into romanticisation — ignoring that local structures, too, can be unequal: caste, patriarchy, gerontocracy, exclusion.

The sharpest present danger is co-optation: the language is adopted, the structures untouched. ‘Decolonising’ becomes a workshop, a job title, a grant theme — a new layer of expertise atop the old hierarchy.