Short Abstract

This roundtable reimagines decolonisation beyond minority framings of race and gender, centring the global majority through the UN-endorsed principles advanced by the Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent.

Description

The roundtable aims to bring together scholars and practitioners to rethink what decolonisation means when anchored in the experiences of the global majority. Too often, decolonial debates in academic and policy spaces remain confined to polarised questions of race and gender rooted in minority contexts, overlooking how caste, descent-based discrimination, and structural exclusions shape the lives of billions.

This discussion for this particular roundtable will foreground the work of the Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent (GFoD), which has been instrumental in articulating a truly global and inclusive vision of justice. Building on the UN-endorsed principles advanced by GFoD, the discussion will examine how decolonisation must reckon with entrenched hierarchies of caste, forced labour, and descent-based exclusion if it is to move beyond the narrow frames that currently dominate.

Participants will engage with questions such as: What does it mean to speak of decolonisation from the standpoint of the global majority, rather than through minority lenses? How might global policy frameworks draw on grassroots struggles against caste, untouchability, slavery, and analogous systems of oppression? And how can we ensure that discourses of decolonisation neither reproduce exclusions nor remain tethered to Euro-American preoccupations?

By weaving together perspectives from across regions and struggles, this roundtable aims to unsettle the existing frames of decolonial thought and practice, offering instead a wider horizon that recognises and centres the voices, labour, and visions of the global majority.

This Roundtable has 1 pending contribution proposal.
Propose contribution