Short Abstract

This panel interrogates multipolarity as colonial continuity. We demand anticolonial anthropology that refuses neutrality, destabilizes power-laden polarities, and foregrounds decolonial praxis from the colonial wound rather than detached academic observation.

Long Abstract

Contemporary rhetoric around "multipolarity"—in geopolitics and academia—often functions as a neutralizing technology that absorbs and depoliticizes decolonial critiques. By proposing a "balance" among multiple poles of power (Global North vs. Global South, West vs. East, North vs. South), this discourse leaves the fundamental colonial logic intact: the legitimacy of "poles" as center of power. Geopolitical multipolarity multiplies those centers, while preserving the center-periphery structure, the nation-state as the sole legitimate political form, and extractivist capitalism with different appellations.This configuration has deep historical roots in colonial enterprises that established the very grammar of polarity— epistemological architectures structuring how we imagine centers, peripheries, and their relations.

We argue multipolarity reproduces and multiplies colonial logic and a power structures where racial classification, international labor division, Eurocentric epistemology, and state control of authority remain intact across all "poles." Tracing these genealogies reveals how contemporary multipolarity is not a rupture but a continuation: new geopolitical actors extend rather than challenge historically-sedimented structures. Chinese extractivism in Latin America mirrors Northern patterns; Southern academic elites reproduce Eurocentric epistemologies in metropolitan languages rather than theorizing from Indigenous cosmologies in their own tongues.

Therefore, this panel interrogates: whose privilege permits neutrality when territories, bodies, and ontologies face elimination? Can anthropology remain "neutral" before extractivist megaprojects polarizing communities, or conservation schemes criminalizing Indigenous practices while permitting corporate exploitation?

We call for papers that destabilize political charged polarities (human-animal, individual-society, nature-nurture, South-North), by emphasizing the power structures from which they emerge and offering decentered, plurilogical alternatives. We welcome contributions addressing: past colonial configurations of polarity; current cases and contemporary manifestations of epistemic geopolitics; critical reflections on future possibilities for pluriversal worlds.

We advocate for positioned, committed anthropology that recognizes co-theorization over epistemic extractivism, foregrounding praxis from the colonial wound rather than observation from protected academic poles.

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