Whither the pluriverse? Degrowth and coloniality By: Andy Stirling, Saurabh Arora 22.09.2021 https://degrowth.info/en/blog/whither-the-pluriverse-degrowth-and-coloniality
Economic growth is a modern obsession, driven by nation-states carved and maintained through coloniality. As Gandhi recognised long ago (1909): “India is being ground down, not under the English heel, but under that of modern civilization”. Coloniality is not just about control of non-European territories by Europeans, but critically also the ongoing extension of modernity. Coloniality constitutes modern topologies of control and extraction. And these topologies underpin obsessions with economic growth (and degrowth).
Pervasive within these topologies are ambitions to control reason by science; (agricultural) production by industry; mobilities by infrastructures; identities by nations; governance by bureaucracy; sociality by racial capitalism; objectified nature by culture; genders and sexualities by heteropatriarchy; and ‘othered’ peoples by an ostensibly rational self – manifesting as racism and xenophobia in everyday life.