How can universities meaningfully confront their colonial legacies without reproducing new divisions or empty gestures? This book offers a timely and original response by rethinking decolonization in higher education through the lens of anticolonial synergy, relational ethics, and coalitional politics. Bringing critical traditions into dialogue – such as decolonial theory, intersectionality, and critical social thought – Michalinos Zembylas shows how tensions around land, knowledge, identity, and justice can become productive rather than paralyzing. Structured in two parts, the book first develops a conceptual framework for working across difference and then applies it through close engagement with influential anticolonial thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Enrique Dussel, and María Lugones. Grounded in real-world examples from universities in Europe, North America, and beyond, the text combines theoretical depth with practical relevance. It is essential reading for scholars, educators, students, and university leaders, seeking more just, solidaristic, and politically grounded futures for higher education.

‘Zembylas offers a timely, generous, and carefully argued intervention into the promises and paradoxes of decolonizing higher education. This book invites readers to move beyond oppositional binaries toward more accountable, historically grounded, and politically discerning anticolonial synergies across distinct but entangled struggles for justice.’

Vanessa Andreotti - author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity

‘Only someone with the extraordinary intellectual range of Michalinos Zembylas can reconcile diverse positions on decolonization with an array of social justice projects in ways that are accessible, coherent, scholarly, and persuasive. His concept of anticolonial synergies breaks new ground by giving us a way out of the frustratingly circular debates on the meanings of decolonization and their implications for politics.’

Jonathan Jansen - author of On Discovery: How Knowledge is Produced across the Disciplines and Distinguished Professor of Education, Stellenbosch University

‘This latest book of Michalinos Zembylas offers a strikingly original and urgently needed intervention in contemporary debates on decolonization and higher education. By refusing both the dilution of decolonization into metaphor and its confinement to a single analytic frame, Zembylas advances a nuanced and compelling argument for recovering anticolonialism as a shared intellectual and political horizon. The concept of ‘anticolonial synergy' is particularly powerful, providing scholars and practitioners with a framework that honors the specificity of Indigenous, Black, and other historically grounded struggles while opening pathways for meaningful dialogue, coalition, and transformation. What sets this work apart is its intellectual courage and clarity in navigating some of the most difficult tensions in the field. Rather than reproducing divisions – between land-based claims and broader social justice projects, or between decolonial and antiracist traditions – Zembylas insists on working through difference without erasure. The result is a sophisticated and deeply reflective account of how higher education can move beyond siloed thinking toward a more relational, ethically grounded, and politically engaged practice. In these challenging times, this book challenges the reader to think differently and act with greater responsibility and solidarity. Theoretically rich and politically incisive, this book will resonate widely with scholars, students, and activists committed to transforming higher education rather than building its walls higher.’

Lester-Irabinna Rigney - Professor of Education, Adelaide University