Introduction
Few claims in contemporary International Relations (IR) are as widely accepted as the indictment of Eurocentrism. Critics have demonstrated how foundational IR categories – across realist, liberal, and English School traditions – universalized European historical experience while marginalizing or subordinating the rest of the world.Footnote 1 Europe’s trajectory toward territorial sovereignty, capitalist development, secularization, and interstate diplomacy was treated not as one historical path among others but as the normative horizon of political modernity itself. The discipline’s core abstractions – anarchy, sovereignty, balance of power, development, and civilization – were presented as neutral descriptors of global politics, even as they encoded the sedimented history of European imperial expansion.
But postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has decisively unsettled this narrative. The production of knowledge about the ‘Orient,’ as famously demonstrated by Edward Said, was never an innocent description but an integral dimension of imperial rule.Footnote 2 Colonial discourse was shown to not merely misrepresent colonized peoples but also enact an epistemic violence through which the subaltern was structurally rendered inaudible.Footnote 3 Nor was colonial authority ever as stable or self-identical as it imagined itself to be, because its claims to coherence were persistently unsettled by mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence.Footnote 4 Within IR, empire has likewise been seen to be constitutive of international order rather than marginal to it, embedded in the very formation of sovereignty, hierarchy, and global governance.Footnote 5 And from a decolonial vantage point, coloniality has been viewed not as a discrete historical episode but as an enduring structure that sutures race, labor, and knowledge into a global matrix of power.Footnote 6
These interventions have been indispensable. They have provincialized Europe, exposed the racialized genealogy of international law, and disrupted the discipline’s claim to universality. To be sure, any attempt to defend Eurocentrism today would be empirically untenable and normatively indefensible. Yet the force of postcolonial and decolonial critique has also generated a further aspiration: the search for an epistemic outside. If IR’s categories are implicated in imperial domination, emancipation is seen as requiring disengagement from Western theory altogether. In some (especially decolonial) formulations, decolonization becomes epistemic rupture – the abandonment of Western categories, the recovery of suppressed cosmologies, the cultivation of pluriversal ontologies presumed to exist beyond modernity’s reach.
This aspiration is not a strawman; it has named proponents and identifiable texts. Its most influential theoretical sources are Walter Mignolo’s program of ‘epistemic disobedience,’ ‘delinking,’ and ‘border thinking,’ and Arturo Escobar’s calls for ‘alternatives to development’ and, latterly, for a pluriversal politics grounded in worlds positioned beyond modernity’s reach.Footnote 7 Moreover, the aspiration now circulates within IR itself: the pluriverse debates urge the discipline to break out of ‘the prison of colonial modernity’ by recovering relational ontologies and cosmologies that precede or exceed the Western symbolic order.Footnote 8 To be clear, the target of my critique is not epistemic pluralization as such, which I endorse; it is the stronger claim – explicit in some of these texts, implied in others – that an uncontaminated standpoint or way of being external to Western mediation is available. The burden of this article is to show, through close engagement with these formulations, that the stronger claim is structurally impossible, and to explain why it nonetheless persists.
It is precisely here that this article intervenes. I argue that after colonialism, there is no fully non-Eurocentric standpoint available. The Western symbolic order – sovereignty, capitalism, international law, development, human rights, and the modern university – has become globally hegemonic to such a degree that even its critique is mediated through its grammar. Sovereignty structures political recognition; capitalist markets organize production and exchange; international law adjudicates legitimacy; development discourse orders temporal hierarchies.Footnote 9 Consequently, critique cannot occupy an uncontaminated exteriority to this order. It must operate from within it. The intervention is therefore double: it is directed, first, at the decolonial and pluriversal turn in IR and at the Mignolian and Escobarian formulations on which that turn draws; and second, at the broader assumption, recurrent across critical international thought, that the value of critique depends on securing a standpoint outside what it criticizes.
This claim is structural rather than moral. It does not deny colonial violence, nor does it suggest equivalence between dominant and subordinate positions. The asymmetries forged through empire persist materially and epistemically. Rather, the claim concerns the conditions of possibility of critique. The fantasy of a pure outside – a fully decolonial standpoint beyond Western mediation – is structurally impossible. Indeed, it risks reproducing the very logic it seeks to undo. Where colonial ideology posited Europe as universal subject and others as particular or deficient, the fantasy of epistemic purity risks positing the non-West as whole and morally intact. The structure of universality remains; only its sign is inverted.
This argument builds on my earlier work on the inescapability of Eurocentric intellectual tools. In ‘Decolonising Development Studies,’ I suggested that even attempts to refuse engagement with the Western canon depend on normative and epistemic resources shaped within European modernity.Footnote 10 The language of emancipation, critique, justice, and rights itself emerged within intellectual traditions implicated in empire, yet these resources were simultaneously radicalized and transformed by colonized actors. Anti-colonial movements appropriated sovereignty, self-determination, and universal rights not as passive recipients but as insurgent reinterpretations. The result is not purity but ambivalence.
Here, I extend that argument in two directions. First, I situate it explicitly within IR debates on hegemony, sovereignty, and global political economy. The Western symbolic order is not reducible to cultural bias; it is institutionalized through the architecture of global capitalism, international law, and state sovereignty. Second, I deepen the analysis through Lacanian psychoanalysis, which allows us to theorize not only the discursive but also the libidinal dimension of the desire for epistemic exteriority.Footnote 11 In doing so, I also situate my critique in relation to a growing literature that interrogates Mignolo’s epistemic politics – Linda Martín Alcoff’s examination of his epistemology, David Myer Temin’s argument that the focus on delinking flattens anti-colonial material practice, and Michalinos Zembylas’s warning that delinking lends itself to ethno-essentialist appropriation.Footnote 12 These critiques are largely epistemological and political-theoretical in character. What this article adds is, first, a structural account, grounded in international political economy, of why no outside is available; and second, a libidinal account of why the desire for one persists – something neither epistemology nor political economy can explain on its own.
In Lacanian terms, the subject is constituted through the symbolic order; there is no pre-symbolic vantage point from which one can step outside language.Footnote 13 If the Western symbolic order has become globally hegemonic – through centuries of imperial expansion, missionary education, bureaucratic administration, capitalist integration, and disciplinary knowledge production – then no subject today stands outside it.Footnote 14 Even resistance is articulated within its grammar. The problem, therefore, is not simply ideological error. It is libidinal investment in wholeness, authenticity, and moral innocence – what psychoanalysis names as jouissance (enjoyment).Footnote 15
Consider contemporary calls to ‘decolonize the curriculum.’ Such demands are often justified, particularly where syllabi reproduce narrow canons and exclude non-Western thinkers. Yet some strands of this movement slide from critique to purification: Western theory is deemed irredeemably contaminated; engagement becomes complicity; epistemic authenticity is to be recovered elsewhere. The aspiration toward epistemic cleansing risks replicating a colonial logic of civilizational partition, albeit inverted. Instead of Europe as universal subject and the rest as derivative, we encounter Europe as irredeemable contaminant and the outside as pure. The structure of universality remains intact; only its valence shifts.
These stakes are not confined to the academy. International institutions continue to operate through forms consolidated in European modernity. Sovereignty structures political recognition; capitalist markets organize production and exchange; international law adjudicates legitimacy; development discourse orders temporal hierarchies.Footnote 16 Even projects that contest Western dominance – from Bandung to contemporary South–South cooperation – operate within this grammar.Footnote 17 To imagine stepping outside it is to underestimate its institutional depth.
But all this does not entail resignation. On the contrary, relinquishing the fantasy of purity may radicalize critique by redirecting it toward structural transformation. If there is no outside, then decolonization must mean transforming institutions and redistributing power within a shared symbolic terrain rather than seeking epistemic secession. The question becomes not whether we can escape Eurocentrism, but how we contest and reconfigure the hegemonic forms through which global politics is organized.
The remainder of this article proceeds in four stages. First, I clarify what is meant by the Western symbolic order and trace its consolidation through empire and capitalism. Second, I engage postcolonial and decolonial IR scholarship, reading Mignolo and Escobar closely to distinguish between indispensable genealogical critique and the more problematic desire for epistemic exteriority. Third, I mobilize Lacanian psychoanalysis to theorize the fantasy of the outside and the libidinal investments that sustain it. Finally, I outline what decolonization without exit might entail for IR: neither Eurocentric universalism nor epistemic separatism, but transformative engagement under conditions of entanglement.
The claim, then, is deliberately paradoxical: we must oppose Eurocentrism precisely because we cannot step outside it.
The Western symbolic order: empire, capitalism, and institutional hegemony
To argue that there is no outside to Eurocentrism is to make a claim about hegemony. Yet hegemony must not be reduced to discursive dominance or cultural influence alone. It names, rather, a historically sedimented configuration of institutional power, epistemic authority, and political economy through which particular categories come to organize global life.Footnote 18 In this sense, the Western symbolic order refers not to a geographically bounded entity called ‘the West,’ but to a historically specific ensemble of forms – territorial sovereignty, capitalist accumulation, international law, bureaucratic statehood, development temporality, racial classification, and disciplinary knowledge – consolidated through European imperial expansion and subsequently universalized. Because such a list invites breadth at the expense of depth, the analysis that follows concentrates on two anchoring institutions – sovereignty and international law, and capitalism and its monetary hierarchies – treating development discourse and the university as subordinate illustrations. The aim is not an inventory of ‘the West’ but a genealogy of how particular forms became globally binding.
To be sure, none of these forms were exclusively European in origin. Political authority, commercial exchange, legal traditions, and complex state structures long predated European modernity. As John Hobson has demonstrated, many institutional and technological developments that later underpinned European expansion had non-European antecedents. The claim here is not civilizational primacy but historical consolidation.Footnote 19 Between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, European imperial powers reorganized global space through conquest, extraction, enslavement, missionary activity, and administrative restructuring. In doing so, they institutionalized particular logics – centralized territorial sovereignty, capitalist property relations, racial hierarchy, and civilizational standards – which became embedded in global governance.Footnote 20 These logics were neither static nor uncontested; they were reshaped by colonized actors and anti-colonial movements. Yet they were not displaced. Nor was this consolidation merely material; it was philosophically underwritten. Jennifer Pitts has traced how British and French liberal thought turned, between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, from skepticism toward empire to its justification, furnishing the vocabulary – civilization, improvement, tutelage – through which imperial rule was legitimated.Footnote 21
Consider sovereignty. The familiar Westphalian narrative of 1648 has long been criticized as mythic.Footnote 22 Yet modern territorial sovereignty crystallized through European interstate rivalry and imperial expansion. The distinction between sovereign and non-sovereign polities was forged through colonial encounter, where doctrines such as terra nullius and standards of civilization justified conquest and tutelage.Footnote 23 International law developed not in isolation from empire but through its management. Sovereignty was extended selectively and hierarchically, often racially coded and contingent upon conformity to European norms.Footnote 24 Antony Anghie’s genealogy is exemplary here: from Francisco de Vitoria’s sixteenth-century writings on the Indies, which constituted the Amerindian as a subject to be governed, through the nineteenth-century standard of civilization, to the League of Nations Mandate system, the sovereignty doctrine was repeatedly produced through the colonial encounter rather than before it.Footnote 25 The point is historical, not merely conceptual: sovereignty’s universalization was an institutional process, administered through treaties, protectorates, and international organizations.
Today, sovereignty is the universal currency of political legitimacy. Postcolonial states claim it; international organizations are structured around it; decolonial movements invoke it through self-determination claims. Even projects that seek to transcend the state operate through its grammar – whether by demanding state accountability, reshaping sovereignty, or appealing to international recognition.Footnote 26 There is no external standpoint from which to critique sovereignty that does not presuppose its conceptual field. The grammar of political agency remains sovereign even where sovereignty is contested.
The same structural embedding characterizes capitalism. European imperial expansion integrated disparate regions into a world economy organized around accumulation, extraction, and unequal exchange. Plantation slavery, resource exploitation, and colonial trade circuits were not peripheral to capitalism’s rise; they were constitutive of it.Footnote 27 World-systems analysis traced how core–periphery relations structured global accumulation from the sixteenth century onward, consolidating a hierarchy of industrial centers and dependent (semi)peripheries.Footnote 28 Contemporary global value chains, financial markets, and reserve currency hierarchies remain anchored in this historical architecture.Footnote 29
Global capitalism today is institutionally dense. The dominance of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency structures capital flows and crisis management.Footnote 30 International financial institutions impose conditionalities that shape fiscal and social policy in debtor states. Trade law codifies intellectual property protections and investor rights that disproportionately benefit capital-exporting economies.Footnote 31 Development discourse orders nations along temporal hierarchies – developed, developing, emerging – reproducing a teleology rooted in European industrialization.Footnote 32
These structures shape not only material outcomes but epistemic framing. Policy debates are conducted in terms of growth rates, fiscal discipline, inflation targets, sovereign risk, and creditworthiness. Such categories appear technical and neutral, yet they naturalize a specific political-economic order. Even critics of neoliberalism frequently mobilize these same categories – arguing for fairer growth, more inclusive markets, and better regulation – rather than stepping outside the framework altogether.
IR theory has long grappled with hegemony, but often abstracted it from its imperial genealogy. Canonical theories of hegemonic stability, institutional cooperation, and international society took shape largely without reference to the imperial and racial histories through which global order was constituted.Footnote 33 Postcolonial IR has corrected these blind spots by demonstrating that empire and race were constitutive of international order rather than external anomalies.Footnote 34
Nevertheless, even critical IR presupposes the same symbolic grammar it interrogates. When scholars invoke global justice, cosmopolitan responsibility, or humanitarian norms, they draw upon vocabularies rooted in European intellectual history – even as these vocabularies have been appropriated, contested, and transformed globally.Footnote 35 This is not a charge of inconsistency. It is recognition of structural entanglement.
The Western symbolic order thus functions analogously to what Gramsci termed hegemony: not merely coercion, but the naturalization of particular institutional forms as universal.Footnote 36 It establishes the parameters within which political projects are articulated. Hegemony here does not mean total control; it means structuring constraint. The field of possibility is delimited even where contestation flourishes.
Three features of this order are especially significant. First, it is materially institutionalized. Sovereignty, capitalism, and international law are not abstract ideas but organizational forms embedded in bureaucracies, courts, financial systems, and educational institutions. They shape incentives, distribute resources, and authorize claims. One cannot simply declare independence from them.
Second, it is globally diffused yet unevenly inhabited. The Western symbolic order does not belong to Europe alone. It has been internalized, rearticulated, and contested across the globe. Postcolonial states operate within sovereign equality while confronting structural dependency; anti-colonial and Indigenous movements press claims through the very legal forms that once subordinated them. The order is shared, though unequally experienced.
Third, it is historically sedimented. Colonialism reorganized global space through institutional forms that persist beyond formal empire. Formal decolonization did not dismantle the political-economic structures that empire consolidated. Instead, these structures were reconfigured within a nominally universal international society.
To recognize this structural embedding is not to deny agency or plurality. It is to reject the binary of Europe versus its outside. The Western symbolic order is no longer territorially confined. It is globally institutionalized, internally contested, and structurally constraining. Political projects operate within it even when they seek to transform it.
This recognition reframes decolonization. If Eurocentrism were merely ideological bias, it could be overcome through epistemic correction. But if it is institutional embedding – if it names the global consolidation of particular forms through empire and capitalism – then decolonization cannot be conceptualized as exit. It must be conceptualized as transformation within constraint.
The impossibility of non-Eurocentrism is therefore not an epistemic failure but a historical condition. Colonialism reorganized global political economy through institutional forms that remain operative. To imagine ourselves outside this reorganization is to misrecognize its depth. The question becomes not whether we can escape the Western symbolic order, but how we contest and reshape it.
Postcolonial and decolonial IR: critique, delinking, and the limits of exteriority
If the previous section clarified the institutional consolidation of the Western symbolic order, we must now engage more directly the intellectual traditions that have most forcefully challenged it: postcolonial and decolonial IR. The aim here is neither dismissal nor caricature. On the contrary, without postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, the discipline would remain far more provincial, self-satisfied, and historically amnesiac than it once was. The intervention is immanent. It seeks to distinguish between indispensable genealogical critique and a more problematic aspiration toward epistemic exteriority.
Postcolonial IR emerged as a challenge to the discipline’s self-understanding as a neutral science of interstate relations. By ‘postcolonial IR’ I mean the body of scholarship – exemplified below by Sankaran Krishna, Siba Grovogui, Robbie Shilliam, and Antony Anghie – that establishes empire and race as constitutive of international order; its theoretical sources, however, lie largely outside the discipline, in the work of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha, to which I turn first. As touched on earlier, Edward Said demonstrated that knowledge about the ‘Orient’ was inseparable from imperial domination; representation was constitutive of power.Footnote 37 Gayatri Spivak extended this insight by revealing how colonial discourse rendered the subaltern structurally inaudible.Footnote 38 Homi Bhabha complicated civilizational binaries by foregrounding hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence within colonial authority.Footnote 39 These interventions destabilized the binary of West and non-West, not by positing a pure outside but by exposing the instability and incompleteness of colonial universality itself.
Within IR specifically, Sankaran Krishna showed how the discipline’s core categories obscured empire’s constitutive role in shaping global order.Footnote 40 Siba Grovogui demonstrated that sovereignty and self-determination were racialized in international law, structured through hierarchies of civilization.Footnote 41 Robbie Shilliam traced anti-colonial struggles as integral rather than peripheral to international thought.Footnote 42 Antony Anghie’s genealogy of international law revealed how doctrines of sovereignty emerged through colonial encounter rather than presupposing equality among states.Footnote 43 These contributions decisively altered the field’s self-conception.
Decolonial thought extends this critique further by positing coloniality not as historical residue but as enduring structure. Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the ‘coloniality of power’ identifies a matrix linking race, labor, and knowledge that persists beyond formal decolonization.Footnote 44 Coloniality is not reducible to colonial administration; it names the durable patterns of racialization and epistemic hierarchy embedded within modern institutions. Walter Mignolo argues that modernity and coloniality are co-constitutive; the universalist claims of Enlightenment reason cannot be disentangled from imperial domination.Footnote 45 Decolonial theory therefore calls for epistemic disobedience and pluriversality – the affirmation of multiple epistemic horizons in place of a single universal narrative.
This decolonial sensibility has acquired a distinct disciplinary presence. Blaney and Tickner argue that IR remains confined within ‘the prison of colonial modernity’ and call for an ontological politics of ‘worlding’ that would open the discipline to the pluriverse.Footnote 46 The Review of International Studies special issue on pluriversal relationality likewise seeks to pluralize IR’s existential assumptions, drawing on cosmological traditions – from the Americas to Asia and Australia – that conceive relation as prior to separation.Footnote 47 These interventions vary in how far they press toward exteriority: some advocate pluralizing the discipline from within, whereas others gesture toward ontologies positioned beyond modernity’s reach altogether. It is the latter tendency, and the broader assumption that such positioning is available, that concerns me here. Even sympathetic observers have registered the difficulty: taking stock of three decades of efforts to address IR’s Eurocentrism, Bilgin and Smith insist that thinking globally is best understood as critical engagement with the discipline rather than as an alternative standing outside it.Footnote 48
These interventions are indispensable. They provincialize Europe, expose epistemic violence, and recover marginalized intellectual traditions. However, the move from critique to delinking requires careful scrutiny. When delinking is understood as epistemic rearticulation within entanglement – foregrounding suppressed histories while recognizing structural embeddedness – it aligns closely with the argument advanced here. When it is understood as ontological separation – the possibility of inhabiting a standpoint wholly external to Western mediation – it risks overstating what is structurally available.
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation of ‘provincializing Europe’ is instructive in this regard. Chakrabarty does not argue that Europe can be discarded; rather, he contends that European categories are both indispensable and inadequate.Footnote 49 They structure modern political life, yet they fail to exhaust it. The task is not exit but translation, supplementation, and historicization. European thought cannot be erased because it is constitutive of modern institutions, yet it must be dislodged from its claim to universality. This ambivalence closely aligns with the structural diagnosis advanced here.
Stronger formulations of epistemic delinking, however, imply that Western categories are irredeemably contaminated and must be replaced wholesale. Mignolo explicitly advocates ‘epistemic disobedience and delinking from the colonial matrix in order to open up decolonial options,’Footnote 50 insisting that ‘modernity is a complex narrative … that builds Western civilization by celebrating its achievements while hiding at the same time its darker side, “coloniality,”’ such that ‘there is no modernity without coloniality.’Footnote 51 The implication is that modern epistemology is structurally complicit in domination and therefore requires fracturing ‘the hegemony of knowledge and understanding that have been ruled, since the fifteenth century … by the theological and ego-logical politics of knowledge.’Footnote 52 Delinking thus becomes not merely critical engagement but an epistemological break aimed at constructing ‘alternatives to modernity’ through ‘border thinking’ and a decolonial ‘pluriversality.’Footnote 53 In its stronger moments, this language gestures toward a de facto exteriority: pluriversal spaces are imagined as able to ‘exist independently of the state and corporations’ by delinking ‘from state forms of governance’ and ‘from the economy of accumulation.’Footnote 54 The affective register of this program is equally telling. The concluding remarks of On Decoloniality are organized under the heading ‘Colonial Wounds, Decolonial Healings, Re-Existences, Resurgences’: decoloniality is figured as a therapeutics, a healing of the colonial wound that would restore ways of being – ‘re-existence’ – damaged by modernity.Footnote 55 I return to this vocabulary below, for it is here that the libidinal stakes of delinking become most visible: what is promised is not simply another epistemology but recovered wholeness.
Escobar’s postdevelopment/decolonial formulations, while institutionally more grounded, move in a similar direction. Development discourse is described as enabling the West to ‘control and, for all intents and purposes, create the Third World culturally and socioeconomically.’Footnote 56 Like Mignolo, he calls for ‘alternatives to development,’ presuming that development’s epistemological frame can be displaced.Footnote 57 The ambition is not reform but epistemic rupture. That ambition has only intensified in Escobar’s recent work: Designs for the Pluriverse reconceives design as a world-making practice oriented toward autonomy and radical interdependence, whereas Pluriversal Politics affirms a world of ‘multiple worlds, partially connected but radically different,’ grounded in the territorial struggles of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities.Footnote 58 At its strongest, this is no longer a plea for epistemic diversity within a shared terrain but an ontological claim: that other worlds, with their own epistemic grounding, subsist beyond modernity’s reach and can anchor politics accordingly. Yet even the language of replacement circulates through institutional infrastructures shaped by modern disciplinary forms. Universities across the Global South operate within global ranking systems, funding structures, and publication hierarchies embedded in academic capitalism. English functions as the dominant medium of scholarly exchange, shaping whose work circulates and whose does not.Footnote 59 Pluriversality itself travels through journals, conferences, and citation networks structured by transnational knowledge economies.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish two senses of pluriversality that these texts tend to run together. In the first, pluriversality names epistemic pluralization within entanglement: the foregrounding of suppressed histories, cosmologies, and intellectual traditions inside a shared – if violently asymmetrical – global terrain. So understood, pluriversality is compatible with the argument of this article, and indeed required by it. In the second, pluriversality names ontological exteriority: the claim that there are worlds and standpoints subsisting outside the Western symbolic order, available as uncontaminated ground for thought and politics. It is this second sense that is operative when Mignolo imagines delinking from state governance and the economy of accumulation, or when Escobar positions the pluriverse beyond development’s epistemological frame.Footnote 60 My critique is addressed to this second sense alone. The trouble is that the two are rarely held apart; the rhetorical force of the first is routinely borrowed to underwrite the second.
Moreover, anti-colonial struggles historically proceeded through appropriation rather than purification. The Haitian Revolution invoked the Rights of Man to expose their racial hypocrisy.Footnote 61 Anti-colonial leaders mobilized sovereign equality within a Westphalian framework to dismantle empire.Footnote 62 Frantz Fanon drew on European existentialism and psychoanalysis even as he denounced colonial violence.Footnote 63 Hence, decolonization was not achieved by locating a pristine outside; it was achieved by transforming categories from within their contradictions. Adom Getachew has shown, moreover, that Black Atlantic anti-colonialists did not merely join an existing order of nation-states: they seized the language of self-determination to attempt a remaking of international order itself – through regional federation and demands for a New International Economic Order – precisely from within its institutions.Footnote 64 Appropriation, in other words, was not capitulation but worldmaking.
To acknowledge this is not to dismiss the aspiration toward epistemic plurality. Nor is it to deny that Western institutions remain sites of exclusion and marginalization. The point is structural rather than moral. If sovereignty, capitalism, and international law constitute the institutional grammar of global politics, then political projects cannot step outside them. They must contest and reshape them.
The risk of overstating delinking is not merely theoretical; it is political. If liberation is imagined as epistemic separation, structural transformation may recede from view. Monetary hierarchies, sovereign debt regimes, trade asymmetries, and environmental exploitation require institutional confrontation. They cannot be dissolved through ontological pluralization alone. A diversified epistemology can coexist with entrenched material inequality.
Furthermore, the binary of West and outside risks reinscribing the civilizational partition it critiques. If Europe is cast as irredeemably corrupt and the outside as inherently authentic, the structure of completeness is inverted rather than dismantled. Colonial ideology posited Europe as whole and universal; its inversion posits the outside as whole and morally intact. The logic of purity persists.
It is important to emphasize that postcolonial theory itself has long warned against such essentialism. Bhabha’s emphasis on hybridity destabilizes sealed cultural identities.Footnote 65 Spivak cautions against strategic essentialism hardening into ontological claims.Footnote 66 Even Mignolo’s notion of border thinking foregrounds liminality rather than purity.Footnote 67 The strongest strands of postcolonial and decolonial scholarship therefore align with immanent critique rather than exterior flight.
The difficulty arises when rhetorical gestures toward exit obscure structural embedding. If the Western symbolic order organizes global institutions and political economy, then even resistance is articulated within its grammar. There is no Archimedean point outside sovereignty, capitalism, and international law from which to critique them. This does not render critique futile. It renders it immanent.
The impossibility of non-Eurocentrism thus reframes decolonization. Decolonization becomes the practice of contesting and transforming hegemonic institutions rather than abandoning them. It involves redistributing power within the symbolic order, not imagining its dissolution. It demands engagement with global finance, trade law, state structures, and disciplinary knowledge production.
This reframing also clarifies the relationship between epistemology and political economy. Coloniality is not reducible to capitalism, yet it has been institutionalized through capitalist forms. Addressing epistemic hierarchy without confronting material structures risks fragmentation. Conversely, confronting political economy without interrogating epistemic violence risks technocratic reformism. The task is therefore conjunctural: linking recognition to redistribution.
But if structural entanglement limits the possibility of epistemic exteriority, we must still explain why the fantasy of an outside remains so compelling. The next section turns to psychoanalysis to illuminate the libidinal dimension of this desire.
Psychoanalysis and the fantasy of the outside: symbolic structure, jouissance, and traversal
The preceding sections established two interrelated propositions. First, the Western symbolic order – sovereignty, capitalism, international law, development, and disciplinary knowledge – is materially institutionalized and globally hegemonic. Second, decolonial critiques, although indispensable, sometimes exceed structural possibility when they imagine epistemic exteriority. The question now becomes as follows: Why does the desire for an uncontaminated outside persist despite institutional entanglement? Why is the fantasy of epistemic purity so compelling?
To answer this, we must move from institutional structure to subjectivity. Political economy explains why there is no outside; psychoanalysis helps explain why we nonetheless desire one. The point is not to psychologize colonial violence or reduce material domination to symbolic misrecognition. Rather, it is to account for the affective investments that accompany critique itself.
In Lacanian theory, the subject is constituted through entry into the symbolic order – the network of signifiers that structures meaning.Footnote 68 There is no pre-symbolic subject capable of stepping outside language to access a pure vantage point. The symbolic precedes and exceeds us; it is the condition of possibility of intelligibility itself. The child enters language through prohibition and loss, accepting limitation in exchange for meaning.Footnote 69 Subjectivity is thus marked by lack. Something is always missing; wholeness is impossible.
Lacan’s tripartite distinction between the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real provides the conceptual architecture necessary to clarify what is at stake in the desire for a non-Eurocentric standpoint.Footnote 70 The Symbolic names the domain of language, law, and institutional structure – the differential network of signifiers through which meaning becomes possible at all. It is not merely discourse in the narrow sense but the structuring order that precedes the subject and into which the subject is inserted. The Imaginary, by contrast, is the realm of identification and coherence, the domain in which the subject misrecognizes itself as whole, unified, and self-transparent. The Real, finally, does not refer to empirical reality but to structural impossibility: the antagonism that cannot be domesticated within signification, the limit point that prevents any symbolic order from achieving closure.Footnote 71
These distinctions allow us to restate the problem of Eurocentrism more precisely. What earlier appeared as ‘Western hegemony’ can now be understood as a historically sedimented Symbolic order – an institutionalized network of signifiers such as sovereignty, development, civilization, growth, and progress that structures global political intelligibility. Subjects do not stand outside this order and then choose whether or not to inhabit it; they are constituted within it. Even critique must pass through its grammar. To speak of sovereignty, modernity, or even coloniality is already to mobilize signifiers forged within a particular historical-symbolic configuration. Accordingly, the aspiration to a fully external standpoint cannot be a simple epistemological gesture; it is bound up with how subjectivity itself is formed.
A clarification is needed here, lest the argument appear circular. If one simply asserts that there is no outside to the symbolic order, the impossibility of epistemic exteriority follows analytically: it would be true of any symbolic order whatsoever and would tell us nothing specific about Eurocentrism. The argument of this article does not rest on that tautology; it rests on the conjunction of two claims that are not analytically given. The first is historical: one particular symbolic configuration – forged through empire and capitalism – has been globally consolidated, such that the signifiers organizing political intelligibility everywhere now pass through it. This is an empirical claim about institutional history, defended in the first section, and it could in principle be false. The second is libidinal: the aspiration to exteriority is not a neutral epistemic error but a fantasy invested with enjoyment, which is why it survives refutation. Lacanian theory supplies the conceptual grammar for both claims; it does not, by itself, decide them. What psychoanalysis adds – what neither epistemology nor political economy can supply – is an account of the persistence of the desire for an outside: of why, even when structural entanglement is conceded, the longing for purity returns.
It is here that the Imaginary enters the picture. The fantasy of an epistemic outside belongs to the Imaginary insofar as it posits a coherent standpoint beyond mediation – a position from which complicity could be escaped and contamination purified: if only one could truly step outside the Western symbolic order, one would no longer be implicated in its history of violence; one would occupy moral wholeness rather than ambivalence. The attraction of this position is not merely intellectual but affective. It promises relief from contradiction. Yet the very coherence it projects is indicative of Imaginary misrecognition, because no subject can stand wholly outside the Symbolic conditions that make speech, critique, and politics possible.
The Real, in this context, names something different altogether. It designates the antagonisms generated by colonialism and global capitalism – racial hierarchy, exploitation, dispossession, ecological breakdown – that cannot be harmonized within the existing symbolic order. These antagonisms persist irrespective of ideological narrative. They surface in sovereign debt crises, structural adjustment programs, migration regimes, and patterns of climate inequality. Such phenomena do not simply contradict liberal developmental rhetoric; they expose the impossibility of reconciling accumulation, equality, and planetary limits within a single coherent framework. It is therefore important to clarify the relationship between capitalism and the Real: capitalism generates antagonisms that repeatedly reveal structural impossibility (the Real). When Žižek speaks of ‘capital as the Real,’ he is identifying the kernel of antagonism around which contemporary ideology circulates.Footnote 72 Crisis is not accidental to capitalism but endemic to it; the system cannot fully reconcile its own contradictions.Footnote 73 The Real names this constitutive non-closure.
Fantasy, in Lacanian theory, is not mere illusion but the scenario that organizes desire.Footnote 74 It stages a world in which the subject’s constitutive lack would be overcome, in which antagonism would be resolved and wholeness restored. The fantasy of epistemic purity operates precisely in this register. It promises that a fully non-Eurocentric standpoint would dissolve ambivalence, absolve complicity, and secure innocence. This promise is libidinally powerful. Ideology persists not because subjects are unaware of contradiction but because they derive enjoyment – jouissance – from its narratives.Footnote 75
Jouissance, then, is not simple pleasure but excessive, often painful satisfaction bound up with identification. Even the denunciation of Eurocentrism can become a site of enjoyment: the gratification of occupying the morally elevated position, of imagining oneself beyond contamination, of believing that one has finally located an uncontaminated ground. This is where the vocabulary of wounding and healing encountered earlier acquires its significance. When decoloniality is figured as the healing of the colonial wound and the restoration of damaged ways of being, critique is invested with the promise of recovered wholeness – an Imaginary plenitude that no symbolic rearrangement can deliver.Footnote 76 The diagnosis is not that decolonial thinkers are uniquely susceptible; it is that this promissory structure is legible in the texts themselves.
Understood in these terms, the impossibility of a complete ‘outside’ is not a conservative defense of Western categories. It is a structural claim about subjectivity and antagonism. There is no position free from mediation, because the subject is always already constituted within a Symbolic order, and there is no symbolic order capable of eliminating antagonism, because the Real continually disrupts it. The task, therefore, is not to fantasize about, and draw pleasure from, a pure exteriority but to confront the contradictions that traverse any position, including one’s own.
This observation does not trivialize decolonial critique. The violence of colonialism is real; the anger it generates is justified. Psychoanalysis does not pathologize resistance. Rather, it clarifies why critique can become attached to fantasies of purity. The desire to be innocent – to stand outside domination – is understandable. But it is structurally impossible.
The fantasy of the outside thus mirrors colonial universality in inverted form. Colonial ideology posited Europe as complete, rational, and universal; the non-West was particular and deficient. The fantasy of epistemic purity risks positing the non-West as complete and authentic, whereas Europe becomes irredeemable contamination. Once again, the structure of completeness persists; only its sign changes.
Traversal of fantasy, in Lacanian terms, involves recognizing that the object promising wholeness does not exist.Footnote 77 It entails accepting the subject’s division and acting without the guarantee of coherence. Traversal does not abandon desire; it transforms its orientation. Instead of seeking purity, the subject confronts antagonism.
Applied to international theory, traversal means relinquishing the dream of epistemic innocence while sustaining critique. It entails acknowledging complicity in the Western symbolic order without collapsing into resignation. The scholar situated in a Western institution cannot claim purity, nor can she withdraw from the symbolic field. She must work within it.
Such a move shifts attention from identity to structure. If there is no outside, transformation must engage institutions – sovereign debt regimes, trade law, and monetary hierarchies – rather than retreating into ontological separatism. It also reorients affect. Instead of deriving satisfaction from purity, critique derives commitment from confronting structural antagonism.
The Real continues to remain operative. Climate crisis, racialized inequality, and financial instability persist irrespective of epistemic vocabulary. The danger of the fantasy of purity is that it may displace attention from these antagonisms toward symbolic separation. When epistemic delinking becomes the primary horizon, material redistribution often recedes, as some critics have alleged is indeed the case with both postcolonialism and decoloniality.Footnote 78
It bears repeating that this psychoanalytic account does not reduce colonial violence to fantasy. Colonialism was material domination; capitalism produces tangible suffering. Psychoanalysis explains not the existence of domination but the form critique sometimes takes in response to it.
The impossibility of non-Eurocentrism thus acquires affective depth. It is not merely that institutions are historically Western in origin; it is that subjects desire a standpoint free from mediation. Traversal entails accepting that such a standpoint is unavailable. What remains is not exit but responsibility. If we are constituted within a hegemonic symbolic order, decolonization must proceed through immanent transformation. The final section draws out the normative and institutional implications of this claim for IR.
Decolonization without exit: normative and institutional implications for international theory
If there is no outside to the Western symbolic order, and if the fantasy of epistemic purity organizes desire without resolving structural antagonism, then the question becomes normative: What does decolonization mean under conditions of inescapable entanglement? How should IR theory and practice proceed if exit is unavailable?
The first implication is conceptual clarity. Decolonization must be distinguished from purification. Purification imagines that Western categories can be excised and replaced by uncontaminated epistemic forms. Decolonization, by contrast, becomes a project of transformation within constraint. It recognizes that sovereignty, capitalism, international law, development, and disciplinary knowledge are historically entangled with empire yet remain the institutional grammar of global politics.Footnote 79 The task is not symbolic abandonment but structural reconfiguration.
To be sure, epistemic pluralization remains indispensable. IR’s canon has long marginalized African, Asian, Latin American, Indigenous, and diasporic thought. Acharya and Buzan’s call for ‘non-Western IR theory’ was not a gesture of inclusion for its own sake but a corrective to disciplinary parochialism.Footnote 80 Expanding citation practices, diversifying curricula, and foregrounding suppressed intellectual traditions are necessary interventions. Yet pluralization alone does not alter the material architecture of global order. A diversified syllabus can coexist with sovereign debt crises, unequal trade regimes, and ecological extraction.
Accordingly, a politics of traversal redirects attention toward institutional transformation. Consider the global monetary system. The dominance of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency confers structural power on particular states, shaping capital flows, borrowing costs, and crisis management.Footnote 81 Sovereign debt regimes frequently impose austerity measures that disproportionately burden debtor populations in the Global South.Footnote 82 Reforming these structures – through more democratic governance of international financial institutions, fairer debt restructuring mechanisms, capital controls, or alternative reserve arrangements – constitutes a form of decolonizing transformation. It confronts the material embedding of hegemony rather than imagining its symbolic dissolution.
Similarly, global trade law institutionalizes property rights and investor protections that privilege capital-exporting states. Intellectual property regimes, as Sell has shown, were shaped by corporate lobbying and global power asymmetries.Footnote 83 Revising dispute settlement mechanisms, strengthening labor and environmental standards, and rebalancing intellectual property protections are not peripheral adjustments; they engage the institutional core of the Western symbolic order.
Sovereignty itself, although historically implicated in colonial hierarchy, remains the grammar through which political agency is recognized. Anti-colonial movements mobilized sovereign equality to dismantle empire; contemporary Indigenous movements invoke self-determination within international law.Footnote 84 A politics of traversal does not discard sovereignty; it democratizes and resignifies it. It presses for egalitarian forms of international society rather than retreating from the state form altogether.
What, then, does structural embeddedness do for political agency, beyond constraining it? Three things. First, it confers leverage: claims articulated in the order’s own grammar – sovereign equality, self-determination, and legal right – are claims the order cannot dismiss without disavowing itself, which is why anti-colonial appropriation succeeded where exit was never on offer. Second, it confers traction: institutions such as debt regimes and trade law are sites where pressure produces binding effects, whereas an imagined outside is a site where pressure produces nothing the order must register. Third, it transforms the agent: working within contradiction obliges critique to specify what it would build, not merely what it would refuse. Entanglement, on this account, is not the negation of agency but its very medium. What fantasized exteriority forfeits is precisely this purchase – enforceability, recognition, and institutional consequence – in exchange for the enjoyment of innocence.
At the level of theory, decentering Europe must proceed through reflexive engagement rather than wholesale rejection. Concepts such as anarchy, sovereignty, development, and hegemony should be interrogated historically and normatively, not abandoned categorically. Chakrabarty’s insistence that European categories are both indispensable and inadequate captures this ambivalence.Footnote 85 They structure modern political life, yet they must be supplemented and rearticulated through engagement with other histories.
This immanent orientation also clarifies the relation between recognition and redistribution. Nancy Fraser famously argued that struggles for cultural recognition can become detached from struggles for economic redistribution.Footnote 86 In the context of decolonization, epistemic recognition without material transformation risks symbolic accommodation within neoliberal order.Footnote 87 Traversal therefore links pluralization to political economy. It insists that confronting epistemic hierarchy and confronting structural inequality are conjunctural tasks, not alternatives.
Moreover, relinquishing the fantasy of purity reconfigures responsibility. If we are constituted within a hegemonic symbolic order, we cannot claim innocence. Scholars located in Western institutions benefit from infrastructures shaped by empire and capitalism. Yet acknowledging complicity need not produce paralysis. On the contrary, it clarifies the terrain of intervention. We act not from outside but within compromised and contradictory institutions.
The impossibility of non-Eurocentrism thus becomes a paradoxical resource. It cautions against the comfort of moral wholeness and redirects critique toward structural antagonism. It rejects both Eurocentric universalism and epistemic separatism. It demands engagement with political economy as well as epistemology.
Importantly, this argument does not minimize ongoing violence. Racial hierarchy, geopolitical inequality, extractive capitalism, and ecological crisis remain pervasive. The impossibility of non-Eurocentrism is not a claim of equivalence between dominant and subordinate positions. It is a claim about structural embedding. The terrain of struggle is shared, though unevenly inhabited.
Nor does this argument reduce coloniality to capitalism. Coloniality encompasses racialization, epistemic marginalization, and ontological hierarchy. Yet coloniality has been institutionalized through political-economic forms that structure global inequality. Addressing epistemic violence without confronting these material structures risks fragmentation. Conversely, confronting political economy without interrogating epistemic hierarchy risks technocratic reformism. The task is therefore integrative.
Decolonization without exit therefore entails four commitments. First, institutional redistribution within global governance – transforming financial regimes, trade law, and sovereign debt structures. Second, epistemic pluralization within disciplinary and academic structures – diversifying citation practices, editorial representation, and language politics. Third, reflexive interrogation of canonical categories – historicizing and resignifying rather than discarding. And fourth, acceptance of ambivalence as a condition of political agency – relinquishing the fantasy of innocence while sustaining critique.
To conclude, we must oppose Eurocentrism precisely because we cannot step outside the structures it consolidated. The Western symbolic order – forged through empire and capitalism – continues to organize global politics materially and conceptually. The fantasy of an uncontaminated outside promises wholeness but obscures structural antagonism. Psychoanalysis clarifies this dynamic; political economy situates it.
There is no outside – a claim advanced, necessarily, from within the order it describes, and offered as a historical-structural diagnosis rather than an apodictic certainty. There is only the shared, contested terrain of global modernity – and the ongoing struggle to reshape it.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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