The Epilogue synthesizes the book’s central arguments and situates them within broader theoretical, political, and pedagogical debates on decolonizing higher education. It reaffirms the pursuit of anticolonial synergies as a shared horizon and emphasizes solidarity, responsibility, and critical relationality as essential to this work. Moving from critique to praxis, the Epilogue advances a futures-oriented roadmap organized around five interrelated trajectories: governance (including public accountability for reparative commitments); knowledge infrastructures (through non-extractive research ecosystems and equitable North–South collaborations); curriculum and pedagogy (shifting from additive inclusion to structural redesign and long-term community partnerships); material repair (linking epistemic change to land, budgets, divestment, and the commons); and institutional affect (challenging how decolonization unfolds within affective environments). The closing reflections frame decolonization not as a fixed endpoint, but as an ongoing project requiring sustained ethical, affective, political, material, and epistemic engagement within and beyond higher education.

This chapter critically analyzes the relevance of critical theory and critical pedagogy to decolonization, given their foundations in Eurocentric traditions. While some scholars critique critical theory for its failure to engage with colonial histories, others caution against conflating decolonization with broader social justice frameworks. This chapter argues that, despite tensions between critical theory and decolonial approaches, a theoretical synergy between the two offers valuable insights into education’s entanglements with coloniality, racism, and social injustice. Critical theory provides analytical tools for examining ideology, power, and capitalist structures, while decolonial thought foregrounds epistemic, affective, and material dimensions of colonialism. Through a synergistic approach, this chapter explores critical theory through a decolonial lens and vice versa, demonstrating how their intersection clarifies distinctions and reveals new possibilities for transformative educational practice. It is argued that this synergy fosters a more nuanced, politically engaged approach to decolonizing higher education while resisting essentialism and epistemic closures.

This chapter rejects the false opposition between intersectionality and decoloniality by demonstrating how coloniality produces intersectional stratifications of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and migration status within contemporary higher education. It advances an integrated analytic that links epistemic injustice to material and institutional conditions, including labor precarity, student debt, language hierarchies, and border regimes. By foregrounding the coloniality of power and knowledge, the chapter critiques Eurocentric academic norms while advocating transformative practices that affirm diverse epistemologies and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. Conceptualizing intersectionality as inherently decolonial, and decolonization as an intersectional process, it shows how colonial legacies and intersecting forms of oppression co-constitute academic inequities. Through illustrative examples and concrete recommendations, the chapter highlights the potential of a decolonial-intersectional lens to foster epistemic resistance and reimagine universities as sites for dismantling colonial structures and advancing more just and equitable academic futures.

The Introduction situates the book’s contribution within broader anticolonial thought and praxis by articulating an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity – one that neither collapses the differences between decolonization and other political projects nor loses sight of the importance of coalition-building across fields, approaches, and geographical regions. It positions decolonization and social justice within contemporary higher education and advances the case for anticolonial synergy as a shared intellectual and political project for making sense of the diverse practices, struggles, and lived experiences of resistance to colonialism and imperialism worldwide. It is argued that anticolonial synergies in higher education (and beyond) cannot be universalized, but must be carefully attuned to specific historical, political, and institutional conditions. The Introduction concludes by outlining the book structure and introducing the chapters, highlighting how each contributes to the book’s overarching commitment to context-sensitive and politically grounded anticolonial synergies in higher education.

This chapter critically interrogates the incommensurability thesis in contemporary debates on decolonization in higher education, showing how, despite its important political interventions, it can inadvertently generate new binaries – such as decolonization versus anti-racism, or land versus epistemology – that fracture possibilities for solidarity. The chapter advances a both/and approach that takes contextual specificity seriously: in settler-colonial contexts, land, sovereignty, and Indigenous self-determination remain irreducible, while in other sites decolonial struggle may center racial capitalism, language, labor, migration, or resource extraction. Rather than treating these orientations as mutually exclusive, the chapter theorizes conditions for anticolonial synergy, including relational accountability, non-substitution (refusing to collapse or displace Indigenous land claims), intersectional and historically grounded analysis, and coalitional politics built around shared campaigns such as alliances between Indigenous land struggles and abolitionist movements. The analysis supports the book’s proposal for a coalitional framework that bridges decolonial and social justice politics through anticolonial solidarity.

This chapter aims to rethink the contours of coalition-building in higher education by drawing on the insights of decolonial thinker María Lugones. It is argued that these insights help challenge monolithic conceptualizations of decolonization as the ‘decolonization of the curriculum’ or merely as ‘land return.’ The analysis advocates for a shift toward centering anticolonial intellectual and political efforts led by ‘other resisters’ in historically different settings as part of the broader struggle to dismantle various forms of coloniality. Within this framework, decolonization work and other social justice projects in higher education are not definitive endpoints but ongoing processes that demand continuous interrogation and transformation of how scholars, educators, and activists engage with and inhabit academia. This theorization suggests a radical reimagining of intellectual practices among those resisting coloniality in higher education, emphasizing the need to embrace the relational and dynamic essence of coalition-building, while paying attention to possible risks

This chapter draws on Frantz Fanon’s concept of the zone of nonbeing to argue for a deeper engagement with the lived experiences and ontological realities of colonized and racialized subjects in higher education. It applies Fanon’s insights to the affective and epistemic infrastructures of higher education institutions, examining how visibility, audibility, and legitimacy are unevenly distributed across academic spaces. The chapter contends that decolonization requires the development of new political concepts grounded in lived experience, historical struggle, and claims to dignity, rather than reliance on abstract theorization or essentialist identities. By resisting both reductive positionality and the reproduction of colonial logics through fixed categories, the chapter foregrounds anticolonial thought as a site of conceptual and political innovation. It argues that politically grounded conceptual work can revitalize decolonization efforts and open new horizons for higher education by reframing decolonization as an ontological and political project attuned to struggle, relation, and transformation.

This chapter examines Enrique Dussel’s liberation theology and pedagogical thought as a decolonial framework that unsettles rigid secularism and foregrounds the ethical, spiritual, and political dimensions of decolonization in higher education. Drawing on Dussel’s critique of Eurocentric political theology, the chapter reimagines decolonization as a praxis of solidarity grounded in the historical experiences and struggles of the oppressed, with significant implications for curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional ethos. Rather than treating decolonization as a singular or settled project, the chapter engages critically with the tensions, contradictions, and plural meanings that shape decolonial debates. In doing so, it demonstrates how attention to these tensions can deepen, rather than weaken, decolonial praxis. The analysis contributes to a more expansive and relational understanding of decolonization in higher education – one that resists narrow secular or technocratic framings and instead affirms the ethical and political responsibilities of universities in struggles for justice, dignity, and collective liberation.

This chapter critically examines Walter Mignolo’s influential framework of epistemic delinking from Western epistemologies. While Mignolo’s approach has inspired substantial decolonial scholarship in higher education, it is argued that his emphasis on breaking away from Western knowledge systems can inadvertently lend itself to ethno-essentialist and authoritarian co-option. The chapter discusses how epistemic decolonization’s narrow focus on dismantling Western knowledge hierarchies risks overlooking complex historical, material and political dimensions essential to anticolonial thought. By discussing examples of higher education from India, Russia, and elsewhere, the chapter warns against oversimplified rejections of liberal-Western knowledge and advocates for a more complex, politically grounded understanding of decoloniality that resists nationalist and exclusionary tendencies By highlighting these risks, this chapter highlights the importance of maintaining a nuanced, politically informed approach to decolonization in higher education that avoids essentialist assumptions and takes into consideration that potential pitfalls of some versions of decoloniality.

This chapter explores the implications of bringing Foucault’s analytic of power into dialogue with decolonial thought in the context of higher education. While decolonial scholars have long critiqued Foucault’s Eurocentrism, Santiago Castro-Gómez’s engagement with Foucauldian heterarchy, which emphasizes dispersed, relational forms of power, enables a productive pathway for rethinking the layered nature of coloniality. Building on this approach, the chapter argues that conceptualizing decolonization in higher education as a multidimensional struggle – spanning macrostructural domination, meso-institutional dynamics, and microphysical, embodied relations – offers a more nuanced and generative framework for analysis and action. This analysis adds to the insights of other Latin American and Indigenous scholars, who emphasize situated, collective, and affective practices of resistance against coloniality. The chapter thus contributes to a relational understanding of decolonization, one that bridges epistemic critique, institutional transformation, and solidarity with grassroots anticolonial movements within and beyond higher education institutions.

This chapter critiques the risks posed by performative proclamations of positionality and identity in contemporary decolonization debates, particularly when such declarations become substitutes for ethical or political engagement. Drawing on the concepts of dis-enclosure and being-in-common – central to the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and further developed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe – the chapter advances a non-identitarian ontology of decolonization. This framework challenges the binary logics that often structure identitarian thinking (e.g., Western/non-Western, white/non-white), within which positionality statements can become morally stabilizing rather than politically transformative. The chapter argues instead for a conception of decolonization grounded in shared ethical responsibility and collective commitments to reparative futures, rather than individualized claims to moral authority or innocence. In doing so, it offers critical resources for rethinking the role of scholars in higher education, emphasizing how research, writing, and teaching can foreground relational accountability and a shared responsibility for building reparative futures.

The introductory chapter discusses the rationale for this book: a groundbreaking exploration of the intricate relationship between disciplines and human rights scholarship and education in higher education. It begins by defining the key concepts of human rights and disciplines as established branches of knowledge, acknowledging the critique offered by decoloniality. The chapter then examines the core premise of the book: how these traditional disciplines are increasingly intersecting with human rights, moving the conversation beyond conventional legal boundaries and into a multidisciplinary format.

This dynamic interplay forms the backbone of the book, and the introduction outlines how each subsequent chapter will explore this relationship across different disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and professional studies. The chapters also briefly address how each discipline intersects with emerging and pronounced human rights challenges, like internally displaced persons, further highlighting the book’s central thesis: every discipline encompasses aspects of human rights, and disciplinary research, writing, thinking, and theory-building can make significant contributions to human rights teaching, research, and understanding, thereby enhancing the international human rights movement.

For most people, human rights (HR) and education are familiar concepts. But when related to one another, the whole means more than the sum of its parts. When we begin to understand how they interact with and affect each other, we discover new avenues that enrich their meanings, and bring to light vital implications they, together, have on our lives. This chapter examines the intersections between them, and their value for a democratic society. Three intersections are discussed: education as a means to teach HR (education in/about and for HR, also known as human rights education); the respect for HR in any education system (HR in education); and education as a human right (the right to education). These intersections are presented following a historical introduction into the discipline of education, with a focus on higher education, and discussions and examples from the author’s work context, Latin America. Once the deep connections between HR and education are understood, none of them can ever be defined – far less practiced – separately.