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Once again, all eyes were on The Hague. After groundbreaking rulings in the Urgenda and Shell cases, the District Court in The Hague on 28 January delivered another important climate change decision in the case of Greenpeace Netherlands v. The Netherlands (Bonaire).

The case stood out as it concerned the climate obligations of states with respect to their overseas territories. Bonaire is a small island in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The District Court ruling was unique in that it found that the Dutch government had discriminated against the citizens of Bonaire by not taking sufficient and timely adaptation measures.

The ruling was also an important first opportunity for a national court to specify states’ mitigation obligations in the wake of the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) KlimaSeniorinnen judgment and the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on climate change, which offered guidance on states’ climate change obligations under international law.

In this contribution we focus on how the court approached the Dutch mitigation obligations. We argue that the court, acknowledging the contested political context in which the ruling was made, sought to square the circle of state mitigation obligations by balancing potentially far-reaching considerations about the mitigation efforts required from states like the Netherlands with an innovative procedural and dialogue-oriented remedy.

The Dutch Climate Act and Greenpeace’s claims

The Netherlands adopted a framework climate law in the form of the 2019 Climate Act, which was amended in 2023 to align itself with the 2021 European Climate Law. The Act “provides a framework for the development of policy aimed at irreversibly and gradually reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the Netherlands in order to limit global warming and climate change”, with the government committing to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, whilst striving for negative emissions afterwards. Moreover, the Act includes an aspirational goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, a step up from a 49% reduction in the original Act.

Greenpeace claimed that these targets were far removed from what it argued to be the Dutch “fair share”. Greenpeace principally demanded that the Netherlands be ordered to take the necessary measures to reduce its own emissions (minus emission reductions achieved through international climate finance) to net zero by 2030, and to reduce Dutch territorial emissions to net zero by 2040. Moreover, Greenpeace requested an order for the state to develop a national carbon budget with a clear explanation of how it is consistent with the country’s fair share of global emissions. In short, Greenpeace sought a court order for more stringent targets.

The state’s mitigation obligations

Three points stand out in the court’s assessment of Dutch mitigation measures.

First among these is the court’s engagement with KlimaSeniorinnen. Given that the claims concerned violations of Articles 2 (right to life) and 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), it was to be expected that the court would draw on the ECtHR’s guidance. Following Urgenda, the court reaffirms that it can review the compatibility of national climate policies with Articles 2 and 8 ECHR (¶¶9.1–9.6). Also referring to Urgenda, the court summarily rejects the state’s drop in the ocean and minimal contribution defenses (¶¶9.3–9.4). It then proceeds with unpacking the European Court’s findings in KlimaSeniorinnen (¶¶10.1–10.31), filling in some of the gaps left by the ECtHR. Notably, it holds that while the ECtHR does not explicitly state whether Article 2 ECHR is applicable in collective actions, this applicability can be inferred from its reasoning (¶10.28). Ultimately, the court decides to focus on Article 8 ECHR rather than Article 2, since there is no acute threat to the right to life of the inhabitants of Bonaire (¶11.2).

Central to KlimaSeniorinnen is the margin of appreciation enjoyed by a state. This margin is limited when it comes to the necessity of greenhouse gas emissions reductions and the reduction goals to be pursued. The state enjoys a wider margin of appreciation with respect to the means chosen to achieve those objectives (¶10.21, referring to KlimaSeniorinnen, ¶543). This wider discretion is not unlimited: the measures adopted must be implemented and be suitable to achieve the goals (¶10.22). KlimaSeniorinnen itself, however, offers little guidance for assessing the substantive adequacy of specific reduction targets. For that assessment, the ECtHR refers back to the state’s obligations under national and international law (¶10.24.3). The ruling in Bonaire, as will be discussed below, also sheds further light on the (possible) application of KlimaSeniorinnen when reviewing specific reduction targets. Remarkably, given the European origin of the Dutch climate goals, the court also comments on the compatibility of the European Climate Law targets with KlimaSeniorinnen and international climate change law.

Second, in its quest for substantive standards for assessing the Dutch climate measures, the court turns to international climate change law, including not only the climate treaties as interpreted in the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion, but also treaty body (COP) decisions. For instance, the court finds that the non-legally binding 2023 Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan, in which UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Parties “recognize” that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 per cent by 2030 relative to the 2019 level”, constitutes a revision of an “interim target” (¶11.9.2), which Annex I (developed) countries like the Netherlands are bound by (¶11.13.2). Although the ICJ acknowledged that COP decisions can in limited instances be binding upon Parties and in other cases play a role in treaty interpretation, the court does not engage with the ICJ’s reasoning, and seems to elevate COP decisions to the same level as treaty provisions, thereby identifying obligations without a clear legal basis.

Other standards referred to by the court could also have been better supported. For example, the court laments that Dutch (and EU) targets do not cover aviation and shipping emissions. The court presumably refers to international aviation and shipping emissions, which are indeed outside the scope of Dutch climate targets. In its reasoning the court mainly refers to Article 3 UNFCCC, which indicates that Parties “should take … policies and measures” that “comprise all economic sectors”. However, this provision falls short of requiring Parties to adopt targets covering all sectors. Although there are good reasons to strengthen mitigation measures for international aviation and shipping, the court’s argumentation here is incomplete.

Third, the court confines itself to a negative determination of the insufficiency of the Dutch reduction targets, primarily assessing the justifications brought forward by the state for these targets, without making a positive determination of what sufficient reduction targets would be. For instance, the court held that there are “strong indications that both the Dutch and European reduction standards are indeed … lower than the UN minimum standards for Annex I countries” and that on the basis of the arguments brought forward by the State “it cannot be established that this is not the case” (¶11.13.3). In a similar way, it considered it to be a “negative factor” that “the State has not provided [an] explanation” why it is equitable that Dutch “emissions per capita … are significantly higher than the global average carbon budget per capita” (¶11.13.5) and that the current targets are based on grandfathering, meaning that past emission levels are taken as the baseline for future targets. Furthermore, the finding that the State will most likely not achieve its current 2030 and 2050 reduction goals (¶11.14.1), the lack of intermediate targets and pathways for the period between 2030–2050 ( ¶11.14.2), and the absence of a clear quantification of the remaining Dutch emissions budgets (¶11.15) are decisive elements in the court’s reasoning.

Some may see this negative approach as a missed opportunity for the court to provide clarity on the applicable targets. Others would approve of this deferential approach to reviewing government policies. Nevertheless, the Bonaire case differs from the other two major Dutch mitigation cases. In Urgenda, the court examined the reduction target that the government should adhere to, and the government was ordered to reduce its emissions by 25% by 2020 (compared to 1990). In the Shell case, the NGO Milieudefensie among others sought a 45% reduction by 2030 compared to 2019 for the company’s emissions. One implication of the court’s approach in Bonaire is that the inherent scientific uncertainties and ambiguities associated with determining the applicable reduction targets played no substantial role, whereas for instance in the appeal in the Shell case this issue proved to be a crucial point on which Milieudefensie’s (scope 3) reduction claim failed.

Squaring the circle through remedial innovation

Another novel element of the ruling is that the court ordered the state to change its regulations within 18 months (¶12.2), thereby referring the positive determination of adequate reduction targets back to the state. This remedial approach reflects the constitutional positioning of the court vis-à-vis the legislature. First, partly in response to Urgenda there is a strong perception among (right-wing) politicians that civil courts are overstepping their mandate by issuing orders with far-reaching societal consequences that leave little room for a political balancing exercise. Such concerns have led to initiatives in the Parliament to restrict possibilities for interest groups to bring (civil) cases against the state.

Second, compliance by the state with court orders is becoming less self-evident. Urgenda serves as a cautionary tale: while the original District Court order was declared provisionally enforceable already in 2015, the state made little effort to implement the order. The COVID-19 pandemic and low gas prices were important external factors for the state ultimately complying. Other recent court orders to reduce Dutch nitrogen depositions and to address noise pollution caused by Schiphol Airport have also led to concerns about non-compliance by the government.

This combination of politicians challenging judicial authority and the prospect of non-compliance with judicial orders may lead to a downward spiral, in which non-compliance may necessitate more intrusive judicial intervention, which in turn fuels debate about the role of the judiciary and may increase political unwillingness to comply (and so on). For courts, this (political) dynamic requires a delicate balancing act, which in the Bonaire case can specifically be observed in the remedial design. As the court observes, urgency is required in the formulation and implementation of adequate mitigation policies, and the judiciary should provide legal protection when the state fails to do so. Partly for that reason, the court declares its order provisionally enforceable (¶11.61). However, the court must remain mindful of its constitutional position and operate with restraint in imposing orders on the state. That is particularly the case when the order implies the drafting of regulation that also affects the interests of third parties (¶ 11.53). In Urgenda, this restraint was exercised by imposing a minimum reduction target and leaving the means of implementation to the state. Bonaire’s innovation lies in imposing this more dialogue-oriented remedy.

The dialogical nature of the order stems from the fact that the court (1) declares the current targets insufficient, (2) refers the setting of new targets back to the state, and (3) provides that, in an execution dispute, it can review the (in)sufficiency of choices underpinning the new targets. Yet the court may still need to substantively review the adequacy of the new regulations.

In that regard, questions arise about the clarity of the ruling.  Some elements of the order are formulated with a fair degree of specificity, and are therefore relatively easy for the state to comply with and for an execution court to assess (e.g., does the state adopt new regulations within 18 months?). Other parts of the order, however, are more general in nature and complying with those elements requires normative, methodological, and political choices (i.e., what reduction targets are in line with fair share principles, and what methodology is used to arrive at those targets?). It is unclear whether the court’s reasoning offers sufficient guidance for the state and the court that would oversee compliance with the order.

In addition, questions arise about the consequences if a court in an execution dispute considers the new regulations to be insufficient, and concerning the extent to which the courts need to provide more substantive guidance on the appropriate targets. In any event, for matters of procedural law, it is impossible for an execution court to impose a specific reduction order on the state, since that claim by Greenpeace has been dismissed. But even if the new regulation is not contested or considered to be adequate, the state remains under the looming prospect of new litigation challenging compliance with the new targets set in it.

To conclude, Bonaire is another milestone in the ongoing struggle to strengthen Dutch climate targets. But like Urgenda, it is unlikely to be the final word.

The post The Bonaire Climate Case appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

In July 1936, Sotheby’s sold the so-called Portsmouth Papers – an unordered corpus of manuscripts in Isaac Newton’s own hand, including his extensive alchemical writings, which until then had attracted little scholarly attention. John Maynard Keynes, an avid collector of art and manuscripts, bought them. He revered Newton, regarding him as the embodiment of the rationalisation of scholarly inquiry. It is likely that Keynes saw himself as standing in Newton’s tradition when, having studied mathematics and written his doctoral dissertation in that discipline, he attempted to place economics on a new foundation.

One can imagine the economist’s astonishment when he was able, for the first time, to witness the depth and seriousness of Newton’s alchemical studies. Keynes surmised that these studies possessed “beyond doubt, no substantial value whatever except as a fascinating sidelight on the mind of our greatest genius,” since they documented, in “extensive records”, Newton’s comprehensive alchemical pursuits. “It is utterly impossible to deny that it is wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not to admit that Newton devoted years of work to it.” Keynes was equally struck by the care – indeed, the methodological rigour – with which Newton had pursued his magical speculations: “There was extreme method in his madness. All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia, if their whole matter and purpose were not magical.”

At least since the emergence of modern conceptions of rigorous scholarly inquiry, Newton had been regarded as “the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason”. Yet anyone who had read the Portsmouth Papers, Keynes argued, could no longer sustain this classification: “I do not think any one who has pored over the contents of that box […] can see him like that.” Newton was, in Keynes’s words, “clearly an unbridled addict” to magic and alchemy. The Newton who emerges from these writings is not the first of the rational scientists but “the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians – […] Copernicus and Faustus in one.”

Like Newton, Keynes undoubtedly belonged, within his own discipline, to those thinkers whom Foucault once termed fondateurs de discursivité. Such figures are not merely authors of works: “Ils ont produit quelque chose de plus: la possibilité et la règle de formation d’autres textes. […] [I]ls ont établi une possibilité indéfinie de discours.” Keynes’s thought dominated political economy for a time. In 1965, even the anti-Keynesian economist Milton Friedman quipped: “We are all Keynesians now.” Yet this assessment later gave way to criticism. The Stanford economist Robert Barro has gone so far as to claim that “[t]here is no meaningful theoretical or empirical support for the Keynesian position”. Future generations may well take yet another view of the ideas of Keynes, Newton, and all earlier great thinkers. One can imagine a world in which Newton’s alchemy is valued more highly than his physical and mathematical work; and one need hardly strain one’s imagination to trace the rise and fall of Keynesianism’s reputation.

What, then, does all this imply for the epistemological and methodological status of Newton’s thinking, Keynes’s thinking, or our own today? Was Newton simply mistaken in his alchemical writings – was he merely dabbling? Are economists correct about Keynes half of the time and mistaken the other half?

Proceeding from these introductory reflections, I will critique the project of a general theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry (what Germans call Wissenschaftstheorie) using the figure of reflexivity. I understand critique here as a procedure that seeks to ceaselessly subdivide its object and thereby complicate it. This specific conception of critique is restless and – crucially – self-reflexive. It must carry on endlessly and thereby be brought to bear against every distinction it has itself drawn.

Against a generalised theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry, I will contrast an historically unsettled concept of epistemology. It will prove less determinate and less clear. Ultimately, however, it points toward an optimistic understanding of inquiry – one that has not merely come to terms with the historical contingency, restlessness, and endlessness of the epistemic process but can even experience them as liberating.

Unsettling history

In their global anthropological study of human societies in the distant past, David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate that a teleology according to which humanity progressively refines its social, epistemic, and cultural concepts and practices is historically untenable. Anglo-American discourse has a term for this view against which Graeber and Wengrow write: Whig history. It denotes, essentially, a Eurocentric perspective on history that takes the present, with all its achievements, as its telos. From this vantage point, historical development appears almost inevitably to culminate in the (undoubtedly valuable) norms of contemporary Western modernity. Seen this way, the history of knowledge becomes a narrative of linear progress, gradual enlightenment, and the disenchantment of the world. Past knowledge is judged in the light of its modern counterpart. Where past thinkers fell short of the insights of the enlightened present, Whig history explains this primarily by their lack of intellectual capacity or by the insufficient state of knowledge of their time. As Paul Feyerabend once put it: “Thus in retrospect everything becomes more simplistic, and we do not learn anything about the manifold and often very surprising coincidences, without which philosophy and the sciences would not have been possible in the first place.”

By contrast, Graeber and Wengrow show that although human beings throughout the history of the species were subject to very different conditions, which produced different modes of perceiving the world, the epistemic, cultural, and political ideas and practices of early human history – so far as we can reconstruct them today – were at times comparable in complexity to those of the present. In this way, a “completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years” emerges. The authors invite the reader to adopt a transformed, anti-teleological and anti-evolutionist view of history, “one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity.”

From studies such as these, we learn that alternative worldviews – such as the natural philosophies and myths of earlier epochs – do not necessarily fall short of our own worldviews in terms of developmental level or complexity. They should not be read in a primitivist manner, nor dismissed as erroneous, dysfunctional, or merely fantastical. Such scientific self-righteousness from a modern vantage point overlooks the fact that our own perceptions and interpretations will one day presumably appear just as outdated to our descendants as those of our predecessors do to us. Once we understand that human cognitive capacities were not necessarily weaker in different local historical constellations but simply different, we should also assess more cautiously the epistemic prospects of an abstract, rigid philosophy of knowledge. There is no super-theory that, from an Archimedean point, can deliver correct knowledge on the basis of invariant, objective, and time-independent criteria. The value of a theory cannot lie in its correspondence with a rigid external standard (for example, “truth”), but only in its always provisional, culture- and time-specific fit with human needs. Different approaches – whether within a single discipline or across disciplines – are better treated as different tools, “as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars.” Even scientific thinking operates according to criteria of situational, often provisional fruitfulness.

Those who set out to reconstruct a contemporary scholarly practice should beware of taking its self-description at face value. Every discipline has the capacity to conceal its own illusions behind a fog that it itself generates – and that also envelops its own practitioners. A general theory of knowledge and inquiry that seeks to approach this will have to relinquish, to some extent, its illusion of pure contemplation. More than that, it must accept that it will absorb its object, perhaps even consume it entirely. But this is also an epiphanic self-consumption of theory itself: once an object has been brought fully and accurately into theoretical view, theory and phenomenon collapse into one, and the object of theory is aufgehoben in its contemplation. Theory is therefore not merely speaking about or thinking of something; it intervenes in the event of being itself. A theoretical relation to the world is always a transformed – and transforming – relation to the world.

For concrete scholarly work, this means that we – reflexively – should sharpen our senses for ruptures, resistances, and fragmentations that ultimately unsettle our very own position. The price to be paid for such epistemological pluralisation is polyphony and discontinuity. Where one previously felt secure in one’s place within a designated coordinate system, an entirely new, deterritorialised topology opens up – marked by contradictions, overlaps, and proliferations. This multiplication should not be understood as a threat to knowledge and understanding. Rather, it calls for exploration, for opening dead ends. It clears the space so that we may go on and free thought itself from the contemplation, reflection, or communication of eternal values, transcendentals, or universals.

Jurisprudence occupies an ambivalent position here. On the one hand, law is the instrument through which freedom and equality can be realised. On the other hand, it justifies and stabilises an often manifestly unjust status quo. If we calibrate our expectations of law’s capacity on the basis of a theory of scholarly inquiry grounded in sharp clarity across all domains, we will frame the concerns we bring to law in a rigid and uncompromising manner, rather than leaving them open. Instead, the “decidedly artificial” character of legal enclosures should not be concealed but, on the contrary, displayed, continually demonstrating that in the world of law everything could remain as it is – or be entirely different.

Unsettling scholars

Seen from this vantage point, the question of who pursues a scholarly question becomes equally as relevant as its objects, purported methods, and so on. The scholars of the Western canon sometimes erred not only in matters of scholarship itself but also in morals – at times closely connected to their intellectual work. John Locke owned shares in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company and helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which granted every American slaveholder in the province of Carolina “absolute power and authority over his negro slaves”. Hannah Arendt disparaged non-Ashkenazi Jews as oriental and inferior, repeatedly referred to Black Africans as “savages”, and criticised the civil rights movement as excessive and prone to violence. A number of French intellectuals, including Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida (all personal heroes of mine), de Beauvoir, and Sartre, signed a 1977 petition to Parliament calling for the abolition of laws on sexual majority, particularly age-of-consent protections. Louis Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in 1980 and claimed in his autobiography that he had thereby done her a service.

One can presumably condemn slavery, racism, antisemitism, the demand to extend sexual maturity to children, and femicide – yet still read all of the authors mentioned. Intellectual history may then ask how biographical facts and patterns of thought relate to one another within a particular, as precisely delimited historical context as possible, or at least explore possible connections. It examines how objects of knowledge and domains of cognition depend on historically contingent arrangements. Apparently, epistemic systems encode blindnesses that prevent even brilliant thinkers from seeing certain forms of harm.

This leads to a different kind of epistemology – one that asks not about the correctness of grand theoretical edifices in the narrow sense, nor one that sets standards for their construction or demolition. Rather, it explores the conditions of thought as comprehensively as possible and works out how particular people, at particular times, thought about particular questions. Even the “why” must be handled with care.

An optimistic outlook

An epistemology thus conceived is less a path to self-assurance than to self-unsettlement. But this should make us optimistic. We no longer need to argue about whether this or that attempt to think about something counts as “scholarly” in the strict sense. We might “substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking,” to put it with Richard Rorty. Thus, in a Nietzschean manner, we can ask other questions of those who call themselves scholars: Where does this lead us? Where does your thinking come from? What does it bring with it, and what does it exclude? Do we like that? Why? Does it allow us to see something anew, or more sharply?

It may be that all that remains for us is to circle again and again around ultimately the same questions – questions we may never resolve. But is that so bad? If we succeed in continually reformulating our striving for knowledge in ways that mean something to people at particular times and in particular places, would that not be enough? Exploring what Joel Modiri, among the first cohort of fellows at our newly founded Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex, during his stay with us in Berlin once aptly referred to as “the éros of research”, the sheer joy of scholarly curiosity, is a worthwhile undertaking in and of itself.

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Over roughly the past decade and a half, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have undergone what is often described as a “global turn.” This shift starts from a historical insight into the disciplines themselves. As they are institutionalized today across universities worldwide, the modern disciplines largely took shape in nineteenth-century Europe and continue to bear the imprint of that moment of origin. Two features are particularly consequential. First, their close entanglement with the nation-state has fostered a predominantly national framing of research questions, archives, and narratives. Second, they have been shaped by Eurocentric assumptions that were deeply embedded in an age marked by imperial expansion and European global hegemony.

A century and a half later, the world has been profoundly transformed. Empires have collapsed, new states and regions have emerged, and social, economic, and cultural interconnections span the globe with an intensity unknown in the nineteenth century. Yet, to a remarkable extent, scholars continue to analyze this world with conceptual tools, categories, and narrative templates forged under very different historical conditions.

Seen in this light, the global turn can be understood as an attempt to critically interrogate these inherited assumptions and to render the disciplines more adequate to the globalized world we inhabit today. Scholars no longer take globalization for granted as the natural teleology of an increasingly integrated world, nor do they understand it as a unilinear process radiating outward from Euro-American centers. Instead, the concept of reflexive globalization, as employed by the Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex, foregrounds a more complex and contested architecture of global interaction—one in which processes of homogenization and fragmentation unfold simultaneously, in which new connectivities generate forms of disconnection, and in which the dynamics of global integration originate from multiple geographies, albeit under conditions of persistent power asymmetries. Crucially, this analytical perspective is grounded in a reflexive awareness of knowledge production itself: interpretations of globalization are understood as situated, shaped by the positionality, epistemic frameworks, and institutional locations of their observers, and therefore as objects of critical scrutiny rather than neutral descriptions of a global process.

A central component of this endeavor has been the critique of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, however, does not manifest itself uniformly across fields. The following reflections are written from the perspective of a historian, though the underlying concerns are likely to resonate beyond the discipline of history.

Institutions, Narratives, Concepts

In historical scholarship, Eurocentrism operates on at least three interrelated levels. The first concerns institutions. The enduring dominance of Western institutions – from universities and curricula to conferences, publishers, and academic journals – means that scholars speak with unequal authority depending on where they are located. Dipesh Chakrabarty has famously captured this condition in his notion of an “asymmetry of ignorance”: while Western scholars can often afford to remain largely unaware of scholarship produced outside Europe and North America, non-Western scholars cannot ignore Western literature without risking marginalization.

The second level is that of narratives. Eurocentric views of world history position Europe as the sole active agent, the “fountainhead” of historical change. Europe acts; the rest of the world reacts. Europe possesses agency; others are rendered passive. Europe makes history; the rest of the world acquires a history only once it enters into contact with Europe. Europe stands at the center, while other regions are relegated to the periphery. Within such a framework, European history becomes the implicit benchmark against which all other histories are measured and evaluated. It is precisely this narrative hierarchy that makes a sentence such as “Charlemagne was an important European ruler of the Tang period” sound jarring, whereas the statement “Hârûn ar-Rashīd was an important Near Eastern ruler of the Middle Ages” appears entirely unremarkable.

The third level concerns concepts. Historical scholarship relies on a vocabulary that claims universal validity but is, in fact, deeply rooted in specific European experiences. Concepts such as nation, class, revolution, liberty, rights, or religion emerged in particular historical constellations in Europe before being projected onto social realities elsewhere. Their global circulation often required the invention of neologisms and complex politics of translation in order to render them intelligible and operative in new contexts. Since then, scholars have engaged in sustained debates over the extent to which societies outside Europe have been – and continue to be – interpreted and evaluated through an idiom that is not their own. The global turn, in this sense, is also an invitation to reflect on the histories embedded in our concepts and to consider alternative ways of thinking that do not take the European experience as their silent point of reference.

As one possible remedy, scholars have increasingly sought to unsettle this terminological hegemony by experimenting with alternative ways of naming and conceptualizing social realities. Rather than relying exclusively on a vocabulary forged in Europe, they have begun to mobilize local and vernacular idioms in an effort to loosen the Eurocentric constraints of the modern disciplines. At stake are fundamental epistemological questions: how can we ensure that societies are not evaluated according to standards foreign to their historical experience? How can we grasp the life of communities in a language that resonates with their own categories of meaning? Decolonial scholars, in particular, have forcefully placed such concerns on the agenda and have proposed a range of alternative concepts intended to provincialize Europe’s conceptual authority.

A recent volume edited by Dilip Menon offers an instructive example of this intervention. Menon argues that, for too long, scholarship has been guided by the trajectories of a European history and by what he calls a self-regarding, nativist epistemology – one that acquired its universal status largely through the violence of conquest and empire. The consequence has been a persistent asymmetry: events and processes in the global South have routinely been interpreted through Western theoretical frameworks, while the reverse movement has remained rare. In this process, alternative forms of knowledge have been marginalized or lost altogether, even though they may hold considerable analytical promise. The contributions to the volume accordingly propose concepts drawn from different regions of the world, concepts that articulate local realities and encode alternative cosmologies.

The aspiration to develop a more place-specific terminology is both understandable and, in many respects, welcome. Nor is it without precedent. Over the past decades, a number of terms originating outside Europe have entered the conceptual repertoire of the social sciences and humanities. Some designate singular historical events, such as the Shoah, the Holodomor, or the Nakba. Others – terms like taboo, fetish, or jihad – have traveled far beyond their points of origin and have been re-semanticized in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Beyond individual concepts, entire theoretical approaches that emerged in the global South have gained wide international currency. Dependency theory, formulated in Latin America, and intersectionality, with roots in both African American and African intellectual traditions, are prominent examples.

Challenges to Unsettling Vocabularies

Such efforts to diversify scholarly vocabularies are undoubtedly productive, and they are timely at a historical moment when Europe’s geopolitical dominance has long since declined, even as its conceptual authority appears strikingly resilient. At the same time, this project confronts a number of challenges. Let me briefly highlight four of them.

First, the decolonial effort to rehabilitate pre-colonial or non-Western concepts is driven by a critique of the hierarchies embedded in Eurocentric vocabularies. Yet the concepts recovered from local or pre-colonial contexts often carry hierarchies of their own, reflecting the social stratifications and exclusions of the societies from which they stem. The analytical task, therefore, is not simply one of recuperation, but of critically assessing the emancipatory potential of these concepts in light of the inequalities they may also reproduce.

Second, questions of representation loom large. It is not always evident who is entitled to speak for “native” or marginalized pasts. In some contexts, alternative cosmologies have survived – at least in fragments – and continue to shape lived realities within local communities. In others, however, the voices articulating these traditions appear to be more closely aligned with transnational academic elites than with the constituencies on whose behalf they claim to speak. Claims to local knowledge are thus also interventions on a global academic stage, embedded in struggles over recognition, authority, and power.

A third challenge is closely related: the critique of Eurocentrism has coincided with the proliferation of alternative centrisms. Yet it remains unclear to what extent the celebration of one cultural tradition over another helps to resolve the epistemological dilemmas at hand. This concern becomes particularly acute when the promotion of alternative knowledges is intertwined with state projects, as in the cases of Xi Jinping’s China or Narendra Modi’s India, where invocations of civilizational distinctiveness can serve explicitly political ends.

Finally, the problem of Eurocentrism cannot be addressed at the level of discourse alone. As Arif Dirlik once observed, “without the power of capitalism, and all the structural innovations that accompanied it … Eurocentrism might have been just another ethnocentrism.” Reworking scholarly vocabularies may be a necessary first step, but it is unlikely to be sufficient. As long as global systems of knowledge production are underpinned by enduring geopolitical and economic asymmetries, conceptual reforms will remain partial. The critical interrogation of terminology must therefore remain on the agenda, even as we recognize that its transformative potential ultimately depends on broader shifts in the distribution of global power.

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