Description
Mainstream International Relations theories and Western media picture the current global order as being still Western(ized) (e.g., bipolarity) or moving into political disorder, a reality of the non-Western world according to Western knowledge. Decolonial thought, instead, shows a reorientation of the interstate/national order in the twenty-first century towards polycentricity. Currently, a polycentric world order means the end of Westernization (1500-2000) as a monocentric interstate/national order and the emergence of various Asian-led de-Westernization projects, as well as the re-Westernizing response to them. Latin American states, although being as much part of the non-Western world as important de-Westernizing countries (e.g., China), have an unstable relationship with de-Westernization, remaining mostly attached to re-Westernization. Why? Our theoretical claim is that epistemic-political dependency causes this tendency. To ground this argument, we show that: (1) such dependency results from the deepest interference of the West in the non-West through the historic and ongoing dismantlement of the knowledge and knowledge-making principles in parts of the latter region; (2) epistemic-political dependency is, thereby, the strongest fortress of re-Westernization, notoriously so in Latin America; and (3) in contrast, the civilizations of firmly de-Westernizing Asian countries have experienced (re-)Westernization more superficially, being inferiorized but not epistemically dismantled by Western actors.
