Description
Theories enable us to organize and interpret knowledge, offering conceptual architectures through which the world becomes thinkable. Yet, the translocation of theory across geopolitical and epistemic boundaries—particularly from the metropole to the colony—has long posed significant challenges. From a postcolonial perspective, such movements often risk reproducing the very hierarchies they seek to critique. While theories remain indispensable to critical inquiry, their unreflective application may result in the attenuation of their conceptual core or blindness to their contextual limitations.
This paper interrogates the problem of travelling a theory and advances a transformation of biopolitics into a qawmopolitical analytic. Through a deconstructive engagement with the biopolitical paradigm, and by mobilizing qawm a central organizing concept, the paper articulates an alternative framework for analysing mechanisms of life management and the distribution of power.
By provincializing biopolitics and dislodging its conceptual core from its Western epistemic grounding—while sustaining its analytic acuity and critical resonance—this rearticulation as qawmopolitics generates new theoretical and methodological trajectories. It calls on scholars to reconceptualize the politics of life and belonging through plural, embedded epistemologies that exceed and unsettle Eurocentric genealogies.
