The Coloniality of Political Theory:
Unpacking the Eurocentric Conundrum in Post-colonial Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2026.1415Keywords:
Coloniality of political theory, Idealism, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Genealogy, World-systems analysis, Decoloniality, AfricaAbstract
This article develops the concept of the coloniality of political theory to critique the universalist assumptions embedded in idealism and its principal ideological formations, liberalism and neoliberalism. It argues that these traditions are not philosophically neutral or universally applicable models of political order, but historically situated expressions of Western modernity that have achieved global authority through epistemic domination. By presenting particular European historical experiences as universal standards of political legitimacy, they marginalize alternative political traditions and sustain a coloniality of knowledge that renders Indigenous political rationalities epistemically subordinate.
Drawing on Foucauldian genealogy, decolonial political thought, and world-systems analysis, the article examines how Eurocentric political theory reproduces its dominance through three interrelated mechanisms: moral hierarchy, juridical universalism, and market rationality. Together, these mechanisms establish a hierarchy of political reason in which Indigenous institutions and moral philosophies are often represented as pre-political, irrational, or deficient rather than as legitimate traditions of political thought.
Using Ethiopia and Somalia as diagnostic cases, the article demonstrates how the transplantation of universalist political models has generated tensions between imported institutional frameworks and locally grounded political ontologies. Against this epistemic closure, the article advances the Gadaa system of Ethiopia and the philosophy of Ubuntu in Southern Africa as philosophically robust alternatives that reconceptualize authority, justice, community, and political obligation beyond the idealist ontological assumptions of Western liberal modernity. It concludes by proposing a decolonial political theory grounded in epistemological pluralism, arguing that African political thought should be recognized not merely as empirical or cultural knowledge but as a legitimate source of normative political philosophy capable of informing more contextually grounded and democratically responsive approaches to governance and state–society relations in postcolonial Africa.
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