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In relation to the intellectual projects which are associated with the agenda of ‘decolonizing the university’, postcolonialism, decoloniality, TWAIL, indigenous studies, global histories, South–South relations, black studies and subaltern studies, amongst other projects, are all seen in a variety of different disciplines and geographical locations to have contributed to this agenda. Three of particular relevance to the perspectives presented in this volume are postcolonialism, decoloniality and TWAIL. Here we briefly sketch out the main foci of these intellectual fields, but for an extended discussion of some of the broader theoretical issues at stake refer to chapter 2.

Leela Gandhi (1998: 4) describes postcolonialism as ‘a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath’. In other words, postcolonialism is a critical theoretical perspective which engages with and contests the enduring uneven relations between formerly colonized societies and former colonizing societies. Postcolonialism is rooted for many scholars in ‘Third World’ struggles for decolonization, both in a practical political sense and in terms of ongoing decolonizations of thought, knowledge, economic power and cultural practices (Young 2001). Academic postcolonialism, as a general orientation, originated in the humanities and is better established in English literature, history and cultural studies (which offers a key bridge into sociology, anthropology and human geography) than in the social sciences (Bhambra 2007, 2011; Go 2013). In theoretical terms, postcolonialism has sought to contest dominant western ways of viewing the world and to challenge the assumed universalism of ideas which emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century to the present day. In this sense (and rather confusingly), it is very much not about seeing colonialism as something which has finished and is now in the past, despite its name.

Three authors are often cited as being the founding theorists of postcolonialism within the humanities and social sciences. They are: Edward Said (1995 [1978]), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1999), and Homi K. Bhabha (2005 [1994]). Said’s ‘Orientalism’ takes a Foucauldian perspective in uncovering the discursive production of colonial meanings beyond the end of formal colonialism. Said is primarily concerned with the way in which the western academy reproduces the colonial difference, the inherent ‘otherness’ of non-European societies, through textual and non-textual (e.g. art) media. Colonial power, Said urges, is not separable from colonial knowledge since the Orient, and the Occident, are the products of systems of representation. He reminds us that ‘human history is made by human beings’ and that ‘since the struggle for control over territory is part of that history, so too is the struggle for control over historical and social meaning’ (Said 1995 [1978]: 331). The Orient, then, is an invention of intellectuals, commentators, artists, politicians, writers and others, but it does not exist as a cohesive entity outside of that representation or outside of its relation to the Occidental self-understanding. What is at stake is not ‘that there is a real or true Orient that could have been known, but rather [Said] is provoking us to consider how what we know is itself framed as knowledge through particular systems of representation and the practices of colonial governance based upon them’ (Bhambra 2014: 212). There is a broader challenge here. For migration researchers, that is about questioning whether the subjects of academic research exist as ‘migrants’ outside of our definitions of them as such, and how those definitions connect to colonial modes of defining the world and the various people within it.

Spivak extends this. Her key contribution is to problematize and question how the Third World subject is represented in western discourse, taking up some of the themes addressed by the Subaltern Studies Collective in the early 1980s. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Spivak 1988), Spivak seeks to complicate the concept of representation, borrowing the vertreten/darstellen distinction from Marx. While vertreten means to represent in the form of a substitute or proxy, darstellen is to represent in the form of a depiction or portrait. Spivak is here interested less in the subjective experience of oppression and more in the mechanisms and structures of domination. She argues that the subaltern, by virtue of being the subaltern, cannot speak in the ways we demand of her, yet too often European academics present themselves either as objective observers of others or as allowing the oppressed to speak for themselves. What this hides, Spivak argues, are the power relations at stake, as well as the historically rooted worldviews of academic ‘observers’ who interpret as they translate.

Finally, Homi K. Bhabha contributed the next keystone publication in what have now, retrospectively, become the key pillars of postcolonialism. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha (2005 [1994]) investigates identity through the lens of representation within the context of colonialism. He suggests that the value differential between the original and the copy, with western culture always representing the former, consistently places the mimicking colonized subject in a position of ‘otherness’. Identity here is therefore either ‘presence’ (the real thing) or ‘semblance’ (similar to but not the real thing). Thus the point that to be anglicized is ‘emphatically not to be English’ demonstrates the place of knowledge as a form of social control: whether such knowledge is implicit or not, it cannot be learned (2005 [1994]: 125). The copy can thus always be identified and therefore controlled. For Bhabha, the writing out of colonial spaces from the narrative of modernity, the spatializing of time, instituted a particular theory of cultural difference which installed ‘cultural homogeneity into the sign of modernity’ (2005 [1994]: 349). The crux of the critique therefore becomes apparent: modernity is fundamentally limited by its built-in ethnocentrism.

While postcolonial studies is often associated with South Asian scholars working from post-structural perspectives in the humanities, decoloniality is associated with Latin American scholars working from world-systems perspectives in the social sciences. In a key founding article of the field, Anibal Quijano articulated a theory of the coloniality of power. Quijano argues that the ‘modernity’ of Europe has become the context for its own being, but that this is in fact ‘so deeply imbricated in the structures of European colonial domination over the rest of the world that it is impossible to separate the two’ (Bhambra 2014: 130). Coloniality and modernity are therefore ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Mignolo 2007: 464). Many other scholars, particularly those from, or working in, Latin America, have explored this co-constitutive relationship between coloniality and modernity (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2000, 2011a; Vázquez 2011; Wynter 2003).

In the same vein as the postcolonialists discussed above, decolonial scholars are interested in the ways in which colonial power has not only been used to physically and materially dominate groups or societies identified as racially inferior, it has also entailed the subjugation, dismissal and erasure of whole systems of knowledge identified as intellectually inferior. Thus Maldonado-Torres has identified three key realms of coloniality which are of interest to their project: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being: ‘while the coloniality of power referred to the interrelation among modern forms of exploitation and domination (power), and the coloniality of knowledge had to do with the impact of colonization on the different areas of knowledge production, [meanwhile] coloniality of being would make primary reference to the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242)

In dialogue with Levinas, Maldonado-Torres explains that ‘coloniality survives colonialism’ and this has implications for political and economic power and for knowledge production, but it also affects our ways of being in the world: ‘It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath[e] coloniality all the time and everyday’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243).

Decolonial scholars are, then, in part, interested in exploring the means by which we can ‘delink’ from coloniality/modernity and in doing so recover alternative knowledge systems (Mignolo 2007). Decoloniality is, therefore, a diverse project which has developed through an intellectual tradition distinct from postcolonialism, but which shares many of the core concerns (see Bhambra 2014).

TWAIL is centred on principally legal concerns from a broadly ‘Third World’ perspective. TWAIL begins from the position that international law is a ‘predatory system that legitimizes, reproduces and sustains the plunder and subordination of the Third World by the West’ (Mutua 1994: 31). Despite the fact that international law is meant to be universally applicable and purportedly delivers global stability, TWAIL scholars argue that the development of international law was ‘essential to the imperial expansion that subordinated non-European peoples and societies to European conquest and domination’ (Mutua 1994: 31). In other words, the very establishment of international law as an international legal framework went hand-in-hand with colonial enterprise (Anghie 2008). TWAIL is deeply connected to movements for decolonization and is seen by many as being inaugurated at the 1955 Asian–African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia (Kanwar 2015). Though it is a wide-ranging intellectual and political project, the TWAIL agenda, according to Mutua (1994: 31), has three foci:

1 ‘to understand, deconstruct, and unpack the uses of international law as a medium for the creation and perpetuation of a racialized hierarchy of international norms and institutions that subordinate non-Europeans to Europeans’;

2 ‘to construct and present an alternative normative legal edifice for international governance’;

3 ‘through scholarship, policy and politics to eradicate the conditions of underdevelopment in the Third World’.

Chimni (2006: 3) argues that ‘international law is the principal language in which domination is coming to be expressed in the era of globalization’ and suggests that part of the (as yet unfulfilled) potential of TWAIL is the promotion of the equal mobility of human beings. A TWAIL perspective, then, draws attention to the ways in which international law does not necessarily offer universal justice precisely because unequal power relations following the patterns of the colonial era are maintained through international law today.

This brief overview gives a flavour of the large bodies of work in postcolonialism, decoloniality and TWAIL which can be drawn on in migration studies in order to think through the legacies of colonialism for migration governance and migrant experiences today.

There are also many other bodies of relevant work which will be drawn upon through the course of the book, including the work of black studies scholars, indigenous scholars, critical race theorists, and decolonial, postcolonial and black feminist and queer scholarship. These bodies of work offer theoretical tools for researchers interested in centring colonialism in migration studies, though it should be noted that they are not always in agreement, or compatible, with each other. We do not seek to smooth the edges of these disjuncts. In this book we nevertheless aim to further explore how such scholarship might contribute to understanding migration-related phenomena, and to showcase the work of scholars who have already taken up this agenda.