Decolonial Epistemological Revisions: Recontextualizing Concepts of Democracy and Protest

Social movement studies emerged as a field of knowledge after decolonisation, in the ex-colonies with peripheral capitalism and decolonial struggles, it emerged later. While sociology of social movements coined many terms making sociology robust from the people’s perspective and emancipatory agendas; the reinterpretation of terms and concepts in decolonial contexts brings refreshingly new meanings in the era of anthropocene.

This paper focuses onradical revisions from decolonial epistemological perspective of concepts like democracy and protest altering and subverting these concepts and the field of movement studies. While we agree that sociology and social movements are siblings of modernity,Southern reality complicates this. While the content of Southern social movements has remained anti-colonial in nature; Sociology, on the contrary, had become a colonial epistemic instrument to label and stereotype ethnic groups,racialize and subjugate them.

I argue that democracy is not just reinterpreted by anti-colonial struggles in colonial societies, it was also radically recontextualized to encompass new dimensions like self-rule-Swaraj, judicious rule-suraj, and people’s rule- jantantra in India to bring in radical transformations on the epistemological level. Similarly protests in its decolonial epistemological revision became all encompassing-where the state was the adversary and yet was owned as a democratic process by the oppressed, and the resourceless masses.

This paper asks how the field of social movements recontextualizes concepts with varied histories and aspirations for an emancipatory global future. While the underlining collective subjectivities change and shift as the political economy and the symbolic sphere are redefined by hegemonic global processes; how do common people decolonize the street protest repertoires with creativity and counter-hegemonic agendas? The ongoing Himalayan movement in the Ladakh region of India for demanding creation of new administrative categories and redefining citizenship for Sustainability of the planet on the backdrop of the Anthropocene is an example of the argument in question.