The Many Endings of the International Colonial Institute and the White Appropriation of Decolonisation (1949–2000)

This article explores several key moments in which one of the most significant colonial institutions of the twentieth century – the International Colonial Institute (ICI) – faked its demise, pretending to end its involvement in colonial governance and its role in producing colonial knowledge, a practice it had maintained since its establishment in 1893. I argue that the ICI faked the elimination of its coloniality by embracing and appropriating the concepts of decolonisation and decoloniality from 1949 onward. Subsequently, its predominantly white members co-opted and manipulated other ostensibly decolonial ideas, such as the notion of ‘differing civilisations’, anti-racism and indigenism, while perpetuating colonial structures of racism, exploitation and global inequality. Proceeding chronologically, I first examine the ICI's alleged self-decolonisation in 1949, when it rebranded itself as the International Institute of Differing Civilisations (INCIDI) and began accepting members from former colonies. I then analyse how it survived the independence era of the 1960s and, finally, I scrutinise its last gasp before dissolving in 1983. While this process of white members pretending to unlearn their coloniality was highly ambiguous, I argue that representatives from the Global South who witnessed the INCIDI's ‘faked’ endings of coloniality grew increasingly sceptical of white appropriations of decolonial language and subsequently refined their own understandings of decolonisation and decoloniality. To conclude, I show how, after its dissolution, the INCIDI's (de-)colonial discourse took on a life of its own. It lived on in the journal Civilisations , which became a platform for global dialogue between Eurocentric and pluriversal epistemologies, introducing decolonial approaches from African, Caribbean and Latin American contexts to European Marxist and anti-racist theory

Appropriation · Colonialism · Decolonization · Ethnology · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Postcolonialism (international relations · White (mutation · African history and culture studies · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy