Undoing Coloniality? Polycentric Governing and Refugee Spaces

This chapter is situated in the emerging field of critical enquiry and praxis of decolonial thinking that gravitates around the notion of modernity as coloniality. In a nutshell, this perspective highlights what modernity actively produces as inexistent, a process that can be conceptualized as ‘epistemicide’. In particular, we critically engage with colonial and monocultural gestures around the volume’s propositions that polycentricity and governing are ‘different’ or ‘new’ forms of ordering. Consistent with a feminist and refugee-centric perspective on coloniality and governing, our response speaks back to power, and in that sense highlights the following questions: what is to be governed, by whom, and for what purposes? In addition, this response is understood as pedagogical praxis and as such engages with the (un)learning opportunities that the concepts in the volume open (and close). This point is developed in relation to two principal concerns: temporalities and understandings of the modern/colonial self. The remainder of the chapter engages with empirical illustrations from refugee spaces in Lebanon. We aim to explore whether a decolonial reading of polycentric governance in dialogue with the field of refugee studies, and more specifically, the politics of refugee voices and representations, can contribute, on the one hand, to undoing coloniality in polycentric governing research, and to desilencing what polycentric governance mutes, on the other.