Introduction
Decolonial thought has become one of the most vibrant fronts in contemporary critical debates within the social sciences and humanities. By questioning the alleged universality of Western knowledge, authors such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Lélia Gonzalez re-center historically subalternized epistemologies that assert themselves both as forms of resistance and as horizons of liberation. Emerging from Latin American experience, this theoretical tradition rejects that there has been a break between the colonial and the post-colonial moments, and advance instead the notion of coloniality: the enduring logic that outlived formal colonialism and continued to shape the modern world through three intertwined dimensions—hierarchies of power, hierarchies of knowledge, and the denial of being, that is, the systematic dehumanization of colonized subjects. In the Arab and Maghrebi worlds, thinkers such as Edward Said, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Frantz Fanon[2], Fatema Mernissi, and Sophie Bessis have reinterpreted these enduring structures in light of their own trajectories, opening pathways for rethinking identity, knowledge, and political practice in contexts marked both by European colonial legacies and by internal struggles over cultural hegemony.
Despite their geographical distance and a history of limited intellectual and political exchange, Latin America and the Maghreb provide fertile ground for critical comparison. Their trajectories, while heterogeneous, converge in the experience of colonial domination and in the persistence of coloniality as a structuring force of social practices and regimes of knowledge. Against this backdrop, this article explores possible dialogues between Latin American and Maghrebi strands of decolonial thought, identifying both convergences and divergences. The exercise does not seek to dissolve historical and cultural differences, but rather to demonstrate how different local responses can collectively enrich the global repertoire of decoloniality. By situating Latin America and the Maghreb in a comparative perspective, we aim to contribute to the re-imagination of knowledge production in the Global South. The goal is not to construct an artificial symmetry, but to highlight shared challenges and differentiated strategies, showing how dialogue between these regions expands the horizons of decolonial critique. In this sense, recent African critiques of Latin American decoloniality (see, for instance, Pillay 2021) further complicate these dialogues, reminding us that decolonial trajectories are deeply situated and cannot be universalized. Our analysis is organized around two axes: indigeneity, conceived both as a legitimate locus of epistemic enunciation and as a terrain of political resistance, though persistently subjected to silencing; and religion, examined as a paradoxical arena where dynamics of domination and possibilities of emancipation intersect.
Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations
While our readings draw upon a broad constellation of scholars from Latin America and the Maghreb, the conversations we privilege in this article are those with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Lélia Gonzalez, and Abdelkébir Khatibi. Our approach is deliberately structured around crossed perspectives: one of us, a Latin American scholar, engages Maghrebi thought through Khatibi, while the other, a Maghrebi scholar, approaches Latin America through Rivera Cusicanqui and Gonzalez. It is worth noting that our choice of Khatibi is not only theoretical, but also reflects the structural asymmetries of knowledge production in the Global South. Access to Maghrebi thought beyond Arabic remains unevenly distributed across academic geographies, and authors whose work might offer distinct significant engagements with coloniality—such as Mohammed Abed al-Jabri— are harder to access for Latin American scholars due to the linguistic barrier, since their intellectual production in Arabic has seldom been translated to Latin American languages[3]. As the Latin American co-author of this article is unable to read Arabic with the depth this undertaking requires, Silvia Ferabolli’s engagement with the Maghreb—like her own writing—necessarily unfolds through colonial languages: French and Portuguese. She encounters the Maghreb through the language of its colonizer, just as she speaks and writes through the language of her own colonizer. This painful condition reveals how coloniality continues to structure academic circulation, determining who can read whom, and under what terms. Khatibi’s work, articulated in French and through post-structuralist registers, becomes readable across these fractured academic geographies, enabling a transversal dialogue with Latin American critical traditions—while simultaneously exposing the epistemic losses that such mediation entails. This predicament resonates directly with Rivera Cusicanqui’s critique of the coloniality of knowledge. Rivera Cusicanqui joins several Decolonial Latin American scholars in arguing that colonialism not only dominated territories but also imposed regimes of knowledge that relegated indigenous cosmologies and orally transmitted knowledge to the status of “folklore” or “superstition.” But she differs from other fellow Decolonial scholars as she anchors her reflection in local thinking and solidly links it with praxis. According to her, Mignolo and others use community based ideas and local concepts, oversimplify them, not to say, sterilize them, to then present them to their Western colleagues. But as they do so, all they achieve is to advance their own careers by pretending to be original and locally anchored thinkers, instead of advancing the agenda and the cause of the population they say they represent. As opposed to that, Rivera Cusicanqui argues that those populations do not need to be given a voice, since they have it and can speak for themselves (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2021, 109). Instead, what they need is to be listened to and taken seriously, which is seldom the case. She operates the latter praxis as she sees what she calls an internal colonialism, a concept initially articulated by Pablo González Casanova,[4] which ultimately refers to the ways in which national elites reproduce colonial hierarchies—through the concentration of land ownership, the monopolization of political power, and the imposition of cultural assimilation—thereby consigning indigenous peoples and peasants to enduring conditions of exclusion and structural dependency. This form of domination also silences the voices of dissent of indigenous and black populations by adhering to and defending the legitimacy—if not the supposed superiority—of the European narrative of universalism and absolute scientific truths. Internal colonialism, far from being merely a political or economic arrangement, is also an insidious colonialism of the mind, insofar as it legitimates colonial thinking by giving it a local iteration and presenting it as a local voice.
With this concept of internal colonialism, it becomes possible to understand why Latin American states—whether in Argentina and Chile, in the Southern Cone where the indigenous population is relatively small; in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, in the Andean region where indigenous presence is significant; or in Brazil, where official statistics indicate that the majority of the population is black and brown—have nonetheless identified themselves as Western, claiming that lineage not only in terms of language and lifestyle but also in ontological and philosophical terms. This has resulted in the marginalization and sidelining of large parts of the population, both black and indigenous, along with their modes of thinking and knowledge production.
Another activist scholar who has emphasized the other unheard voice in Latin America was Lélia Gonzalez. This Brazilian thinker uses the concept of amefricanidade/amefricanity to argue that far from carrying an exclusive European heritage, Brazil and Latin America have also significantly been shaped by African and indigenous identities and cultures. Gonzalez, who is known for her black activism, argued insistently that Brazilian history has mistakenly been presented as a white European descendent history. According to her, the contribution of afro-descendants not only to Brazilian culture but also to the country’s struggle for independence is undeniable, though consistently marginalized, silenced or undermined in the national official and intellectual narratives. Those contributions and their concomitant silencing continued in independent Brazil, notably with the attempts to encourage European immigration in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, that effort not only continued but intensified, in particular under the military regime that lasted from 1964 to 1985 (Gonzalez, 2022, 17). Consequently, and in order to reflect those distinct lineages and their contributions to the subcontinent’s history, identity and culture, Gonzalez proceeded with the renaming of the territory known as Latin America as “Ladin Amefrica” (Rios and Lima, 2020).
Back to Rivera Cusicanqui, her other valuable contribution to the argument we make here is her use of the concept senti-pensar (“feel-thinking”), which was first used by the Colombian thinker Orlando Fals Borda. With sentipensar, Rivera Cusicanqui defends forms of knowledge rooted in collective praxis, refusing to separate reason from emotion or thought from body (Scauso, 2021, 173). By affirming this inseparability, she challenges the Cartesian and colonial hierarchies that have historically devalued indigenous ways of knowing, and in doing so, repositions indigeneity not as an object of study described by others, but as a legitimate locus of epistemic enunciation, capable of producing its own theories and interpretations of the world. This local, grassroot, praxis-oriented, way of thinking, does not seek to trace some middle ground between a West that is all about rationality and a rest that is all about feeling and emotion. Instead, it rejects such dichotomies and empowers local views and ways of thinking in order to confront challenges and deal with a unique and universal narrative. This is exactly what she does with her concept of ch’ixi, a local indigenous, Aymara way of social reproduction that sees that things can at the same time be and not be, which she sees as different from hybridity (da Silva, 2024, 8). With ch’ixi, Rivera Cusicanqui wants to simultaneously overcome and nurture the contradictions instead of avoiding them through hybridity or métissage, which she considers to be a continuous reproduction of a European understanding of synthesis and homogenization as the ultimate resolution of difference.
Among the several concepts articulated by Rivera Cusicanqui in her reading of Latin American decolonial thought, this article foregrounds five—namely, the necessary return to local, community-based knowledge; the centrality of praxis; the overcoming of internal colonialism through the valorization of indigenous and black contributions; the refusal to separate thinking from feeling, expressed in the notion of sentipensar; and, as a consequence, the articulation of a third way, which is embodied for her by ch’ixi, that is not a synthesis but an overcoming of contradictions. These concepts will then be placed in dialogue with four central ideas in Khatibi’s thought: double critique, pensée-autre, métissage and the vision of a Magreb pluriel. Indeed, in the Maghreb, Abdelkébir Khatibi advanced a critique analogous to that of Cusicanqui, yet distinct in its strategy, developed across both theoretical and autobiographical registers. In Maghreb pluriel (1983), he formulates the concept of double critique, a simultaneous refusal of Eurocentric universalism—which elevates its own experience as the measure of humanity—and Arab-Islamic homogenization, which erases internal plurality in the name of essentialism. Against both, Khatibi defends the plurality of inheritances as constitutive of Maghrebi identity, insisting that no single tradition—Arab, Islamic, Amazigh, or French—can exhaust the region’s meaning. From this tension emerges his idea of pensée-autre (other thought): a way of thinking that inhabits the entre-deux (in-between), refusing closure and cultivating métissage as a horizon of thought. His vision of a Maghreb pluriel foregrounds the interplay of multiple legacies where difference is sustained rather than assimilated. If Maghreb pluriel (1983) articulates these ideas in theoretical terms, La Mémoire tatouée (1971) explores them autobiographically, tracing how they are inscribed on the body. Here, Islam appears not only as a language of belonging and resistance against colonial intrusion, but also as a disciplinary structure that regulates gender relations, sexuality, and social hierarchies, particularly through patriarchal authority. Religion, memory, and language thus function both as resources of emancipation and as instruments of regulation. By linking the personal to the political, Khatibi demonstrates that the struggle over Maghrebi identity cannot be reduced to an external confrontation with Europe, but must also reckon with the internal inscriptions of power within local traditions.
If Rivera Cusicanqui breaks with the Cartesian dichotomy that separates thought and body and rejects hybridity and métissage, Khatibi, by contrast, disrupts linear notions of identity, showing instead how subjectivity in the Maghreb is always fractured, layered, and open-ended. Unlike Rivera Cusicanqui, he cultivates métissage as the affirmation of the plurality of Arab, Amazigh, and European colonial inheritances that constitute the aesthetic, political, and epistemic conditions of Maghrebi identity. This divergence, however, is less a fundamental opposition than a difference in strategy: while Rivera Cusicanqui dismisses hybridity as a reproduction of colonial logics, Khatibi reworks métissage through his double critique, transforming it into a tool for unsettling both Arab thought in its limitations and Western thought in its hegemonic claims. In these terms, pensée-autre emerges as a possible way of engaging aspects of local heritage and placing them in relation with generative elements of Western thought—as in the dialogue between Islamic art and Western aesthetics. By contrast, Rivera Cusicanqui does not engage in a critique of local thinking but rather embodies it. In other words, each is deeply embedded in their own environment and engages it in order to confront its particular challenges. Taken together, their perspectives form the theoretical foundation of this article, guiding our reading of indigeneity and religion not merely as cultural dimensions, but as political and epistemic battlegrounds traversed by coloniality.
Axis 1 – Indigeneity
Building on these formulations, the analysis of indigeneity reveals processes of silencing and insurgent epistemic practices. In Latin America, the materialization of internal colonialism was the marginalization of the indigenous population from national narratives, public spaces, and structures of political power. As for indigenous resistance, it took several forms, all of which rescued local ways of thinking, of acting, of producing knowledge and of transmitting it. In Ecuador, for instance, Manuela Picq (2013) discusses how Kichwa women challenged state sovereignty–a state that has been instrumentalized by local leaders as the embodiment of a European heritage—through taking the Ecuadoran state to international justice and defending their agency and the legitimacy of their voices through international courts. In order to face a double marginalization–internal colonialism both as indigenous people and as women– Kichwa women had to affirm their agency through international courts, emphasizing thus their distinctiveness as indigenous people in the country. Bolivia provides an additional, although distinct, Latin American example. In Bolivia, which indigenous population varies between 43% and 62.2%, depending on the estimates, until the revolution of 1953, the indigenous population was not allowed to be in the main squares of Bolivian cities. Along the same lines, that country had been exclusively ruled by white, European descendent, presidents since its independence in 1825 until 2006, when Evo Morales was the first indigenous president elected. A turning point that allowed this development to take place was the 1990 March for Territory and Dignity, which, in line with Rivera Cusicanqui’s argument and in parallel to it, underlined the existence of an indigenous question in the country and fostered an awareness of the structural discrepancies that had led to the marginalization of the indigenous population in Bolivia (Gumucio, 1996). In other words, Rivera Cusicanqui’s insistence on rescuing the distinctiveness of the indigenous people in Bolivia was echoed by activists who marched and brought the indigenous question into the public sphere. Despite this, it was only after the election of Morales that those disparities began to be addressed, culminating in the refoundation of the state as a Plurinational one in the 2009 constitution (Nilsson, 2013). Those developments in Bolivia —the election of Evo Morales, the new constitution– would not have been possible without the rescue of the legitimacy of the contribution of the indigenous thinking to which Rivera Cusicanqui’s concept of ch’ixi and her defense of the indigenous distinct way of producing knowledge solidly contributed. In Brazil, indigenous mobilizations have gathered annually at the Acampamento Terra Livre (Free Land Camp) in Brasília since 2004 and have articulated demands ranging from the demarcation of ancestral territories and environmental protection to the consolidation of political rights and recognition of the country’s ethnic plurality. These encounters brought together hundreds of indigenous peoples from diverse regions of Brazil and exemplify the political articulation of an epistemology that rejects assimilation and asserts diversity as a foundation of democracy[5] . In this sense, the total marginalization and silencing of the indigenous population in different Latin American settings and societies necessitated a long struggle that brought together social resistance and academic activism in order to open spaces for the distinct voice of the indigenous population in the subcontinent.
In the Maghreb, the Amazigh issue has also been present in the political agenda, though in historically distinct ways from Latin America. Whereas in Latin America indigeneity is largely articulated vis-à-vis European settler colonialism, Amazigh mobilizations unfold in relation to Arabized postcolonial states. In Morocco, for instance, from the 1980s onward, Amazigh mobilizations coalesced into a sustained movement that directly contested Arabization and demanded recognition of Tamazight, the valorization of Amazigh culture, and the protection of indigenous knowledge, thus underscoring how indigeneity in North Africa is relational and historically contingent. Arab presence in the Maghreb predates European colonialism by more than thirteen centuries, emerging through long processes of Arabization and Islamization beginning in the seventh century. Arabs, therefore, cannot be read simply as external settlers: their belonging is the outcome of a historical process of indigenization. “Indigenous” here signals layered histories of inhabitation shaped by shifting configurations of power, rather than an original or fixed essence.
Earlier, the post-independence Moroccan state dismissed Amazigh claims as colonial legacies of “divide-and-rule,” invoking the Arab–Berber distinction institutionalized under French rule only to deny its legitimacy and to subsume Amazigh difference within an Arab-Islamic narrative of unity (Wyrtzen, 2011). It was not until the political opening of the 1980s that Amazigh associations and intellectual networks carved out space for activism, publishing newsletters and local periodicals and staging cultural events; over the following decades, this grew into a wider ecosystem that included journals such as Asinag, as well as major festivals like Timitar in Agadir and the Festival de la Culture Amazighe in Fez, thereby asserting Amazigh collective identity as a political and cultural force. While for decades after independence, the monarchy alternated repression and co-optation, the creation of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) in 2001 and the 2011 constitutional reform, which made Tamazight an official language, marked symbolic breakthroughs—though implementation has remained limited. When approached through Khatibi’s double critique, these mobilizations illustrate the dual labor of challenging colonial legacies while also contesting post-independence narratives of unity. On one front, Amazigh intellectuals and associations challenged the Eurocentric categories that had long reduced their language and culture to folklore or colonial anthropology. They did so by codifying Tamazight in written form and mobilizing it in literature and scholarship, contesting its confinement under French rule to colonial taxonomies. On another, they resisted the postcolonial state’s reliance on an Arab-Islamic discourse of cultural essence that sought to erase plural identities in the name of national unity. By reclaiming Tamazight as both a linguistic practice and a political horizon, Amazigh activism enacted what Khatibi called a pensée-autre: a refusal of fixed identities and a commitment to plurality and métissage. In praxis, this meant reworking elements of local traditions through their encounter with Western categories, neither rejecting the former nor imitating the latter, but enacting the kind of double critique and pensée-autre that Khatibi envisioned. Rather than demanding assimilation into a homogenizing project, these movements affirmed a Maghreb “pluriel”, where Arab, Amazigh, and Islamic legacies meet without collapsing into a single essence, while the French legacy enduring as the indelible scar of colonial memory.
In Algeria, parallel dynamics unfolded. The 2001 ‘Black Spring’ protests in Kabylie were sparked by the killing of Massinissa Guermah, an 18-year-old high school student from the region, by a member of the Algerian National Gendarmerie. His death ignited mass mobilizations that addressed the long-standing political and cultural marginalization of Kabyle communities. The protests gave rise to the Arouch Movement, which became the main vehicle for institutionalizing Amazigh demands, pressing for democratization, regional autonomy, and recognition of Tamazight (McDougall, 2017). The state combined repression—the clashes resulted in over 120 deaths and thousands of injuries—with incremental concessions, granting Tamazight “national language” status in 2002 and elevating it to “official language” in 2016. These reforms reconfigured national identity but, as scholars note, implementation has lagged behind symbolic recognition, reflecting the limits of accommodation within an authoritarian political system (IWGIA 2025). To read the Algerian ‘Black Spring’ in light of Khatibi’s thought, one must be aware that French colonial rule institutionalized what came to be known as the “Kabyle myth”: the idea that Kabyles were “almost ‘European’ in their nature” and therefore less “Arab” than the rest of the Algerian population, a racialized distinction deployed as a classic strategy of divide-and-rule (see Silverstein 1996; 2004). Against this legacy, the 2001 Arouch Movement did not embrace Kabyle exceptionalism but instead demanded recognition of Tamazight and democratic rights within Algerian citizenship. In this sense, their mobilization unsettled both the colonial categories that had essentialized Kabyle difference and the postcolonial state’s homogenizing Arab-Islamic narrative—an embodiment of the dynamics of double critique. By articulating claims for democratization and regional autonomy alongside the recognition of Tamazight, Kabyle activists enacted a form of pensée-autre—a thought that resists closure and insists on plurality. Their mobilization not only contested state repression but also gestured toward a Maghreb “pluriel”, where diverse identities could coexist without being subordinated to authoritarian definitions of unity. In this sense, the “Black Spring” challenged not only specific policies but the very grammar of Algerian nationalism, exposing its exclusionary foundations and reasserting the possibility of a Maghreb of multiple inheritances. Yet this episode was not an isolated eruption: it was part of a longer trajectory of marginalization and resistance in Kabylia, marked most starkly by the “Black Decade” of the 1990s, when successive massacres of Kabyle people—carried out by both the regime and Islamist groups, though more intensely by the latter—sought to silence their voices. The Black Spring thus needs to be understood less as an exception than as a continuation of that violent history, and as another moment in the enduring struggle of Kabyle communities against erasure and repression.
Axis 2 – Religion
If indigeneity reveals parallels of exclusion and resistance, religion demonstrates the dual role of tradition as both an instrument of domination and a potential vehicle for emancipation. In Latin America, religion was also the space to question European universalism: Christianity—historically mobilized to legitimize colonization, slavery, and patriarchy—was reconfigured by certain theologians into a discourse of liberation and popular organization under the rubric of Liberation Theology. In Brazil, beginning in the 1960s, Liberation Theology re-appropriated Christianity in the name of the poor and marginalized (Carvalhaes and Py, 2017). By interpreting the Gospel through the lens of the concrete oppression experienced by rural and urban communities, thinkers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff transformed religion into an instrument of resistance against authoritarian regimes as well as structural and economic inequalities (Camilo, 2011). In El Salvador, the work of figures such as Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980, and of grassroot ecclesial communities, illustrated how Liberation Theology became a political practice of resistance against military repression and the violence of Central American dictatorships. With this, religion ceased to be an instrument of oppression, a tool for conservative thinking and status quo, as it became a tool for emancipation. How did that happen, i.e., how did religion become a tool for change? And what did that mean concretely?
To answer these questions, it is important to note the parallel context of the Catholic Church and of Latin America. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) introduced significant changes aimed at modernizing the Church and bringing it closer to the people. In Latin America, these reforms coincided with the rise of military dictatorships, which, by and large, were supported by the Church hierarchy. Against this backdrop, a sector of the Latin American Church developed Liberation Theology, which, as mentioned above, was a movement that aligned itself with the poor and dispossessed in opposition to capitalist exploitation and authoritarian rule (Löwy, 2000). This stance generated a paradoxical dynamic: the more these religious leaders stood with popular sectors against injustice, the more they provoked the ire of military regimes, whose repression in turn deepened the leaders’ bonds with the very communities they sought to defend. It was hence in that context that Liberation Theology transformed part of the religious leadership into a tool for change instead of status quo. Another key element that explains that evolution was positionality: those theologians contested the pretendedly universal and conservative meaning that the religious text was having and proposed against it an alternative reading, a locally embedded one. With that, if religion could be considered by some as a discourse and a force for status quo, other possible and legitimate readings considered it a force of change, a force for the oppressed to struggle for change. A final element that explains that evolution was the embeddedness of those theologians in their communities. Indeed, it is that proximity of the leaders with their people and the compatibility of their views that gave force and legitimacy to Liberation Theology.
The consequence of that is that Christianity could have multiple readings, and that the Western and European interpretations not only were not universal, but were only one specific interpretation among many possible others. In sum, in Latin America, with religion as with indigeneity, there is a strong claim for a local interpretation, a local reading of texts and concepts, based on local communities and their challenges within their contexts. In this sense, there is a clear intent not only to distinguish the region from Europe, its universalism and its identity, but also to confront the internal colonizer in it and liberate the region from it.
In the Maghreb, Islam is the common identifier of the population of the region. Both Amazigh and Arabs claim their attachment to their religion, and although some Amazigh do see Islam as the religion of the invader and call for the right to practice other religions, or even, to be atheists, they represent a very small minority. In Morocco, for instance, the 1930 Dahir Berbère sought to separate Arabs and “Berbers” by placing Imazighen under customary rather than Islamic law. Intended to fragment anti-colonial resistance, it instead provoked broad opposition: Arab and Amazigh elites, religious leaders, and nationalists mobilized Islam as a shared framework of resistance (Wyrtzen 2015). The controversy fostered a nationalist discourse that made Islam the ultimate marker of Moroccan unity, eclipsing linguistic and ethnic diversity. While remembered as a failed colonial measure, its long-term legacy was to elevate Islam as a unifying signifier while legitimizing Arab-Islamic hegemony and marginalizing Amazigh recognition. Within Khatibi’s conceptual framework, the Berber Dahir illustrates the duality of religion as a marker of national identity—at once a force of anti-colonial solidarity and a vehicle of exclusion. In La Mémoire tatouée (1971), Khatibi reflects on the intimate ways Islam was inscribed in everyday life in Morocco, not only as a spiritual horizon but also as a disciplinary structure regulating gender relations, sexuality, and social hierarchies. This patriarchal dimension, often overlooked in nationalist accounts, reveals how the mobilization of Islam against colonial rule was double-edged: it offered a language of emancipation while it also naturalized forms of domination within society. Seen through the lens of double critique, the rejection of the Dahir exposed colonial manipulation but also reinforced a homogenizing Arab-Islamic narrative of cultural essence that constrained plural identities. Khatibi’s autobiographical meditation makes visible this tension: religion as memory and belonging, yet also as inscription on the body—of women, of minorities, of those who bore the marks of otherness. In this sense, the legacy of the Dahir was not only political but also epistemic and corporeal, demonstrating how state-sponsored nationalist Islam—mobilized as a discourse of Arab-Islamic unity—resisted colonial fragmentation while simultaneously reinforcing patriarchal hierarchies in postcolonial Morocco. Although Amazigh communities were themselves Muslim, their cultural and religious practices often reflected more heterodox and less rigidly patriarchal interpretations—such as women’s active role in oral poetry and local rituals—which were delegitimized by the state’s promotion of a rigid orthodoxy anchored in male authority.
Echoing this pattern, in Algeria the National Liberation Front (FLN) drew on Islamic symbols as part of a nationalist language of sovereignty during the independence war (1954–1962). In the post-independence period, however, that idiom became one of the legitimating grounds for the consolidation of conservative gender hierarchies—as codified in the 1984 Family Code (see Charrad 2001; 2012)—while Amazigh language and culture were simultaneously marginalized under an Arab-Islamic nationalist narrative. This ambivalence—Islam first mobilized by the FLN as a unifying idiom of anti-colonial liberation, and later weaponized in the violent confrontation between the Algerian state and Islamist movements claiming to embody the nation’s ‘true’ essence—became brutally evident in the 1990s after the army cancelled the December 1991 elections, in which the Islamic Salvation Front had won the first round and was poised for overall victory. According to Martinez (2000), the ensuing ‘Black Decade’ exposed the paradox with tragic clarity: armed groups such as the Armed Islamic Group and the Islamic Salvation Army targeted state officials, media professionals, and foreign residents, while security forces and militias responded with widespread repression. Within this generalized violence, Amazigh communities—particularly in Kabylia—were also singled out, their cultural practices and heterodox religious expressions denounced as threats to Islamist orthodoxy (Silverstein, 2004; McDougall 2017). In Algeria, at that particular political juncture, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary civilians became emblematic victims of a trajectory in which Islam, once invoked as a language of liberation, was turned into an instrument of coercion. These dynamics highlight the profoundly ambivalent role of religion in Maghrebi politics: at once a shared idiom of anti-colonial struggle and a contested field where recognition, repression, and resistance are continually renegotiated.
Placed side by side, these cases highlight the paradoxical duel between liberation and oppression: religion both legitimizes and contests political orders. It can function as an instrument of coloniality, yet also as a motor of decolonial resistance.
Conclusion
This article has shown how thinkers in Latin America and the Maghreb have generated different intellectual and political responses to deal with similar exclusions and comparable marginalizations produced by coloniality. Rivera Cusicanqui’s insistence on praxis, sentipensar, and ch’ixi, and Gonzalez’s notion of amefricanidade, reconfigure the Latin American landscape by reclaiming indigenous and Afro-descendant contributions as constitutive of collective identity. Khatibi’s double critique, pensée-autre, and vision of a Maghreb pluriel articulate a parallel intervention: one that resists both Eurocentric universalism and Arab-Islamic homogenization by affirming plurality and métissage as the conditions of Maghrebi subjectivity. These scholars go back to their communities and environments (Rivera Cusicanqui through her activism in the Katarista movement advocating Aymara rights, Gonzalez through her activism in the Brazilian Black movement, and Khatibi through his academic work at Mohammed V University and his involvement in communist and student activism) to look for ways to resist and to deal with their predicaments. And although they do not necessarily offer similar paths for dealing with those challenges, they share similar objectives of resistance and emancipation. While in Latin America, and for Rivera Cusicanqui in particular, decolonization has meant rejecting western universalism and its ways of knowing, in the Maghreb, and for Khatibi particularly, it has entailed neither imitating the West, nor rejecting it outright, since métissage can bring an answer to the challenges faced by Maghrebi societies. In both regions, hence, the double critique reflects the double struggle that is necessary, against the West, but also against the internal colonization. And the only answer that exists is going back to resistance, praxis and grassroots. Taken together, these dialogues underscore that decoloniality must be thought of as a constellation of situated practices that confront coloniality in its multiple power-knowledge-being articulations and contradictions. Comparative engagement between Latin America and the Maghreb thus expands the horizons of critical thought, revealing how different genealogies of struggle illuminate one another.
As scholars of International Relations, we also feel compelled to offer a final reflection on the nexus between the struggle for the emancipation of politically marginalized minorities subjected to internal subalternization and the broader struggle against the perpetuation of imperial structures of power at the international level. For us, it is not only the Maghreb that can be imagined as pluriel – Latin America and what is conventionally referred to as the Arab world can also be understood in plural terms. The very concepts of the Arab world (of which the Maghreb is a part) and Latin America (where a substantial proportion of the population – numbering in the hundreds of millions – is not Indigenous, Black, or mixed-race, but rather descended from Arab and European immigrants, especially in the Southern Cone and parts of Brazil) should not be reduced to racial, ethnic, or religious identity frameworks posited as inherently oppressive and exclusionary. Such reductions– whether of Arabness or of Latin Americanness–ultimately serve the interests of those who benefit from fragmented regions. This is an urgent question with which decolonial praxis must contend. In fact, these reductions have historically disempowered both the Arab world and Latin America, undermining them epistemically and politically while eroding their collective capacity to act in global politics. Initiatives such as U.S. and Israeli projects for a “New Middle East,” European endeavors like the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, or hemispheric schemes such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas are but a few examples of external attempts to fill the void left by the regions’ inability to act collectively. Emancipation, therefore, requires not only resisting global and local hegemonies but also reclaiming a collective identity as a possible horizon of solidarity and historical agency. Otherwise, indigenous peoples once again risk being trapped in a false choice: either subjugation to external colonial powers or accommodation within hegemonic nationalist regimes.
Indeed, any meaningful collective agency in Latin America or the Maghreb can only emerge through the recognition and incorporation of the mosaic of actors that constitute both spaces. Endeavors such as the one we propose—to read decolonial struggles in comparative perspective, across regions so geographically distant and shaped by such distinct forms of colonization—can nurture the necessary transversal conversations as an ongoing practice of mutual recognition, one that affirms difference as a condition of solidarity and reimagines the Global South as a plural site of epistemic production and political possibility.
Silvia Ferabolli is affiliated with the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Nizar Messari is affiliated with Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco.
This research was partially supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil.
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