This article responds to the JRAI Dialogues on decolonizing anthropology (Theodossopoulos et al. 2026). While engaging sympathetically with the contributors' concerns — the instability of the colonizer/colonized binary, the danger of authenticity claims, the difficulty of locating decolonization within ambiguously positioned regions — I argue that these problems arise from a structural deficit in the conceptual architecture of decolonial discourse itself. Drawing on Living Value Theory (LVT), I propose that what is commonly called "colonialism" is not a single historical formation but a variable configuration of five irreducible mediations (embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multi-materiality, and multi-symbolization), and that different colonial formations amplify different mediations to produce radically different architectures of domination. From this follows the concept of mesocosmic fit: the degree to which an analytical category tracks stable, recurrent patterns across multiple mediations of lived coordination. I argue that "colonizer/colonized" has low mesocosmic fit while "unequal extraction" has high mesocosmic fit, and that treating low-fit and high-fit categories as equivalent produces systematic analytical distortion. The article further argues that the decolonial project, as commonly deployed, operates as a metarecursive binary stabilization within an Enlightenment-derived transactive ontology, and that without specifying the mediational profile of the formation it targets, decolonization cannot generate completion criteria and therefore becomes an indefinite orientation rather than an achievable project. I conclude by proposing a diagnostic framework in which decolonization is completed dimension by dimension when specific mediational distortions have been structurally closed at appropriate levels.
1. Introduction: the productive discomfort of the Dialogues
The two Dialogues published in the JRAI (Theodossopoulos et al. 2026) are valuable precisely because they refuse to settle. In the first, Stef Jansen and Jessica Greenberg relocate the decolonization debate to Southeast Europe, where the colonizer/colonized binary visibly fails. In the second, Elsayed Abdelhamid, Maria Obrebska, and Isabel Sturges bring embodied experience — Egyptian border crossings, Polish inferiority complexes, the Rhodes flag outside an Oxford library — to bear on the question of what it means to inhabit and transform institutions shaped by colonial histories. Together, the contributors surface a set of tensions that run through the entire field: the binary doesn't hold, contexts vary enormously, authenticity is dangerous, universalism is both needed and suspect, and no one can say when the decolonial project would be done.
These are the right problems. But the Dialogues, for all their sensitivity, do not resolve them. They describe complexity without explaining it structurally. They name discomfort without locating its source. They call for openness without specifying what openness would look like as a research programme. Above all, they do not answer the question that haunts every page: what exactly are you trying to decolonize?
This article attempts to provide the missing diagnostic framework. I draw on Living Value Theory (LVT), a general theory of human coordination, to reframe the decolonization debate from the ground up. My argument proceeds in six stages. First, I show that the concept of "colony" is itself genealogically unstable, compressing historically non-equivalent formations under a single term. Second, I argue that what contemporary discourse usually means by "colonialism" is a historically specific expansion of what I call transactive dualism — a value cosmology organized around discrete agents, commensurated exchange, and contractual closure — and that decolonial critique is largely an immanent critique of that same cosmology rather than an exit from it. Third, I introduce the concept of metarecursion to diagnose the "colonizer/colonized" distinction as a specific kind of symbolic operation — a binary stabilization that enables political action but systematically misfits the heterogeneous structure of lived coordination. Fourth, I propose mesocosmic fit as a criterion for ranking analytical categories by how well they track multi-mediational patterns of coordination, showing that some binaries (like unequal vs. equal exchange) have high fit while others (like colonizer vs. colonized) have low fit. Fifth, I develop a comparative anatomy of colonial formations, showing that different forms of colonialism amplify different mediations — embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multi-materiality, multi-symbolization — to produce radically different architectures of domination. Sixth, I argue that political action only succeeds when it targets the dominant mediation at the appropriate level, and that decolonization can therefore be completed dimension by dimension rather than remaining an indefinite orientation. Throughout, I engage directly with the claims and examples raised in the JRAI Dialogues, showing how this framework resolves the tensions they identify.
2. The genealogical instability of "colony"
Before asking what decolonization means, we must ask what colony means. The answer is less stable than it appears.
The Latin colonia derives from colere: to cultivate, to inhabit, to tend. In the Roman world, a colonia was a settlement of Roman citizens, a legal extension of Rome, a tool of territorial integration rather than extraction. It is closer to implantation and replication of a polity than to domination of a radically external Other. The Greek apoikia, conventionally translated as "colony," literally means "a home away from home," and Greek settlements were typically politically independent from the metropolis, often founded through negotiated departure. So even at the level of antiquity, two non-equivalent logics are already compressed under a single term: Roman incorporation and extension on one side, Greek dispersal and autonomy on the other. Neither maps cleanly onto what we now call colonialism.
With Iberian and later Northern European expansion, something qualitatively different emerges: large-scale extraction of resources and labour, racialized hierarchies, long-distance imperial administration, epistemic domination through classification, mapping, and "civilizing" missions. This is a new assemblage. It is not simply an extension of Roman or Greek models. The word "colony" now covers Roman legal transplantation, Greek diasporic settlement, and early modern extractive empire — formations that differ not merely in degree but in kind.
This matters because when contemporary anthropology speaks of "colonialism," it typically assumes a stable referent. But the referent is historically heterogeneous, conceptually overextended, and retroactively unified. The term functions less as a precise descriptor and more as a symbolic compression. If the foundational concept is unstable, then every derivative category — colonizer, colonized, centre, periphery, decolonization itself — is built on moving ground.
The Dialogues sense this problem without naming it. When Jansen and Greenberg argue that the Balkans complicate the colonizer/colonized binary because the region was shaped by overlapping empires — Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, EU — they are pointing to a specific instance of this instability. The Balkans resist the standard binary not because they are exceptional but because the binary was never adequate to begin with. It compressed formations with radically different structures into a single moral axis and then discovered, case by case, that the compression does not hold.
Similarly, when Obrebska struggles with whether "decolonization" applies to Poland — a country shaped by Russian and German imperial domination but positioned within Europe, and whose relation to colonial extraction is indirect — she is encountering the same compression from a different angle. And when Sturges wonders whether seventeenth-century fen drainage in East Anglia should be understood as a form of colonialism, she is asking whether a term coined for one kind of formation can be stretched to cover another without losing its analytical purchase. The answer from a mediational perspective is: it depends on the specific architecture of domination in each case. It cannot be answered by appeal to the umbrella term.
3. Colonialism as the expansion of transactive dualism
If "colonialism" is too broad, what specifically do people mean when they use the term? In most contemporary usage — and certainly in most decolonial discourse — the formation silently presupposed is not Roman settlement or Greek dispersal but something that crystallizes with the Dutch and later the British commercial empires of the seventeenth century onward.
What is distinctive about this formation is not settlement per se, nor even domination per se, but a specific kind of infrastructure: contractualized relations (charters, concessions, treaties), commensuration of land, labour, and goods into exchangeable units, accounting and pricing as core technologies of governance, and legal closure through transaction. What is being imposed is not just power but a transactive ontology — what I call transactive dualism. This is a value cosmology organized around four principles: agents are treated as discrete and bounded; exchange between them is the primary mode of coordination; goods and services are rendered commensurable through pricing or equivalence; and relations are stabilized through contractual closure.
Colonialism, in this specific sense, is not the absence of Enlightenment principles but their violent, asymmetrical overextension. The same logic that demands fair exchange within the metropole is deployed across domains that were not previously organized in transactive terms — and deployed coercively, without the reciprocity the logic ostensibly requires. This is why the Monty Python scene from Life of Brian — "What have the Romans ever done for us?" — functions as such a precise diagnostic. The would-be revolutionaries cannot stabilize their opposition because the Romans have delivered real mediational transformations: aqueducts (multi-materiality), sanitation (embodiment), roads (dwelling), peace (being-with). The binary breaks down under the weight of concrete mediations. But the scene also shows the structural entanglement: the critique itself operates within a transactive frame. The rebels evaluate Roman rule in terms of inputs and outputs, costs and benefits. They are already thinking transactively even as they try to oppose the transactors.
This entanglement extends to the decolonial project itself. The dominant strand of decolonial critique does not reject the transactive ontology of the Enlightenment. It demands that Enlightenment principles of equality, reciprocity, and fairness be consistently applied. This is what makes it so powerful — and so limited. Anti-slavery arguments framed in terms of rights, labour exploitation framed as unfair exchange, demands for equal citizenship: these do not leave transactive dualism. They perfect it.
The entanglement is doubled by the fact that colonial powers themselves often legitimated domination as the delivery of transactive order: law, courts, administration, infrastructure, rational governance. Jansen captures this when he notes that Balkan polities "have been assembled from subordinate parts of successive empires understood to be run largely by people whose centre was elsewhere." The centre justified itself precisely through its claim to provide superior transactive coordination. So colonial rule and decolonial critique share a value cosmology. Colonialism imposes transactive dualism asymmetrically; decolonization demands that it be applied symmetrically. But neither questions the underlying ontology.
There are, to be sure, strands of decolonial thought that attempt to step outside transactionality: refusal of commensuration, insistence on incommensurable value, rejection of equivalence (for example, the claim that land is not "exchangeable"). These moves begin to destabilize the transactive frame itself. But they remain rare and underdeveloped relative to the dominant mode of decolonial argument, which is essentially a demand for fair dealing within the same system.
This produces a structural dilemma that the Dialogues feel acutely but cannot articulate: if decolonization uses transactional language, it reproduces the ontology; if it refuses transactional language, it risks losing political traction. The dilemma is not resolvable within the terms of the debate as currently framed. It requires stepping outside the binary of "colonial vs. decolonial" altogether and asking what kind of operation the binary itself is performing.
4. Metarecursion and the colonizer/colonized binary
Here I introduce a concept that is central to the diagnostic framework I am proposing: metarecursion. By metarecursion I mean the process through which a distinction is stabilized at a higher order of abstraction, enabling it to function as a decision-making device — a switch that organizes perception, guides action, and produces moral alignment. Metarecursive operations are not descriptions of reality. They are compressions of reality into actionable binary form.
The colonizer/colonized distinction is a metarecursive binary. It takes a vast, heterogeneous field of relations — covering centuries, multiple continents, dozens of political formations, overlapping mediational architectures — and compresses it into a two-position schema that enables political orientation. Once installed, the binary allows questions to be answered: Who is responsible? Who is harmed? What must be undone? Without some such compression, coordinated political action would be impossible. This is not a defect of metarecursion. It is its function.
But the compression comes at a cost. Metarecursive binaries work by flattening the multi-mediated structure of lived coordination — what I call the mesocosm — into a single evaluative axis. The mesocosm does not come in binaries. It is explosively diverse, relationally structured, multi-mediated, and temporally shifting. Any binary imposed on it will produce what I call ontological misfit: a gap between the category and the reality it purports to describe.
This misfit is not incidental to the decolonization debate. It is the debate, in structural terms. Every tension surfaced in the Dialogues can be traced to it.
When Jansen notes that "only some of those centres were located in Western Europe and carried the flag of hyper-real Europe — others weren't and didn't," he is identifying the failure of the colonizer/colonized binary to hold across different imperial formations. When Obrebska wonders whether decolonization applies to Central and Eastern Europe, given the region's "distinct historical trajectories," she is asking whether a metarecursive binary designed for one formation can be extended to another without losing its grip. The answer is that it depends on the mediational profile — but the binary itself has no way to ask this question.
And when all three early-career scholars invoke the "house" metaphor — staying, leaving, burning, renovating — they are, without quite realizing it, describing the paradox of operating within a metarecursive system: you need the binary to orient yourself, but the binary does not match the building you are actually in.
There is a further complication. The colonizer/colonized binary is not merely a metarecursive stabilization. It is a metarecursive stabilization within an Enlightenment-derived symbolic regime. That is to say, the form of the binary — its structure as a moral opposition, its claim to universal applicability, its organization of complex reality into a two-term schema — is itself a product of the intellectual tradition it critiques. Decolonization, as commonly deployed, is one of the Enlightenment's most reflexive products: it uses Enlightenment-style binary reasoning to oppose Enlightenment-derived domination. This is not necessarily fatal. Immanent critique has a long and honourable history. But it does mean that "decolonizing decolonization" — recognizing the Enlightenment form of the decolonial operation itself — is a necessary step that the field has mostly failed to take.
The Dialogues come close. Jansen's worry that "a principle of anti-universalism led us to ignore or jettison" emancipatory struggles animated by their own universal categories is, in effect, a worry about the self-defeating character of a metarecursive binary that cannot accommodate the universalism it sometimes needs. But without the diagnostic vocabulary, the worry remains a worry. It cannot be converted into a structural analysis.
5. Mesocosmic fit: ranking categories by their adequacy
If not all binaries are equal, we need a way to distinguish them. The concept I propose is mesocosmic fit: the degree to which an analytical category tracks stable, recurrent patterns across multiple mediations of lived coordination.
A category has high mesocosmic fit when it aligns across several or all of the five irreducible mediations through which human coordination operates: embodiment (the biological and sensory dimensions of life), being-with (the relational and hierarchical dimensions), dwelling (emplacement, habitation, territorial rootedness), multi-materiality (the flows of objects, resources, and infrastructures), and multi-symbolization (the regimes of language, law, classification, and meaning). A high-fit category can withstand empirical elaboration without constant qualification. It enables action without massive distortion. In some cases, it can be partly quantified, though quantifiability is a diagnostic signal of fit, not a requirement for it.
A category has low mesocosmic fit when it collapses heterogeneous relations into a single axis, requires heavy symbolic enforcement to hold, and constantly breaks down under empirical pressure.
Consider two categories central to the decolonization debate.
Unequal extraction. This distinction — between coerced one-sided extraction and more reciprocal arrangements — has high mesocosmic fit. It aligns across embodiment (famine, mortality, depletion), being-with (coercive administrative hierarchies), dwelling (long-term transformation of agrarian systems and landscapes), multi-materiality (measurable flows of wealth, taxation, commodity chains), and multi-symbolization (revenue records, legal codifications of property and obligation). It can be partly quantified: historians have estimated, for example, that approximately US$64.82 trillion was transferred from India to Britain over two centuries (Oxfam 2025, as cited in the Dialogues). It remains stable under empirical elaboration. It does not require constant qualification. It enables targeted action.
Colonizer/colonized. This distinction has low mesocosmic fit. It mixes different historical formations (Roman, Greek, settler, extractive empire). It collapses roles that shift over time and context. It cannot align cleanly across mediations: the same formation may involve infrastructure provision (multi-materiality), coercion (being-with), collaboration (being-with again, differently), land seizure (dwelling), legal recoding (multi-symbolization), and bodily harm (embodiment), and these do not all point in the same direction. The Bengali administrator under British rule is both colonized and, in certain relations, a colonizer. The Balkan subject of Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian and then EU governance occupies a position that the binary simply cannot render. The category requires constant qualification and expansion — hence the proliferating subcategories (settler colonialism, internal colonialism, neo-colonialism, coloniality, etc.) that signal repair work on a concept that keeps failing.
The crucial insight is this: these two categories are not interchangeable. Yet decolonial discourse routinely treats them as equivalent, or worse, treats the low-fit category as more fundamental than the high-fit one. This produces a characteristic pattern of analytical distortion: the real mechanisms of domination (unequal extraction, coerced labour, land seizure, symbolic recoding) get folded into a totalizing moral opposition (colonizer/colonized) that then proves unable to guide either diagnosis or intervention.
The Dialogues exhibit this pattern repeatedly. Every contributor identifies a case where the colonizer/colonized binary fails: the Balkans, Poland, Egypt, the English Fens. But none asks the follow-up question: is there a better category available, and how would we know? Mesocosmic fit provides the answer. You know a category is better when it aligns across more mediations, remains stable under empirical pressure, and enables more precise action. "Unequal extraction" passes these tests. "Colonizer/colonized" does not.
There is a further implication. Low-fit categories tend to become morally saturated precisely because they lack empirical precision. The moral charge of "colonizer" compensates for its analytical emptiness. This is not a cynical observation. It is a structural one. When a category cannot do analytical work, it is recruited for affective work — mobilization, alignment, denunciation. This explains why the decolonization debate generates so much heat and so little resolution: the categories are optimized for moral orientation rather than structural diagnosis, and no amount of moral intensity can compensate for a category that does not track what is actually happening.
6. A comparative anatomy of colonial formations
If "colonialism" compresses formations with different mediational architectures, then the obvious next step is to decompress it. What does a comparative anatomy of colonial formations look like when organized by mediational amplification?
Every colonial formation involves all five mediations — embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multi-materiality, multi-symbolization — and all levels of coordination from embodied habit to ideological superstructure. This is a crucial methodological point that prevents the typology from hardening into its own set of rigid boxes. What varies is not which mediations are present — they are always all present — but which mediation is dominant: which one structures the formation's primary mode of operation and reproduces its central logic.
Embodiment-anchored colonialism. The paradigmatic case is Atlantic plantation slavery in the Caribbean and the American South. Here, colonial power was anchored first and foremost in direct control over bodies. Bodies were commodified, transported, disciplined, and reproduced. Labour extraction was literally metabolic. Violence, punishment, exhaustion, and disease were primary mechanisms of domination. Being-with was structured through the master/slave hierarchy; dwelling was transformed through the plantation system; multi-materiality was organized around commodity flows (sugar, cotton, tobacco); multi-symbolization provided legal codification of slavery. But the anchor was the body as extractive interface.
Being-with-anchored colonialism. The paradigmatic case is British indirect rule, as crystallized in Lugard's system in Northern Nigeria. Here, colonial power operated primarily through reconfiguration of social relations. Existing elites were retained and repositioned. Authority flowed through layered intermediaries. Domination was relational rather than directly imposed. Embodiment was present but secondary; dwelling was relatively little transformed; multi-materiality was infrastructural; multi-symbolization provided administrative codification. The anchor was the re-wiring of social coordination without replacing it.
Dwelling-anchored colonialism. The paradigmatic case is British settler colonialism in Australia (and, differently, in New Zealand, South Africa, and the Americas). Here, the defining feature was transformation and replacement of habitation itself. Land was surveyed, divided, owned, fenced. Indigenous dwelling patterns were displaced. Ecological systems were re-engineered. The other mediations were present — violence against bodies, restructured social relations, infrastructure, legal categories — but the anchor was world-replacement through land and habitat.
Multi-materiality-anchored colonialism. The paradigmatic case is British East India Company rule in Bengal from the eighteenth century. Here, colonialism was primarily an extractive logistical system: taxation, trade routes, commodity flows, ports, railways, revenue systems, massive wealth transfer. Embodiment was present (famine, labour exploitation), being-with was restructured through administrative hierarchies, dwelling was modified but not wholly replaced, multi-symbolization provided accounting and legal infrastructure. The anchor was re-routing material flows at scale.
Multi-symbolization-anchored colonialism. The paradigmatic case is French assimilationist colonialism in Algeria. Here, colonial power was deeply invested in re-coding the symbolic order. Language imposition (French as the medium of law, education, and public life), legal reclassification (citizen vs. subject), educational and cultural transformation, civilizational narratives — all operated to reprogram categories of personhood and legitimacy. Embodiment was present but indirect; being-with was reshaped through legal categories; dwelling was altered but not central; multi-materiality provided infrastructure. The anchor was symbolic recoding of who counts, in which language, under which law.
Several consequences follow from this decomposition.
First, it makes immediately visible why "colonialism" as a single category has low mesocosmic fit: it compresses formations that differ radically in their dominant mediation. Plantation slavery and indirect rule are not variations on a theme. They are different architectures of domination requiring different analytical tools and different political responses.
Second, it clarifies why the Balkans resist the colonizer/colonized binary. The Balkans were shaped by overlapping formations with different mediational profiles: Ottoman rule (strongly being-with-anchored, with complex dwelling and multi-symbolic dimensions), Austro-Hungarian administration (combining multi-symbolic and multi-material elements), and EU governance (primarily multi-symbolic and legal, with multi-material conditionality). These cannot be stacked on a single axis. They require separate profiling.
Third, it explains a puzzle that the early-career scholars in the Dialogues wrestle with: why "decolonization" feels applicable to some aspects of their experience but not others. Sturges's account of fen drainage as "internal colonialism" makes much more sense when profiled as a dwelling-and-multi-material transformation driven by a logic of "improvement" than when forced into the colonizer/colonized binary. Obrebska's account of Poland's positioning between "East" and "West" is illuminated by recognizing it as a primarily multi-symbolic domination (the imposition of Western normative frameworks as the default for human rights and progress) rather than a material extraction regime. Abdelhamid's experience of visa regimes and tuition fees is a multi-material and multi-symbolic formation — not well captured by "colonizer/colonized," but very precisely captured by "unequal extraction embedded in mobility regimes."
7. The completion problem: when is decolonization done?
Here I arrive at what I take to be the most consequential argument of this article. The Dialogues, like virtually all decolonial scholarship, treat decolonization as ongoing, contested, and indeterminate. Abdelhamid calls it "a mindful orientation and a cry for worldly justice." Sturges speaks of "an iterative pursuit that is always in the making." These are not unusual formulations. They represent the consensus of the field.
I want to argue that this consensus reflects a structural deficit, not a feature. A project without completion criteria is not a project. It is a mood. The reason decolonization has no endpoint is not that domination is complex (though it is), or that the world is contradictory (though it is), or that transformation is slow (though it is). The reason is that the umbrella category "colonialism" compresses formations with different mediational profiles, and without specifying which mediation you are targeting, you cannot say what success would look like.
Consider India. The question "Is India decolonized?" is routinely debated and never resolved. Within the framework I am proposing, the question is malformed. It presupposes a single state — "decolonized" — that could apply to an entire country across all mediations simultaneously. But once you profile British colonialism in India as primarily multi-materiality-anchored (with strong multi-symbolic and being-with dimensions), the question decomposes into tractable parts:
Political sovereignty (a multi-symbolic and being-with closure): largely achieved in 1947.
Material extraction (the dominant mediation): substantially transformed by independence, but residual through trade structures, institutional inheritance, and global economic positioning. Partly quantifiable. Partly ongoing.
Multi-symbolic inheritance (legal codes, educational structures, administrative categories, language hierarchies): hybrid. Some elements retained by choice, others under active renegotiation, others so deeply embedded as to be invisible.
Being-with hierarchies (caste, class, regional positioning): interacting with but not reducible to colonial legacies.
So the answer is: India is decolonized in some mediations and not in others. This removes the confusion entirely. It also prevents two common distortions: the total closure claim ("we're done") that ignores remaining distortions, and the total incompletion claim ("nothing has changed") that ignores real closures.
For any case, decolonization can be said to be complete in a given dimension when three conditions are met: the specific distortion identified in the dominant mediation no longer structurally reproduces itself; the closure is stable across related mediations (a legal change that has no effect on material flows or embodied experience is not yet a real closure); and the closure persists over time (a reform that reverts within a political cycle is not yet complete).
This gives decolonization what it currently lacks: verifiable, dimension-specific completion criteria.
8. Why the mediational profile determines the political project
The practical consequence of this framework is that political action must match the mediational profile of the formation it targets. Different colonial architectures require different interventions.
For a multi-symbolization-dominant formation (such as French Algeria, or the imposition of Western normative frameworks on Central and Eastern Europe that Obrebska studies), the primary targets are legal categories, language policy, educational curricula, and institutional classifications. Material redistribution, while important in its own right, does not address the dominant distortion. The question "has the symbolic recoding been undone?" is the right question.
For a multi-materiality-dominant formation (such as the East India Company's extractive regime), the primary targets are fiscal structures, trade arrangements, resource ownership, and benefit-sharing. Renaming institutions or diversifying reading lists, while potentially valuable, does not address the dominant distortion. The question "has the one-sided extraction been reversed or equilibrated?" is the right question.
For a dwelling-dominant formation (such as settler colonialism in Australia or New Zealand), the primary targets are land tenure, territorial sovereignty, ecological rehabilitation, and spatial governance. Legal reforms without land restitution, or symbolic recognition without territorial change, do not address the dominant distortion. The question "has the world-replacement been undone or renegotiated?" is the right question.
For a being-with-dominant formation (such as indirect rule), the primary targets are institutional design, accountability chains, power-sharing arrangements, and the dismantling of intermediary elites installed by colonial authority. The question "have the relational hierarchies been restructured?" is the right question.
For an embodiment-dominant formation (such as plantation slavery), the primary targets are labour rights, health systems, reparative justice for bodily harm, and the dismantling of coercive labour regimes. The question "has the bodily extraction been stopped and repaired?" is the right question.
Without this profiling, "decolonize!" floats as a slogan without a target. Worse, it invites mismatch: symbolic gestures applied to material problems, legal reforms applied to relational distortions, material redistribution applied to symbolic injuries. The result is not progress but category confusion — effort expended at the wrong level, addressing the wrong mediation.
The Dialogues provide a vivid example of this mismatch. When Sturges describes the Manchester anthropology department as built partly on extractive colonial wealth, she is identifying a multi-material legacy. When the response to this legacy takes the form of reading group discussions and curricular reform, the intervention is multi-symbolic. These are not the same mediation. Curricular reform addresses the symbolic inheritance of anthropology — its canon, its categories, its assumptions. It does not address the material inheritance — the money, the buildings, the institutional endowments. Both may be worth doing, but they should not be confused with each other, and completing one does not complete the other.
Similarly, when Obrebska describes Poland being positioned as "catching up" with Western norms of gender and sexual rights, she is identifying a multi-symbolic domination: the imposition of a developmental timeline in which Western categories define the destination and non-Western societies are measured by their distance from it. The appropriate intervention is epistemic and legal — challenging the universality of the framework, producing localized knowledge, demanding recognition of alternative trajectories. Treating this as a material extraction problem would miss the target.
The framework thus provides a diagnostic discipline: name the dominant mediation, identify the specific distortion, design the intervention to match, and define success in terms of that distortion's closure. Without this discipline, decolonization remains what many of its practitioners admit it is: an orientation rather than a programme. With it, the orientation acquires targets, timelines, and completion conditions.
9. Decolonizing decolonization
There is one further move that the argument requires, and it is the most uncomfortable. If the colonizer/colonized binary is a metarecursive stabilization within an Enlightenment-derived transactive ontology, then the decolonial project itself must be subjected to the same diagnostic.
This does not mean abandoning decolonization. It means recognizing three things simultaneously.
First, the dominant strand of decolonial critique operates within the same value cosmology as its target. It demands that transactive principles of equality, reciprocity, and fairness be consistently applied. This is immanent critique, and there is nothing wrong with immanent critique. But it should be recognized as such, because otherwise the debate becomes muddled: colonialism and decolonization appear to be opposites when they are in fact co-generated within the same symbolic regime.
Second, the colonizer/colonized binary is a metarecursive operation: a symbolic compression that enables political action by producing a moral topology. This operation is real as an operation. It has effects. It mobilizes people and organizes struggles. But it is not real as a description of the mesocosm. The mesocosm does not come in binaries. It is multi-mediated, relationally structured, and temporally shifting. Any binary imposed on it will produce misfit. This is not a contingent failure. It is a structural feature of metarecursion itself.
Third, decolonial discourse often mistakes its own metarecursive stabilization for ontology — it confuses the political device with the structure of reality. When this happens, the binary hardens: positions become fixed, internal differentiation disappears, and the question "who is the colonizer?" is treated as if it had a stable answer. But as the Dialogues repeatedly show, it does not. Bengali administrators, Balkan subjects of overlapping empires, Polish scholars navigating East-West hierarchies, English researchers studying internal colonialism — none of these fit the binary. The binary keeps breaking because the mesocosm is more complex than any metarecursive compression can capture.
"Decolonizing decolonization" therefore means: use the binary strategically where necessary, but do not reify it; track the mediational profile of the specific formation you are addressing; define success in high-fit terms (unequal extraction reversed, land restituted, symbolic codes reformed) rather than low-fit terms (the colonizer has been named and denounced); and know when you are done.
This is not a deflation of the decolonial project. It is an attempt to make it land.
10. Returning to the Dialogues
Let me now return to the JRAI Dialogues and show, point by point, how this framework resolves the tensions they identify.
The binary problem. Jansen and Greenberg argue that the colonizer/colonized binary is too crude for Southeast Europe. This article explains why it is too crude: because it is a low-fit metarecursive compression applied to a region shaped by overlapping mediational architectures. The solution is not to "complicate" the binary but to replace it with mediational profiling.
The authenticity problem. Jansen argues that decolonial reliance on "authentic, uncontaminated 'outside' to coloniality" requires a "kernel of essentialism" that is both theoretically problematic and politically dangerous. This article goes further: authenticity is itself a metarecursive stabilization with low mesocosmic fit. The mesocosm does not contain pure pre-colonial states any more than it contains clean binaries. Authenticity is not just politically risky. It is ontologically misfitting.
The universalism problem. Jansen worries that anti-universalism forecloses emancipatory struggles that require universal claims. This article reframes the problem: the question is not whether to be universalist but which universals have high mesocosmic fit. Some universal claims (equal exchange, freedom from coerced extraction) track real multi-mediational patterns. Others (the "civilizing mission," "hyper-real Europe") are low-fit symbolic projections. Mesocosmic fit allows you to rank universals rather than accepting or rejecting universalism as a whole.
The "house" problem. The early-career scholars ask whether to stay in, leave, burn down, or renovate the "house" of academia. This article argues that the metaphor is evocative but under-specified. A "house" is a multi-mediated configuration: funding structures (multi-materiality), hiring and authority hierarchies (being-with), physical spaces (dwelling), curricula and categories (multi-symbolization), embodied experiences of inclusion and exclusion (embodiment). Without specifying which mediation you are transforming, "staying in the house" describes an attitude, not an intervention. The framework asks: which walls, made of what material, at which level, and what would replacing them look like?
The completion problem. The Dialogues frame decolonization as ongoing and indeterminate. This article diagnoses that indeterminacy as a failure to specify mediational closure conditions, and proposes dimension-specific, verifiable completion criteria. The question "Is X decolonized?" is malformed. The proper question is: "Which mediational distortions have been closed, and which remain open?"
The embodied dimension. The early-career scholars' accounts of felt dissonance — Abdelhamid's "something is wrong," Obrebska's internalized inferiority complex, Sturges's awareness of entanglement — are experientially precise and analytically productive. This article locates them as pre-reflective registrations of mediational misfit that precede and motivate metarecursive stabilization. The "something is wrong" feeling is an embodied disruption that then gets coded into the colonizer/colonized binary at the metarecursive level. The feeling is real. The binary it produces may or may not be the right diagnostic. The framework provides a way to check.
11. Conclusion
The decolonization debate, as currently constituted, oscillates between moral urgency and conceptual indeterminacy. It insists that something must change but cannot say precisely what, because the categories it relies on — colonizer, colonized, colonial, decolonial — have low mesocosmic fit. They compress heterogeneous formations into a single binary that then breaks under empirical pressure, producing the pattern that the Dialogues so vividly display: proliferating qualifications, regional exceptions, personal discomfort, institutional ambivalence, and — above all — the absence of completion criteria.
The framework proposed in this article does not dismiss decolonial critique. It takes its central concerns — asymmetry, extraction, symbolic domination, institutional entanglement — and gives them structural addresses. Different colonial formations amplify different mediations. The analytical categories we use to diagnose them differ in mesocosmic fit. Political action succeeds when it targets the dominant mediation at the appropriate level. Decolonization can be completed, dimension by dimension, when specific distortions have been structurally closed and remain stable.
The deepest contribution of this framework may be the simplest: it replaces the question "Are you for or against decolonization?" — a metarecursive binary that produces alignment but not understanding — with the question "What exactly are you trying to decolonize, in which mediation, at which level, and how will you know when you are done?" That question is harder to answer. But it is the only one that can actually be answered.
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