The World Decolonization Forum concluded on Tuesday after two days of discussions in Istanbul.
At Tuesday’s sessions, participants held debates on decolonizing media, decolonizing knowledge production and technocolonialism, among other topics.
“Why must we keep proving that our ideas are as good as ideas that come from the West? Many Muslims fear that what they have is only secondary. That fear is itself a product of coloniality. Decolonization is to reimagine. To reconstruct and redefine futures that exist beyond the artificial constraints of colonial modernity,” Khairudin Aljunied, a professor of Islam in Southeast Asia at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, told the forum’s “Decolonial Voice” session.
Fırat Oruç, associate professor of culture and politics and director of the Arab and Regional Studies Certificate Program at Georgetown University in Qatar, addressed the “Voices of Liberation” session and noted the importance of “energy justice.”
“Oil from the Middle East, lithium from Latin America, cobalt from Africa. These are not abstract commodities. They are linked relationships. If humans are interconnected through invisible fibers, then exploitation anywhere reverberates everywhere. Energy justice requires ethical responsibility across borders,” Oruç said.
“When translations come from the Global North, they spread widely, but as those working in the Global South, we must now prioritize works that have remained on dusty shelves. They are treasures of genuine knowledge within them. We want to decolonize, but when someone who speaks Indonesian or someone who says they’ll translate a book from the Arab world approaches publishers, there’s no response. Yet books from the North are published immediately,” Mahmoud Alhirthani, associate professor of translation and intercultural studies at Alaqsa University in Gaza, told a session entitled “Decolonizing the Canon: Translation and the Field of English Literature.”
Held at the Atatürk Cultural Center under the theme “Decolonizing the Production and Circulation of Knowledge,” the forum brought together thinkers from South America, Africa, Asia and Europe to examine how colonial influence persists in education, media, economics and intellectual life.
Participants included professor Şule Albayrak, a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marmara University, decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, sociologist Salman Sayyid, political scientist Anne Norton, Palestinian thinker Munir Fasheh, historian Halil Berktay and British singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens.
Discussions focused on how Eurocentric models continue to dominate universities and social sciences through claims of objectivity and universality, while sidelining indigenous and non-Western knowledge traditions.
Psychiatrist and author Dr. Kemal Sayar argued that the universalist approach of Western psychiatry imposes a secular and individualist worldview on non-Western societies, describing it as a form of “epistemic violence.”
Yusuf Islam reflected on his experience in the global music industry, saying cultural production is often shaped by systems of control similar to colonial structures and emphasizing the importance of intellectual and artistic independence.
The forum also featured academic sessions on decolonial education, economics, ecology, feminist knowledge systems and Islamic epistemologies, with researchers from 40 countries presenting their work.
