The collapse of the normative architecture expected to govern the modern world has been highlighted in relation to developments in Gaza, according to Esra Albayrak, chair of the board of trustees of the NUN Education and Culture Foundation.
Albayrak wrote an article for The Jakarta Post, in which she referred to the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in April 1955. She recalled that participating countries gathered with the aim of "setting their own agendas.”
She noted that Western powers were not invited to the conference, emphasizing that this was a deliberate decision.
Albayrak argued that in a world where meetings without the West are often considered insignificant, Bandung declared that the majority of humanity could chart its own path. She added that this vision was realized through the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement.
She stated that the Non-Aligned Movement was not merely a diplomatic stance but a declaration that the world is broader than imposed frameworks.
She underlined that this claim remains incomplete, saying, "What the Bandung generation faced was not only political dependency; it was also something harder to name and therefore harder to eliminate: the dependency of ways of knowing.”
Referring to sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas, Albayrak described this as the "captive mind,” an intellectual condition in which societies analyze themselves through externally produced categories and accept borrowed tools as universal truths.
She stressed that the captive mind is unaware of its own condition, adding, "The intellectual legacy of colonialism was designed precisely to ensure this.”
Albayrak noted that the Bandung Conference was a turning point in the struggle for political independence, but highlighted that achieving independence in thought, knowledge, and imagination remains difficult.
"In this sense, colonialism did not end in the 1960s; it changed form,” she said.
She added that financial systems, education models, and legal frameworks were restructured in a way that makes the colonial order appear natural and inevitable. "What we call the ‘post-colonial world’ today is, in fact, the continuation of colonialism under a new language,” she said.
Albayrak argued that the current period should be understood as an era of "recolonization,” adding that the Western-centered order is no longer only debated but visibly unraveling, with Gaza being the most striking example. "What Gaza has revealed is the collapse of the normative architecture expected to govern the modern world,” she said.
Forum on decolonization to be held in Istanbul
The World Forum on Decolonization, initiated to examine colonial legacies and build a more equitable future of knowledge production, will be held in Istanbul on May 11-12.
The forum aims to bring together voices and experiences from different regions to build a new academic consensus.
Its academic framework is shaped by Albayrak’s analysis titled "Beyond Bandung: The Urgent Task of Decolonizing the Mind.” The main theme of the Istanbul gathering is "Decolonizing the Production and Circulation of Knowledge.”