Chapter 8 draws together the major themes of the analysis and prompts further thinking on decolonial feminist modes of conflict resolution. This chapter concludes that the UN’s attempt to stay relevant through developing mediation expertise is counterproductive, and contends that it should instead adopt a solidaristic approach that foregrounds politics and aims to produce ‘knowledge encounters’ between different worlds. The bulk of the chapter discusses some principles for decolonial feminist approaches to mediation, which include encounters across different ontologies of peace, decolonising expertise, solidarity, and establishing relations of care and accountability.

The colonial question has not been sufficiently addressed by comparative legal studies. Although more scholars acknowledge the Eurocentric bias of the discipline, a radical rethinking of its methods and assumptions has not emerged yet. To contribute to decolonising comparative law, this chapter proposes two strategies. First, engaging with indigenous or Southern scholars that think from a decolonial episteme. These scholars often address comparative issues from their own experience of past colonialism and present coloniality. Second, engaging with social actors on the ground through decolonial methodologies. Engaging with the political agendas of local and indigenous peoples and activists allows a deep understanding of their concerns and aspirations. To explain the implications of these strategies, the chapter discusses the issue of norm diffusion in human rights debates. Viewed through a decolonial lens, this would suggest that indigenous and local people are norm makers rather than being mere norm takers or beneficiaries. Then, they either reinterpret the norms or produce their own norms. Some of these norms are local and global at the same time. They are embedded in their own local thinking and practice, but also are emerging as valuable legal models to address global social and ecological crises.

Created by Chicanx and Indigenous artists living and working in the US–Mexico Borderlands, Borderlands Shakespeare appropriations situate Shakespeare within the unique context of la frontera, engaging with its hybrid cultures, genres, and languages. These appropriations draw from Anglo, Spanish, and Indigenous traditions, and they confront Shakespeare’s colonial legacies, interrogating the complex layers of colonialism shaping the region and Shakespeare’s reception in it. To explore the decolonial vision of Borderlands Shakespeare, this essay focuses on Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers (1991), an appropriation of Romeo and Juliet set in Los Angeles during Día de los Muertos, and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry (2014), an appropriation of Henry IV, Part I set in post-apocalyptic San Diego. These plays engage with Shakespeare to critique imperialist policies that have resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous land, the criminalization of migration, and high levels of labor and environmental exploitation. In their use of multilingual Indigenous and Chicanx frameworks to imagine more just futures, Borderlands Shakespeare plays such as The Language of Flowers and El Henry offer valuable methodologies for decolonizing English literary studies and for approaching canonical Western texts in culturally sustaining ways.

This chapter investigates the evolution of rap music in Guadeloupe at the end of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic data and grounded in both postcolonial and decolonial theories, the chapter explores the relationship between Guadeloupe and American hip-hop, as well as the role local French Caribbean cultural politics served in enabling new constructions of belonging to take root in Guadeloupe hip-hop.

The introduction places climate disruption within histories of colonization and enslavement. A reflection on the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice frames the persistence of structures of enslavement and racial apartheid that are evident in the US landscape through both presence and absence. Proposing a reparative and decolonial approach to climate justice, the introduction draws on a range of perspectives, including environmental justice, decolonial theory, and Black agrarianism. In dialogue with expressive cultures and resistance movements of frontline communities, the introduction outlines the ways that utopian narratives can express a desire to be freed from the sins of the past. In response, this introductory chapter offers narratives of revolutionary pasts and dystopian futures; practices of mourning, dissent, and hospitality; and everyday inhabitation and social care as locations where better worlds are created.

In this chapter, James Tully takes us deep into the phenomenology of the kind of dialogue across traditions that is capable of disrupting the unjust power structures that currently connect diverse traditions in the modern global order. He contrasts “genuine dialogue,” in which traditions have equal status as forms of human understanding, with the many kinds of “false dialogue” that are likely to emerge under circumstances of unequal power and power-knowledge. As beings that make sense of the world through our received traditions, we tend to project onto others the terms that make the world meaningful to us. Deparochializing our political thought must begin by “reparochializing” it, recognizing that the truths we hold to be self-evident have arisen within a sociohistorically specific context. The “deep listening” required for genuine dialogue requires practices of the self that must be cultivated over time before dialogue can generate reciprocal elucidation and transformation. When we succeed, participants in this dialogue can achieve not only mutual understanding but also the possibility of bringing to light ways of “thinking, judging, deliberating, and acting together in response to the situation they share that were unimaginable and unthinkable prior to the dialogue.”