Current debates

Current debate

Despite the relevance and overall interest in the topic, there is surprisingly little work that particularly focuses on economics as a discipline, and its colonial entanglements. And this might be because it is not entirely clear what decolonisation actually is, and that many scholars particularly in the majority world, do not use those terminologies, while being relatively aligned with the discourse. Yet, as a starter, here is a list of books and publications that directly focus on economics and how decolonise it.

Dutt, D., C. Alves, S. Kesar and I. H. Kvangraven. 2025. Decolonizing Economics – An Introduction. London: Polity Press.

• This book is the outcome of many years of thinking and organising of the four authors, and represents an important step in the discourse by trying to touch on many debates that constitute the discourse:
  1. Reading the history of economic thought from an anticolonial perspective
  2. Discussing explicitly if and how heterodox economics might also be entangled with coloniality
  3. Trying to figure out what to do within the economics discipline itself
• Despite the title, their work seems to be centered around the notion of eurocentrism more than coloniality, which I found slightly confusing in the beginning. The book also seems to represent more of a specific perspective of what decolonising economics should be rather than discussing it more broadly.
• The authors also are co-founders of the very nice collective of D-ECON that regularly post alternative reading lists and also has this repository of texts relevant for the topic. The blog on their website regularly discusses economics from an anti-colonial perspective.