Mignolo presents decoloniality as an option rather than a creed: one of several trajectories he expects to shape the coming decades, alongside rewesternization, a reoriented Left, dewesternization, and a spiritual turn. He declines to pick a victor, arguing that the era in which any single course could claim to be the truth of history has ended.

The argument builds on Anibal Quijano's coloniality, which names what the rhetoric of modernity conceals and looks at it from the receiving end rather than, as world-system analysis does, from the vantage of the wealthy North. Fanon supplies the second thread: thinking starts from a body located in a particular history, which unsettles critical theory's placeless knower.

Later chapters read Renaissance periodization, Greenwich meridian time and Kant's geography as colonizations of time and space, then take Zapatista practice as a case where thought and action are one, closing on a cosmopolitanism that is plural and local rather than designed from Europe.