Written in two voices that stay deliberately separate, this book sets out what its authors mean by decoloniality and how it differs from the decolonization struggles of the mid-twentieth century. The horizon is not sovereign statehood, nor solely a fight with capitalism, but the habits that the modern/colonial matrix of power has planted in everyone, and the knowledges and world senses it continues to deny.

Quijano's concept of coloniality is the shared anchor: decoloniality, they contend, was born at the moment coloniality was named, as the Cold War ended and neoliberal global designs opened. It is offered not as a new paradigm but as an option, a standpoint, an analytic and a praxis, plural and bound to context.

Reading the present through it, Walsh and Mignolo find right-wing nationalism, neoliberal globalism and progressive governments funded by extractivism all continuing coloniality by different means.