The term “decolonization” has gained traction in recent years. Especially in academia, you cannot spend a day without encountering people talking about the “need to decolonize” in papers, conferences, textbooks, lectures, and social media. Despite this incessant droning, when you look at how universities and institutions actually function, decolonization seems more like a lifestyle, a vibe, rather than policies aimed at attacking colonialism and imperialism. Here’s my humble, simple contribution to this discussion, (a discussion which threatens to veer into flamboyant absurdity with each passing day, unfortunately):

1. Stop charging 10x fees from international students, especially from the Global South.
2. Return artifacts and manuscripts looted from other countries.
3. Compensate research participants, or rather the producers of your research data, from the Global South at par with participants from the Global North.
4. Include more participants from the Global South before falsely generalizing your findings to the Global South.
5. Transfer technologies and resources to under-funded universities and academic institutions in the Global South.
6. Protect academics and students from physical threats when they speak against imperialistic policies.
7. Start paying PhD students a fair wage, especially when they are from the Global South. And stop charging fees for people who literally provide labour to you.
8. Stop using Decolonisation as a metaphor for anything and everything. Decolonisation is the overthrowing of economic and political domination of one country/society over another. Everything else is not Decolonisation.

The current trend of emphasizing the cultural, identitarian, spiritual, and ethnic movements as ‘decolonization’ is nothing but a smokescreen. When countries are carpet bombed or are paid slave wages for valuable labour, neither their religion, nor their rituals save them. Decolonisation is neither a lifestyle nor is it some niche anti-science philosophy. It is first and foremost a direct challenge to the capture of land, bodies, and resources of the world by certain people and certain classes. All other movements are decolonial only when they support this primary aim. Everything else is just misdirection.