Justin I. Fugo

The dominant development paradigm, despite its promises of universal prosperity, has functioned as one of coloniality’s most enduring instruments. By positioning Western modernity as the natural endpoint of human progress, it has systematically marginalized alternative ways of knowing, being, and organizing collective life. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter, Lewis Gordon, and Manfred Max-Neef, this article mounts a philosophical challenge to that paradigm. Wynter exposes how development naturalizes a colonial conception of the human, overrepresenting the Western bourgeois subject as the measure of all humanity. Gordon’s teleological suspension interrupts this logic, demanding that we refuse development’s imposed endpoints and embrace the radical indeterminacy of human futures. Max-Neef offers a practical path forward, centering the satisfaction of interdependent human needs over growth, and empowering communities to define well-being on their own terms. Together, these thinkers ground a vision of pluriversal development—community-defined pathways toward dignity, ecological sustainability, and collective flourishing.

This paper examines the epistemic dimension of dominant group ideologies in order to disrupt oppressive epistemic norms; specifically, the aspiration to ‘neutral’ knowledge, and as a result, what is given the status of knowledge, and who is considered to be producers of said knowledge. It aims to offer evidence that we are under the influence of a longstanding, oppressive, and dominative epistemological system, which leaves us facing clear structural and ideological barriers to epistemic justice. Following this structural critique, it offers measures for ‘changing the structures of knowledge’, alongside alternative norms for cultivating epistemic justice; most centrally, an alternative conception of objectivity understood as a product of democratically inclusive intersubjective and dialogical processes. In summary, this paper aims to: (1) highlight the centrality of structural oppression to epistemic injustice; (2) identify specific structures of epistemic oppression today; and (3) offer strategies for resisting epistemic oppression in order to cultivate epistemic justice.

This article offers a critical analysis of Euromodernity through an engagement with the Africana existentialism of Lewis R. Gordon. Drawing on Gordon's recent work Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021) as well as Frantz Fanon, the author argues for the need to decolonize modernity by decoupling Europe and reason, freedom, knowledge, and power. Understanding what it means to be a human being involves an ongoing commitment understanding its relationship to the larger structures of reality, including social reality.

This paper develops an account of racism as rooted in social structural processes. Using Sartre, I attempt to give a general analysis of what I refer to as the “structures” of our social world, namely the practico-inert, serial collectives, and social groups. I then apply this analysis to expose and elucidate “racist structures,” specifically those that are oftentimes assumed to be ‘race neutral’. By highlighting structures of racial oppression and domination, I aim to justify: 1) the imperative of creating conditions free from oppression and domination, over the adherence to ‘ideal’ principles which perpetuate racial injustice; 2) the shared responsibility we have collectively to resist and transform social structural processes that continue to produce racial injustice.

This paper critically examines violence, and our shared responsibility for it. Drawing on insights from Jean-Paul Sartre, I develop the correlation between scarcity and violence, emphasizing scarcity as agential lack that results from conditions of oppression and domination. In order to develop this correlation between scarcity and violence, I examine the racial dimension of violence in the U.S. Following this analysis, I claim that we all share responsibility for the social structural processes in which we participate that produce scarcity. On these grounds, I argue for the imperative of democratic equality, i.e., conditions for the self-development and self-determination of all.