Ricardo Sanin Restrepo

The concept of the republic is a complex meta-principle that facilitates and conceals global relations of domination. Specifically, it enables the invisibility of racism as the core of political power. From its very origins the concept of republic serves to seize constituent power or politeia. In modernity, as it merges with private property, it will serve as the launchpad of a vast colonization project that then evolves in a new form of power in coloniality. The article applies the theory of the ‘encryption of power’—to decrypt the historical concept of the republic. In doing so, we will demonstrate the key antidemocratic role it has played at the heart of global coloniality. We will bear witness as to how, from within the concept of republic, a refined mechanism of domination raises and expands, conforming the most magnificent and lethal form of power of our times. We exemplify our theory showing that the concept of ‘republic’ is the common thread between the law that abolished slavery in Brazil and the 1988 constitution. Within this scope, we propose a vital space of reconsideration of political ontology through radical democracy as the only means to build the world from immanent difference.

Amartya Sen’s theory of enhancement of justice bears an insurmountable blind side that impairs and makes it incomplete, if not parochial. It dismisses coloniality as the veiled face of modernity without which any understanding of a theory of justice in a globalized world is impossible. Constructing a theory outside the complex frame of coloniality makes the theory vulnerable to severe hindrances. The duality produces a twofold but interdependent reality: for the western world it means the achievement of values such as liberty and prosperity; for the non-western world, racism, extraction and exclusion. Since colonialism has been rearticulated into coloniality, these two categories cannot be isolated for they presuppose one another. Democracy remains a fallacy as long as real power depends on capitalism, which is the inextricable way of coloniality itself. Henceforth, free public discussion and free social choice remain chimerical, obtainable only when democracy as a true, unresolved conflict is a reality through the destruction of coloniality. Finally we propose a third principle of justice that would correct both Rawls’ and Sen’s conceptions of justice. Such corrections pinpoint the void in their approaches thus inverting the panoptic.