When analyzing the global power structures of international policy or institutional peace frameworks, we often find that dominant governance models are top-down, Eurocentric, and inherently fractured. Even today, they remain tightly bound to the interests of elite administrations that carry the legacies of colonial times. But what happens when the Global Majority doesn’t wait for an invitation to the table? What happens when they rewrite the rules on one of the world’s biggest stages?

What if the closest way to decolonize, is in fact, to start from looking within? What was robbed through colonization, was all of the ‘other’ ways of knowing, relating to the world, nature, and understanding history. To decolonize, sounds like a large concept that is hard to grapple with a single individual, but it can start here and now. 

As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote, colonialism's "most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world." 

It begins with reflecting on our own mind and confronting the complicity we may have within us.

The first time I heard the word ‘dictatorship’, I was eating dinner. Not in school, not from a documentary. My grandparents said it casually, the way people mention typhoons they survived years ago.