Over roughly the past decade and a half, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have undergone what is often described as a “global turn.” This shift starts from a historical insight into the disciplines themselves. As they are institutionalized today across universities worldwide, the modern disciplines largely took shape in nineteenth-century Europe and continue to bear the imprint of that moment of origin. Two features are particularly consequential. First, their close entanglement with the nation-state has fostered a predominantly national framing of research questions, archives, and narratives. Second, they have been shaped by Eurocentric assumptions that were deeply embedded in an age marked by imperial expansion and European global hegemony.

A century and a half later, the world has been profoundly transformed. Empires have collapsed, new states and regions have emerged, and social, economic, and cultural interconnections span the globe with an intensity unknown in the nineteenth century. Yet, to a remarkable extent, scholars continue to analyze this world with conceptual tools, categories, and narrative templates forged under very different historical conditions.

Seen in this light, the global turn can be understood as an attempt to critically interrogate these inherited assumptions and to render the disciplines more adequate to the globalized world we inhabit today. Scholars no longer take globalization for granted as the natural teleology of an increasingly integrated world, nor do they understand it as a unilinear process radiating outward from Euro-American centers. Instead, the concept of reflexive globalization, as employed by the Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex, foregrounds a more complex and contested architecture of global interaction—one in which processes of homogenization and fragmentation unfold simultaneously, in which new connectivities generate forms of disconnection, and in which the dynamics of global integration originate from multiple geographies, albeit under conditions of persistent power asymmetries. Crucially, this analytical perspective is grounded in a reflexive awareness of knowledge production itself: interpretations of globalization are understood as situated, shaped by the positionality, epistemic frameworks, and institutional locations of their observers, and therefore as objects of critical scrutiny rather than neutral descriptions of a global process.

A central component of this endeavor has been the critique of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, however, does not manifest itself uniformly across fields. The following reflections are written from the perspective of a historian, though the underlying concerns are likely to resonate beyond the discipline of history.

Institutions, Narratives, Concepts

In historical scholarship, Eurocentrism operates on at least three interrelated levels. The first concerns institutions. The enduring dominance of Western institutions – from universities and curricula to conferences, publishers, and academic journals – means that scholars speak with unequal authority depending on where they are located. Dipesh Chakrabarty has famously captured this condition in his notion of an “asymmetry of ignorance”: while Western scholars can often afford to remain largely unaware of scholarship produced outside Europe and North America, non-Western scholars cannot ignore Western literature without risking marginalization.

The second level is that of narratives. Eurocentric views of world history position Europe as the sole active agent, the “fountainhead” of historical change. Europe acts; the rest of the world reacts. Europe possesses agency; others are rendered passive. Europe makes history; the rest of the world acquires a history only once it enters into contact with Europe. Europe stands at the center, while other regions are relegated to the periphery. Within such a framework, European history becomes the implicit benchmark against which all other histories are measured and evaluated. It is precisely this narrative hierarchy that makes a sentence such as “Charlemagne was an important European ruler of the Tang period” sound jarring, whereas the statement “Hârûn ar-Rashīd was an important Near Eastern ruler of the Middle Ages” appears entirely unremarkable.

The third level concerns concepts. Historical scholarship relies on a vocabulary that claims universal validity but is, in fact, deeply rooted in specific European experiences. Concepts such as nation, class, revolution, liberty, rights, or religion emerged in particular historical constellations in Europe before being projected onto social realities elsewhere. Their global circulation often required the invention of neologisms and complex politics of translation in order to render them intelligible and operative in new contexts. Since then, scholars have engaged in sustained debates over the extent to which societies outside Europe have been – and continue to be – interpreted and evaluated through an idiom that is not their own. The global turn, in this sense, is also an invitation to reflect on the histories embedded in our concepts and to consider alternative ways of thinking that do not take the European experience as their silent point of reference.

As one possible remedy, scholars have increasingly sought to unsettle this terminological hegemony by experimenting with alternative ways of naming and conceptualizing social realities. Rather than relying exclusively on a vocabulary forged in Europe, they have begun to mobilize local and vernacular idioms in an effort to loosen the Eurocentric constraints of the modern disciplines. At stake are fundamental epistemological questions: how can we ensure that societies are not evaluated according to standards foreign to their historical experience? How can we grasp the life of communities in a language that resonates with their own categories of meaning? Decolonial scholars, in particular, have forcefully placed such concerns on the agenda and have proposed a range of alternative concepts intended to provincialize Europe’s conceptual authority.

A recent volume edited by Dilip Menon offers an instructive example of this intervention. Menon argues that, for too long, scholarship has been guided by the trajectories of a European history and by what he calls a self-regarding, nativist epistemology – one that acquired its universal status largely through the violence of conquest and empire. The consequence has been a persistent asymmetry: events and processes in the global South have routinely been interpreted through Western theoretical frameworks, while the reverse movement has remained rare. In this process, alternative forms of knowledge have been marginalized or lost altogether, even though they may hold considerable analytical promise. The contributions to the volume accordingly propose concepts drawn from different regions of the world, concepts that articulate local realities and encode alternative cosmologies.

The aspiration to develop a more place-specific terminology is both understandable and, in many respects, welcome. Nor is it without precedent. Over the past decades, a number of terms originating outside Europe have entered the conceptual repertoire of the social sciences and humanities. Some designate singular historical events, such as the Shoah, the Holodomor, or the Nakba. Others – terms like taboo, fetish, or jihad – have traveled far beyond their points of origin and have been re-semanticized in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Beyond individual concepts, entire theoretical approaches that emerged in the global South have gained wide international currency. Dependency theory, formulated in Latin America, and intersectionality, with roots in both African American and African intellectual traditions, are prominent examples.

Challenges to Unsettling Vocabularies

Such efforts to diversify scholarly vocabularies are undoubtedly productive, and they are timely at a historical moment when Europe’s geopolitical dominance has long since declined, even as its conceptual authority appears strikingly resilient. At the same time, this project confronts a number of challenges. Let me briefly highlight four of them.

First, the decolonial effort to rehabilitate pre-colonial or non-Western concepts is driven by a critique of the hierarchies embedded in Eurocentric vocabularies. Yet the concepts recovered from local or pre-colonial contexts often carry hierarchies of their own, reflecting the social stratifications and exclusions of the societies from which they stem. The analytical task, therefore, is not simply one of recuperation, but of critically assessing the emancipatory potential of these concepts in light of the inequalities they may also reproduce.

Second, questions of representation loom large. It is not always evident who is entitled to speak for “native” or marginalized pasts. In some contexts, alternative cosmologies have survived – at least in fragments – and continue to shape lived realities within local communities. In others, however, the voices articulating these traditions appear to be more closely aligned with transnational academic elites than with the constituencies on whose behalf they claim to speak. Claims to local knowledge are thus also interventions on a global academic stage, embedded in struggles over recognition, authority, and power.

A third challenge is closely related: the critique of Eurocentrism has coincided with the proliferation of alternative centrisms. Yet it remains unclear to what extent the celebration of one cultural tradition over another helps to resolve the epistemological dilemmas at hand. This concern becomes particularly acute when the promotion of alternative knowledges is intertwined with state projects, as in the cases of Xi Jinping’s China or Narendra Modi’s India, where invocations of civilizational distinctiveness can serve explicitly political ends.

Finally, the problem of Eurocentrism cannot be addressed at the level of discourse alone. As Arif Dirlik once observed, “without the power of capitalism, and all the structural innovations that accompanied it … Eurocentrism might have been just another ethnocentrism.” Reworking scholarly vocabularies may be a necessary first step, but it is unlikely to be sufficient. As long as global systems of knowledge production are underpinned by enduring geopolitical and economic asymmetries, conceptual reforms will remain partial. The critical interrogation of terminology must therefore remain on the agenda, even as we recognize that its transformative potential ultimately depends on broader shifts in the distribution of global power.