Beyond Innocence, Towards Recursivity. Developing a Critical Political Theology of Coloniality

Objetivo

RECUR addresses a critical blind spot in coloniality studies: theology’s role in sustaining colonial power in contemporary Europe. While colonialism is often framed as a past transgression, RECUR shows that its afterlives persist through political-theological discourses across religious and secular domains. Concepts like sin and redemption are recursively mobilized to sustain colonial power by producing narratives of restored innocence instead of enabling structural change. These logics operate across institutions, from religious bodies through remembrance practices to academic epistemologies. Yet, we lack tools to grasp theology’s role in shaping postcolonial European power.
RECUR develops a Critical Political Theology of Coloniality: a new paradigm to identify and analyze political-theological discourses that simultaneously sustain and obscure colonial power, opening them up to critique and transformation. It has four objectives: (1) compile the first empirical dataset on political-theological dynamics of coloniality in Europe; (2) develop conceptual tools and (3) methods to analyze these dynamics as recursive world-making where appeals to transcendence reproduce the conditions they claim to overcome; and (4) synthesize these insights into a coherent theoretical framework.
Breaking with paradigms separating religion from secularity and Europe from its colonial history, RECUR studies political theology in Germany, Belgium, and Ireland, across two domains: religious (abuse in Catholic Church) and secular (state violence remembrance). Combining empirical research (discourse network analysis) and interdisciplinary theorizing (critical contextual theology), RECUR lays foundations for a new field: the critical study of theological recursion as a mechanism of colonial power. Doing so, it redefines debates in political theology, postcolonial theory and post/secularity studies, exposing recursive narratives that sustain coloniality and providing tools to transform them.

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