I have observed some early, tentative steps of young academics to become world-class decolonial scholars in global health. This is a rich and rewarding area of endeavour that has real potential to launch a career without the baggage of narrow disciplinary boundaries, rigid methodological commitments, or premature demands for epistemic closure. When approached carefully, decolonial scholarship allows emerging researchers to engage critically with power, history, and knowledge while retaining considerable flexibility in analytic approach. What follows is offered as practical guidance for those who wish to navigate this space with confidence and coherence.
Decolonising global health has become a central ethical orientation for contemporary scholarship in the field. For early-career researchers, the challenge is not whether to adopt a decolonial stance, but how to do so convincingly within existing academic norms. You do not want a piece buried in the Malawi Medical Journal when global recognition can be found in The Lancet, PLOS, or BMJ. This brief guide offers practical advice on positioning oneself as a decolonising scholar, drawing on common techniques that are widely recognised as markers of both epistemic and moral alignment.
A successful decolonial paper begins with the scholar rather than the question. Reflexive positioning statements have become an essential opening move, allowing authors to locate themselves within global hierarchies of power, privilege, and complicity. Personal proximity to marginalisation is an asset. These declarations are most effective when they are candid yet indeterminate, signalling awareness without constraining interpretation. Once positionality has been established, subsequent analytic choices are more readily received as ethically grounded rather than methodologically contingent.
Research problems should then be framed in historical or structural terms rather than as empirical hypotheses. Questions that invite falsification risk reintroducing evaluative standards associated with dominant epistemic traditions linked to globalised practice. By contrast, concepts such as colonial residue, epistemic silencing, or inherited injustice resist closure and encourage moral elaboration. Where findings introduce ambiguity or contradiction, this can be interpreted not as analytic weakness but as evidence of the complexity produced by colonial histories themselves.
Within this framing, epistemic injustice can be treated as an outcome rather than a proposition requiring demonstration. The presence of asymmetry—between disciplines, regions, or forms of expertise—may be taken as sufficient indication of harm. Distinguishing between the unjust exclusion of valid insight and the justified rejection of erroneous claims is rarely necessary and may inadvertently reinscribe colonial distinctions between knowledge and belief. Moral recognition, once granted, does much of the epistemic work.
Lived experience occupies a privileged place in this literature and should be elevated accordingly. Personal and communal narratives can be used generously as data, though care should be taken to avoid subjecting them to processes such as validation, triangulation, or comparative assessment. Such techniques imply the possibility of error, which sits uneasily with commitments to epistemic plurality. Where accounts conflict, the tension may be presented as evidence of multiple ways of knowing rather than as a problem requiring resolution.
Ontological language offers particular flexibility. Early declaration of commitment to multiple ontologies allows scholars to accommodate divergent claims without adjudication. Later, when universal commitments are invoked—such as equity, justice, or health for all—these can be treated as ethical aspirations rather than propositions dependent on a shared reality. The absence of an explicit bridge between ontological plurality and universal goals rarely attracts critical scrutiny.
Power should be rendered visible throughout the paper, though preferably without becoming too specific. Abstractions such as “Western science”, “biomedicine”, or “the Global North” serve as effective explanatory devices while minimising the risk of implicating proximate institutions, funding structures, or professional incentives. Authorship practices, by contrast, provide a concrete and manageable site for decolonial intervention, often with greater symbolic return than methodological reform.
Papers should conclude with a call for transformation that exceeds immediate implementation. Appeals to reimagining, unsettling, or dismantling signal seriousness of intent, while the absence of operational detail preserves the moral horizon of the work. Evaluation frameworks, metrics, and timelines may be deferred as future tasks, once the appropriate epistemic shift has been achieved.
Finally, dissemination matters. Publishing in high-impact international journals ensures that critiques of epistemic dominance reach those best positioned to recognise them. Should access be restricted by paywalls, a brief acknowledgement of the irony is sufficient to demonstrate reflexive awareness.
In this way, decolonising global health can be practised as a scholarly orientation that aligns ethical seriousness with professional viability. The goal is not to resolve uncertainty or to determine what works, but to occupy the correct stance toward history and power. When that stance is convincingly performed, the work will speak for itself.
