Never forget your ancestors: Reimagining postcolonial security studies

This article reimagines Postcolonial Security Studies (PSS) through the allegory of ancestors. It examines two generations of responses to coloniality in Security Studies – Third World Security Studies and Decolonial Security Studies – highlighting their fundamental contribution to the formation and evolution of PSS, while noting their partial disconnection from the ideas and traditions of the South. These often-ignored contributions could offer a deeper understanding of violence, state formation and liberation rooted in anti-colonial struggles. Rather than finding an epistemic rupture, the article argues for recovering liberation entities from formal and informal referents that carry memory and meaning. The examples of Brazil's Tambor de Sopapo and South Africa's Makhanda demonstrate how marginalised legacies might reorient the field. The article advances a people-centred PSS grounded in historical and community-based perspectives. This approach challenges Eurocentric frameworks and affirms the significance of knowledges and knowings of the South in theorising Security.