Allsobrook, Christopher2026-08-302026-08-302024-12Allsobrook, C. (2024) ‘Strategies of normative ambivalence in critical theories of recognition for the decolonised diagnosis of conflict and oppression’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 71(181), pp. 1–20. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2024.7118101.1755-2567http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11837/5065Research paperA context of protracted postcolonial misrecognition and social injustice brought most of the contributors to this special issue together. This context raises an acute awareness of the ideological limitations not only of the dominant normative frameworks of recognition, developed by social and political theorists such as Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Charles Taylor, but of the African philosophical conceptions of recognition represented by ubuntu. What is the ethical or normative status of the insights into social ontology that we find in theories of recognition? The authors acknowledge the entanglement of norms of recognition in contested relations of power that influence the formation of subjects and the normative ambivalence of recognition which enables and constrains subjective agency. Ongoing inequality and social injustice makes palpable the practical effects of norms of mis/recognition. The authors reinterpret the concept of recognition to allow for normative ambivalence and ideological sensitivity in the current postcolonial setting.AmbivalenceCritical theoryIdeologyPostcolonial conflictArticle