1 Avoid bad binaries!
The ‘West vs. the Rest’ (or, with a different choice of compass location, ‘Global North vs. Global South’) are impossibly elastic terms, resulting in categories for those terms with widely – even ‘wildly’ – divergent features in each.
2 Avoid lumping!
Whatever about ‘the Rest’ , certainly ‘Western’ (scholarly) thinking is not just one categorical bucket (see Avoid #1). To make the most rudimentary points: consider the diversity of fertile organized scepticism, including but not confined to, anti-capitalist / oppositional social theory and analysis in ‘Western’ countries, e.g. France (Bettelheim, Althusser, Latour, Foucault); Germany (Marx and Engels, who found refuge in Manchester and London; the Frankfurt School); the United States (Chomsky, Arrighi, Said, E. O. Wright, Judith Butler) to name but a few. And being from Ireland, please note we were the first colony of what would become the British Empire – and the first of these colonies to throw off the yoke of Empire!
3 Avoid credulity!
‘Organised scepticism’ – the challenging of taken-for-granted assumptions and narratives – is an essential requirement of any serious scholarly enquiry. This entails an objective, systematic scrutiny of claims – from ‘the West’ AND from ‘the Rest’ (see Avoid #1 and Avoid #2). A certain Western thinker provides excellent advice here: “I presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself” (Marx, Capital, Preface to the First German Edition).
* Finnerty, J. (2025) “The Three Avoids: Closing Remarks by Moderator”, Parallel Session 2 Part 2. The 80th Anniversary of the United Nations: Toward the Universalization of Human Rights, Central South University Human Rights Center, Changsha, China, 18th October 2025.