This presentation will discuss the contribution of anti-colonial movements in framing autonomous and alternate social theory. It offers a comparative historical analysis of three trends – the indigenous, the postcolonial, and decolonial – which have confronted the nineteenth century Western disciplinary field of sociology as a hegemonic field organized through the colonial grid. It maps the ontological-epistemic stances that these positions articulate to legitimize non-Western pathways to political modernity. It argues that distinct political contexts have organized the scholarship and research queries of these subaltern/non-hegemonic perspectives and analyzes these in terms of the two forms of colonialism: settler vs. nonsettler colonialism. While highlighting some internal critiques that have informed these positions, it argues that these circuits of knowledge-making have created cognitive geographies which need to be taken into account to ensure non-hegemonic global social theory.