The deliberate marginalisation of a knowledge tradition, treated as unfit for serious public reasoning not because its claims were refuted but because it was ruled out of the conversation before the argument ever started.
Public debate about economics, law, and policy runs on an unstated filter: if a claim traces back to scripture, revealed law, or a spiritual tradition, it gets filed as “religious” and treated as inadmissible to “serious,” “neutral,” or “rational” discussion, even when the same claim, stripped of its source, would be weighed as an ordinary policy position. That filtering is not just an informal cultural habit. Several real, well-developed bodies of scholarship study exclusions of exactly this shape, and “epistemic war” is best understood as a pointed, combative rephrasing of that scholarship rather than an established term with its own separate literature.
The closest real citation: epistemicide
The strongest documented version of this claim is epistemicide, coined in 1998 by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos and developed at length in his book Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Santos defines epistemicide as the killing, silencing, or devaluing of a knowledge system, including the destruction of the social practices and communities that carry it. He argues that Western modernity operates through “abyssal thinking,” a line that sorts knowledge into what counts as fully rational on one side and what gets treated as non-existent, primitive, or irrelevant on the other. Colonialism, on this account, did not just conquer territory; it enforced that line, and non-Western and indigenous epistemologies fell on its far side. Sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel extended the argument, describing how European philosophy secured an “epistemic privilege” that let it install itself as the sole legitimate foundation for knowledge across the colonised world.
A second real citation: epistemic injustice
A related but distinct concept is epistemic injustice, introduced by philosopher Miranda Fricker in her 1998 work and developed fully in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Fricker’s claim is narrower and more individual than Santos’s: a person is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. She distinguishes two forms. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s word is given less credibility than it deserves because of prejudice against who they are. Hermeneutical injustice occurs earlier and more structurally: the collective interpretive resources available to a society are themselves gapped in a way that leaves a group unable to even articulate their own experience clearly, let alone have it taken seriously.
What “epistemic war” adds
Neither epistemicide nor epistemic injustice is, by itself, a claim about strategy or intent; both describe patterns and structures, and scholars in both traditions are careful about how far to push claims of deliberate design. “Epistemic war” names something more specific and more combative: the argument that a knowledge tradition’s exclusion from legitimate public reasoning is not simply an inherited structural pattern but an actively maintained one, sustained by treating faith and reason as opposites, then using that manufactured opposition to keep spiritual and religious alternatives to prevailing economic and political arrangements from ever reaching serious institutional consideration. That is a stronger and more contestable claim than epistemicide or epistemic injustice make on their own, and it should be read as this specific framing’s own extension of those concepts, not as an established position within decolonial theory or epistemology with its own citation record.
It is also worth distinguishing this usage from a separate, narrower one: philosophy of science literature uses “epistemic warfare” in a technical sense, to describe the distinction between epistemic weapons (such as scientific models) and non-epistemic weapons (such as propaganda or deliberate falsehoods) within disputes over contested science. That usage concerns methodological disagreement within scientific practice and has no direct bearing on the marginalisation of religious or spiritual knowledge traditions from public reasoning.