Complicity or accountability? The limits of positionality statements

In recent years, positionality/reflexivity statements have become increasingly common in global health, qualitative health research, and bioethics.Often framed as practices of reflexivity, recently they are also taken up as part of decolonial projects.Yet their growing prevalence invites a critical pause.I argue that thin positionality statements can function less as transformative practices and more as strategies for securing moral innocence, allowing scholars to acknowledge power and privilege without disrupting one's complicity in retaining them.When reflexivity is reduced to declarations or disclosure rather than accountability, positionality and reflexivity risks becoming a comfort narrative that reproduces, rather than unsettles, coloniality and systemic epistemic and structural injustice.In this paper, I question whether they are normative 'enough', particularly in the context of systemic unequal knowledge practices and structural injustice.Specifically, do positionality statements contribute to social justice and decolonial work, or do they perpetuate harm, coloniality and implicate the privileged in imperial and colonial ways of knowledge production?This paper foregrounds complicity as a necessary lens for evaluating positionality statements, rethinking it not as an endpoint of ethical practice but as an ongoing engagement that resists the desire for moral innocence, unsettles privilege, refuses unjust knowledge production and practices, and demands accountability.