The Uses and Abuses of the Anti-Colonial in Global Reactionary Politics

While framing liberal universalism as imperialist, they remain embedded within neoliberal structures and embrace a market universalism in tandem with claims of cultural particularity. Secondly, the contributions explore a series of ironies, reversals, and convergences not only across regional divides, but also across conventional ideological boundaries. This includes conceptual affinities between the radical right’s emphasis on ontological difference and the nativist temptation within the history of anti-colonial nationalism, as well as the confluence between the radical conservatives, the postcolonial authoritarians, and a certain strand of decolonial discourse in their envisioning of a multipolar civilizational order. Finally, we suggest that for international political sociology, this urges us to deepen engagement with anti-colonial traditions that are radically incompatible with the far right and to center forms of vernacular anti-colonial theorizing from marginalized places.

Se fondant sur un éventail d’expertises régionales et de perspectives en relations internationales, économie politique, théorie politique et sociologie, cette discussion collective apporte les contributions suivantes à la recherche sur la politique réactionnaire mondiale et les discussions relatives à la décolonisation. D’abord, nous affirmons que l’érosion de la légitimité des ordres libéraux met le langage anticolonial à la disposition des projets autoritaires et conservateurs dans les pays du Sud et du Nord pour articuler un rejet sélectif de l’universalisme. Tout en représentant l’universalisme comme impérialiste, ils restent ancrés dans des structures néolibérales et acceptent un universalisme de marché en même temps que des revendications de particularité sociale. Ensuite, les contributions s’intéressent à une série d’ironies, de revirements et de convergences transcendant les divisions régionales, mais aussi les frontières idéologiques conventionnelles. On y trouve par exemple les affinités conceptuelles entre l’accent de l’extrême droite sur la différence ontologique et la tentation nativiste dans l’histoire du nationalisme anticolonial, ainsi que la rencontre entre les conservateurs radicaux, les figures autoritaires postcoloniales et une certaine branche du discours décolonial dans leur imagination d’un ordre civilisationnel multipolaire. Enfin, nous suggérons qu’en sociologie politique internationale, cela nous pousse à approfondir l’étude des traditions anticoloniales radicalement incompatibles avec l’extrême droite et à nous centrer sur les formes de théorisation anticoloniale vernaculaires dans les lieux marginalisés.

Este debate colectivo aprovecha una variedad de conocimientos y perspectivas regionales de las relaciones internacionales, la economía política, la teoría política y la sociología con el fin de realizar las siguientes contribuciones a la investigación sobre la política reaccionaria global y los debates sobre la descolonización. En primer lugar, argumentamos que la erosión de la legitimidad de los órdenes liberales hace que el lenguaje anticolonial se encuentre disponible para proyectos autoritarios y conservadores tanto en el Sur como en el Norte Globales con el fin de articular un rechazo selectivo al universalismo. Mientras enmarcan el universalismo liberal como imperialista, estos proyectos autoritarios y conservadores permanecen incrustados dentro de estructuras neoliberales y abrazan un universalismo de mercado junto con afirmaciones de particularidad cultural. En segundo lugar, las contribuciones analizan una serie de ironías, reveses y convergencias, no solo a través de divisiones regionales, sino también a través de límites ideológicos convencionales. Esto incluye afinidades conceptuales entre el énfasis de la derecha radical en la diferencia ontológica y la tentación nativista dentro de la historia del nacionalismo anticolonial, así como la confluencia entre los conservadores radicales, los autoritarios postcoloniales y cierta corriente del discurso decolonial en su visión de un orden civilizacional multipolar. Por último, sugerimos que, desde el punto de vista de la sociología política internacional, esto nos insta a profundizar sobre el compromiso con aquellas tradiciones anticoloniales que son radicalmente incompatibles con la extrema derecha y a centrar las formas de teorización anticolonial vernácula desde lugares marginalizados.

Introduction

Scholarship on the global right in International Relations has provided rich insights into the relationship between reactionary politics and the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO) (Abrahamsen et al. 2020, 2024 ; Adler-Nissen and Zarakol 2021 ; Anievas and Saul 2023). Meanwhile, a parallel and multidisciplinary literature has examined how anti-colonial sensibilities and the language of decolonization have been abused or “hijacked” to promote authoritarian, ethnonationalist, misogynistic, and reactionary projects across the world (Korolczuk and Graff 2018 ; Bar-on and Lopez 2022 ; Zhang 2023 ; Shah 2024 ; Mihai and Ungureanu 2024 ; Hew and Chan 2024 ; Wilson 2024). This forum seeks to bring these conversations together, addressing specifically how the repurposing of the anti-colonial in reactionary politics is symptomatic and constitutive of the legitimacy crisis of the LIO, while also being a distinctive product of the international system it purports to reject. Instead of a merely coincidental or superficial hijacking of rhetoric, the co-optation of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist discourse has been enabled by the erosion of the normative authority of liberal orders, as discontent with global inequalities, civilizational hierarchies, and moral inconsistencies deepens. Moreover, we emphasize that an examination of nativist temptations internal to anti-colonial nationalism is warranted. Critical engagement with these tendencies and emerging transversal convergences is crucial not only for understanding current global challenges, but also for reconsidering key debates of international political sociology (IPS) regarding (de)coloniality, reaction, and solidarity.

Drawing on a wide range of regional expertise and perspectives from international relations, political economy, political theory, and sociology, this collective discussion makes the following contributions to research on global reactionary politics and to postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. First, we show that the dominant ideological projects of emerging powers (Chacko, Altinors, Kazharski, and Zhang), articulated through civilizational discourse, use the anti-colonial to selectively reject liberal universalism and certain aspects of the international order as imperialist, while being embedded within global capitalism and embracing a form of market universalism. Reified notions of culture and “tradition” are not only completely compatible with, but also integral to the neoliberal logic, where cultural or civilizational distinctiveness itself becomes a resource for market competition. The political valence of decolonial talk, performing a resistance to liberal hegemony, lends legitimacy to these projects both domestically and internationally.

Secondly, extending the emerging literature on convergence, opportunistic alliances (Michelsen, De Orellana, and Buranelli 2025), and global connections in reactionary politics (Campos 2023 ; Abrahamsen et al. 2024), the contributions explore a series of ironies, reversals, and confluences in postliberal political imagination not only across the Global North and South, but also across conventional ideological boundaries. The renewed commitment to the particular means that, in a neo-Orientalist fashion, the Western right now looks with envy to geographies of the “East” for alleged cultural coherence, authoritarian efficacy, and unfettered capital accumulation (Valluvan and Zhang). Furthermore, we note the conceptual affinities between the radical right’s rejection of liberal universalism and the nativist temptation within the history of anti-colonial nationalism as regards assumptions of essentialized indigeneity and ontological difference (Chacko and Davidson). This leads to an uneasy convergence between the radical conservatives, the postcolonial authoritarians, and a certain strand of decolonial discourse in their envisioning of a multipolar civilizational order said to be “post-imperial.”

Finally, we reflect on the implications identifying these patterns of affinity and realignment has for IPS. While critiquing Eurocentric universalism is important for postcolonial and decolonial approaches to IPS and beyond, this critique should remain cautious about the romanticization of indigeneity and difference without an ethical commitment to justice, as well as the mistaking of geopolitical opposition for emancipation or decolonialization (Zhang). Moreover, given its interest in challenging state-centric frameworks that overlook transnational and social processes, IPS is particularly well suited for centering vernacular, diasporic, and marginalized forms of anti-colonial theorizing “on the street.”

Old Wine, New Bottles ? Re-Establishing “Traditional” Hierarchies in a Liberal Capitalist International Order in Crisis (Priya Chacko)

Characterizing the use of anti-colonial rhetoric by contemporary reactionary movements as “hijacking” or appropriation risks giving the impression that anti-colonialism was always progressive or radical. Yet, there have always been strands of anti-colonialism, which blended reactionary local and foreign ideas/interests to produce distinctive reactionary anti-colonialisms, foregrounding exclusionary organicist conceptions of the nation, which also became transnational in scope. Anti-colonialism is never simply a negation of coloniality, as some decolonial thinkers presume, but emerges through a dialectic with colonial capitalism (Sunnemark and Sunnemark 2024).This means that, both historically and in the contemporary period, the disruption to traditional power and authority structures caused by capitalist transformation and crises has created the conditions for elitist forms of reactionary politics that reassert traditional social hierarchies domestically, in the name of challenging international material and symbolic hierarchies.

Civilizational discourse, for instance, is historically often underpinned by organicist and evolutionary theories shaped by European thought and local resources and practices. This promoted a politics of inequality both domestically and internationally, based on the protection of particular ethnic identities rather than universal rights. From the mid-1930s, for example, East Asia was conceived as a hierarchical ethnic regional order led by Japan, a conception underpinned by the notion of minzoku (ethnic identity). The leaders of the Meiji state were influenced by German organicist traditions that fused the state and society to resist Western imperialism and curtail internal dissent (Sullivan 2011, 548). While Japanese pan-Asianism is usually linked to Japanese imperialism, in the early twentieth century it constituted an anti-imperial politics against Western capitalist expansion by asserting the notion of a suppressed but superior, spiritual Asian civilization which was to be restored under Japanese leadership (Shahabuddin 2024, 6–7). Though there were culturalist, humanist strands of Pan-Asianism aimed at resisting scientific racism and civilizational hierarchies, the idea of Asian unity, superiority, and oppression also lent itself to justifications for Japanese militarism and expansionism (Hotta 2007, 31–35).

Organicist and evolutionary theories associated with Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and the ambiguities in their writings, proved useful for several other anti-colonial nationalist movements, including Turkish Kemalists (Karaömerlioglu and Yolun 2020) and Indian liberal, radical, and Hindu nationalists, by providing concepts to subvert colonial civilizational hierarchies while consolidating local hierarchies (Marwah 2023, 886–887 ; Bayly 2011, 256). Radical nationalists drew on Spencer and neo-Vedantic philosophy to ground their anti-colonialism in the promotion of an upper caste Hindu-centered social order and the notion of Aryanism—the idea that Hindu civilization could be traced to an ancient Aryan people (Bayly 2011 ; Marwah 2023). This formed the basis of the now-dominant Hindutva strand of Hindu nationalism, according to which a Hindu civilization, cosmically unified by varna (caste), was corroded from within by internal “viruses,” like non-violent Buddhism, as well as from without, by external pestilence brought by foreign invasions (Savarkar 1971).

The spread and adaptation of evolutionary theories also led to reactionary transnational East–West linkages. United by the common foundation of Aryanism, caste and race emerged as homologues, with conceptions of caste inspiring and shaping the theoretical construction of race in Europe (Dwivedi 2023). Aryanism formed the basis of inter-elite connections between upper caste Hindus, and Japanese, British, and German elites (Law 2019, 14–17 ; Manjapra 2014, 201). Aryanism ; a common subaltern/colonized identity ; German cultural geography ; and notions of holism and totality also formed some of the shared bases on which German and Indian intellectuals and political leaders sought to challenge Europe and the British empire, respectively (Manjapra 2014, 198–209 ; Roy 2024, 18–57).

In short, organicist and evolutionary theories, which are so easily appropriated for reactionary purposes, are at the same time amenable to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism because of their rejection of external intervention and emphasis on internal social transformation. These political projects reflected capitalist transformations, the material and political interests and justificatory ideologies of their elite leaderships, and their transnational interactions. Minzoku, for instance, became prominent in the 1920s in Japan as the Japanese economy weakened and theories of ethnic capital were asserted against Westernized Japanese elites (Doak 2007, 172). The linguistic and religious exclusions in Kemalist nationalism were shaped by the political networks of elite actors (Goalwin 2017, 1162). From the mid-nineteenth century, Aryanism was used by upper caste Indian elites to forge a connection with British elites to shape power struggles in colonial India (Birkvad 2020, 76–77). Hindutva emerged in the early twentieth century among Brahmins in Maharashtra, where colonial policies, non-Hindu proselytization, and secular, non-Hindu, and lower-caste anti-colonial mobilization during the colonial era challenged their position in the socio-economic order (Cashman 1975).

Similarly, we must consider the conjuncture in which contemporary reactionary anti-colonialisms have emerged, and the ethnic identity-based domestic and global orders they seek to create. Take the case of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva in India—the dominant form of Indian reactionary anti-colonialism, associated with the ruling political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which manifests in several different ways. One is the unofficial renaming of India as Bharat by both Hindutva polemicists and political leaders—an assertion of the archaic as decolonial with the intent of portraying the modern (India) as a colonial imposition. J. Sai Deepak’s 2021 book, India, That is Bharat : Coloniality, Civilization, Constitution infamously carried an endorsement (later rescinded) by the decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo as an example of conceptualizing “pluriversal futures” (Deepak 2021). In his 2023 book, Why Bharat Matters, India’s External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar (2023) proclaims Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership to have made India “more Bharat,” meaning more authentic. At the 2023 G20 Summit, which India hosted, Modi sat behind a placard that read “Bharat” and India was declared the “mother of democracy” because of its supposedly ancient democratic heritage.

Yet, Bharat is not simply an uncontroversial indigenous name for India ; this campaign of renaming was driven by tangible political and economic ends shaped by a particular transnational capitalist and geopolitical context. Bharat is derived from Bhārata, a term that appears in the ancient Sanskrit texts, the Purāņas, to refer to a spatial and cosmological territory in which a Brahmanical social order prevails. Bhārata became Bharat, a supposedly ancient name for the political entity of India, during the colonial era thanks to British and German Orientalist scholars and their Brahmin interlocutors and was subsequently adopted by anti-colonial leaders. While left-liberal leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru used Bharat alongside various other terms including Hindustan (a term of Persian/Greek origin used by the Moghuls), Hind and India, some, including Brahmin conservatives in Nehru’s Congress Party, foregrounded Bharat and associated it with freedom from “slavery for a thousand years”—a conception of history intended to link Indian sovereignty with Hindus and position Muslims as invaders of an “upper caste idyllic a priori” (Constituent Assembly Debates 1949 ; Dwivedi and Mohan 2024). The phrase “India, that is Bharat,” was much debated in the Constituent Assembly that finalized the Indian Constitution, to the exasperation of its chief architect, the Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar. The term was ultimately added to the preamble as the Sanskrit equivalent of “India,” without being given primacy (Clémentin-Ojha 2014). In independent India, the term Bharat took on various meanings. Ambedkar advocated for Prabuddha Bharat (Enlightened India) as opposed to the existing division between Parushkrut Bharat (Rewarded India) and Bahushrut Bharat (Discarded India). The agrarian leader, Charan Singh, mobilized neglected rural Bharat against privileged urban India.

The Bharat of Modi, Jaishankar, and Sai Deepak however, is an authoritarian populist tool that facilitates condemnation of India’s liberal elites as having colonized minds and producing inauthentic institutions ; the articulation of the national people in an upper caste Hindu mould ; dismisses other religious groups as both insignificant and potential threats ; and depicts transnational liberal elites and institutions as antagonistic to India’s economic rise. It is a distinctive product of a liberal capitalist international order in crisis and produces a new vision of a reactionary world order driven by market competition between states, in which civilizational, cultural-ethnic identity is said to provide an advantage for India to become the “vishwa bandhu” (world’s friend). What makes India a successful brand, according to Jaishankar, is recognition and authenticity in a postliberal world. As he (Jaishankar 2024) put it in a 2024 speech on “building brand Bharat,” which touted India’s democracy and technological advancement : “Our history, tradition, culture, and heritage makes us stand out. . .Our very way of life has elicited much greater interest and acceptance. . .The very term [Bharat] captures the civilizational aspect, while underlining how much more rooted we have become. . .Bharat is a statement of authenticity, be it in representation, articulation or beliefs. . .in a world asserting its independence from a globalized elite.”

The Bharat campaign emerged in the context of mounting domestic and transnational political and economic challenges. These included the formation of a new electoral coalition that had given itself the acronym INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) ; international opprobrium over India’s declining democracy ; and its struggle to attract foreign capital. After 2020, the Modi regime faced economic damage to an already slowing economy from the Covid pandemic, protests from farmers and Muslims against its agricultural and citizenship policies, and geopolitical tensions with China which led to various policies to curb its economic reliance on the country, including by boosting Western investment. India’s declining score in various democracy indices, but particularly in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index, was, by 2020, perceived as potentially damaging to India’s reputation as a safe place for international investment and this was compounded following allegations of corporate and market malpractice against the Modi government’s chief capitalist ally, the Adani conglomerate (Dutta 2023b). The regime’s public response to these criticisms involved exerting pressure on the EIU to use government-sanctioned data, seeking to discredit the Democracy Index and announcing plans for its own rankings system (Dutta 2023a ; Jalihal 2024).

Jaishankar has accused rankings bodies of being “Self-appointed custodians of the world. . .India is not looking for their approval” (Dutta 2023b), a similar tactic deployed by China to deal with criticism, as pointed out by Zhang below. He depicted Modi/Adani critic and universal target of the global far-right, George Soros, as dangerous and inducing a “fear psychosis,” harming India’s social fabric (Jaishankar 2023). India, Jaishankar (2023) said, is “a country that went through colonialism, we know the dangers of what happens when there’s outside interference.” Even while they obviously fulfill the political function of delegitimizing the political opposition, these claims have a kernel of truth—global rankings bodies and the activities of non-governmental organizations like Soros’ Open Society Foundation have long been subjected to criticism related to their political and ideological biases and their claims to objectivity (Stone 2010)—which mean they cannot be simply dismissed.

As in the past, moreover, reactionary anti-colonialism utilizes transnational far-right networks, discourses and tropes. Jaishankar’s vision of a world order consisting of cultural-ethnic states free from the influence of “globalized elites” and focused on economic survival has much in common with, and is influenced by, the Western New Right’s “reactionary internationalism,” which, likewise, privileges what De Orellana and Michelsen (2019)call “birth-culture” identities. Akin to the New Right (which is discussed further by Valluvan and Davidson), Hindutva leaders craft elaborate conspiracy theories tying the Indian opposition to Soros while decrying the influence of cultural Marxism and wokeism and claiming leadership of the global conservative movement (apparently in the mold of Thatcher) as “Brand Bharat” at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC (Yadav 2023 ; Madhav 2023, 2024). The broader Hindutva movement is networked with right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and far-right figures like Aleksandr Dugin, Richard Spencer, and Tommy Robinson, who promote its reactionary anti-colonial agenda to the extent that it concurs with their own (e.g., in relation to Islamophobia, anti-liberalism, and authoritarianism) (Schaeffer 2018 ; YouTube 2022 ; ANI 2024 ; Gourdon 2024).

Neoliberal Globalization, Decolonial Discourses, and Turkey’s Role in the Global Political Economy (Gorkem Altinors)

In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned the enduring injustices in Africa and the oppressive legacies of the colonial era, positioning Turkey’s engagement within a discourse of decolonial solidarity through his own slogan “the world is bigger than five” (Anadolu Ajansı 2023). This articulation not only mobilizes a critique of global power asymmetries but also re-imagines the relationship between the domestic and the global through an anti-colonial register—one that positions Turkey as a voice of the Global South challenging Western hegemony. Erdoğan’s rhetoric resonates in a global context marked by the erosion of the LIO, both economically, through deepening inequality and financial volatility, and ideologically, through disillusionment with the civilizational hierarchies historically associated with Western modernity. What distinguishes the current discourse, however, is its articulation within a post-2018 political conjuncture, following Turkey’s transition to a hyper-presidential regime and the consolidation of authoritarian rule. Unlike earlier forms of Third Worldism, which were often grounded in developmentalist aspirations or non-aligned solidarity, today’s discourse is shaped by a national-conservative synthesis that combines cultural assertiveness with neoliberal endurance. While this rhetoric has garnered some resonance in the Global South, Erdoğan’s claims of Turkey’s substantive contributions to the so-called decolonial moment require a more critical interrogation. Initiatives frequently cited as evidence of Turkey’s involvement, such as the Yunus Emre Institute, the Maarif Foundation, Turkish Airlines, and TİKA, serve not only as instruments of cultural and developmental outreach but also as mechanisms for expanding Turkey’s geopolitical influence and economic reach. These mechanisms reveal how the concept of “the international” is selectively constructed by Turkish elites as an exclusionary Western-dominated domain, against which an alternative vision is posited—yet one still embedded in global capitalist logics. Rather than constituting a genuine decolonial agenda, this approach risks hijacking (Shah 2024) and instrumentalizing decolonial discourse for strategic and hegemonic purposes.

Turkey’s engagement with the Global South increasingly aligns with a sub-imperialist agenda, reflecting both the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and the complex dynamics of the contemporary global political economy. Efforts to revive a modernized form of Ottoman-era regional hegemony and pursue sub-imperialist ambitions stand in stark contrast to Turkey’s rhetoric of decolonization and calls to address global wealth and income inequality (NTV 2024). This illustrates the paradoxical nature of Turkey’s resistance to the LIO : while it challenges Western dominance rhetorically, it simultaneously reproduces and benefits from the neoliberal structures of that order. Turkey’s stance thus reflects a broader crisis in liberal capitalism itself, a model whose legitimacy has been eroded by financial instability, widening global inequality, and a failure to deliver developmental promises. At the same time, Turkey’s rejection of Western “double standards” echoes a growing disillusionment with the moral claims and civilizational hierarchies embedded in the liberal “standard of civilization.” The current moment is thus marked by a convergence of crises, economic, ideological, and geopolitical, that enables Erdoğan’s discourse to gain international traction, especially in contexts where dissatisfaction with Western-led global governance is intensifying. The emphasis on sovereignty, dignity, and multipolarity finds echoes in other emerging powers, suggesting that Turkey’s positioning should be read not in isolation but in relation to broader shifts in the global South, including BRICS + narratives. This juxtaposition underscores a dialectical tension between rhetoric and practice, exposing the limits of Turkey’s claims to solidarity. These contradictions are deeply rooted in Turkey’s neoliberal transformation, which, while mirroring elements of East Asian developmentalism, reveals the paradoxical interplay between national aspirations, global capitalism, and the re-articulation of regional power.

To unravel this complex puzzle, it is essential to critically examine the specific dynamics underpinning the global dimensions of Turkey’s far-right populist politics, which both shape and are shaped by these contradictions. Turkey’s instrumentalization of decolonial rhetoric and its simultaneous pursuit of sub-imperialist ambitions are symptomatic of the broader resurgence of far-right populism globally. This resurgence thrives on paradoxes : the rhetorical challenge to global hierarchies while reinforcing new forms of regional domination, and the selective mobilization of anti-colonial discourses to advance neoliberal developmental goals. In this way, the construction of “the West” as a foil to Turkish exceptionalism functions as a political tool, its rejection justifying a domestic consolidation of power and regional assertiveness. The global appeal of this posture lies in its dual function : displacing discontent with the crisis of liberal capitalism onto a civilizational other (the West), while obscuring domestic complicity in reproducing similar inequalities. The current model repurposes decolonial language to reinforce national-conservative rule, placing Turkey in a comparative frame with similar trajectories in Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Orbán’s Hungary. These parallels are crucial for this discussion’s broader goal of analysing how contemporary claims to global justice are embedded in, and constrained by, national authoritarian projects. By situating Turkey’s political and economic strategies within this global populist framework, a more nuanced understanding emerges, one that highlights how such contradictions are not anomalies but rather defining features of far-right populist politics in the contemporary global political economy.

The decolonial discourse promoted by Turkey under AKP (Justice and Development Party) rule possesses a distinct internal dynamic rooted in the political Islamist tradition. Emerging in the 1970s, this tradition articulated an ostensibly anti-capitalist stance, but one that was primarily anti-Western rather than structurally critical of capitalism itself. It sought to foster solidarity among Muslim-majority countries, imagining a form of Third Worldist engagement akin to an Islamic iteration of Latin America’s Pink Tide. However, this legacy was paradoxically discarded as the AKP consolidated its power, adopting a pro-EU and pro-neoliberal agenda during its early years to establish a hegemonic position that would extend its influence both domestically and internationally. In effect, the AKP absorbed and neutralized political Islam’s challenge to capitalism (Tuğal 2009), orchestrating a synthesis between Islam and neoliberalism that culminated in what can be described as Islamic neoliberalism (Altinors 2025).

Ironically, as tensions with Western countries and institutions escalated, the AKP began to re-engage with the political Islamist discourse critical of capitalism, albeit in a strategically altered form. While Erdoğan’s rhetoric frequently denounces global inequalities, this critique remains superficial, as it coexists with the AKP’s management of a neoliberal accumulation regime that perpetuates similar inequalities domestically. For instance, Erdoğan’s condemnation of rising global inequality is strikingly undermined by the parallel intensification of socio-economic disparities within Turkey under his leadership. According to an Oxfam report, Turkey has the third-most unequal distribution of wealth among 161 countries (Bianet 2022). This contradiction reveals that Erdoğan’s opposition to inequality is not a genuine structural challenge to global capitalism but rather a strategic appropriation of anti-capitalist and decolonial discourses for populist ends. By leveraging this rhetoric, the AKP obscures its complicity in reproducing the very inequalities it claims to oppose, further underscoring the performative and instrumental nature of its populist politics. Turkey’s pivot away from a neoliberal political economy in the late 2010s, particularly following the 2018 transition from a parliamentary to a presidential system, underscores similar contradictions (Altınörs and Akçay 2022). Rather than addressing the structural inequalities inherent to neoliberalism or transitioning toward a more equitable system, this shift primarily serves to reinforce the state’s capacity to sustain neoliberal ends. The regime perpetuates the existing patterns of wealth and income inequality characteristic of neoliberalism while strengthening state mechanisms to uphold and reproduce the neoliberal accumulation model. In this context, this trajectory does not represent a departure from a neoliberal political economy or the LIO, even as Turkish foreign policy appears to diverge from these frameworks. Instead, it reflects how the state is instrumentalized to shape the country’s political economy. In this regard, it bears similarities to the East Asian developmentalist model, wherein the state plays a central role in achieving economic objectives. However, this approach continues to reproduce and sustain existing patterns of income and wealth inequality, while simultaneously consolidating state power to facilitate these outcomes.

On a global scale, the contradictory dynamics shaping this discourse are closely linked to the perceived decline of the LIO. Some scholars argue that rule-based neoliberalism has effectively reached its limits, particularly following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, which marked a significant turning point and a shift in the global axis, notably toward Russia and China. The state capitalism literature highlights this transition as a shift toward a new form of capitalism characterized by intensified state intervention and centralized economic control. While this model ostensibly contrasts with the market liberalism that defined the preceding era, it nonetheless sustains the neoliberal accumulation regime. Turkey’s geopolitical repositioning and the revival of anti-colonial rhetoric must be understood in this broader context : not as a rupture with the LIO, but as an adaptation to its mutation. Turkey’s rhetorical rejection of liberal internationalism gains traction precisely because of the LIO’s declining ideological legitimacy, especially its inability to uphold its own civilizational claims in the wake of economic crisis, climate breakdown, and ongoing imperial entanglements. Turkey’s growing role within this global political–economic context (Erol, Altinors, and Uysal 2025), particularly in relation to its deployment of decolonial rhetoric, cannot be simply understood through narratives of globalizations’ decline or the LIO’s demise. Instead, it represents a far more intricate and multi-faceted dynamic. This complexity necessitates a critical engagement with Turkey’s decolonial discourse from a perspective that foregrounds the rise of the global far right. The global rise of the far right has facilitated the emergence of a new model, national-conservatism, characterized by an expanded state role in the economy, a proactive and confrontational foreign policy, and the reinforcement of traditional hierarchies (Altinors and Chryssogelos 2024). This framework provides critical insights into understanding how and why, particularly in the Global South and in countries with regional ambitions like Turkey, decolonial discourse is often co-opted and instrumentalized. Rather than advancing genuinely progressive goals, such rhetoric is repurposed to serve far-right populist agendas, effectively hijacking a discourse rooted in resistance and emancipation for regressive and exclusionary ends.

Central and Eastern Europe : Self-Colonizing Victims or Self-Victimizing Colonizers ? (Aliaksei Kazharski)

In 2013, Hungary’s far-right MEP Krisztina Morvai famously stood in the European Parliament with the sign saying “HUNGARY ≠COLONY, in response to a parliamentary report critical of the state of democracy in her country. Since then, charges of “colonialism” or “imperialism” against various Western centers of power have become a routine part of the discourse of right-wing nationalistic populists or “illiberals” both in Hungary and beyond. Ironically, some if not all of them, simultaneously grew more lenient toward Russia, which had occupied subjugated their countries in the past and which, at least from 2014 (in truth, from 2008), had been pursuing a revisionist–expansionist policy of landgrabs toward its former dominions. Through “creative” use of collective memory, illiberal-populist leaders in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) projected past tragic experiences of being occupied and dominated by various regional empires onto present day entities, with the EU being rhetorically framed, for example, as the “new Soviet Union” or Brussels as the “new Moscow.” An anti-multiculturalist agenda, which targeted Western migration policies could also be fused with the negative image of the Ottoman Empire, also formerly present in the region, whilst liberal-progressivist policies could be presented as Western attempts to colonize the locals (Maďarová and Rankovová forthcoming). Against this background Huntigtonian ideas about the “clash of civilizations,” which had always been rather popular among Central and Eastern Europeans, were also spearheaded. “Civilizational” or culturalist understandings came at least in two important aspects. First, this was in terms of essentialist drawing of borders between cultures and regions—what Zhang calls “self-essentialization”—as part of the anti-migration campaign gaining momentum in CEE after the 2015 European migration crisis. Here, self-proclaimed anti-colonialists/anti-imperialists like Hungary’s prime minister quite openly spoke out against “mixing” different civilizations. As Davidson below shows this trope of “miscegenation” is an old one and parallels ideas of the earlier, biologically conceived racist doctrines.

Secondly, in terms of the newly discovered ambition to champion what the promoters of this discourse framed as the “true European values” said to be largely abandoned by the West, e.g., sovereignty, the nation-state, monoethnicity, Christianity, and the “traditional” family. As this inversion comes following the post-1989 period of learning from and catching up with or “returning” to the West, it rather resembles the mechanism captured by Kiossev’s (1999) concept of “self-colonizing cultures.” Using the example of Bulgaria, Kiossev argued that an initial feeling of cultural inferiority experienced by peripheral nations vis-a-vis Europe can undergo an inversion and become a sense of superiority.

However, the charges of “colonialism” and “imperialism” thrown at the EU by some CEE leaders and politicians, especially in combination with some of these “illiberal” leaders’ cozying up to the increasingly imperialist Russia, are situated in a rather peculiar context. It is, on the one hand true, that economic inequality between Western Europe and the post-Communist member states persists two decades into their EU membership, that is, despite the initial expectations of a quick catch-up with Western living standards, yielding disappointment and questioning the fairness of the existing EU-based order and the extent to which it might also be exploitative. At the same time, it should be noted that being plugged into the larger regional system of economic exchanges through the EU’s single market also becomes a factor of stability for the “illiberal” or “hybrid” (semi-democratic) political regimes, such as the Hungarian one. This detail is predictably omitted from their “anti-imperialist” Euroskeptic narrative. At the political level, however, the extent of rights and freedoms, both individual and collective, which are underwritten by the presence of the EU and NATO, can in no way be compared to the region’s previous existence as a collection of semi-independent states in the USSR’s totalitarian “informal empire.” The agency provided by the EU’s institutional set-up to small CEE countries, who can not only participate in collective decision-making but sometimes even block some of the key decisions at the regional level clearly does not rhyme well with the standard notions of “imperialism” or “colonialism.” It also stands in stark contrast to the period of Soviet control when sending tanks would be the standard answer to any serious attempts at diverging from the Moscow-imposed totalitarian political and economic model. At the level of individual freedoms, this collective freedom is paralleled by the equality of citizens of the Union as expressed, for example, in the freedom of movement and equal access to the member states’ labor markets.

Generally speaking, the regional status of the term “colony”/“colonial,” not just as a tool of political rhetoric but also as an analytical vocabulary, has been ambiguous, and its applicability to the CEE context were debated in the literature (Riabchuk 2013). This debate understandably received a new impulse with Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine that shocked the region. Thus, despite the obvious limitations for comparison with the formerly colonized countries of the “Global South,” one, for example, could make a case for previous Soviet domination as containing strong elements of colonialism, not necessarily only from the economic or political but also from the cultural perspective, e.g., the forced learning of Russian language in schools or various monuments and symbols from the totalitarian period that Russia continued to perceive as marking its “sphere of influence” even after the collapse of Communism. In 2022, some prominent scholars of the region argued that a “postcolonial moment” had come (Mälksoo 2023), with the debate on the “decolonization” of knowledge production ensuing (Shchyttsova and Korablyova 2024). At the same time, as researchers point out, the use of postcolonial perspectives to forge a shared understanding and win greater sympathy of the Global South for Ukraine has had rather limited success (Kurnyshova 2023). Russia’s instrumentalization of the “decolonization” agenda to internationally justify its war of conquest happens against the background of a certain “amnesia” about Russia’s own colonial and imperial past (and present), which is ignored by prominent decolonial thinkers like Mignolo (Durdiyeva 2023). Unlike the USSR, for whom anti-colonialism was always part of its standard left-wing ideological script, its actual imperialist practices notwithstanding, post-Soviet Russia had a very different ideological trajectory. The applicability of the term “fascist” to Vladimir Putin’s political regime has been debated by political scientists (Umland 2024). As Putin’s power consolidated, the technocratic market liberalism with strong undertones of a “great power” identity was being replaced by anti-liberal homophobic ideas about “traditional values” and a territorial revisionism underpinned by a culturalist or “civilizational” geopolitical imaginaries like “the Russian world.” As Zhang also points out, such civilizationist doctrines can be used to re-imagine “regional imperial formations,” which are also simultaneously cast in terms of “legitimate spheres of interest” and great power privilege, and to maintain/build hierarchical imperial orders while claiming to challenge “liberal” or “Western hegemony.”

Furthermore, at some point, elements of this right-wing cocktail in the form of cultural essentialism, anti-liberalism, and (somewhat milder) anti-Westernism also diffused to the political rhetoric of CEE “illiberals,” whose replacement for imitating the West now, in fact, came to be imitating the “East.” However, CEE “illiberalism” does not merely engage in a superficial imitation of certain themes from Putinist discourse. Arguably, there is a common historical denominator for these political phenomena, which stems from similar experiences of peripherality that historically characterize the broader CEE region, albeit to a different extent with respect to different countries. Thus, co-optation of anti-colonial/anti-imperialist rhetoric is part of a broader trend toward politically instrumentalized self-victimization that relies on dramatic collective memories and carefully and deliberately cultivated traumas. This also very much includes Russia as, despite its size and military might, its dominant ideology strongly relied on self-victimization and the constructed trauma of losing the former dominions. Consequently, the self-victimizing discourse makes constant references to the present international or regional order, which it deems unjust and oppressive. In this image, Russia, for example, is presented as another victim of Western/American imperialism, and simultaneously as a champion of the so-called “global majority” rebelling against it. The theme of decolonization, through which Russia capitalizes on memories of USSR’s assistance to the then Third World, serves as one of the instruments meant to camouflage its own imperial (re)conquest and the colonial and genocidal practices the Kremlin pursues, above all, in Ukraine. The said past includes a long history of Russian settler–colonialism and conquest and exploitation/extermination of lands, resources, and indigenous people in North America (Alaska), Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Black/Caspian Sea area, and elsewhere. Some of this Russian history was generally forgotten (see for example Richmond 2013) or not particularly well known in the Global South, thus allowing Russian authorities to successfully play imperial innocence. In fact, some of this colonial history carried on throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century as many indigenous languages and cultures have continued to go extinct on the territories Russia historically annexed as a direct result of its policies.

In sum, by adopting “anti-colonial” rhetoric, peripheral European players rejected the ideas of liberal globalism and what could be called “thick” liberalism, including interventionism, democracy promotion, and a global standard for democracy and human rights. This was typically being rejected in favor of a cultural (“civilizationist”) relativism underpinned by Huntingtonian ideas, as Valluvan also points out below. It also involved rejecting some important notions associated with a liberal-globalized model of the world like openness to migration and multi-culturalism. Finally, this also included rejecting what these actors saw as Western or American “unipolarity” and positing “multipolarity” (or “multi-civilizationism”) as something that is desirable or, at least, inevitable.

In terms of international connections, for the EU’s Eastern flank, as noted above, there is a notable correlation between this “illiberal” stance and sympathies toward Russia, with some of these figures having been long called Russia’s “Trojan horses” in the EU. Subsequently, both CEE “illiberals” and Moscow were also trying to establish a special relationship with Trumpism, clearly sensing overlaps both in normative issues like gender and migration and in terms of Trump’s foreign policy instincts, which included isolationism and transactionalist great power politics devoid of any morals.

Despite the multiple global overlaps, there are also specificities that can be attributed to Europe’s Eastern periphery. Chacko demonstrates convincingly above that anti-colonialism has never been “purely” progressive, and that it has always generated “reactionary” or right-wing ideologies. Hence, the very idea of “hijacking” anti-colonial rhetoric can seem dubious. However, the Eastern European context is somewhat different as it is not immediately clear who here qualifies for “coloniality” in the first place. The grotesqueness of Russia’s posing as an “anti-colonial” power has already been described above. When it comes to the EU’s Eastern flank, the analytical application of the language of colonialism and postcolonial theory to the region has of course been debated. However, as noted above, the CEE “illiberals” are actually included in the institutional order which they present as “colonial” or “imperialist” in ways that gives them both individual and collective agency and tangible benefits that are clearly unavailable to countries outside this order—not to mention those in a situation of “classical” colonialism. This makes the usage of the “anti-colonial” rhetoric look particularly hypocritical. Naturally, the region has known no lack of imperial oppression, historically speaking, and the most recent emancipation event was the 1989 fall of Moscow-backed Communist totalitarianisms and withdrawal of the Soviet occupational forces. While that clearly counts as an anti-imperialist moment, the paradox is that those who had struggled for liberation from Soviet occupation, could, in fact, also feel uneasy about being identified with the world of the “colonized” (Kalnačs 2015, 49). To them liberation was synonymous with a “return to the West” (i.e., the “First World”) as the overarching myth of their post-1989 transitions, while the “postcolonial” label would challenge their “Westernness.” In contrast, the “anti-colonial” rhetoric was later instrumentalized by those who would now other the EU. Ironically, sometimes they could even be the very same individuals, as Hungary’s prime minister Orbán who started out as a young liberal anti-Communist dissident going to Oxford on a Soros scholarship and, in the decades that followed, evolved into a prominent European ideologue of anti-EU “illiberalism.”

The New Global Geographies of Postliberal Nationalism (Sivamohan Valluvan)

The above contributions reckon with how a new right has been consolidated across very different geographic contexts but in also often historically ironic ways. What they help map out is a reactionary authoritarian convergence, a convergence that brings with it many historic continuities but also some crucial discontinuities. Not least, this is a global spread that, in its many family resemblances, further complicates any all too straightforward notion of a Global North/South distinction as inherited from the political geography of the twentieth century.

As Richard Seymour (2024) sets out in his recent but already influential Disaster Nationalism, this global consolidation does certainly retain emphases that demarcate, respectively, a Western and non-Western articulation of nationalist-authoritarian legitimacy. The former remains wedded to civilizationist idioms of a normative whiteness and a revanchist sense of entitled superiority amid perceived European decline—what more solemn economists call “secular stagnation.” Conversely, as Zhang describes, non-Western renditions frequently reach for the legacy of anti-colonial rebellion when impugning progressive politics as merely the imported scheming of “mentally colonized” “anti-nationals.” But anchoring both forces, even if ostensibly reaching from opposing ends of colonial history, is their joint commitment to a distinctly postliberal future. Periodizing the ongoing era as one of liberal decadence and fatigue, nationalist-authoritarians cutting across a Global North/South political geography make increasingly confident appeals to alternative conceptions of order. As Seymour (2024) puts it, it is the renewed postliberal commitment to the “particular,” not least nationhood and its alleged cultural coherence, that is advanced as the basis by which order can be realized, an order that the humanist universalisms of a previous era are seen as imperiling. What I accordingly dwell on is the ways in which the “postliberal,” what Zhang identifies as the now ascendant “counter-reaction to the liberal triumphalist vision of “end of history””, is being invoked here.

It is the peculiar case of Western Europe, and Britain in particular, that might act as a giving base for grappling with this wider shift. Namely, as far as the periodization of the hegemonic right in Europe is concerned, a nascent but still distinctive break is currently unfolding—a break from previous right-nationalist formations as modeled in a civilizationist posture of “the West.” This previous civilizationist posture largely called upon a formal conceit of self-declared Enlightenment orientations, around which Europe asserted its claims to freedom, law, and supremacy more broadly. Of course, those self-same assertions allowed for classed, neo-colonial and consistently racialized moral panics, where conceptions of decay and threat were routinely written upon those lacking the normative repose of the bourgeois European citizen (Hall et al. 1978). But importantly, such notions were often presented as stemming from the racial Others’ illiberal proclivities—i.e., a civilizational backwardness. Law and order alarms were herein identified as addressing racial and colonized peoples who could not abide by a liberal orientation—for whom the cultural properties to exercise responsible civic and entrepreneurial freedoms were lacking. This is what Paul Gilroy (1993), but more recently, Arun Kundnani (2012), Mahmood Mamdani (2005), and Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley (2011) all parsed as being a pretense of “culture talk” that revolves around a “values racism.” Decisive here were the wider colonial-racial taxonomies, which posited that non-Europeans carried the burden of ethnically rooted culture, in contrast to the modern European who was animated by the spirit of individuality. Such notions of ethnically indexed culture were consequently mapped onto a general liberal–illiberal civilizationist distinction. As such, even the authoritarian premise of Thatcherism as identified by Stuart Hall (1985)—the “authoritarian-populism” that was the handmaiden to a wider neoliberal advance—trafficked in a self-avowed claim to liberalism. Hall foregrounded here Thatcherism’s successful re-branding of freedom as the freedoms of the market and selfhood, and as a conservative safeguarding of the individual against the tyrannies of the state, the tyrannies of mass organizations, but also the tyrannies of the inner-city, trade unions, and those gathering at the border. So nominally at least, nationalist conservatism worked upon a confessional position of liberal freedoms that occasionally blurred into libertarianism, particularly amongst its more celebrated intellectual strands.

But today we see in increasingly influential new right intellectualism, via a pointed turn to the nation, a supposed call for a “Postliberal Order” (for indicative voices see Vermeule 2022 ; Deneen 2023 ; Kruger 2023 ; Gray 2023 ; Goodwin 2023), one that declares the very premise of liberal freedoms both functionally and morally void. Be they those that obtain through the globalized market as market freedoms or the individual’s freedoms via a rights-based regime.

In one key historical sense, this is merely the recovery of a wider arc of conservative anti-modernism, encapsulated in Europe by fin-de-siècle cultural positions that decried the atomizing anomie of the modern condition. The pathologies ascribed to modernization were of course legion : as the city and its anonymizing urbanization ; as the calculating, amoral logic of capital ; as industrialization and its upending of pastoral gentility ; as the desacralizing excess of secularization, yielding only bureaucratic abstraction ; and, perhaps most fundamentally, as legal and cultural individualism. And in today’s politics, this critique has been revived most strongly via frenzied alt-right nods to the allegedly disordering excesses of anti-racist, feminist, and transgender activism, but also the alleged ubiquity of a rampaging “ecomob” or those who dare protest a genocide being livestreamed onto people’s screens. The new right alleges that these social movements and political claims are typical of the nihilistic, self-absorbed righteousness of Millennial and Gen Z left-liberals. There is an underlying intimation that we are witnessing modernity’s accursed chickens coming home to roost, where the West is undertaking “self-annihilation” (Zhang 2020), held hostage by an anachronistic entitlement to individualistic rights that is dislocated from any wider, binding social form.

But irrespective of a longer conservative history of anti-modernism, philosophically speaking, we see these thinkers, and their online vanguard, reach more regularly for more recent areas of academic output. Namely, we see a much more aggressive rehabilitation of what emerged in the 1990s as the communitarian critique of liberal political normativity. The significant axis of such a critique were less nationalists per se and more a sort of softly anti-neoliberal brigade uniting Charles Taylor, Daniel Miller, Michael Sandel, and Alasdair MacIntyre. It is incidentally telling that Danny Kruger (2023, ii), an emerging star of the Tory Party who has now decamped to Reform UK, names MacIntyre as one of his key “philosopher-theologian” inspirations. Or consider the prominence of Blue Labour, a self-declared communitarian faction within the Labour Party, in the current Keir Starmer-led UK government. It is that noteworthy backstage Blue Labour influence that explains the unabashedly Powellite “Island of Strangers” Starmer speech, a speech that even took some of his centrist allies by startled surprise.

Fundamental to this communitarianism is its claim that the humanist projects of the twentieth century—be they liberal, socialist, or otherwise—are characterized by a “practically thin and ethically abstract altruism” (Prakash 2015, 28). This can never compete with the thick affective ties of national community—the thick “pre-political” (Gilroy 2000, 8) ties that work prefiguratively as the base by which order, but also selflessness, duty, and prosperous stability all obtain. But what is also now self-evident is that this perhaps more benign appeal to community has been forcefully smuggled into the moral ontology of nationhood, which asserts a much more effective claim to the very possibility of community and its attendant virtues.

And as many like Davidson (2024) have observed, a perverse romance with the non-European East, via some at least ostensibly anti- or decolonial motifs, is taking embryonic shape in these European new right circles. This being a romance that sees the East—necessarily conceived along distinctly neo-orientalist stereotypes—as exemplary of a communitarian minded order that the West is said to have prematurely forfeited. Put differently, an uncanny casting of the colonial and anti-colonial is being improvised amid these shifting ideological coordinates. In some admittedly still idiosyncratic alt-right environments, the Western demagogue identifies with the non-European elsewhere. But, as Altinors shows, this is not because it might serve as a beacon of radical liberation, freed of Western hypocrisy—i.e., the Third-Worldism that many Western dissenters frequently sought solidarity with. On the contrary, the very reverse is now being galvanized in some populist–nationalist forums of the West : where what they perceive as being the “market civilizations of the East and South” (Slobodian and Plehwe 2022) are seen as the arbiter of a form of nationalist reaction and executivist, “strong man capital accumulation without the guardrails” (de Noronha 2024, 84). These being guardrails that this newly emergent stable of European ideologues conceive as being a distinctly Western malaise.

There is an interesting recent history to such ideological projections. As Slobodian and Plehwe (2022, 12) explain, some of how neoliberalism was innovated in Japan and India was explicitly tied to a sense that their national culture and civilizational base is a capital in itself. As they argue,

[W]hile recent work has emphasized how ideas of racial hierarchy in neoliberal thought projected pejorative traits onto nonwhite races, these chapters show the inverse : a claim of superiority for non-European cultural traditions. The neoliberal intellectuals considered here saw nation and race as assets resistant to emulation and able to be leveraged in market competition, varieties of what one of us has called elsewhere “Volk capital”.

It is these early Asian innovators who helped “prefigure the contemporary varieties of nationalism and socially conservative culturalism” (Slobodian and Plehwe 2022, 13) that is now so constitutive of a new right commonsense in Europe too.

In other words, in some realigned new right circles, the West understands itself as insufficiently nationalist, insufficiently authoritarian (remarkably so given recent political developments). As the legal scholar of Empire, Kojo Koram (2025), recently reflected, there are prominent Western demagogues who now positively affirm the seeming authoritarianism of the elsewhere, envious of their capital innovation, tech futurity, and statist security politics alike. Echoing Zhang (2024), Koram writes that “in Britain, it has become more common for our politicians and journalists to cite their admiration for the emergence of technologically advanced, politically repressive states in what was once called the ‘developing world’.” And “even Donald Trump, in his nativist justification for a trade war with China, often betrays the envy he feels toward its ability to crush dissent and suppress wages in a way that US constitutional traditions make more difficult.” Or, as Koram concludes, simply recall Boris Johnson’s exhortation upon visiting Riyadh in February 2024—“Saudi Arabia is a country where things are happening with incredible speed and decisiveness. Frankly, we need to learn that in the UK.”

What becomes evident is that in the new right’s nationalist embrace of relativism, where commitments to equality, freedom, or a deepening of democratic processes are seen as formally misplaced universalist abstractions, they turn to an eroticization of “muscular national capital” (Seymour 2024, 47) and a complementary statist authoritarianism. But perhaps more intriguingly, in terms of the wider moral theater that flows out of the colonial era, these yearnings do often implicitly turn to an albeit mediated conception of “Eastern governance” as the correct historical model, the model better suited to the twenty-first Century.

Racial Relativism and the Vicissitudes of the Anti-Colonial (Miri Davidson)

Chacko is right to note that viewing the far-right’s anti-colonial thinking through the frame of appropriation risks misrepresenting the complexity of the anti-colonial tradition—or, we could say, of occluding its “bad side.” The reactionary strands of Japanese, Indian, and Turkish anti-colonial politics that she discusses are illustrative here, as are the Latin American examples surveyed by Bar-On and Paradela-López (2022) and the pan-African nativisms examined by Abrahamsen (2020). But if anti-colonial history has reactionary threads running through it, the history of far-right thought is also woven with anti-colonial sentiments. Expansion into foreign territories and subjugation of sovereign peoples have not always been seen by far-right thinkers as positive. Principal here are the far-right advocates of “differentialist” race-thinking (Taguieff 1985), who viewed human races as fundamentally (perhaps originally) separate from and incompatible with one another. Unlike the “civilizing” colonial racisms that viewed racial groups as corresponding to different stages on a single human evolutionary continuum—meaning that the “lower” races could one day assimilate with the “higher”—differentialist race-thinking envisioned not one single destiny of humanity or standard of civilization, but rather discrete racially based civilizations that developed according to their own unique logics. Because racial separation was the natural substrate of the human condition, colonialism could be interpreted as a violation of that nature. We could call this strand of thinking racial relativism.

Early elements of this racial relativism appear in the mid-nineteenth century in Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s 1853–1855 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, one of the principal inspirations for Nazi racial theory. Although hardly abandoning a hierarchical view of race, the core of Gobineau’s argument was that the human species had become “degenerate” due to the excessive mixing of races (Gobineau 1970 : 59). While some merging of populations was necessary for civilization to emerge, race-mixing ultimately sent civilizations on a path to mediocrity, nihilism, and chaos : distinctive cultures blended into a homogeneous mass, the inventive spirit of the great races withered and died, and humanity entered an era of generalized stagnation. “If mixtures of blood are, to a certain extent, beneficial to the mass of mankind,” Gobineau wrote, “if they raise and ennoble it, this is merely at the expense of mankind itself, which is stunted, abased, enervated, and humiliated in the persons of its noblest sons” (Gobineau 1970 : 140). For Gobineau, imperialist expansion was both a cause and symptom of this anthropological degeneration. The United States, a society whose “prime and overriding social law” was the conviction of its “right of total encroachment” upon other societies (Gobineau 1970 : 151), was a degenerate society par excellence, composed of “the human flotsam of all ages” (Gobineau 1970 : 161). Like many far-right thinkers, Gobineau saw parallels between the Anglo-American imperialism of his time and that of the late Roman empire. Both represented the peak of cosmopolitan decay, their mingled populations spreading themselves across the globe in a chaotic final act.

Gobineau’s anti-cosmopolitan vision of world history was transformed into a systematic racial relativism in Oswald Spengler’s immensely popular The Decline of the West, first published in 1918. Here, Spengler cast world history as constituted by “the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms” termed Cultures, all of which went through a period of blossoming, withering, and inevitable death. From this picture, Spengler constructed an epistemological relativism whose influence can be seen in the ideas of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss as well as much of the postcolonial theory tradition. History was not a linear progression but rather a series of organic cycles, Spengler argued, and hence systems of knowledge and art could not be stable or singular either : “There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained” (Spengler 2021 : 27).

A certain ambiguous anti-imperial sentiment followed logically from Spengler’s relativism. Imperialism was for Spengler a “typical symbol” of civilizational decline. “The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense” (Spengler 2021 : 49), he wrote, for only cultures that could no longer develop internally fixated on extending themselves across the world. The West, in this respect, was “ripe”—both at its peak and on the verge of decomposition—and its production of imperialist “Caesars,” such as Cecil Rhodes reflected this condition. Yet, Spengler’s valuation of these Caesars was ambivalent, and in his later works he would appear to celebrate the brute decisionist power they wielded (Spengler 1934 ; see Toscano 2024). In any case, Spengler’s panic about what he called the “colored world revolution,” which he imagined as sweeping away the white race, prevent us from classing his critique of imperialism as anti-colonial in any real sense.

Today’s New Right has defined itself by reviving this lineage of racial relativism ; its enthusiastic use of an anti-colonial register is hence no simple arrogation of leftist vocabulary. In the New Right vision of a “pluriversal” world order in which different civilizations flourish in ontological separation from one another, relativism plays a crucial role : Alexander Dugin and Alain de Benoist, the most prominent thinkers of the European New Right, insist that all such civilizations have their own unique value—provided, that is, they resist the forces of cosmopolitanism and miscegenation that advance from the de-cultured and de-racinated West. As Dugin writes : “To think in terms of the universality of Western criteria, theories, and conceptions of history, politics, society, and philosophy means to remain within the framework of colonization” (Dugin 2023). Instead, he insists, “we should rediscover the multiplicity of all kinds of cultures and societies, and we should accept them” (Dugin 2012 : 75). Universal history, and universal moral standards, are out. “Nothing should be universally condemned or justified. Everything depends on the balance of decision made by each civilization” (Dugin 2012 : 75). This commitment to relativism applies only to supposedly “traditional” values and practices, however—which is to say those that revive or entrench naturalized hierarchies, whether based around race, sex, caste, or class.

Any theoretical or political tendency that rejects such naturalized hierarchies is cast as a colonizing force, violating the ways of life of the “indigenous” peoples of white Europe. What does indigeneity mean here ? While for much of the anti-colonial tradition indigeneity has been considered a relational identity constituted through colonization (as Fanon (2001) said, “it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence”), the far right’s conception of indigeneity emphasizes not so much a position (being against a colonizer) or process (being in a struggle) but rather an essence (being “traditional”). Hence, various fantasies of primordial ethnic inheritance must be produced : de Benoist (2017) draws on a range of fantastical narratives about Indo-Europeans, Hyperboreans, Atlanteans, Aryans, and Teutonic Germanic tribes, for example, while Dugin refers to the Orthodox Russian people as the “core” of a Eurasian civilization composed of multiple ethnic groups “living traditionally on the territory of Eurasia” (Dugin 2023). To add to Valluvan’s characterization of postliberal civilizational thinking above, the meaning of civilization is here reversed : to participate in a “civilization” means not to be “civilized” but—quite the contrary—to be pre-modern or archaic.

Matthieu Renault (2024) has shown how Spengler’s relativism influenced many thinkers in the Black radical tradition, including W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Aimé and Suzanne Cesaire, and Malcolm X, who repurposed his thought to fashion their own critiques of Western civilization. The fact that these thinkers draw on Spengler does not invalidate the power of their critiques of the European racial and colonial order. Yet, it is also true that certain types of decolonial theory prominent today in academic discourse replicate some of the more contestable assumptions of the anti-colonial far right. Walter Mignolo (2021) speaks of the resurgence of the “civilization-states” of Russia and China in a way strikingly like Dugin, both claiming that these regimes incarnate forms of ontological and epistemological difference to the Western liberal order, seen as the only possible source of colonization. Dugin, de Benoist, and Mignolo all also draw heavily on Carl Schmitt to claim that today’s emerging multipolarity represents the emergence of a new “nomos” of the earth. As Mignolo writes, “today we are witnessing the resurgence of the many civilizational variants of laws, customs, economies, and other social constructions that previously constituted the many forms of life all over the planet” (Mignolo 2021 : 494). What is overlooked here, as Chacko, Altinors, and Kazharski describe above in the cases of India, Turkey, and CEE, is that many of the leading regimes of this multipolar order neither represent a resurgence of a lost civilizational authenticity but rather an intensification of the neoliberal project—if one in which many of its residual democratic elements are jettisoned.

These convergences of decolonial and far-right thought force us to rethink some of the fundamental concepts of IPS : not only “indigeneity,” but also the “colonial” and the “decolonial” demand greater specificity. Today’s far right uses of the concept of the “colonial” probably find their closest analogue in the term “coloniality” coined by Anibal Quijano, and popularized by Mignolo, to refer to the “matrix of power” that dominates long after formal colonialism ends, and which is uniquely tied to the West and its liberal epistemology and universal history. Zhang’s discussion below of the recent neologism zhiren, to refer to individuals who are accused of having internalized forms of coloniality, is a revealing example. But colonialism is, of course, not simply a Western or a liberal phenomenon, and not all relations of epistemic, cultural, or financial domination are colonial in nature. De Benoist’s claims that the peoples of Europe are colonized by US-dominated financial markets and Dugin’s characterizations of liberal and progressive institutions as colonizing bodies affixed to the authentic Russian soul stretch the term beyond recognition, detaching it from the historical phenomenon of colonialism and all it entails : territorial annexation, seizure of political power, systematic displacement or elimination of peoples, legal prohibition of indigenous languages, and so on.

The phenomenon of far-right anti-colonialism also compels us to specify what we mean by decolonization. If associated merely with the affirmation of difference (whether cultural, epistemological, or “ontological”), or with a relativistic tradition that has roots as much in the far right as the left, the concept of decolonization finds itself on shaky ground. It seems important, in light of this, to emphasize those parts of the anti-colonial tradition that have seen the overcoming of colonialism as not (or not only) about the revival of indigenous cultures but, more ambitiously, about the remaking of the world order in a manner fundamentally oppositional to capitalism (see Getachew 2019 ; Okoth 2023). For anti-colonial thinkers within the tradition of what Okoth calls “Red Africa” (2023), it was not sufficient to “de-link” civilizations from one another ; instead, the global structures of political economy that assured their imbrication became the object of radical, socialist transformation. This anti-colonial tradition embraced a universalism of solidarity in struggle against this capitalist order while avoiding the traps of both Eurocentrism (e.g., Sekyi-Otu 2018) and the empty (formal) universalism of liberalism (e.g., Fanon 2001). Only on such premises, it would seem, can an anti-colonial politics be radically incompatible with the ethical visions of today’s far right.

Postliberal Convergence and Emergent Solidarities (Chenchen Zhang)

As other contributors have demonstrated, the current revival of civilizational discourse posing as an assertion of particularistic identity and cultural distinctiveness against universalism is not entirely new. We find the precursors of reactionary civilizationism in the inter-war period in both “East” and “West,” as well as the wave of counter-reactions to the liberal triumphalist vision of “end of history” in the 1990s. In inter-war East Asia, Pan-Asianist intellectuals legitimated Japanese imperialism by casting the empire as the liberator “Asian civilization,” conceived as a “spiritual, moral, and timeless essence,” from “the enslavement of Western colonialism” (Duara 2001, 111). In China, the ruling Nationalist Party in the 1930s engaged in a “conservative revolution” through state-led capitalist development and appealing to “the nation and Eastern civilizational ideals” (Tsui 2018, 20). Contributing definitively to the popularization of a particular geo-civilizational mapping of global space, Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis in fact also offers a seeming critique of Western “cultural imperialism.” Reminiscent of the present moment, he wrote in the 1990s that Western hegemony “encourages populist politicians in non-Western societies to denounce Western cultural imperialism and to rally their publics to preserve the survival and integrity of their indigenous culture” (Huntington 1996, 98). Much like a contemporary “culture warrior,” Huntington also asserted that the “clash between the multi-culturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed” is the “real clash” within “Western civilization” (Huntington 1996, 307). It is unsurprising that Huntington’s thesis resonated not only with national conservatives in the United States, but also with civilizationists and critics of liberal universalism from the non-Western world.

There is, therefore, a longer political and intellectual lineage to conservative political projects premised on organicist, essentialist, and exclusionary notions of nation or ethno-civilization speaking an anti-colonial language. However, contributors to this collective discussion have highlighted that the contemporary appropriation of the anti-colonial must be understood within the specific political and economic dynamics of the post-Cold War international order and the erosion of its legitimacy. Despite the partial rejection of the international as colonial or imperialist and the reassertion of civilizational identities, emerging powers such as China, India, and Turkey continue to perceive globalization as “opportunities for upward mobility in the global income and power hierarchy in a period of declining American hegemony” (Kumral 2023, 774). As Chacko and Valluvan have shown, while reactionary civilizationisms appear to reject liberal universalism as hierarchical, they at the same time embrace the logics of market competition and civilizational distinction as a universal framework for ordering the world, where cultural distinctiveness becomes a “brand” in a global marketplace of civilizations.

Much like elsewhere, authoritarian and conservative nationalism in China strategically and selectively reject certain aspects of the international as Western and imperialist, but not others. While feminism, queerness, human rights, or other social justice movements are framed as “Western values,” technological modernity, capitalism, or a realist view on international relations as power struggles are not framed as “Western,” but rather neutral and objective truth. The political function of the invocation of Westernness can be further unpacked through the lens of victimhood, indigeneity, and security. In the first sense, international criticisms of Chinese actions are interpreted as stigmatization within a global social hierarchy inherently biased toward China. Gruffydd-Jones (2019) finds that the state capitalizes on this mechanism by “strategically passing on” criticisms from US and Western sources (whereas non-Western sources were barely reported) regarding human rights violations to the domestic public. This exposure makes citizens indeed more inclined to regard criticisms as unfair stigmatization and more approval of the government’s actions. Arguments about indigeneity posit that certain values or movements are “Western” and unsuitable for Chinese culture or society, while arguments about security make a more direct reference to geopolitical and geo-ideological struggles. In this framework, feminism and LGBTQ movements are not only “Western values,” but also serve as an instrument of foreign influence operation and “ideological infiltration” aiming at regime change (Huang 2022 ; Fu 2024).

Colonialism is not a word commonly used in China’s official discourse today, which tends to use “hegemony” (baquan) when criticizing Western domination. However, the recent emergence and proliferation of the derogatory neologism zhiren (a compound word consisting of zhi, meaning colonial or colonized, and ren, meaning person) on social media captures an interesting discursive turn and an emerging sensibility among the politically minded digital public. According to users of the label, it refers to those they consider to be “mentally colonized,” “worshiping the West,” or displaying (self-)racist attitudes toward Chinese people. The term thus resembles other preexisting slurs referring to the “enemy within,” such as hanjian (race traitor) or yangnu (foreign lackey), yet with an explicit reference to the colonial. The popularity of the term among nationalist influencers reflects a backlash against the narratives of civilizational hierarchy that dissident and liberal-leaning intellectuals and internet users tend to employ when criticizing domestic conditions (Lin 2021). Rather than criticizing power structures, the politics of naming in the circulation of the zhiren label identifies “coloniality” as an individual moral failure and a sign of betrayal (Zhang 2025). It has therefore become a semiotic device for authoritarian nationalism to police the boundary of the nation and vilify internal others, targeting in particular feminists, queer communities, and minoritized groups demanding the right to self-determination. The accusation of coloniality is directed not at the external other, but rather the Chinese subjects, whose proximity to values and identities coded as Western becomes framed as signifying subservience to “colonialism” and betrayal to the national body.

Across different localities, we have seen that the exhaustion of the moral authority of liberal orders has led to tactical, transversal, and sometimes unexpected alignment across not only geopolitical fault lines and the North and South divide, but also conventional ideological boundaries. As Valluvan has hinted at, China has emerged as an object of both fear and envy in global postliberal imagination. The renewed binary of China as a model of authoritarian competence and technocratic efficiency versus “the West” as undermined by moralizing ideologies is produced by both Chinese techno-nationalists and Western postliberal thinkers (Zhang 2024). For the former, it amplifies both revanchist pride and the sense of continued victimhood ; for the latter, fantasizing can function simultaneously as fearmongering. Perhaps even more strikingly, commentators on the right and left are also converging in their envisioning of a “mulitipolar, civilizational world order” (Abrahamsen et al. 2024) from different perspectives. National conservatives in the United States argue that the preferred strategy in a “post-imperial” world is to allow all great powers to assume leadership in their respective “concerts of power” or spheres of influence, rather than pursuing global hegemony (Lind 2008). Meanwhile, some Marxist analyses suggest that states such as Russia and China enhancing its own regional security should not be considered imperialist, but rather challenging “the domination of the United States and the West” (Foster 2024).

In his latest book, Walter Mignolo proposes that “multipolarity” should be “the goal of de-Westernization” in the global order, and pluriversality should be the goal of epistemic decolonization (Mignolo 2021, xi). Despite the acknowledgment that decoloniality should not be state-led, Mignolo argues that “de-Westernization” can only be “advanced by a strong state” and applauds the “restitution” of the “civilization-state” in places such as China, Russia, and Turkey. While Davidson (2025) has critiqued the assumption of ontological difference from a political-theoretical perspective, more can be said about the geopolitical vision shared by this particular kind of decolonial discourse and the right—one that views a multipolar order of major regional powers, known as civilizational states and with their respective spheres of influence, as a desirable alternative. There is a curious and deafening silence, willful or not, about oppressive structures and hierarchical relations within regional imperial formations, or their embeddedness within global capitalism. In China, whereas civilizational discourse acts as a vehicle for claiming difference internationally, the revival of ethno-civilizational ideas of zhonghua wenming and zhonghua minzu serves to legitimate the “remolding” of “non-Han minorities in the culture, behaviour, and linguistic norms of the Han majority” (Leibold and Chen 2024, 7), suppressing articulations of difference domestically. Without an ethical commitment to justice and equality, the “decolonial” endorsement of the “civilizational states” risks becoming indistinguishable from the authoritarian and radical conservative arguments for a multipolar civilizational order. The powerful states, or the “poles” in “multipolar,” are considered entitled to their respective “spheres of interest” supposedly characterized by “cultural and historical affinity” (Pizzolo 2023). The language of civilization naturalizes racialized and gendered power hierarchies within regional imperial formations, and calling this anti-imperialist or decolonization suggests that only some forms of domination and colonial violence matter, not others.

What does this mean for IPS, a field profoundly influenced by postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist approaches and attuned to transnational connections ? First, identifying these patterns of transversal realignment is necessary for us to stay alert to the kind of decolonial discourse that mistakes geopolitical opposition or power transition for decolonization and emancipation. It is a reminder that the rejection of liberal hegemony and Western imperialism itself does not necessarily entail a commitment to justice or foreground the lived realities of marginalized, including colonized, groups confronting structural violence. Secondly, given its interest in challenging state-centric approaches to understanding global orders and changes, IPS is uniquely positioned to investigate and center marginalized, non-institutionalized, and diasporic voices that are envisioning and building anew what Davidson calls “a universalism of solidarity in struggle.” If this collective discussion has shown that, in various ways, postliberal reactionary sensibilities are converging across geopolitical and ideological boundaries, then it becomes urgently important to pay attention to forms of critique and solidarity that rupture conventional binaries and are grounded in the interconnectedness of multiple, overlapping structures of injustice.

As Shah (2024, 1) reminds us, “the most important anti-colonial intellectuals may not use the language of decolonization and may not be in universities, but on the streets, with social movements, and in prison.” The feminist and Palestine solidarity organizing among a new generation of transnational Chinese activists illustrates this. The flourishing of diaspora Chinese feminist collectives reflects a broader reorientation of political critique that breaks from the dualistic geopolitical imaginary of “authoritarian China” versus the “free world” characteristic of earlier dissident discourse (Li 2021 ; Peng 2025). It is reoriented toward connecting struggles against patriarchy, authoritarianism, and imperialism across different localities, without collapsing their differences or instrumentalizing one to diminish another. Through translation, knowledge creation, fundraising, and grassroots organizing, diaspora Chinese initiatives such as Palestine Solidarity Action Network have not only mobilized against US support for the ongoing crimes against Palestinians, but have also exposed Chinese complicity in Israeli settler colonialism, mapping technological, infrastructural, and economic links between colonial violence in Palestine and Xinjiang. These are anonymous writers, translators, and organizers, working collectively and informally, rather than formally recognized intellectuals or activists. There is great potential in IPS to engage with these vernacular, transnational practices of critique and solidarity, extending the field’s (and the journal’s) ongoing efforts to de-center dominant modes of knowledge production and acknowledge forms of decolonial world-making that may remain illegible to state-centric frameworks.