The Anticolonial Right, or How the Language of Liberation Has Been Captured
The grammar of global politics has undergone a structural shift. The language of anticolonialism, that is the right of peoples to determine their own futures, is increasingly being wielded by political forces with very little in common with the anticolonial struggles of yesteryear. What is emerging, across these different contexts, is a coherent political formation that deserves its own name: illiberal anticolonialism.
Illiberal anticolonialism is not simply misappropriation of the anticolonial tradition or cynical bad faith, though both may be present. It is made possible by something structural: the grammar of anticolonialism was never logically tied to its emancipatory content. That content was a historical conjuncture, dominant for most of the twentieth century but never exclusive. Once detached from that historical specificity, the grammar retains its full moral force while serving different ends.
Understanding how that detachment became possible requires looking at two things the dominant liberal narrative has preferred not to see. The first is the hidden conservative genealogy of anticolonialism itself. The second is liberalism’s own entanglement with neoliberal regimes, its failure to answer demands for belonging and redistribution, its increasing appearance as the ideology of the globally mobile rather than a universal horizon of emancipation.
This piece traces that double movement: the structural vulnerability of anticolonial grammar to illiberal capture, and the political conditions that turned vulnerability into opportunity. The space that emancipatory politics has failed to hold is now occupied by civilizational narratives.
The Grammar of Anticolonialism and its Vulnerability
Anticolonialism’s moral power derives from a distinctive “grammar,” a structure of moral evaluation organized around binary oppositions: oppressor and oppressed, sovereign and colonized, authentic and imposed. This grammar is potent because it maps moral judgment directly onto political position: to be colonized is to be wronged, to resist is to be right.
What makes anticolonialism the relevant reference point here, rather than, say, Marxism or feminism, is that it organizes relations between political communities rather than individuals or classes and it carries a specifically geopolitical charge that maps directly onto the present contestation between Western liberalism and its challengers. Marxism offers a rival grammar of emancipation, but one organized around social relations within societies; feminism, around gender hierarchy within them.
For most of the twentieth century, the content was supplied by the emancipatory traditions with which anticolonialism allied: universal human rights, racial equality, social redistribution, the solidarity of peoples against imperial capital. Today, the repertoire has changed: the defense of traditional gender hierarchies becomes the defense of authentic culture against Western liberal imposition; the suppression of minorities becomes the protection of sovereign national identity; the rejection of human rights law becomes resistance to neo-colonial normative domination.
It works, too, because its diagnostic claims are partially correct. Western powers did instrumentalize universalist language as cover for particular interests: the Iraq War was launched in large part in the name of democracy; structural adjustment programs were imposed in the name of development while protecting creditor advantage; humanitarian intervention provided legal cover for regime change. International institutions did reproduce, in attenuated form, the paternalist logic of the Western civilizing mission.
But the diagnosis is only partial. What disappears in illiberal anticolonialism is precisely the dimension that made anticolonial politics emancipatory in the first place: the liberation of individuals and collectives, not merely states. The reduction of domination to an external relation between sovereign entities partly erases the question of domination within societies themselves, exercised through authoritarian rule, patriarchy, religious coercion, or ethnic hierarchy. Once sovereignty becomes the supreme moral principle, internal forms of oppression are recoded as matters of cultural authenticity or civilizational particularity beyond legitimate critique.
The Hidden Genealogy of Anticolonialism
The standard narrative presents anticolonialism as an essentially progressive tradition: Fanon’s revolutionary humanism, Césaire’s universalism, Cabral’s liberation struggle, Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism, Nehru’s nonalignment, the Bandung spirit, Mandela fighting from his prison cell against Apartheid. That genealogy is real, but also truncated.
Resistance to Western colonial domination has always been able to draw on conservative social resources as well as emancipatory ones, be it religious authority, social hierarchy, or civilizational particularity. These were not incidental features of specific movements, but available alternatives to the Marxist grammar of emancipation, present from the beginning. There were, then, always multiple paths for anticolonialism to follow. These paths shared the immediate goal of expelling the occupiers, but diverged sharply in their vision for what a post-colonial society should look like.
Islamic revivalism in Sudan and Egypt framed liberation from colonial rule as inseparable from moral purification and the restoration of religious order. In India, Hindu revivalism provided the idiom of national regeneration against British modernization. Even Gandhi, likely the most iconic figure of progressive anticolonialism, drew deeply on conservative social resources: his vision of authentic India organized around rural self-sufficiency and religious tradition generated persistent tensions with secular-democratic alternatives.
Postcolonial consolidation reproduced the pattern across a wide spectrum. At one end, leaders like Nyerere in Tanzania pursued genuinely redistributive projects with real popular legitimacy, even as ujamaa’s communitarian logic suppressed internal pluralism in ways its architects framed as cultural authenticity rather than authoritarianism. At the other end, Sékou Touré’s Guinea descended into brutal personal dictatorship behind the same anticolonial language.
Even the Soviet Union, the great institutional sponsor of progressive anticolonialism, normalized the pattern through its accommodations. Moscow routinely prioritized anti-Western alignment over ideological consistency, backing Nasser’s Egypt even as it suppressed its own communist left, tolerating the ANC’s accommodation of traditional authorities and chieftaincy structures, supporting Islamic anticolonial currents whose religious framing sat uneasily with Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. What mattered was opposition to Western colonial powers and alignment against American influence; social or cultural conservatism within a movement was an inconvenience, but not a disqualification. Soviet internationalism thus implicitly confirmed that resistance to imperialism could coexist with, even depend upon, conservative value systems.
This genealogy has been written out of collective memory because it is uncomfortable for liberals for more reasons than one. For one thing, a conservative anticolonialism reveals that the same impulse can serve the defense of hierarchies that Western liberals, especially progressive liberals, seek to dismantle.
But for another thing, the relative success of conservative anticolonialism, compared to its emancipatory counterpart, can be partly attributed to Western assistance. While decolonization may have meant Western retreat, it did not mean the West disengaged from the politics of its former colonies. During the Cold War especially, Western powers sought to stamp out precisely those emancipatory strains of anticolonialism, seeing them as too aligned with Moscow. This often meant, practically speaking, assisting more conservative anti- and post-colonialist forces.
The illiberal appropriation of anticolonial language is thus not, in the end, a cynical distortion of a purely emancipatory tradition. It’s the activation of a latent potential that was always there, a potential that the progressive mainstream either preferred not to see or else actively abetted. That refusal to look is precisely what liberal responses to the illiberal turn so unprepared: not simply outmaneuvered rhetorically, but caught without an account of why the appropriation resonated, and why so many in the Global South did not experience it as theft.
The Anticolonial Turn of the Right
The European New Right identified this opening long before liberal elites registered it as a threat. Beginning in the 1970s, Alain de Benoist performed a decisive intellectual operation: he detached the right to cultural self-determination from its progressive foundations and redirected it against liberal universalism itself.
The colonized, in his inversion, were no longer the peoples of Africa or Asia but Europeans, dispossessed not by military force but by American-led homogenization, market liberalism, and cosmopolitan norms that dissolved every particular form of life into the same undifferentiated global monoculture. Resistance to that process was reframed as a form of liberation. That inversion became the intellectual bridge to the present moment.
The bridge proved remarkably load-bearing. With the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Eastern European conservative movements began translating it into institutional politics: portraying the European Union as a distant metropole imposing alien values on historically rooted nations through legal pressure, funding conditionalities, and moral supervision. Hungary under Orbán, PiS-era Poland, and Putin’s Russia became the fullest expressions of this logic, each presenting itself as the guardian of an authentic civilization threatened by liberal homogenization.
A quite similar logic increasingly organizes Trumpist America, though the scale has inverted. Here the alleged colonizer is not a foreign power but an internal one: a liberal professional class that has captured schools, media, language, and national memory, imposing its values on the authentic people from within the institutions meant to serve them. The promise to “take the country back” functions as an anticolonial slogan: liberation of the real nation from alien ideological occupation.
What makes this convergence significant is not that these movements borrow from each other (though they do on some aspects), but that they have independently discovered the same grammatical structure of illiberal anticolonialism.
How Russia Learned to Speak Anticolonialism
Russia’s contemporary anticolonial positioning is the fullest expression of what that bridge made possible. It is neither a simple continuation of Soviet policy nor a purely cynical imposture but an ideological synthesis, grafting Soviet symbolic capital onto New Right civilizationism to produce something genuinely new: a right-wing decolonization project in which colonialism is primarily epistemic and cultural and decolonization is the recovery of civilizational sovereignty.
The Soviet legacy supplies the historical memory: Lenin’s principled anti-imperialism, the USSR’s later material support for national liberation movements, and its opposition to colonialism at the United Nations. But the ideological substance increasingly comes not from Soviet internationalism but from older currents of Russian civilizational thought, reconstructed for the post-Cold War moment. The Eurasianist lineage, running from Nikolai Trubetzkoy through a tradition Aleksandr Dugin consciously rebuilt in the 1990s, deliberately spliced with de Benoist’s New Right ethnocivilizationism, reframes resistance to liberalism not as reaction but emancipation.
What this synthesis enables is a dual messaging strategy of remarkable flexibility. To audiences in the Global South, Russia presents itself as a fellow victim of Western normative hegemony. To European and U.S. conservative audiences, it presents itself as the last defender of Western civilization against liberal decadence. One adversary, two faces, one structural message: liberalism is the problem, and Russia is its principled opponent.
The coherence of that synthesis was on full display at the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, addressed African leaders in the language of anticolonial solidarity while simultaneously invoking traditional values, religious inheritance, and the heteronormative family as the shared moral foundation of both Russian and African civilizations. The important point was not the hypocrisy but the absence of any felt contradiction. Anticolonialism and social conservatism appeared not as competing commitments but as mutually reinforcing ones, two faces of the same resistance to Western liberal imposition.
The “World Majority” concept, developed by foreign policy thinker Sergey Karaganov from 2022 onward, gives this strategy its narrative architecture. It replaces “non-West” (defined by negation) and “Global South” (too geographically determinist) with a positive designation: the states that together constitute a global majority against the self-serving minority of the “collective West.”
The concept is majoritarian in structure (democracy as the unmediated will of the many against unaccountable elites), sovereigntist in content (the international order should rest on noninterference and great-power coexistence, not liberal expansion), civilizationist in framing (each civilization has the right to its own trajectory), and conservative in its moral register (traditional values as the shared foundation of non-Western solidarity). All four pillars of Russian illiberalism, assembled under an anticolonial banner.
The Ukraine war exposes the internal contradiction of the entire framework most acutely because both sides speak the language of anticolonialism. Russia frames its invasion as the liberation of historically Russian-speaking populations from Kyiv’s “Nazified” cultural colonization, and as resistance to NATO’s eastward expansion as a form of Western imperial encirclement. Ukraine, meanwhile, deploys a textbook anticolonial narrative: the assertion of a distinct national identity against centuries of Russian imperial domination, the right of a smaller nation to self-determination against a great-power neighbor that denies its separate existence. What the confrontation reveals is a deep instability in the anticolonial grammar itself: whose liberation, on whose terms, and at whose expense?
How Liberalism Lost the Language of Liberation
What ultimately distinguishes illiberal anticolonialism from the tradition it claims is not hypocrisy, though that is obviously present, but a constitutive truncation. Illiberal anticolonialism recognizes one form of domination only: the subordination of states to Western normative hegemony. It has no language for the oppression of individuals and minorities within those states by the hierarchies that sovereignty protects. The liberation it offers is the liberation of the state and its governing elite from external constraint, not the liberation of people from internal hierarchy.
But liberalism did not lose the language of liberation passively. It surrendered it through a specific historical move. The neoliberal turn of the 1980s-1990s (the Washington Consensus and the conflation of liberal universalism with market discipline) hollowed out social solidarity at home and delegitimized liberal universalism abroad in a single motion.
What “emancipation” delivered in practice was austerity, conditionality, and the disciplinary architecture of international financial institutions that constrained sovereign choices while protecting Western economic advantage. Illiberal actors did not invent this exhibit; they worked systematically to make it damning, ensuring that liberalism and neoliberalism appeared not as separable but as identical.
As a result, liberal universalism now appears less as emancipation than as a thin managerial ideology, technocratic, procedural, and socially disembedded, ill-positioned to answer demands for redistribution or historically rooted forms of collective life. As long as Western powers refuse meaningful reform of international finance, development regimes, and global decision-making architecture, legitimate rejection of Western dominance will continue to flow toward projects organized not around human liberation but around sovereignty and civilizational closure.
Recovering the language of liberation is not simply a matter of reversing the neoliberal turn, though that would be necessary. The redistributive liberal tradition was itself entangled with Western dominance in ways that cannot be unwound by good intentions alone. What is required is harder: a political language capable of holding universal rights and rooted forms of community together, without subordinating either to the other, and credible enough, institutionally and morally, to contest the illiberal grammar on its own ground. What that language might look like, nobody yet knows. But the cost of not building it is becoming harder to ignore.