Abstract: Today, the ‘pluriverse’ is considered to be a radical new concept capable of decolonising political thought. However, it is not only decolonial scholarship that has taken up the concept of the pluriverse; far-right intellectuals, too, have been cultivating a decolonial imaginary based on the idea of the pluriverse. This article compares the way the concept of the pluriverse appears in certain strands of Latin American decolonial theory exemplifed by Walter Mignolo, on the one hand, and the ethnopluralism of the European New Right represented by Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin, on the other. Despite Mignolo’s pluriverse being an ‘open pluriverse’ of entanglement between peoples, while the European New Right’s is a ‘closed pluriverse’ of ethnic separation, I argue that these uses of the pluriverse are nevertheless underpinned by a shared analytical and normative framework. This framework is defned by a simple refrain: that what oppresses the world is ontological and epis- temological sameness, and what will liberate it is ontological and epistemological diference. I argue that this schema, which misapprehends imperialism as a form of epistemic domination geared purely towards homogenisation, rather than as a set of material relationships that also produce (e.g. racial, sexual, and class) diference, does not provide a solid foundation for contesting colonial relations.
The endorsement a few years ago by the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo of a book by Hindu supremacist author Sai Deepak (2021) is just one example, among an increasing number today, of the political malleability of the framework of decoloniality, and its capacity to shape itself to ethnonationalist agendas. The concept of the ‘pluriverse’, considered to be a radical new means of decolonising political thought, is caught up in similar dynamics. Not limited to decolonial scholarship, the French Nouvelle Droite founder Alain de Benoist and the Russian neo-fascist Alexander Dugin have both drawn on the idea of the pluriverse (or ‘pluriversum’) in their traditionalist manifestos for a ‘European Renaissance’ (de Benoist & Champetier, 2012) and ‘Eurasianism’ (Dugin, 2012), respectively. For both authors, the revival of ‘indigenous’ European or Eurasian civilisational identity is presented as a means of resisting the imperialism of the liberal ‘globalist’ order—in short, as a decolonising project.
These phenomena raise serious questions for decolonial theory. How is it that the framework of decoloniality and the idea of the pluriverse, which at frst sight appear to be clearly emancipatory, can be put to such reactionary ends?
A number of recent criticisms of tendencies within decolonial theory—which here refers strictly to the Latin American ‘decoloniality’ approach, as distinct from anticolonial and postcolonial theory [1]—may take us some way towards diagnosing the source of such problems. Scholars have argued that decolonial theory relies on a notion of authentic precolonial indigeneity that has long been weaponised in favour of nationalist or reactionary political projects (Hull, 2022; Okoth, 2021; Rambukwella, 2022; Wilson, 2017). Questions have been asked about how groups such as migrants and Jews, who are not seen to personify the values of territorial rootedness, ft within certain decolonial frameworks (Woods, 2020). Critics have also noted how the common foregrounding of epistemological questions (such as the ‘coloniality of knowledge’) in decolonial theory can work to evade any engagement with the tensions inherent to concrete anticolonial struggles, past and present (Cusicanqui, 2012; Okoth, 2021; Wilson, 2017). As Kevin Okoth (2021) argues, the decolonial theory of Mignolo, in particular, is a form of philosophical idealism, since it sees colonial relations as ultimately propelled by a prior epistemic framework associated with Enlightenment reason rather than by material practices such as resource extraction, land dispossession, ecological destruction, labour exploitation, slavery, and so on. ‘Delinked’ from the complicated histories of struggle against colonialism, and reduced to a discursive rejection of the epistemic basis of modernity, it is not so diffcult to see why some strands of decolonial theory have begun to be appropriated by reactionary political actors. Deepak’s (2021, p. 323) use of Mignolo’s theoretical framework to promote the notion of ‘Bharat’s indigenous consciousness’, playing into prominent Hindu nationalist tropes, is a prime example of such appropriation.
This article seeks to contribute to these critical readings of decolonial theory by reconstructing the analytical and normative framework underpinning one of its central concepts, the pluriverse, and comparing the way this concept is used by major thinkers of the European New Right (ENR), focussing on de Benoist and Dugin. If this comparison between decolonial theory and the ENR seems provocative, my aim here is not to obscure the fundamental oppositions between these traditions of thought or to argue that decolonial theory is surreptitiously a far-right discourse.
I am also by no means suggesting that we dismiss decolonial theory in general. [2] Far from monolithic, decolonial theory is a heterogeneous approach full of internal disagreements and yielding widely divergent political visions (see, for example, Ciccariello-Maher, 2020). Moreover, it is a field that should be praised for insisting on the serious engagement with the philosophies and social practices of indigenous and colonised peoples, an engagement that has produced illuminating developments in felds such as development studies, education, and global ethics, which continue to struggle against an entrenched disregard for cultural, linguistic, and epistemological diference.
While recognising the important interventions of decolonial theory, this article nevertheless aims to prompt caution amidst the rush to pluriversal thinking, and to point to the limits and risks inherent in the way such thinking conceptualises both imperialism and the histories of anti-imperial struggle. In my examination of decolonial theory’s version of the pluriverse, I find these problems to emerge most acutely in the writings of Mignolo, and hence he is my main (though not exclusive) focus in this part of the article. While this may carry a risk of recentering and canonising Mignolo, even as it criticises him, it seems a justifed risk given his enormous influence over the field.
My argument is that despite being opposed in many respects, a shared analytical and normative framework underpins the idea of the pluriverse in the writings of Mignolo and the European New Right. This is an anti-universalistic framework articulated around through a mutual opposition to the two dominant ideologies of the postwar era: liberalism and Marxism. It sees both as driven by a homogenising Enlightenment rationality, intent on remaking the world in its own image, and sees the defence and affirmation of (variously cultural, ontological, and epistemological) diference as the only way to cast of this universalising oppression. While they share this framework, I argue that the pluriverse as conceived by decolonial theory and the European New Right are also distinct in a fundamental respect: the former is an ‘open pluriverse’ that insists on the inevitable entanglement between peoples, while the latter is a ‘closed pluriverse’ that claims cultural diversity can only survive through the separation of ethnonational communities from one another. Nevertheless, I suggest, Mignolo’s recent writings on Russia demonstrate that the distinction between the open and closed pluriverse may not be as impermeable as one would hope.
This article suggests that for all its decolonising claims, the idea of the pluriverse (open or closed) cannot provide a foundation for challenging colonial relations, or for constructing a genuinely transformative and emancipatory politics. In viewing the crises of the present to issue from a ‘will to render the world one’ (Escobar, 2018, p. 66), and seeing the consequences of ongoing imperial relations exclusively in terms of standardisation, homogeneity and monoculture, the framework of the pluriverse overlooks that imperialism does not only homogenise and erase difer- ence—which it certainly does on a cultural level—but also constantly and relentlessly produces diference in the form of striated, hierarchical, and often essentialist ethnic, racial, national, and sexual identities.
Such differentiations within and between populations, which imperial ideologies work to present as natural and eternal at the same pace that they fabricate them, are central mechanisms in the formation and functioning of imperial regimes. Viewing imperialism not as a system of contingent material relationships and processes underpinned by capitalism’s need to self-accumulate, but as a diffuse drive for unification at the heart of ‘Enlightenment thought’, thinkers of the pluriverse often neglect a more productive analysis of how exploitative global social relations are consolidated through combined processes of social differentiation and cultural homogenisation.
This has consequences for political practice: many varieties of pluriversal thinking, according to which cultural difference is in itself emancipatory and universals are in themselves oppressive, may do more to encourage the closure of political communities than to construct new concepts of transnational solidarity and anticolonial universalism—concepts capable of incorporating plural and democratic visions of how to transform the world—that are needed today. [3]
The pluriverse according to decolonial theory
In decolonial theory, the concept of the pluriverse is especially associated with the work of Arturo Escobar (2018), Walter Mignolo (2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2018a, 2018b), and Mario Blaser (2009). For these authors, the pluriverse refers to the idea that there is not one universe, world, or mode of being, but many. This ontological plurality is considered to be a possibility foreclosed by the monist ontological matrix of what several decolonial theorists call ‘Modernity/Coloniality’ (Mignolo, 2012).
The ontology of Modernity/Coloniality is a ‘one-world world’ (Law, 2015), because even if it recognises that a multiplicity of cultures, viewpoints, and perspectives on reality exist, it reduces these to mere representations or ‘beliefs’ beneath which, it insists, only one true substratum of reality persists. This reality is Nature (which retains the status of a universal), separated from Culture (the realm of particular, and variously adequate, representations of Nature). Decolonial theory thus sees the one-world-world as premised upon the distinction and hierarchical rela- tionship between Nature and Culture, which ‘constitutes the ontological bedrock of a system of hierarchies between the modern and the non-modern’ (Blaser, 2009, p. 888), and which breeds other hierarchical dualisms, such as that of the human/non-human, animate/inanimate, thought/body, and fact/value, which decolonial theorists argue are alien to indigenous cosmologies (Blaney & Tickner, 2017, p. 4).
Pluriversal thinkers are less interested in negating the premises of Modernity/ Coloniality than in affirming or ‘render[ing] visible’ those worlds which have been ‘erased’ by its repressive logic. For example, Escobar writes that thinkers of the pluriverse ‘hope to render visible those heterogeneous assemblages of life that enact nondualist, relational worlds’ and in doing so to ‘expose anew the [one-world-word’s] epistemic inability to recognize that which exceeds it’ (Escobar, 2018, p. 66). Thus, even if the pluriversal thinkers endeavour to distance themselves from the liberal politics of recognition, one of the major goals underpinning their project is ultimately the recognition of difference—but, they stress, ontological diference. In colonial contexts, the stakes of such recognition are high. Those worlds which go unrecognised may find themselves subject to ‘ontological erasure’ (Blaney & Tickner, 2017, p. 3), a term invoking the overlapping processes of genocidal, cultural, and cartographical elimination which Patrick Wolfe argued are at the core of settler colonialism. [4]
Guided by this notion of ontological erasure, pluriversal thinkers tend to cast the refusal to recognise radically diferent indigenous peoples—as autonomous, as human, or as even there at all (as in the terra nullius imaginary)—as the driving force behind the colonial elimination of difference. The pluriverse’s strategic vision is ultimately based on an inversion of this schema: if radically different indigenous peoples could be recognised in their autonomy and humanity, then such processes of ‘erasure’ or ‘elimination’ would not take place. As a result, the pluriverse is an inseparably descriptive and normative concept: it describes what exists (plurality and difference), and it prescribes how political actors should relate to one another (in ways that recognise and affirm such plurality and diference).
For Mignolo, the pluriverse is defned by its rejection of what he deems to be ‘three main ideologies of Western civilization’: Christianity, liberalism, and Marxism (2012, p. xxi). Marxism and liberalism are ‘two sides of the same coin’, Mignolo maintains, mirroring in one another their universalising premises (2012, p. 311). Both are guided by a unilinear view of world history, which casts indigenous modes of life as stages along a developmental trajectory ending with western modernity. Both are also ‘global designs’ (2012, p. 310) incarnating dangerous ‘abstract universals’ (2012, p. 272), illustrated in the IMF, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other. Mignolo’s criticisms of Marxism, which tend to be uniform among thinkers of the pluriverse, pivot on this familiar point: Marxism is constitutively and inescapably Eurocentric; it imports an analytical and normative model derived from Europe onto the colonised world with little attention to local conditions, bulldozing cultural particularity; caught in the western epistemic circle, Marxism ends up reproducing the system of capitalist modernity it purports to oppose. Even more critical Marxists, such as Marx himself, ‘remain within the same cosmology that created the problems they were trying to solve’, Mignolo argues (2012, p. xxi). [4]
The decolonial, for Mignolo and other thinkers of the pluriverse, has found a way to escape modernity’s critical circle: it ‘confronts all of Western civilization, which includes liberal capitalism and Marxism’, and it does so ‘from the perspective of the colonies and ex-colonies rather than from the perspective internal to Western civilization itself’ (Mignolo, 2011a, p. xviii). Yet only some perspectives from the (ex-)colonies are true to the spirit of decoloniality, which Mignolo differentiates from the decolonisation movements of the twentieth century. These movements may initially have been animated by the desire for ‘decoloniality’, he argues, but they wound up being caught tragically in the logic of the one-world-world. They failed for this reason: ‘as in socialism/communism, they changed the content but not the terms of the conversation, and maintained the very idea of the state within a global capitalist economy’ (2011b, p. 51). Indeed, any political project seeking to take hold of the state apparatus cannot help but fall into the terms of coloniality, Mignolo argues, and into the ‘ego-centred’ logic of centralised governance and planning, which he takes to inhere in both Marxism and liberalism (2018a, p. xiv). Against such centralised planning, pluriversality is a spontaneous bottom-up emergence: ‘pluriversality cannot be designed and universally managed; it just happens‘ (Mignolo, 2018b, p. 95). Pluriversal politics, at least Mignolo’s version, is suspicious of institutions as such—but above all, it rejects any political project associated with state power.
Mignolo writes:
[D]ecolonial and communal personalities are driven by the search for love, conviviality, and harmony. For this reason, decoloniality cannot aim to take the state, as was the aim of the decolonization movements during the Cold War. And so decoloniality also delinks from Marxism. Indeed, it withstands alignment with any school or institution that would divert its pluriverse back into a universe, its heterogeneity back into a totality (2018a, p. xiv).
Yet the politics underpinning Mignolo’s idea of decoloniality are aligned with a specific set of political projects and institutions, notably the alter-globalisation movement, which emerged predominantly in the US and Latin America around the turn of the millennium and emphasised the building of counter-power, prefgurative institutions, temporary autonomous zones, and communal modes of being. This orientation was itself shaped by a specifc conjuncture: labour movements were at a low, defeated by neoliberalism; widespread disillusionment in state socialism reigned; and Marxism had effectively been forced out of academic discourse. Through the ascendancy of multinational corporations, mass consumer goods spread inexorably into the most distant regions of the globe, and cultural homogenisation and standardisation indeed seemed to be the order of the day: to many onlookers, US empire seemed to express itself through the ‘McDonaldsisation’ or ‘Cocacolonisation’ of the planet.
This was the conjuncture in which Mignolo’s political views, and those of many of the founding thinkers of decoloniality, were formed. Yet while the world has since changed in signifcant ways, this political orientation remains preserved within the concept of the pluriverse, which has taken on a vigorous new life in academic discourse today.
Imperialism and the production of difference
While never defined explicitly, a particular concept of imperialism underpins the pluriversal imaginaries of Mignolo and other decolonial theorists. This concept bypasses current debates about whether imperial relations can be understood as primarily economic relations—as the transfer of surplus value from dominated countries to an ‘imperialist bloc’ (Carchedi & Roberts, 2021)—or whether they are not more closely bound up in regimes of racial diferentiation (Wolfe, 2015), or the projects of particular states and the balance of forces underpinning them (Mohandesi, 2018).
Mignolo does not involve himself in such debates; for him, imperialism is not a concrete set of economic and political relationships but rather a difuse but omnipresent drive towards assimilation and standardisation, emanating ultimately from an apparently homogeneous and unchanging ‘Western thought’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, p. 3). For Escobar, too, imperialism can be defined simply as the ‘will to render the world one’ (2018, p. 66), or the tendency of ‘privileged groups [to] act as if the entire world were, or should be, as they see it’ (2018, p. xvi).
In a similar way, Mignolo casts imperialism as a universalising, assimilating rationality (an ‘imperial logic’), to the point that the concept of imperialism is often interchangeable with universalism, and appears most often in the form of the adjective ‘imperial’. As he writes, ‘Universality is always imperial and war driven’ (Mignolo, 2018a, 2018b, p. xii). As such, imperialism inheres in the ‘logics’ underpinning the UN, the IMF, and the multinational corporation as much as it does in the party form, the bureaucracy of the newly independent nation-state and the mind of the urban planner.
Imperialism, for Mignolo and other thinkers of the pluriverse, thus tends to be defned by three characteristics.
First, imperialism is defined as a will or telos towards homogenisation and assimilation. Imperialism has (or is) one logic or goal: the destruction of radically different cultures, worlds, and ontologies, whether through genocide, dispossession, or cultural transformation, and their incorporation into the western model.
Second, imperialism is understood as at root a form of epistemic domination: the domination of ‘imperial knowledge’ (e.g. Mignolo, 2009, p. 176), ‘imperial episte- mology’ (Mignolo, 2009, p. 177), ‘imperial logic’ (Mignolo, 2007, p. 458), or ‘the imperial form of consciousness’ (Mignolo, 2007, p. 462). No decolonial thinker would deny that imperialism has material efects, but its engine, driving force, and unifying core is nevertheless ‘Enlightenment thought’.
Third, and as a consequence, imperialism is conceived as a distinctly western phenomenon. The ‘one-world world’ logic of imperialism has its unique source in western rationality, a current of thought spanning ‘from the European Renaissance to the US neoliberalism’ (Mignolo, 2009, p. 176). In this way, western thought is portrayed as uniformly committed to universalism, while universalism is provincialised as a form of thought or political rationality that could only issue from, or make sense to, the western mind. This overlooks both the anti-universalist traditions that also run through the history of western political thought (some of which I come to below in the discussion of Schmitt), and the varieties of universalism issuing from other parts of the world (see n. 3).
Blinkered by these three characteristics, this pluriversal conceptualisation of imperialism cannot account for the fact that imperial processes just as often create or reinforce forms of difference as they erase them. Imperialism’s racial regimes are by no means necessarily assimilationist in nature; perhaps more often, they work to intensify diferences of race, caste, culture, nationality, sexuality, and class within colonial spaces, so that colonised populations can be governed and value extracted more successfully. There is a wealth of literature that testifes to this point. To give just a few examples: Patrick Wolfe (2015) traced the way in which new racial logics have been generated from the varying confgurations of land, labour, and class in diferent settler-colonial contexts. Nandita Sharma (2019) and Mahmood Mamdani (2020) both show how the postcolonial era has engendered new, violent separations between the categories of ‘native’ and ‘migrant’, and how discourses of indigeneity have become bound up in nationalist agendas. Suren Pillay (2021) describes how the architects of South African apartheid elaborated policies of ‘Bantu education’ as a means of separating the schooling systems of black and white South Africans. And as Maria Lugones (2007) shows, imperialism also creates new differential regimes of gender and sexuality, rather than simply imposing a homogeneous western sexual order onto the colonised world. While heterogeneous cultures of gender and sexuality were indeed destroyed by imperialism, a proliferation of new sexual codes, rules, and stratifying systems emerged in their place, with often antithetical sexual regimes attached to white, black and indigenous women, for example (see also Stoffel, 2022).
This imperial production of diference was a familiar reality to colonised peoples. As Adom Getachew (2019) demonstrates, postwar anticolonial thinkers had long criticised the notion, put forward by colonial actors and certain Marxists alike, that colonialism would create ‘one world’. Instead, such thinkers insisted that ‘Europe’s effort to produce “a world after its own image” through imperial expansion was always a chimera that belied colonial dependencies and inequalities. Imperial integration did not create one world but instead entailed racialized diferentiation’ (2019, p. 4).
Yet the framework of the pluriverse tends to conceal or at least minimise this fundamental logic of differentiation by casting imperialism as instead a unilateral process of homogenisation, standardisation, and oneness. This flawed understanding of imperialism, which enters into many (if certainly not all) versions of pluriversal thinking, boils down to a simple antinomic schema: what oppresses the world is ontological or epistemological sameness, and what will liberate it is ontological or epistemological difference. As we shall see, this diagnosis and its remedy are also the constant refrain of the far right’s thinkers of the pluriverse.
Alain de Benoist’s ethnopluralist pluriverse
Within the European New Right (ENR), the idea of the pluriverse frst appeared in the writings of Alain de Benoist. De Benoist is the founder, with Dominique Venner, of the French Nouvelle Droite, the intellectual movement from which the European New Right originates. The Nouvelle Droite emerged in the late 1960s with the founding of the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (Research and Study Group for European Civilisation, or GRECE), conceived by de Benoist and Venner as a vehicle for a counter-hegemonic ‘metapolitical’ project and a ‘Gramscianism of the Right’ (Bar-On, 2007, p. 47). Guided by the aim, the Nouvelle Droite has sought to disassociate itself from the overt racism of traditional far-right organisations; this strategy of ‘plausible deniability’ has served it well in the past decade or so, its ideas being taken up vigorously by a younger generation in the identitarian movement across Europe as well as by the developing network of ‘dissident right’ writers, podcasters, and activists based in the US. Nouvelle Droite ideas have made their way well into the mainstream as well, for example by finding articulation in Marine Le Pen’s arguments against immigration (Rueda, 2021, p. 229).
One of the key pillars of the success of the Nouvelle Droite, and a constant refrain from 1968 until the present, has been their concern with the erasure of cultural diversity and their insistence that cultural groups should therefore be endowed with a ‘right to difference’. This is the basis of what the Nouvelle Droite dub ‘ethnopluralism’: a vision of closed ethnic groups whose identities can only be preserved by way of their separation from one another. The foundational text of ethnopluralism is de Benoist and Charles Champetier’s Manifesto for a European Renaissance (2012).
In this text, frst published in 1999, de Benoist and Champetier describe the world as ‘a pluriversum, a multipolar order in which great cultural groups fnd themselves confronting one another in a shared global temporality’ (2012, pp. 43-44).If these ‘great cultural groups’ had for most of human history existed in separate worlds, modernity and globalisation have forced them into artifcial spatiotemporal proximity, dissolving all diferences to form an indistinct human mass. The main forces behind this ‘unprecedented menace of homogenisation which looms over the entire world’ are liberalism and Marxism (2012, p. 48). Both incarnate modernity’s universalising drive, seeking to remake the world in their image. As the authors write, ‘The main enemy of this pluriverse will be any civilisation pretending to be universal and regarding itself entrusted with a redeeming mission (“Manifest Destiny”) to impose its model on all others’ (de Benoist & Champetier, 2012, p. 45). This anti-universalism is—in this respect—indistinguishable from critique of the ‘one-world world’ put forward by Mignolo and others:
The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world … Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernisation of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness by imposing on the world a supposedly superior model invariably presented as ‘progress’ (De Benoist & Champetier, 2012, p. 42-43).
If these are the classic parameters of a decolonial critique, the Nouvelle Droite’s anti-universalism nevertheless differs from the decolonial theorists’ in that it rests on a conceptual separation between an indigenous European identity and a homogenising and imperial ‘West’. Guillaume Faye, another major figure of the Nouvelle Droite, expounds this conceptual move in his L’Occident comme déclin (2010): ‘The West is no longer European, and Europe is no longer the West’. This is because the West is not a location but rather a movement of de-locating, de-rooting, and de-culturation; ‘to be Western is to be nothing rather than something’ (Faye, 2010).
As such, the west appears here again in metaphysical terms as a homogenising force, a drive to empty, eradicate and flatten the substantiality of difference. It is via this same schema of difference and homogeneity that the Nouvelle Droite claims itself as a decolonial project in solidarity with indigenous peoples across the world. De Benoist and Champetier write ‘The French New Right upholds equally ethnic groups, languages, and regional cultures under the threat of extinction’ and ‘supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism’ (2012, p. 50).
De Benoist and Champetier argue that ‘differences are the very substance of social life’ (2012: 49) and efforts to suppress them will only cause them to burst forth in ‘pathological’ forms (2012, p. 48). For them, cultural mixing leads to cultural disintegration: ‘All cultures have their own “centre of gravity”‘ (Herder): different cultures provide diferent responses to essential questions. This is why all attempts to unify them end up destroying them’ (de Benoist & Champetier, 2012, pp. 25-26). Immigration is therefore neither benefcial for the host country nor for the migrants, who are uprooted from their cultural centre of gravity and valued only as a source of abstract labour, ‘reduced … to the level of merchandise that can be relocated anywhere’ (2012, p. 53).
It is on this basis that de Benoist and Champetier can claim that the Nouvelle Droite is committed to a ‘differentialist’ anti-racism which, unlike the anti-racism of the left, would be capable of truly valuing racial diference rather than denying it or seeking the assimilation of races into a non-raced global order. ‘For the New Right, the struggle against racism is not won by negating the concept of races, nor by the desire to blend all races into an undifferentiated whole’ (de Benoist & Cham- petier, 2012, p. 52). This fear of the erosion of the borders between racial, ethnic or cultural groups is intrinsically related to de Benoist’s use of the concept of the pluriverse, which he draws from Carl Schmitt (de Benoist & Champetier, 2012, p. 22 n. 6). Schmitt states in The Concept of the Political that, ‘The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe’ (1996), thus redefining politics as premised on a necessary diferentiation between political communities—the friend/enemy distinction— which he considers to be an essential element of a healthy international order. ‘The political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world’, Schmitt wrote (1996, p. 53). These principles, and the infuence of Schmitt, have marked the ENR’s ideas since the early years of GRECE (Bar-On, 2007, pp. 47, 95-97).
Today, de Benoist’s vision of the pluriverse lives on in currents of far-right thought that are more openly violent and exclusionary than his relatively mild-mannered Manifesto. For example, Faye has done much to further a far-right common sense in which white Europeans are victims of an ‘immigrant colonisation’ (2011, p. 231) led by Islam and the global south with the support of American elites, replacing ‘indigenous’ white populations in an ‘invasion [that] is as much about maternity wards as it is about porous borders’ (2011, p. 68). If the villains are external to Europe, they have been produced by European civilisation itself, which is ‘gangrened with the cosmopolitanism that comes with the Western system’ (2011, p. 67). Against de Benoist’s slogan that GRECE struggles for ‘the cause of peoples’, Faye insists ‘We fght only for the cause of our own people’s destiny’ (2011, p. 65). This is no longer a vision of the pluriverse at all, but it rests on the basic schema that subtends the politics of difference: that civilisation has succumbed to the rot of sameness, and that the assertion of identities in their difference from one another will bring forth a radiant new age.
Alexander Dugin’s ‘imperialist anti‑imperialism’
Outside of France, the foremost representative of ethnopluralism is the Russian theorist Alexander Dugin. Dugin’s writing synthesises many elements of Nouvelle Droite thought with a range of other radical right ideologies, including German SS-sponsored völkisch occultism, Julius Evola’s traditionalism, the interwar German thinkers of the ‘Conservative Revolution’, and interwar Russian ‘Eurasianism’ (Laruelle, 2019, p. 159). Dugin’s ideas have had a clear infuence on Russia’s military and political circles: his frst major book, The Foundations of Geopolitics: Russia’s Geopolitical Future, published in 1997, was commissioned by the then-Minister of Defence and has since been reissued four times and read widely among the Russian military (Laruelle, 2019, p. 157). The book is described as ‘a 600-page program for the eventual rule of ethnic Russians over the lands extending “from Dublin to Vladivostok”‘ (Dunlop, 2001, p. 92)—an ambition premised, frst and foremost, on the elimination of Ukraine as an independent state.
At the same time, Dugin is a keen proponent of the idea of the pluriverse, which is central to his two key theoretical manifestos, The Fourth Political Theory (2012) and The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory (2017). These texts display the infuence not only of radical right thought but also of French philosophy and anthropology, especially the critique of universal history put forward by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Like the decolonial theorists discussed above, Dugin envisages the pluriverse as above all an epistemological project opposed to the unifying knowledge claims of modernity. The essence of each people is built upon its own epistemic framework, ‘opposed to a unitary episteme of Modernity including science, politics, culture, anthropology’ (Dugin, 2012, p. 137). Modernisation, westernisation, and colonisation are for Dugin, as for Mignolo, ‘a synonymous series’: all refer to the process of imposing upon plural civilisations an exogenous developmental model (Dugin, 2017, p. 28).
‘Now, we are still in colonisation’, Dugin writes in his most recent book. ‘There is only one subject: the modern Western liberal subject, which tries to impose its own values as a universal formal order over all others’ (Dugin, 2021, p. 73).
Liberalism is the ‘first’ political theory to have imposed this universalising logic upon the world, but Dugin insists Marxism and fascism (the ‘second’ and ‘third’ political theories) are equally trapped in modernity’s ‘hermeneutic circle’, based as they are on the ‘normative hierarchization of societies based on the ethnic, religious, social, technological, economic, or cultural grounds’ (Dugin, 2012, p. 40). Rejecting all three of these theories, Dugin’s ‘fourth’ political theory insists on ontological relativism and the affirmation of non- or premodern modes of being:
We should rediscover the multiplicity of all kinds of cultures and societies, and we should accept them. Accept the most archaic people, the most archaic societies and tribes living outside the so-called ‘civilization’ as an example to follow, maybe, or to discover, study, something that we need to understand first, not judge or try to bring within the criteria of Western political modernity (Dugin, 2021, p. 71).
At the heart of Dugin’s rhetoric is thus an insistence on the rights of traditional cultures to self-determination in the face of globalism’s homogenising drive. Yet, as we have seen, he is also an outspoken supporter of Russia’s entitlement to expand its borders and eliminate independent nation-states such as Ukraine. How does Dugin reconcile these apparently contradictory positions? Quite simply by theorising Russian expansion as itself a struggle for difference against the reigning unipolarity of the west. Central here is his vision of Eurasia, an extended civilisational bloc with Russia at its centre, coexisting with four or five other civilisations in the world. For Dugin, Eurasia has been struggling against western colonisation, encompassing both the military encroachment of NATO and a more diffuse ‘planetary colonization’: a financial, ideological, and technological process today spearheaded by the World Economic Forum and their ‘Great Reset’ (Dugin, 2021, pp. 2-4). The war in Ukraine is thus the frst stage of what Dugin calls ‘the Great Awakening’, a millenarian battle to overturn the current liberal, posthumanist world order and usher in an authentic multipolar world (Dugin, 2021).
Dugin and Carl Schmitt’s pluriverse of ‘great spaces’
Tamir Bar-On and Miguel Paradela-López (2022) have aptly classifed Dugin’s political framework as a form of ‘imperialist anti-imperialism’. Yet Dugin’s paradoxical orientation involves more than simply the opportunistic mobilisation of today’s popular decolonial discourse for imperial ends. Rather, Dugin’s imperialist anti-imperialism is grounded in a theory of the international developed by Schmitt in the 1930s and 1940s. This theory is captured in Schmitt’s concepts of the Grossraum (or ‘great space’) and Reich (realm) (Schmitt, 2011). A Grossraum can be understood as a civilisational bloc (to borrow Dugin’s terms), while the Reich is the spiritual, logistical, and moral centre of this bloc. As Schmitt writes, ‘Not every state or every people within the Grossraum is in itself a piece of the Reich… But, to be sure, every Reich has a Grossraum into which its political idea radiates and which is not to be confronted with foreign interventions’ (2011, p. 101). For Schmitt, a Grossraum is not just a ‘great space’ in the quantitative sense; ‘great’ also signals qualities of power and accomplishment. Key to the achievement of a Grossraum is that it is internally homogeneous (it has a coherent civilisational and racial identity) but externally differentiated (it resists assimilation or mixing with other Grossräume). Finally, the Grossraum must be a territorially coherent space extending across a singular land mass.
Schmitt insists that Reich and Grossraum are anti-imperial concepts, by claiming they are opposed on an ontological level to what he calls the ‘imperium’ (2011, p. 102). The imperium is based on the predominance of British and American sea power. This sea power gives rise to a type of scattered, territorially incoherent empire and to a spatial-juridical framework that regards the earth’s surface as so many trafc routes rather than as the concrete ‘living space’ of a rooted people (Schmitt, 2011, p. 91). Schmitt’s imperium thus has all the qualities of what the contemporary far right calls ‘globalism’. It is the ‘non-stately, non-national overreach into a universalistic global law as carried out by the Western democracies’ (Schmitt, 2011, p. 110), a totalising system that is at once cultural, fnancial, and epistemological, and which instantiates the values of abstraction and universalism. As Schmitt writes, ‘The juridical way of thinking that pertains to a geographically incoherent world empire scattered across the earth tends by its own nature towards universalistic argumentation’ (2011, p. 91). Under the guise of abstract universals, such as human rights or the open society, the imperium ‘interferes in everything’—this is ‘a pan-interventionist ideology as it were, all under the cover of humanitarianism’ (Schmitt, 2011, p. 90).
A racially coded opposition between abstract and concrete is at work in Schmitt’s concept of the Grossraum. Schmitt argues that the imperium corresponds to an ’empty, neutral, mathematical-natural scientifc conception of space’, while the Grossraum is based on a concrete conception of space (as a cultivated ‘living space’)—which, he writes, ‘is incomprehensible to the spirit of the Jew’ (2011, p. 122). This echoes de Benoist and Champetier’s (2012) elevation of the apparently concrete, in which local ‘productive’ economies are opposed to state planning and transnational finance capital, the rhythms of the rural against the artifciality of urban consumer life, and the folk traditions of ‘rooted’ peoples and their intuitive ways of knowing against the abstract reasoning of globalist elites.
Schmitt, Dugin and de Benoist’s writings might thus be seen as exemplary cases of ‘the hypostatization of the concrete’ and the ‘hatred of the abstract’ that Moishe Postone identifed as underpinning antisemitic ideology (Postone, 1980, pp. 111-113). For Postone this emerged from a ‘foreshortened anti-capitalist movement’: a one-sided critique of capitalism that artificially separated certain of its characteristics (associated with capitalism’s abstract value dimension) from the capitalist totality, in which the apparently ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ are inseparably entwined (1980, p. 13). The Jew’s imagined power was thus characterised in terms of ‘abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility’ (Postone, 1980, p. 108), characteristics taken to represent capitalism as such. It followed that to rid the world of the evils of capitalism one need ‘only’ destroy the Jews—hence Postone’s characterisation of Auschwitz as ‘a factory to “destroy value”‘ and ‘to “liberate” the concrete from the abstract’ (1980, p. 114).
To liberate the concrete from the forces of abstraction is similarly the aim of Schmitt’s Grossräume order. Indeed, it is this antinomy between concrete and abstract that enables the concept of the Grossraum to contain anti-imperial and imperial sentiments at the same time. Schmitt rejects one kind of imperial order (that of the ‘abstract’, territorially incoherent, sea-based, artifcial imperium) in favour of what is evidently another (a ‘concrete’, territorially coherent, land-based, organic imperialism). We might call the frst ‘deterritorial imperialism’ and the second ‘territorial imperialism’. It is the separation between the two that allows Dugin to insist in his more recent writings on the ‘imperial renaissance’ of Russia, while also framing this project in decolonial language (2021, pp. 41-43).
We can recall that for the decolonial theorists, imperialism was (1) defned by homogenisation and assimilation, (2) equated with epistemic domination, and (3) a distinctly western phenomenon. Dugin’s concept of deterritorial imperialism bears these same three characteristics, while affixing to them a further characteristic of (4) territorial incoherence and abstraction. For Dugin, deterritorial imperialism is a uniquely ‘ethnocidal’ kind of imperialism, geared to the erasure of traditional and ethnic identities. And he argues (again following Schmitt) that any political idea incarnates the will of a particular people—he calls this a theory of ‘collective historical idealism’ (Dugin, 1992)—deterritorial imperialism emerges from the special will of the western people, which he sees as the only culture imbued with its universalising mode of reasoning, its drive to erase diference, and its ‘pan-interventionist’ rationality. This enables him to cast Russia’s territorial imperialism as an urgent defensive project: ‘Either Neo-Eurasianism will become the fundamental paradigm of the Russian elite, or an occupation awaits us’ (Dugin, 2021, p. 86).
Between the open and the closed pluriverse
Despite the similarities between the decolonial theorists’ pluriverse and that of the European New Right, they differ in one fundamental way: the former can be characterised as an open pluriverse of entanglement between different social, cultural or ethnic groups or peoples, while the latter as a closed pluriverse defned by the separation between such groups. As Kimberly Hutchings notes, this slippage between separateness and entanglement is one of the key ambiguities of a pluriversal ethical framework: ‘One’s vision of the ideal pluriversal world will differ depending on whether one puts emphasis on “difference” or “relationality”‘, she writes (2019, p. 120). ‘To the extent that the ideal incorporates separateness, it pushes decolonial ethics towards a kind of pure affirmation of diference, and prejudges attempts to ground it in the politics of actual engagement between people and ideas’ (Hutchings, 2019, p. 120).
The pluriverse of de Benoist and Dugin sees the concept’s tendency towards separateness and ‘identity policing’ (Hull, 2022) unfold to its most extreme conclusions. For these thinkers, the pluriverse is premised on the idea that culturally diverse worlds can only live a healthy existence in separation from one another.
Hence, the border between cultural worlds must be erected and re-affirmed at risk of civilisational decline. For if each ethnic identity is defined by its organic attachment to a given piece of territory, then the spatial coexistence of different groups cannot be possible; some elements must be deemed ‘alien’ and forced out.
By contrast, the decolonial theorists insist that their pluriverse is composed of many related and entangled worlds which mingle and coexist with one another. Escobar writes ‘It should be stressed that different ontologies do not mean separate worlds. Worlds are multiple and different but not disconnected… they overlap and interact with one another’ (2018, p. 83). For Mignolo, too, the pluriverse is defined in terms of entanglement: ‘if a pluriverse is not a world of independent units (as is the case with cultural relativism), but a world entangled through and by the colonial matrix of power, then a way of thinking and understanding that dwells in the interstices of the entanglement, at its borders, is needed’ (2018a, p. xi). In line with Mignolo’s prescription, decolonial thinkers of the pluriverse for the most part seek not to enforce the borders between worlds but rather seek to wrestle with their diferences through ‘relational ways of knowing’ (Escobar, 2018, p. 83) or ‘inter-cosmological dialogue’ (Behr & Shani, 2021).
But how can we be sure that the open pluriverse will remain open, and that the tendency towards separation—which is seemingly ever-present where these ontologies or worlds are deemed quite simply incommensurable—does not creep back in unannounced? Mignolo’s more recent discussions regarding the differences between ‘dewesternisation’ and ‘decoloniality’ indicate this to be a genuine risk.
Dewesternisation, for Mignolo, signifes the process of emerging multipolarity: it is ‘a state-led project’ expressed in the administrations of the BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and Iran (Mignolo, 2018b, p. 92). Thinkers of decoloniality, on the other hand, ‘rejected the idea of building (or taking already constituted) nation-states’ and instead ‘focused on the necessity of changing the terms (rules, principles, assumptions) of the conversation’, thus operating at the levels of epistemology and civil society (Mignolo, 2018b, p. 106). In sum, dewesternisation aims to seize control of the ‘colonial matrix of power’, while decoloniality seeks to delink from it, opening the way to true pluriversality (Mignolo, 2018b, p. 106).
It would seem, then, that decoloniality would oppose dewesternisation as well as westernisation. But this does not turn out to be the case. ‘Decolonial delinking’, Mignolo writes, ‘should beneft from and draw on dewesternization’ (2018a, p. xiv). In a more recent essay, he is even more explicit about the partnership between decoloniality and dewesternisation, which now seem to be merely two parts of a necessary division of labour. ‘[M]ultipolar de-Westernization is walking hand in hand with pluriversal gnoseology’, he writes, even if ‘the first is the task of the State, the second of the political society in the public sphere’ (Mignolo, 2023). [6] And again, ‘Both [dewesternization and decoloniality] are contributing to gnoseological pluriversality displacing epistemological universality’ (2023). Dewesternisation has thus come over onto the side of pluriversality, opening the way to the much-anticipated world of many worlds. Considering that Mignolo understands dewesternisation to be led by the current governing regimes of Russia, Iran, India, and China, this seems a remarkable claim to make for a theorist ostensibly opposed to ethnonationalist or authoritarian political projects.
For Mignolo, the pluriverse is up against a single enemy: the west. Anything that opposes this enemy, which can help to break its power, is thus a legitimate ally and will help to open the door to a fourishing world of pluriversality, in which radical ontological diference can finally be affirmed. This reasoning leads Mignolo to a certain sympathy with even the current Russian administration, writing (in 2023) that China and Russia ‘are simply disobeying and working on the reconstitution of their own needs and interests. They are not attacking but defending themselves from the harassment of Western designs’ (Mignolo, 2023). Here is a clear expression of ‘campism’, which Dardot and Laval describe as a ‘one-sided anti-imperialism’ based on ‘the principle that the enemies of the Enemy are, if not friends, at least “objective allies” in a just fght’ (Dardot & Laval, 2022). Campism thus maps well onto the conceptual framework of difference and homogeneity that underpins the idea of the pluriverse as it appears in Mignolo and the European New Right. For if the single source of oppression is the totalising sameness of the western one-world world, then it is not a great leap to regard any type of difference-affirming project as a source of emancipation. Following this chain of reasoning, the open pluriverse (of relational ‘border-thinking’) and the closed pluriverse (of ethnonationalist and exclusionary formations) may not necessarily be opposed to one another after all. For Mignolo, they are allies in a just fght.
Conclusion
Today, discourses of decolonisation are mobilised by the neoliberal academy, warring administrations and teenage reactionaries alike to legitimate an assortment of violent and exclusionary agendas. Yet the notion of appropriation, describing the cynical seizure of an object with an authentic origin, is ultimately neither sufficient nor historically accurate to comprehend the parallel uses of the idea of the pluriverse in decolonial theory and the European New Right. While the term pluriverse begins to appear at a similar time in the writings of de Benoist (de Benoist & Champetier, 1999) and Mignolo (2002, p. 250), it is not that one of these authors appropriated it from the other; rather, their uses of the term can be traced to a mutual interest in Schmitt that became prominent at this time. [7]
This Schmitt revival, which took hold among critics of liberalism and globalisation from various political persuasions, began in the late 1980s with the journal Telos and was taken up vigorously again at the turn of the millennium (see Teschke, 2011). It helped to lay some of the foundations, in both its radical left and radical right adherents, for a common reading of capitalist modernity as a tendency to ‘render the world one’: a process of ever-increasing cultural, economic, political, aes- thetic, and spiritual homogeneity, guided by the universalising logics of liberalism. This reading persists today in the framework of the pluriverse. For Mignolo, it is this universalising drive that propels the continued colonial oppression of the global south. For the European New Right, on the other hand, the forces of universalism underpin the ‘crises’ of immigration, cultural mixing and the decay of traditional values that afflict ‘indigenous’ Europe.
Although the identifcation of victim and oppressor is at times inverted, the analysis is homologous in many ways. For both, what oppresses the world is ‘the ideology of sameness’ (de Benoist, 2022) or of the ‘one-world world’ (Law, 2015), and what will liberate it is the affirmation of ontological difference: of unique peoples and their incommensurable worlds.
I have argued above that this schema cannot give rise to an effective politics of decolonisation. There are two main reasons for this. The first revolves around its misunderstanding of the nature of imperialism: as I have argued, the framework of the pluriverse misrecognises the myriad ways in which imperialism does not simply erase but also produces difference, whether racial, cultural, class, caste, national, or sexual diference. From this perspective, the imperial structure of the global economy in fact generates the antithesis of a one-world world: imperialism differentiates and stratifies global populations, assigning some to the sphere of wage labour, some to that of slavery, and others to that of unwaged social reproduction, locking some indelibly within carceral systems and others within slum economies, all the while proclaiming such differentiations to be natural in the sense of issuing from a cultural or biological essence.
While imperialism undoubtedly also engenders forms of epistemic, aesthetic, and cultural homogeneity, it is hard to argue that this is its sole or even its principal logic. The inability of thinkers of the pluriverse, on the both the left and right, to perceive this is related to their abandonment of a form of analysis that would examine the complex material relationships that underpin imperialism in its historical and contemporary forms, in favour of an idealist reading of imperialism as a logic or rationality that manifests itself uniformly across the most diverse geographical and historical settings.
Moreover, by casting universalism as an exclusively western phenomenon, thinkers of the pluriverse tend to view imperialism as something that emerges exclusively from the west: if imperialism is at its core ‘Enlightenment rationality’, then it is a product of a particular culture (‘western’ culture) and lives and dies with that culture. [8] Even leaving aside the problems this notion of an undiferentiated ‘west’ creates for comprehending the antagonistic histories of US imperialism and that of European states (see Mohandesi, 2018), today’s world of increasing multipolarity demonstrates that imperialism is not simply a ‘western’ phenomenon.
If imperialism is understood as a set of relationships in which a state (or set of states) seeks to dominate or violate the sovereignty of another, often buttressed by racial ideology and as a means of extracting value from the subjugated region, then imperialist projects are a manifest feature of the current regimes of China, India, and Russia, even while these are occluded by the decolonial rhetorics of these regimes. [9] Yet the fact that today’s multipolar world is marked by this ‘clash of conficting imperialisms’ (Fekete, 2023) is something that pluriversal antinomies of difference and universalism, which locate imperialism in the culture or rationality of the ‘west’, leave us unable to comprehend.
Secondly, I have argued that the framework of the pluriverse, with its antinomy of (bad) universalism and (good) difference, erases from history the complex conceptions and practices of universalism invented by movements against colonialism and empire. These anticolonial movements rejected the false universalisms of liberal capitalism and Eurocentric visions of history, but refused to replace these with their easy antonyms of difference, plurality, or particularity. Rather, they sought to change the very meaning of universalism so that it designated not the standardisation of forms of life, but the very opposite: a world in which all people could be universally free to determine the (inevitably diferent) conditions of their lives. [10]
Such movements often viewed the nation as in fact a vehicle for a fundamentally internationalist political project—a project seeking to remake the world for the emancipation of all those within it—rather than as an endpoint in itself. These movements often drew, too, from elements of local culture to transform the world of nation-states so that it could be governed by and for all, and to create alliances between all oppressed peoples. It is precisely these histories of anticolonial solidar- ity, between peoples considered to occupy not incommensurable worlds but the very same world, that the pluriversal thinking of many strands of decolonial theory eliminate from view. In an era marked by the fragmentation of struggles for liberation, whether through forms of identity politics or simply a lack of coordination, the foreclosure of a universalistic mode of thought constitutes a serious political obstacle.
In navigating the structural similarities between the pluriversal visions of decolonial theory and those of the European New Right, I have argued that it is nevertheless important to contrast the open pluriverse of Mignolo and others to the closed pluriverse of Dugin and de Benoist. The open pluriverse views diferent cultural worlds as necessarily entangled, their borders overlapping. The closed pluriverse, by contrast, insists on the separation of cultures as a condition for their self-preservation. Yet, as I have suggested, Mignolo’s recent writings on ‘dewesternization’ provide a case study in the mechanics of how the open and closed pluriverse might blur into one another. The shifts Mignolo’s political thought appears to be undergoing should act as a caution, especially at a moment in which several erstwhile leftists have found themselves joining the ranks of the ‘anti-woke’ or ‘post-liberal’ culture warriors who draw similarly on ontologising logics of cultural and sexual difference. [11]
The decolonial and far-right concepts of the pluriverse emerged at a similar time: at the beginning the millennium, when the homogeneous destiny of humanity seemed to have become secured under a horizonless liberal capitalism. As ecological crisis has intensifed and the illusions of the liberal consensus have been decisively ruptured, the conditions are there for the framework of the pluriverse to continue to develop as a major ideological touchstone, on both the left and the right. If it does, we can wager that it will not succeed in overturning any of the fundamental structures of contemporary imperialism, which will continue to subjugate, dispossess and extract value where it can, whether through the erasure of racial, sexual, or cultural diferences or through their violent reproduction.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Kimberly Hutchings, Alberto Toscano, Alexander Stoffel, Felix del Campo, Ida Birkvad, Marie Louise Krogh, and two anonymous reviewers for their important feedback on early drafts of this article.
Notes
[1] ‘Decolonial theory’ is sometimes used to refer to all work wrestling critically with problematics of colonialism, decolonisation, and race. This is not the sense in which it is used here. Here ‘decolonial theory’ refers to the Latin American ‘decoloniality’ approach, whose most prominent thinkers include Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Mario Blaser, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Marisol de la Cadena.
[2] It may also be worth clarifying that my target here is (some strands of) decolonial theory, not decolonial struggles. The false equivalence sometimes posited between indigenous claims for land back and ‘blood and soil’ ethnonationalism is based on a formalism blind to the differences between struggles by those to whom the term ‘indigenous’ can in good faith be applied—the term reflecting a common relationship to a colonial process—and those who cynically appropriate the label of indigeneity while seeking to perpetuate these very colonial processes.
[3] For important discussions of these non-Eurocentric and anticolonial concepts of universalism, see, for example, Arnall (2022), Getachew (2016, 2019), Okoth (2023), Tomba (2019), Younis (2022).
[4] For important criticisms of this notion of the ‘logic of elimination’, see Sai Englert (2020) and Jack Davies (2023).
[5] For criticisms of, and alternatives to, such readings of Marx and Marxist thought in relation to indigenous thought and struggles, see, for example, Anderson (2010), Arnall (2022), Coulthard (2014), Tomba (2019).
[6] It is worth noting that de Benoist appears to be much less sympathetic to state-led projects of dewesternisation, and retains an anti-state and localist orientation that, while openly ethnonationalist, is in many other respects more on the side of Mignolo’s ‘decoloniality’.
[7] Mignolo (2018a, p. ix) traces his own use of the term ‘pluriverse’ to Franz Hinkelammert and Enrique Dussel, both of whom wrote about Schmitt in this period; as discussed above, de Beniost and Champetier (1999) cite Schmitt directly, with de Benoist referring to Schmitt as early as 1979 (see Bar-On 2016, p. 96).
[8] Dugin, as we have seen, undertakes the craftier move of splitting off an illegitimate western imperialism from a legitimate non-Western imperialism.
[9] For a persuasive discussion of how imperialism should be conceptualised today, see Mohandesi (2018).
[10] See, for example, Dirik et al. (2023), Getachew (2019), Okoth (2023), Younis (2022).
[11] See, for example, the magazine Compact, established in 2022 as a major new vehicle for Anglophone discourse drawing heavily on New Right themes yet portraying itself as an organ of the ‘dissident left’.
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Miri Davidson is an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Warwick. She works on the history of radical political thought, focussing on French Marxism, decolonial theory, and the European New Right.