Drawing on a 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 discussions of decolonization.
First, we argue that the erosion of the legitimacy of liberal orders renders the anti-colonial language available for authoritarian and conservative projects in both the Global South and North to articulate a selective rejection of universalism. 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.
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. Anticolonialism 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.
[The full text of this section is available in the PDF at the foot of this post.]
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-
[The full text of this section is available in the PDF at the foot of this post.]
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 antimigration 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.
[The full text of this section is available in the PDF at the foot of this post.]
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.
[The full text of this section is available in the PDF at the foot of this post.]
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.
[The full text of this section is available in the PDF at the foot of this post.]
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.
[The full text of this section is available in the PDF below.]
Gorkem Altinors (Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University, Türkiye), Priya Chacko (University of Adelaide, Australia), Miri Davidson (University of Warwick, United Kingdom), Aliaksei Kazharski (Charles University, Czech Republic), Sivamohan Valluvan (University of Warwick, United Kingdom), and Chenchen Zhang (Durham University, United Kingdom).
This article first appeared in International Political Sociology, Volume 20, Issue 2, June 2026.
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