TO THE END OF THE ‘POSTCOLONIAL MOMENT’ OF THE ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE: OUTLINES OF THE NEW RESEARCH PROGRAM

Philosophers only explain the world in different ways.

The point is to change the world.

Karl Marx, 11 Theses on Feuerbach [Marx, Engels, 1955, p. 4].

The first issue of the academic journal “Postcolonialism and Modernity” comes against a macro-historical backdrop: after a pause of almost forty years (!), a genuine anti-colonial struggle is returning to the world stage. What has caused and filled this pause? What are the signs of its end? The answers to these questions are the focus of this paper.

Another aim of the publication is to identify the “blind spots” of decolonization, the most promising topics that seem to require additional reflection, including in the pages of the new edition (hereafter referred to as “topic A”, “topic B”, “topic C”, etc. to “topic P”). In fact, this is a future research program that will enable the transition from “contemplative regional studies” in the study of Asia, Africa and Latin America to theoretical reflection on current issues of decolonization.

When and why was the anti-colonial struggle “put on pause”?

The fierce and sustained anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s had all but disappeared by the mid-1980s, leaving dozens of countries in a deeply entrenched system of neocolonialism (Taylor, 2020). The main reason is the withdrawal from the historical scene of an irreconcilable fighter and “ice-breaker” of the colonial world – the USSR. Indeed, the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the adoption of UN GA Resolution 1514 (XV) “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” of December 14, 1960, which was approved by an overwhelming majority of the then UN members (89 out of 99 countries), with only 9 abstentions [Denisov, Urnov, 2010] [1].

In the following decades, the USSR provided economic assistance to the newly liberated countries on such a large scale that we have yet to objectively assess its true size and significance (“topic A”), given the gradual discovery of Soviet archival materials on the subject [Vasiliev, Degterev, Shaw, 2022, pp. 1-17]. Whereas in mid-1957, the USSR had signed economic and technical assistance agreements with only 17 countries, by 1986, these agreements were signed with 84 countries (including 72 developing countries, of which 23 were least developed), including 36 African countries (Grekov et al. 1987, p. 24). The collapse of the socialist system led to the loss of the subjectivity of developing countries and the reduction of South-South political and economic cooperation in various formats (including UNCTAD, the Group of 77, the Non-Aligned Movement), making the concepts of self-sufficiency and “collective self-reliance” difficult to implement in practice [Gosovic, 2018; Kuznetsov, 2019].

However, the heat of the anti-colonial struggle began to recede even before the collapse of the USSR. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet elites had embarked on a course of integration into the “collective West”, the practical implementation of which became “new political thinking” [Gorbachev, 1987].

And if in the mid-1980s Soviet experts in the theory of scientific communism spoke of “the most sophisticated system of neocolonialist exploitation” [Portnyagin, 1988, p. 1], then a couple of years later, in the context of “new political thinking”, they also noted “the unstoppable process of socio-economic transformation in developing countries”, the unacceptability of “old thinking” and the importance of “collective, universal reaction, the struggle against the common misfortune threatening humanity” [Portnyagin, 1990, p. 2][2]. This raises the question of a critical and unbiased analysis of Soviet studies on the anti-colonial struggle: separating works of real theoretical and practical value from hypocritical and purely opportunistic ones (“topic B).

There were still battles for the “Angolan Stalingrad” – Cuito Cuanavale, which 30 years later Africans still extol as the greatest victory over the racist regime of South Africa [Campbell, 2020, p. 116], but the fate of most countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America for the next few decades was again in the clinging hands of their former colonizers. After all, it is impossible to simultaneously strive for integration with the “collective West” and fight against it in Africa!

Along with the change in the mood of the USSR, the pressure of the “collective West” was also increasing. And if in the military sphere the Soviet Union “held the blow” until the very end, its financial structural power initially left much to be desired [Degterev, 2021a]. In the 1940s, the USSR even negotiated the possibility of membership in the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank Group) [Minkova, 2017], but later abandoned the idea. Nevertheless, the USSR did not actively block UN cooperation with these institutions, although it did not support the establishment of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) [Larionova, 2019, pp. 147-148].

Lacking comparable financial resources for development with the US and its allies, which was clearly demonstrated by the creation of the UN Special Fund for Economic Development [Larionova, 2019, p. 149], the USSR was unable to offer an alternative to these institutions, which caused “disorder and confusion” among its allies. For example, Poland was a member of the IMF until 1950 and rejoined it in 1986, Czechoslovakia – until 1954, and Cuba – until 1964[3].  The PRC became a member of the Bretton Woods institutions in 1980, long before the collapse of the CMEA.

Many African countries began to cooperate actively with the IMF as early as the 1970s, and by the 1980s such countries were the vast majority (see Table 1), while continuing to receive Soviet assistance (Grekov et al., 1987).

Table 1

IMF programs in Africa (1980-1991)

Source: [Riddell, 1992, p. 56].

Note: + - The country is running at least one of the following IMF programs in a given year: Compensatory Financing Facility (CFF); Compensatory and Contingency Financing Facility (CCFF); Structural Adjustment Facility (SAF) or Extended SAF (ESAF).

Africa’s cooperation with the IMF has varied. In some countries there have been civil wars, and aid has often been stolen because of high levels of corruption. However, one should not underestimate the role of the economic adjustment programs of the Bretton Woods institutions, which literally reformatted national socioeconomic models [Perkins, 2014]. For all their country differences, these programs led to devaluation of national currencies, reduction of state involvement in the economy, elimination of subsidies and social expenditures, and trade liberalization [Riddell, 1992, p. 53].

The state simply withdrew from whole sectors of the economy, national industry was destroyed [Carmody, 1998] (often built with the participation of the USSR), and with it real sovereignty was disappearing. The “counter-revolutionary” role of the Bretton Woods structural adjustment programs in the process of decolonization has yet to be seriously explored (“topic B”). One by one, countries were increasingly integrated into the US-centric system of international economic relations.

Who to fight against? Collective neocolonialism

By the beginning of the 21^st century, neocolonialism has evolved considerably and its contemporary “agents” are very different from the usual images of “damned colonialists” created by Soviet propaganda half a century ago. The latter are perhaps the closest today except for descriptions of French policy in Africa [Amara et al., 2022; Davidchuk et al., 2022; Sidorov, 2019; Filippov, 2017; 2020; Vershave, 2003], which should be supplemented by the problem of self-determination of French overseas departments and territories (“topic D”) [Nezhentsev and Ponomarenko, 2017], whose small population has rights similar to those of the metropolis [Sirotkina, 2020, p. 83].

It is much more difficult to describe contemporary neocolonial practices in the former British colonies (“topic D”) [Tarabrin, 1969], where direct control was not initially used, but over the years it became increasingly “indirect”, to the point of delegating some functions to American “cousins”. In this context, of interest is the redistribution of global influence between the US and Britain at the signing of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, as well as the Atlantic Charter 2.0 in 2021[4]. After Brexit, discussions around the formation of a “global Britain” intensified, including through the re-actualization of the Commonwealth of Nations [Hearne et al., 2019].

Germany, deprived of its colonies under Article 119 of the Versailles Treaty of 1919[5], trying to atone for crimes committed more than a century ago and benefit from a preferential partnership in the 21^st century, is rather a “phantom neocolonialism” [Ivkina, 2021]. But the main problems of operationalizing contemporary neocolonialism are not even that.

Firstly, as European integration progressed, the former metropolises moved towards collective neocolonialism, primarily within the EU–ACP format. And while the Berlin Conference of 1884 reached agreements on the division of colonial possessions in Africa, the Lomé Conventions of the 1970s and 1990s formed an institutionalized system of preferential trade and economic cooperation between the former European metropolises and their colonies [Amuhaya, Degterev, 2022, pp. 125-177].

The 2000 Cotonou Treaty and the EU’s emerging 21^st century system of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with blocs from Asia, Africa and Latin America[6] is a move towards a more disruptive “peer-to-peer system” of trade relations for developing countries. In some cases, local integration projects collapse when EPAs are signed with the EU because of overlapping membership. A higher degree of integration (customs union and above) with a developed partner (EU) today closes the prospects of close integration with neighboring countries tomorrow. This is explicitly written in the texts of the respective agreements [Amuhaya, Degterev, 2022, p. 125-177].

The detrimental role of EU trade agreements with third countries in the formation of the modern neocolonial world-system, non-equivalent exchange and center-periphery relations (“topic G”) requires deep reflection. And this despite the fact that both the Ukrainian Maidan (2004 and 2014) [Foreign Policy ... 2019, p. 161-201], as well as the failed Belarusian one (2020) were directly related to Euro-association and the prevention of alternative Eurasian integration. In other words, the configuration of trade agreements beneficial to the EU is established literally “by fire and sword”!

Until the beginning of the special military operation, the Russian Federation believed more in the pretty pictures of European propaganda, the “normative power of the EU” [Pogorelskaya, 2021] rather than in the texts of association agreements and hard facts! This is all the more surprising as Europeans themselves soberly and critically describe the neocolonial nature of EU cooperation with third countries [Hurt, 2012; Muntschick, 2018]. As the European External Action Service (EEAS) has been institutionalized and strengthened by the territorial staff of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Development (DG DEV), European collective neocolonialism has shifted from a strictly commercial and economic dimension to a political-military one [Lucia, 2017].

Secondly, from 1945 to 1991 there is “a stage of the establishment of the hegemony of American imperialism over European capitalism” [Sirotkin, 2020, p. 82]. In practice, American priorities and European collective neocolonialism in Asia, Africa and Latin America have been juxtaposed since the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OECD since 1961) as part of the US Marshall Plan in 1948.  In particular, within the framework of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, a “collective Western donor” is being formed with unified demands to effectively “twist the arms” of developing countries (“topic Z”) [Degterev, 2021a].

The former European metropolises became sub-imperials of the “collective West” led by the American hegemon [Davidchuk et al., 2022], and the US, from a nation interested in decolonization in the first half of the 20^th century [Fursov, 2015, p. 6], became one of the main actors of neocolonialism. Late Soviet literature and official discourse acknowledged this, albeit with a certain amount of propaganda pathos: “Developing countries are exploited by all imperialist states, but US imperialism undoubtedly does it with the most cavalier manner” [Portnyagin, 1988, p. 1]. Previously, R.A. Ulyanovsky and L.M. Kuznetsov wrote about American neocolonialism in Africa; in Latin America – B.I. Gvozdarev et al., as well as N.A. Ermolov, O.I. Zemtsova et al. [Sirotkina, 2020, p. 86].

In the 1960s and 1970s, the US was more likely to “insure” the European neocolonial powers in their traditional zones of influence (e.g. France in Francophone Africa), remaining mostly in the shadows, although even then Soviet scholars spoke of American neocolonialism [Kremenyuk, 1976]. The US came to the fore in the 1980s, implementing the economic restructuring programs mentioned above. The Bretton Woods institutions effectively recolonized national economies by reformatting socio-economic models less than a century after the European colonizers had done so [Riddell, 1992, p. 59].

Of course, economic structural adjustment programs were rather “depersonalized neocolonialism”, which could not always be directly linked to US policy, as they were implemented by faceless IMF and World Bank administrators and the “new bureaucracy” of Western graduate recipient countries [Kassae Nygusie, Ivkina, 2000, p. 29]. However, as Tanzanian President J. Nyerere noted in this regard: “They act as a group and make decisions in their own interest. The leadership of this group is in the hands of the nation with the most powerful economy, the United States... The IMF has largely become an instrument of economic and ideological control of the poor countries by the rich” [Nyerere, 1985, pp. 493-494]. These programs were not neutral. As S. George, a prominent British critic of neo-imperialism, puts it, they “kill” but actually provoke “low-intensity financial conflicts” [George 1988].

By removing measures to protect local industry, the IMF reforms returned the economic structure of the former colonies to their colonial state, with specialization in raw material extraction and agriculture (Riddell, 1992, p. 58). In a diversified economy, many returned to subsistence farming in the villages and to informal trade and artisanal production in the cities. In fact, this has led to more primitive economic models and, in the spirit of post-developmentalism, has reinforced the informal economy as a form of social escapism [Rahnema, Bawtree, 1997] (“topic I”). In some cases (Liberia, Somalia, Ethiopia) this has led to the dismantling of the state as such [Riddell, 1992, p. 60] and the formation of so-called “failed states” (“topic K”).

As MNCS penetrated into developing countries, they located the “lower floors” of global production chains, relocated polluting, labour-, energy- and resource-intensive production, created “partial production” (production of individual parts and components of finished products), intensified TNC equity participation in the capital of local enterprises [Koptev, 1988, pp. 16; 23; 33-35]. We can speak of the “key role of transnational corporations and banks (MNCS and TNBs) in implementing the imperialist strategy of neocolonialism” [Koptev, 1988, p. 9]. This took place against the background of the declining role of the nation-state in Western countries (the example of D. Trump’s “bring back the state” is illustrative) and the strengthening of the corporatocracy [Perkins, 2014].

In fact, there was a transition from isolated, national neocolonialism to global neocolonialism of a new type against the background of the increasing role of supranational structures, monetary and financial neocolonialism [Koptev, 1988, p. 6], the formation of decentralized networks of MNCS and NGOs [Sirotkina, Alpidovska, 2020]. In this context, the transition in the neo-Marxist academic literature from the theories of dependent development (including Latin American structuralism) to the world-system paradigm as a more adequate reflection of realities is indicative [Degterev, 2021, pp. 116-118].

In the field of security, a qualitative transition took place after the events of 11 September 2001 and the deployment of the global fight “against international terrorism”. The Americans began to “save the world” by destroying it and also by legalizing torture [Dabashi, 2011, pp. 9, 51-60]. The American approach to “conflict management” led to millions of deaths in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, until it “stumbled” over Syria [Dolgov, 2021; Khudaykulova, 2016].

The strengthening of the US military presence in Africa (creation of powerful drone bases to monitor the situation in real time [Hot Africa, 2022], formation of the US Africa Command in 2008 for total (rather than focal) control over Africa), the strengthening of vassal relations with its allies (even NATO), imputing to them the obligation to maintain foreign military bases – all this is evidence of transition to “the stage of systemic neocolonialism as the last phase of development of colonialism” [Sirotkina 2020, p. 82].

“A postcolonial moment”

 The author calls the pause in the anti-colonial struggle of several decades (from the mid–1980s to the late 2010s) a “postcolonial moment” for a number of reasons.

Firstly, this period culminated in the so-called “unipolar moment” of the 1990s, the period of undivided US dominance in the international arena after the dismantling of the socialist system [Krauthammer, 1991], the flowering of American-style globalization. New York is becoming the intellectual capital of the world, while the centers of the former metropolises (e.g. Paris) are themselves becoming intellectual semi-periphery of the “collective West”, although they still attract intellectuals from peripheral European countries. For example, one of the classics of postcolonialism, Yu. Kristeva, once moved to Paris from Bulgaria. From a macro-historical point of view, the unipolar world did not last long. Already after 2010, the first signs of multipolarity appeared, as well as the increasing role of the PRC, and at the turn of the 2020s these changes have become irreversible [Degterev, 2021c].

Secondly, we are not talking about post-colonialism (with a hyphen) in the usual sense of domestic scholarship as a temporal category (i.e. time after the 1960s and the liberation of colonies), but rather about postcolonialism figuratively (without a hyphen) as a lived experience of the colonial past [Shohat, 1992, p. 101]. The shift from a narrative of decolonization, anti-imperialist rhetoric and a real critique of neocolonialism [Amin, 1973; Nkrumah, 1965] to a more conventional postcolonialism with its contemporary narratives without rigid political content [Shohat, 1992, p. 99, 105] took place in Western scholarship just in the 1980s and 1990s. From the largely substantive and concrete subject matter of political geography, political economy, ethnography in the “postcolonial library” [Africa: Postcolonial Discourse, 2020], the focus shifted to intangible studies of interracial relations, education, science and technology, literary and cultural studies [Fituni, Abramova, 2020, p. 29].

In the absence of clear alternatives for self-realization in their own countries, millions of people from the Global South were forced to immigrate and “integrate” into the economies of the industrialized countries of the center of the world-system, but already in a personal capacity, no longer linking their fate to that of their homeland. The sublimated personal experiences of the “subalterns” (so-called storytelling) formed the basis of an imitative postcolonial discourse that gradually replaced the imperatives of real decolonization (“topic L”). Problems of self-representation, vivid theatrical performances, literary creativity became the focus of attention [Fituni, Abramova, 2020, p. 35], there was a gradual shift from academic science and political administration (including in the context of the theory of colonial power and condemnation of any hierarchies) in favour of creative professions and civic activism. The leading role in postcolonial discourse on Africa has been taken by Afropolitanism [Mbembe, Balakrishnan, 2016], a philosophy of “Africans of the world”, AfriGen, who come from the periphery of the world-system but are successfully integrated into its center.

The emergence of postcolonial cultural studies fell on ground prepared by the social sciences. The shift in development issues to the level of the individual was first reflected in the 1974 UNEP/UNCTAD Cocoyo Declaration, according to which development should be the development of the individual rather than the “development of things”. The formation of the right to development as a human right is linked to the activities of Keba M’Baye, chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights [M’Baye, 1972], as well as K. Wasak, Secretary General of the International Institute for Human Rights in Strasbourg, who formulated the concept of third-generation human rights (solidarity rights). This discourse ran counter to the approaches of the USSR and the socialist countries, which primarily promoted a model of national development and a strong state. Cultural studies at this time were deconstructing the image of a strong nation-state and the imperatives of industrial development as associated with violence.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a real “counter-revolution in development theories” under the influence of the predominantly developed countries [Peet, Hartwick, 2009, p. 74-76], expressed in the rejection of neo-Keynesian perspectives on national development in the Third World in favour of neoliberal self-realization of the individual, including in the context of the Club of Rome “limits to growth” paradigm. The focus on development issues has gradually shifted from the collective right to development to the individual, from issues of economic development to the integrated consideration of social, environmental and other factors. There seems to be a considerable intellectual journey to be made in the opposite direction to understand where mistakes have been made, “distortions” in favour of a pseudo-global civil society and to the detriment of real decolonization (“topic M”).

Thirdly, postcolonial studies, for all their diversity, including decolonialism, are a “moment” after all. The fact is that, with the beginning of the special military operation, the familiar picture of the world, so carefully shaped by the Western world for decades, collapsed. In recent years, enormous resources have been spent on reshaping mass consciousness and scholarship, on educating younger generations around the world, on achieving a new “cognitive consistency” of performance society (Dabashi, 2011, p. 7), of which postcolonial studies was a part.

However, due to the strengthening of the PRC and the accelerated “transit of power” (US–PRC) [Degterev et al., 2021], the proxy conflict in Ukraine erupted too early for the US, even before the older generation with its historical memory had left. As a result, veterans’ accounts of the horrors of WWII and the principled nature of the Cold War [Protopopov, 2014], including on the frontline of the real struggle against colonialism, became the center of the worldview again in a matter of days. The “postcolonial fleur” quickly “evaporated”, and in most Russian universities it never managed to become mainstream. After all, the older generation, being the backbone of the teaching staff traditionally viewed it with skepticism, and the academic youth have not yet matured.

Fourthly, the period from the collapse of the socialist system to the present is also only a “moment” in historical terms. And it is clearly insufficient to adequately reflect in postcolonial studies the current role of the Russian Federation and other countries of the former Second World (“topic H”).

Despite active inter-state and trade relations with Africa during and after the Cold War, the Second World has generally fallen out of the postcolonial discourse. This is particularly true of the Russian Federation [Moore, 2001] and, to a lesser extent, of China, which has been the subject of a wave of publications in recent years “exposing China’s imperial essence” in Africa [Carmody et al., 2020]. At the same time, while Western experts (see, for example, P. Bond and P. Carmody) talk about the neocolonial nature of China’s policy, Russian experts (T.L. Deich, E.N. Grachikov) speak of its anticolonial character [Vasiliev et al., 2021].

The lack of interpretations of the Second World in postcolonial studies seems to be due to a number of reasons. First, there was no racial discourse in the USSR and intellectuals from Asia, Africa and Latin America had no need to break down any stereotypes of white supremacy as they had to do in the West. Second, most African students studying in the USSR and other socialist countries returned to their home countries to develop national economies. Few stayed in the USSR. In most cases, therefore, personal experience of the Second World is confined to the memories of youth. Moreover, in recent years, there have been a number of focused studies in the West on rethinking this experience [Katsakioris, 2019], including a thematic issue of Cahiers d'études africaines (No. 227 for 2017) entitled “Élites de retour de l’Est”[7]. A number of Soviet graduates re-emigrated to Western countries after returning home, but the number of those who integrated into Soviet society was minimal.

Attempts to equate the “decolonization” of the post-Soviet space (and even the territory of the Russian Federation) and the anti-imperialist struggle in Africa are clearly inappropriate [Fituni, Abramova, 2020, p. 35; Moore, 2001]. On development issues within the UN, the USSR, as a donor and purely geographically located in the North, has always been on the same side as developing countries, including when voting on “Right to Development” resolutions and on a number of other aspects [Degterev, 2016; Larionova, 2019]. It is very difficult to call such a country an “imperialist predator”!

Postcolonial people and ideas: what’s wrong?

In contrast to substantive academic works on decolonization, theory and practice of Third World national liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s, postcolonial literature is First World academic discourse of the 1980s–1990s” [Fanon, 1986, p. XVIII], but produced by Third World migrants. As the US became the intellectual center of the world, with almost a million students from peripheral countries on campuses [Degterev, 2021c, p. 129], a more global approach to education and the social sciences was required [Dabashi, 2011, p. 10-11] to manage expectations (or manipulate consciousness) of hundreds of thousands of people from Asia, Africa, Latin America. The task was to “broaden the scope” of Western-centric social disciplines without “diluting” the “right” discourse. Thus, in the international field “global international relations” were formed [Acharya, 2017].

A hierarchical system of knowledge creation and dissemination has emerged, led by Anglo-American publishers and higher education institutions (see Figure 1). At the top of the “knowledge pyramid” (the Sense Academic Publishers’ Ranking, Netherlands^[8], is a good overview) are A publishers representing two British universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and eight American ones (mostly Ivy League). As a rule, these elite university publishers have an elaborate system of international distribution, and their books are the most thoroughly prepared (2-3 years each).

It is in these publishers that meanings are formed, which are subsequently transmitted to the lower floors of the “pyramid of knowledge”. B publishers, such as Springer (including Palgrave Macmillan) and Taylor & Francis (including Routledge), which are not tied to individual universities, have the highest circulation and distribution, e.g. in international relations. Nevertheless, they rather replicate the meanings formed in publishing houses (universities) at the top level. Concepts such as “democracy”, “development”, “human rights”, etc. are first formulated in the books of category A publishers, and then the monographs of category B publishers explore how these concepts are developed/observed in different countries of the world.

Figure. 1. Hierarchy of the world’s social science publishing houses

Source: compiled by the author on the basis of Sense Ranking of Academic Publishers. URL: http://www.sense.nl/gfx_content/documents/ABCDE-indeling%20Scientific%20Publishers%20SENSE_approved_May_2009.pdf (дата обращения: 10.06.2022).

Moreover, even the critical discourse of the existing world order after the collapse of the socialist system is also concentrated in the US and the UK, where most of the neo-Marxist intellectual centers and publishers are located, publishing the bulk of the books on non-Western approaches to development in the Global South. The most prominent of these is the New York-based Monthly Review, which also publishes a magazine of the same name. Since 1960, New Left Review has been published in London, on the basis of which New Left Books, later renamed Verso Books (also published in New York), was established in 1970. Pluto Press opened in London in 1969 and Zed Books in 1976. The Review of Radical Political Economics has been published in the United States since 1969, and Alternatives since 1975 [Degterev, 2021b, p. 118]. This allows the most critical discourse to be effectively managed.

In this context, there was a great demand for “comprador intellectuals” in the intellectual capitals of the Western world [Massad, 1997; Dabashi, 2011, p. 12] while in the former socialist countries science and education were in deep crisis in the 1990s. The so-called “native informers”, as the Iranian intellectual H. Dabashi put it, were particularly popular in the United States. Their task is to provide biased information about their countries of origin (“new orientalism”), distorting the facts and calling the victims aggressors and the terrorized terrorists [Dabashi, 2011, p. 19]. They seem to inform Americans about the “atrocities” that have taken place in their countries, thereby justifying US actions as “liberating” [Dabashi, 2011, p. 73], helping to implement the “grand strategy” of US dominance [Dabashi, 2011, p. 13] and establishing the superiority of the hegemonic imperial culture over local cultures [Dabashi, 2011, p. 8], including the Russian one.

H. Dabashi compares these foreign researchers to mercenary intellectuals, “homeless thinkers, and the intellectual link of Blackwater USA” [Dabashi, 2011, p. 62-63]. They make an important contribution to the formation of “civilized society”, Western civilization, in fact to the “civil religion” of the West (according to R. Bell) – “a combination of historical events, sociological developments, metaphysical beliefs and fetishized visual representations” [Dabashi, 2011, p. 7]. The presence of this ideology is another sign of a more “advanced” form of neocolonialism, with new forms of domination, including through ideological neologism [Dabashi, 2011, p. 37]. Western cultural dominance and globalization should not be confused with universalism. It is pseudo-universalism, the domination and imposition of only one culture and discourse, the formation of a pseudo-global civil society [Fanon, 1986, p. XV-XVII].

Of course, not all intellectuals in the US become “local informants”. Many, for instance, help American society to gain an objective view of their countries by working as consultants and translators in so-called “security languages” (Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and now Russian and Chinese) at military academies [Dabashi, 2011, p. 18]. In this way, they help the US military and security services to better suppress resistance and fight non-Western countries.

Americans attract the strongest and most talented researchers from many countries around the world, which explains much of their exceptionalism. Passionate “subalterns” from among highly skilled migrants have successfully integrated into the academic community in the US and European countries, as well as into the cultural life of the Western world (the Global North). The “trinity” of “global postcolonialism” (E. Said, G. Spivak, H. Baba) was joined by the African postcolonial “trinity” – V.Y. Mudimbe, C.E. Appiah and A. Mbembe [Africa: Postcolonial Discourse..., 2020], followed by other researchers and civic activists. They are quite outspoken in their denunciation of imperial flaws, thereby helping to redress them. The limits of the conventionality and objectivity of critical research by non-Western intellectuals in the countries of the “collective West” is an open question (“topic O”).

Disillusioned with the possibility of socio-economic progress in the newly liberated countries, the modernization of national economies and the diversification of export supplies, the well-educated (mostly Western) intellectual elites of the newly liberated countries gradually turned to non-material spheres, deconstructing their past to form an “acceptable present” [Zeleza, 2006] in the spirit of the postmodern (and post-truth) era. In fact, their full-fledged resistance was rather transformed into an internal, intellectual protest, transferred to the “blurred” for precise statistical accounting mental sphere [Fituni, Abramova, 2020, p. 30].

Many of them did not have the conditions for academic fulfilment in their home countries and simply had to go to the US. But by working in an American (European) academic environment, they strengthen Western expertise and thus extend the hegemony of the “collective West”. It is noteworthy that H. Dabashi, who so vehemently denounces the comprador elite. Dabashi concludes his work by saying that since his children live in America, he should fight to ensure a favourable environment for them in the US [Dabashi, 2011, pp. 131-133]. And he ends his book with the words “Welcome to America! Welcome home!” [Dabashi, 2011, p. 135].

Many Palestinian intellectuals (only the first generation really fought against the Israeli occupation), Soviet intellectuals – after the collapse of the USSR; Latin American structuralists (including F.E. Cardoso and others), having changed their beliefs to pro-Western pragmatism [Dabashi, 2011, p. 42-43].

Two iconic figures who define the symbolic boundaries of the genuine anti-colonial struggle and the postcolonial narrative are F. Fanon and E. Said allow to “feeling the difference”. Both are revered in postcolonial studies (E. Said is seen its founder) although even in contemporary Russia they are considered somewhat “toxic” and even “terrorist sympathisers” (they are too anti-colonial!)[9].

F. Fanon, who supported the Algerian National Liberation Front, is certainly a “terrorist”, especially if we do not take into account the activities of the French Secret Armed Organization (OAS), which unleashed a massive terror on all those who advocated self-determination in Algeria. Al-Sayyid and all those who sympathize with the Palestinian resistance, with Hamas (which emerged after the first intifada in 1987) and Hezbollah (which emerged in response to the Israeli occupation of parts of Lebanon in 1982) are also “terrorists”, not to mention the terrorist organization Irgun in the 1930s and 1940s, which eventually made millions of Palestinians refugees.

This includes turning a blind eye to the armed seizure of power on the Maidan in Kiev in 2014, the peaceful demonstrators burned alive in Odessa on 2 May 2014, the hundreds of pro-Russian activists thrown into prison (in many cases extrajudicially by national battalions), the “Angel Alley” in Donetsk with the names of dead children, but suddenly “seeing the light” when the special military operation started.

It is this “reticence” that makes “browns” (Arabs) the “new blacks” (“Negroes of the sands”), Muslims (after the events of 11.09.2001) the “new Jews” [Dabashi, 2011, p. 6]. After 2014, but especially after the start of the special military operation, the role of international pariahs, “new blacks”, the modern “Other” (the Other) of the Western world [Dabashi, 2011, p. 9] passed to the Russians – the first to challenge Western hegemony in a real way, not imitative or suicidal. It is noteworthy that F. Fanon attributed the concept of “blacks” to the entire non-Western world [Fanon, 1986, p. XV].

A second wave of interest in F. Fanon emerged in the 1990s among postcolonial authors. He was a strictly anti-colonial theorist and practitioner, became the leading ideologist of the Algerian revolution, but he attracted the attention of postcolonialists with his disciplinary approach. After all, he offered the most penetrating analysis of the social psychology of colonialism (a psychoanalytic deconstruction and interpretation of the problem of blacks to overcome and liberate them) and described the complex of their secondary status. Moreover, he wrote his text when he was 27 years old, in the midst of the bloody events [Fanon, 1986, p. VI-XX].

Did the “postcolonial people” have a choice? Could they have followed the path of the true fighters for independence, the leaders of the national liberation struggle of the first generation? Those who were mainly educated in Europe, but then returned home and moved on from interpreting the world to actually changing it (like F. Fanon)? In the second half of the 1980s, in the 1990s, and even in 2000, definitely not. In the 2010s, the first hopes emerged, and in the 2020s, definitely yes! This is what the final section of this article will focus on.

Return of anti-colonialism

As we know, 1960 was the year of Africa, as most African colonies (mainly French) became independent. Symbolically, the return of anti-colonial struggles in the early 2020s is still associated with Francophone Africa. The collapse of French neocolonialism is unfolding before our eyes, involving the Central African Republic, followed by Mali, then Burkina Faso, Niger and other countries and dependencies.

Millions of young Africans are hanging on every word of a new generation of Pan-Africanists and fighters for real decolonization – Kemi Seba, Natalie Yamb, Franklin Nyamsi and others. The Global South was once again awake and buzzing! There were particular hopes for both the first Russia-Africa Forum (2019) and the next one planned for 2023.

What has changed in the postcolonial world? For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is now a new key element – subjectivity or agency! African countries now have a strategic alternative in the form of Russia and China. The former Third World, Global South in the period of the “postcolonial moment”, has suddenly turned ... into a “collective non-West”, which cannot be “pushed aside” and “crushed” by the combined force of the “collective West”!

Indeed, for several years there has been a power transi”, i.e. the shift of international power from the US to the PRC (and more broadly from the West to the non-West), with US-centric institutions being replaced by those of the “collective non-West” [Degterev et al., 2021]. At the same time, the aggregate hard power potential of the NATO countries is significantly lower than the corresponding potential of the SCO countries – 25.6 per cent and 36.6 per cent in 2018 respectively[10] [Degterev, 2021c], and that’s without counting Iran and other countries that will soon join the SCO.

The power transit is a period of instability in which the previous system of world order will be heavily changed, which has already entered an active phase with the beginning of the special military operation. The Russian Federation and non-Western countries, including most of Asia, Africa and Latin America, find themselves on one side of the barricades and the former metropolises of the “collective West” on the other. A new bipolarity is rapidly developing, block discipline is crystallizing and decoupling, i.e. the gap between the two circuits (Western and non-Western) in the economy, technology, ideology, politics and other spheres is intensifying.

The decupling in Africa is primarily power-driven, as the security factor on the continent is decisive. The Russian Federation acts as a security-provider (and, more broadly, sovereignty) for many countries in the world. But it is not just a question of security in the narrow sense. It is also about energy security, food security, IT security and credit and financial security. In this context, new challenges arise for Russia’s international aid and foreign economic relations policy (“topic P”). In this case, P is not only the ordinal number of the theme, but also a special focus on its purely practical nature! Unlike the USSR, the Russian Federation does not promote socialism around the world, but sovereignty in its broadest sense.

The formation of a multipolar world that began in the 2010s offers hope for a better future for Asia, Africa and Latin America [Degterev, 2020]. It is in this context that the narrative of multiple modernities, first introduced by C.N. Eisenstadt [Eisenstadt, 2000] and only recently gaining popularity [Bhambra, 2007], is developing. Eisenstadt rightly points out that “modernity and westernization are not identical” [Eisenstadt, 2000, pp. 2-3]. Thus the “disengagement” of a country from the Western project is not a “verdict”, but ... new opportunities in alternative modernization projects of the non-West.

Historically, since the 16^th century, there has certainly been a dominance of the Western modernization project, but this is not the only modernity. Non-Westernism in itself is not the antonym of modernity. Since the 1920s and 1930s, the alternative modernity of the Soviet project [Eisenstadt, 2000, p. 11], which also affected Africa, made itself evident. In the 21^st century, the PRC is rapidly developing, offering an alternative model (“socialism with Chinese characteristics”), and the role of the state in the Russian model is also great. Modern Turkey also offers an interesting combination of modernity with elements of Islam.

In the past period of active anti-colonial struggle, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, significant moral and political successes were achieved in developing the new world economic order [Degterev, 2016], but these were not backed up by economic means of struggle [Koptev, 1988, p. 41-42] and eventually came to nothing. It is important not to make this mistake in the next round of anti-colonialism by reforming the system of international economic regimes accordingly (“topic P”). These configurations will be in demand after the “reset” of the international system as a whole, but it is necessary to work now on uniting international efforts in the struggle against neocolonialism!

***

Postcolonial discourse will not disappear altogether, but it will cease to be the ideological mainstream of critical studies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It will no longer be possible to offer multiple interpretations of imperial domination in the face of the real struggles and thousands of victims of non-Western peoples for their independence (Syria, Venezuela, Mali, CAR, Afghanistan, Ukraine and beyond in Asia, Africa and Latin America)... Specific case studies on strengthening the real sovereignty of the non-Western world are on the agenda, because there is nothing better for practice than a good theory! I am convinced that some of the strongest papers on this subject will appear in the pages of this journal – “Postcolonialism and Modernity”.

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Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to the organizers and participants of the conference “Russia and the African Awakening: Prospects for Combating Neocolonialism in the 21^st Century”, held at the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation on 27 June 2022, who helped to capture the spirit of the times (Zeitgeist). The author is also grateful to O.A. Morgunova (RUDN-University) for critical remarks and comments.

Source:  Traslated from Russian: Degterev D.A. Toward the End of the “Postcolonial Moment” of the Anticolonial Struggle: Contours of the Research Program // Postcolonialism and Modernity. 2023. No. 1. P.13-46 . - http://inion.ru/ru/publishing/prochie-nauchnye-zhurnaly/postkolonializm-i-sovremennost/arkhiv/2023-1/