Postcolonial populists are dressing up contemporary authoritarian politics as a project of decolonial liberation.
By Kira Huju
Over the past few years of working as a critical scholar of International Relations toward “decolonising” the discipline, I have learned to be careful what I wish for.
To decolonise academic knowledge means interrogating the traditionally Western-centric forms of thought and inquiry that are presented as universal. It means unseating the West as the theoretical benchmark and empirical focus point and taking seriously the many ways in which imperial legacies shape contemporary international politics.
However, there is growing unease in the academy about decolonial appropriation: the fashionable language of decolonial liberation is strategically mobilised to market nationalistic, nativist and conservative ends.
In Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), I argue that even in a formally decolonised international society, Indian diplomats continue an awkward balancing act; despite a genuine desire to strive toward a postcolonial international society founded on diversity and difference, there coexists a lingering belief in a caricature-like notion of a white, European-dominated homogenous club to which Indian diplomats feel a social imperative to belong.
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