Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: a field of struggle
Proceedings from the International Conference: “Postcolonial, Decolonial, Postimperial, Deimperial,” University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, May 15–17, 2024, Invited Roundtable: Thinking about De/Coloniality from (South-)East Europe.
What does it mean to decolonise knowledge and politics in East Europe (EE)? While decolonial discourse has gained momentum globally, its transplantation into the context of EE remains fraught with epistemological ambiguity and geopolitical contradictions. In particular, this post-socialist space shaped by diverse yet interlinked socialist legacies, neoliberal transitions, and current geopolitical conflicts poses specific challenges for translating decolonial vocabularies and frameworks. In this post, I reflect on the book Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation as a way to hold space for these sometimes difficult conversations.
Building the Lexicon
In mid-February 2022, an online discussion series was organised that later evolved into the Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: Lexicon of Reorientation. This edited volume, among other, focuses on a specific section of South-East Europe that shares a history of socialist experimentation and post-socialist transformation. At that time, engaging with narratives of decoloniality emerged as a politically potent and necessary intervention. The aim was to foster a strategic dialogue between the geographies of the “posts”—post-socialist and post-colonial—by revisiting the anti-colonial narratives of socialism, confronting contemporary forms of neo-colonialism, and introducing a language for addressing racialisation and racism in Eastern Europe, a region long imagined as raceless. The seminar was conceived as a continuation of discussions initiated during the “Dialoguing Between the Posts” event in Belgrade. While there was initial skepticism regarding the relevance of decoloniality in the Eastern European context, reading the proceedings from this conference in the special issue of Diversia, Decolonial Theory & Practice in Southeast Europe, edited by Polina Manolova, Katarina Kušić, Philipp Lottholz helped give shape to the conversation, particularly through its insistence on the anti-capitalist dimension.
The Lexicon of Reorientation gathers critical concepts and interventions that attempt to reorient decoloniality from the perspective of Eastern Europe such as: an anti-colonial museum, our raceless region revisited, decentering humanitarianism, intimate colonisation, unequal Europes, restless history, non-aligned modernism, disawaval, performing solidarity, peripheral self, drunken whites, lived solidarities, socialist world making, techno-imperialism, and transcoloniality. Rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all application of Latin American or Anglo-American decolonial thought, the volume explores how regional specificities might demand new conceptual tools and alliances. The very term "reorientation" signals both a geographical and epistemological shift, one that insists on grappling with the legacies of state socialism, the layered effects of empire, and the ongoing violence of neoliberalism. The lexicon itself was never risk-free of reproducing blind spots, particularly in danger of depoliticising the historical specificities of socialism, overstating the marginalisation of Eastern Europe vis-à-vis the West or missing to recognised important historical occurrences. It was embraced as a risk inherent to such a conversation, one that did not shy away from vulnerability in its attempt.
In the aftermaths
The making of the book took some months after the event and its publishing coincided with the begginings of the invasion of Ukraine. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the conversation around decoloniality took a dramatic and complex turn in Eastern Europe. Decoloniality became a field of political contestation. On the one hand, ideologues close to the Russian regime, started taking the stage, particularly Alexander Dugin. His Fourth Political Theory—a blend of neo-Eurasianism and anti-liberal critique— frames Russia as a victim of Western universalism. Dugin posits that Russia, like the postcolonial world, has been assaulted by the flattening force of Western liberalism that negates its diversity. In his theory there is no space for the modernist drive behind many anti-colonial movements. Dugin claims that the Fourth Political Theory signals the decolonisation of political consciousness, and that its first expression is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This act, according to him, represents the beginning of a Great Awakening—a millenarian, civilisational battle to dismantle liberal hegemony and restore a multipolar world.
Meanwhile, decolonial discourse also intensified in Ukraine. Online groups, publications, and activist networks began framing Ukraine as a colonised subject of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Ukrainian intellectuals, artists, and activists increasingly called for decolonial readings of their historical and contemporary position. This work was to an extent inspired by the work of Madina Tlostanova, theorist whose work engages with decolonial theory from a post-Soviet standpoint.
Decoloniality as a field of struggle
The discourses that included anti-capitalist and systemic world system critiques started legging behind the naratives that emerged as tools and responses of an ongoing war. The Lexicon faced critiques, mostly on social media, for not sufficiently amplifying Ukrainian voices or framing Russia more explicitly as a coloniser. Another binary formed: on one side, efforts to build a situated, structural, and intersectional decoloniality across regions; and on the other, a more ethno-national articulation of decolonialism tied to the immediate geopolitical moment.
What has emerged is a deeply fractured field of debate. On the one hand, we witness an instrumentalisation of decoloniality by authoritarian regimes to legitimise imperialist violence under the banner of multipolarity. On the other, we see a liberal-nationalist version of decoloniality that risks aligning with Euro-Atlantic geopolitical interests while erasing the structural critiques of capitalism, racialisation, and global extraction. Both risk detaching decoloniality from its radical roots and reducing it to a rhetorical tool in global power games. There have also been movements, albeit often sidelined and silenced, that go against this logic; in particular movements (especially feminist) that are primarily anti-imperial and anti-capitalist.
Decoloniality has always been a field of struggle—contested, plural, and shaped by diverse forms of resistance. Rather than an inherently emancipatory concept, it must be understood through the tensions, contradictions, and situated struggles that animate its uses. In EE it has undoubtedly become firmly embedded in far-right discourse, as well as in more liberal appropriations of decoloniality as a form of domination. While anti-capitalist decolonial politics still exist and maintain a strong foothold elsewhere, in Eastern Europe they seem to be losing ground before they have even had a chance to take off.
Recently voices emerged that criticise decoloniality and negate its potential for understanding Eastern Europe. Maria Todorova, for instance, takes a critical stance toward decoloniality as an analytical framework relevant for Eastern Europe, instead arguing that imperiality offers a more appropriate lens. Stef Jansen, on the other hand, provided a critique that highlighted the specificities of various decolonial narratives in the region, calling for greater conceptual clarity and distinction within the context of the everyday geopolitics and inter-imperiality.
Conclusion
At this moment, it is difficult to see the political potential of decolonial politics in Eastern Europe. Engaging with decoloniality as a field of struggle means wrestling with specific historical entanglements: the region's ambiguous position in global hierarchies (as both coloniser and colonised), its socialist past and post-socialist neoliberal present, and its role in the current geopolitical context. This makes decoloniality in such a context not a settled theory but an evolving, often risky political praxis—one that must remain alert to appropriation, instrumentalisation, and the reproduction of new forms of dominance under the guise of critical engagement.
The Lexicon promises not to be a one-time deliverable but a continuous engagement with problems that we observe, analyse, and fight against as organisers, activists, artists, curators, and writers, each in our own capacity and our own way. This commitment compels us to seek out new moments for reflection—opportunities to pause and consider our position within the ongoing process of re-orienting knowledge about Eastern Europe. This task still unfolds in the context of a broader lack of awareness and critical understanding of colonialism, anti-colonialism, decolonialism, and decoloniality from a globally historical perspective.
Photo by Andrew Stutesman on Unsplash