Russia’s Illiberal Anticolonalism: De-Westernization, World Majority, and the Politics of Normative Pluralism

Russia’s Illiberal Anticolonalism: De-Westernization, World Majority, and the Politics of Normative Pluralism

Maxime Audinet*, Maxime Daniélou, and Marlène Laruelle

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Keywords: illiberalism, anticolonialism, Russia, Global South, de-Westernization, strategic narratives, Sergey Karaganov

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At the Second Russia-Africa Summit, held in 2023, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church declared: “Russia has never viewed the continent of Africa as a land to derive benefit from or as a target of colonization. Never has Russia spoken with African nations in an arrogant manner, from a position of superiority and power … Being faithful to traditions, seeing family as a union between a man and a woman, loving and respecting one’s own history, striving for goodness and justice—all these essential principles of our civilization are of overriding importance to people in both Russia and Africa who cherish their spiritual and cultural identity.”[1] This declaration encapsulates the encounter between an anticolonial narrative that promotes the emancipation of former Third World countries against Western domination and a conservative vision of the social order. While not new, this discursive blending has become a flagship of Russia’s outreach to the so-called Global South.[2]

Anticolonialism emerged alongside the twentieth century’s struggles for social justice, connecting the fight for national independence to social redistribution, gender reforms, and the restructuring of global hierarchies.[3] In this sense, anticolonialism attempted to transform political independence into a more global project of human equality.[4] However, the progressivist memory of anticolonialism tends to cover up the fact that anticolonial movements may also draw on conservative social resources to resist Western colonial influence. Many anticolonial thinkers turned to precolonial frameworks as sources of moral authority. This conservative genealogy of anticolonialism has been largely ignored in our collective memory, as it generates tensions in interpreting the progressivist nature of anticolonial struggles: reclaiming tradition can be emancipatory in restoring agency to colonized peoples and simultaneously repressive for individual freedoms. Nowadays, both state and nonstate actors have repurposed the language of decolonization to advance anti-Western and antiliberal agendas.[5] The result is that resistance to Western hegemony is increasingly framed as the defense of traditionalism, religious orthodoxy, and sometimes authoritarian governance.

This article argues that contemporary Russian anticolonial discourse should be understood as a form of illiberal anticolonialism: a hybrid strategic narrative that selectively reappropriates Soviet internationalist legacies while drawing heavily on conservative, sovereigntist, and civilizational repertoires. Drawing on the categorization of strategic narratives proposed by Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle, it sees illiberal anticolonialism as a new “international system narrative” through which Russian actors seek to construct a “shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international politics in order to shape the behavior of domestic and international actors.”^[6] Scholars such as Kiryukhin have described the Russian narrative as “right-wing decolonialism,” a mix of Marxist anticolonial rhetoric, Eurasianist criticism of Western cultural hegemony, and socially conservative positions.[7]

This paper first situates Russia’s anticolonial language within a broader illiberal grammar built around four mutually-reinforcing registers—majoritarianism, sovereigntism, civilizationism, and conservatism—through which domestic and international order are articulated. In revisiting Soviet anticolonial legacies through a conservative lens, it then shows how Russia’s de-Westernization agenda is translated into strategic narratives, focusing in particular on Sergey Karaganov’s concept of the “World Majority.” The third part tracks how these narratives circulate and what illiberal content they carry in practice by analyzing their rhetorical and institutional production and their foreign-policy uses, before concluding on the tensions and limits of this illiberal anticolonial project.

From Illiberal Backlash to Anticolonial Rearticulation

The current most powerful antagonist and alternative to the Western universalism of liberal-democratic discourse can be analyzed under the broad umbrella of illiberalism. By this term, we define a cluster or an aggregation of different ideological families that articulate a rejection of what we call the four scripts of liberalism.[8]

Political liberalism emphasizes the protection of individual freedoms from state interference and defines democracy not only through elections but through constitutionalism, checks and balances, and the safeguarding of minority rights. Economic liberalism, now largely expressed through neoliberalism, promotes market economies, private property, and globalization, advancing policies of privatization, deregulation, and austerity often enforced by states and supranational institutions. Cultural liberalism extends the logic of individual rights from the political sphere to the realm of identity, prioritizing emancipation from collective norms through the recognition of ethnic, sexual, and gender diversity, and challenging institutions such as the family as sites of entrenched power. Geopolitical liberalism, defined by multilateralism, supranational institutions, a trade-based vision of peace, and the right to engage in humanitarian intervention on the grounds of universal human rights, presents its norms as universally valid and historically progressive.^[9]

Illiberalism can be defined as combining a critique of some or all of the scripts of liberalism, either as a philosophy or a practice, in combination with a prior experience of liberalism, and the promotion of an alternative political project based on five criteria: (a) a belief in the primacy of executive power and majoritarianism over and against institutional checks and balances and minority rights, (b) a defense of the sovereignty of the nation-state over and against supranational institutions and international law, (c) a call for a realist and transactional foreign policy in a multipolar world based on a civilizationalist interpretation, (d) advocating for the cultural homogeneity of the nation over and against multiculturalism, and (e) demands for preservation of traditional hierarchies and values over and against those of left-progressivism.^[10]

In the early 2000s (if not before), Russia became the first European country of size to produce a massive backlash against liberalism precisely because it had experienced an authoritarian liberalism, both political and economic, that had deeply shaken the foundations of its social order in the 1990s. At the same time, Russia’s international prestige had decreased, as the post-Cold War order had relegated the country to second-class status. While the authorities mainly responded to the decline of the country’s international status, the citizenry reacted mostly to the destabilizing influence of political and economic liberalism—a top-down and bottom-up encounter that has produced the social consensus of the Putin regime.[11]

What had begun as a situational ideology quickly reconnected with older roots, namely a long conservative tradition anchored in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, and forms of moral conservatism and anti-Westernism dating back to the Soviet era. The Putin regime has since been able to stay in tune with the evolution of the international arena, inspiring those who challenge the liberal hegemony in all its aspects: political, social, economic, and geopolitical. It has taken the lead in denouncing a crusading US universalism during the neocon era of the George W. Bush administration; in defending authoritarian sovereignty against external interference in the so-called Global South; and in criticizing progressivism in national, family, sexual, and gender matters and contributing to the idea of a decline of white Christian Western civilization.

Putin’s speeches can serve as a barometer of the changing tides within the Russian political elite. Historically, the Russian president has not been obsessed with liberalism per se, at least not for very long. In the 2000s, he mentioned liberalism and liberalization in a positive sense,[12] and it was only in 2013–2014 that a semantic shift began to emerge, when Putin first identified “liberals” as a political group and decried the “liberal defense” of homosexuality.^[13] However, the term still bore some positive connotations, as he referred to himself that year as “a real liberal,” going on to say that “I support liberal views.”^[14] While he has continued to stress the importance of economic modernization and has never totally abandoned references to universal values, the shift from supporting liberalism, at least in some discursive aspects, to denouncing it wholesale, was a major change of the second half of the 2010s. It culminated in his 2019 declaration to the Financial Times: “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”^[15] This rupture did not remain at the level of official rhetoric; it crystallized into a structured set of illiberal scripts that redefined democracy, sovereignty, and international order.

Russian Illiberal Grammar and Its Scripts

Russia’s strategic narrative is structured around four mutually reinforcing registers—majoritarianism, sovereigntism, civilizationism, and conservatism—which together constitute the ideological grammar of the regime.[16] These registers do not operate independently; they form an integrated response to liberalism as a political, economic, cultural, and international order, allowing Russia to articulate both an internal model of governance and an external critique of Western dominance.

Majoritarianism lies at the core of Russia’s response to political liberalism. It does not reject democracy as such but radically narrows its meaning. It reduces it to electoral legitimacy and the unmediated expression of a presumed homogeneous majority, while liberal constitutionalism, pluralism, and minority protections are recast as artificial constraints imposed by unaccountable elites.[17] In this framework, institutions designed to limit power (independent courts, autonomous media, civil society organizations) are portrayed not as safeguards of democracy, but as obstacles to popular sovereignty and threats to state security. Majoritarianism thus enables a discourse in which illiberal practices are justified in the name of democracy itself. This logic also facilitates the projection of majoritarian claims through Russian foreign policy, laying the conceptual groundwork for a narrative of a “World Majority.”

Sovereigntism constitutes the second pillar of Russia’s backlash, this time against geopolitical liberalism, portraying the liberal international order as a vehicle for Western—and above all, US—hegemony.[18] Liberal norms such as humanitarian intervention, the international rules-based order, and supranational governance are reframed as instruments that undermine state autonomy under the guise of universal values. The Russia-West conflict is thus a normative conflict between two contending principles: on Russia’s side, the idea that the world order should be based on rules of coexistence such as sovereignty, noninterference, and balance of power between great powers; and on the West’s side, the idea that the expansion of the liberal community is the main guarantee of peace and stability.^[19] Sovereigntism links domestic authority to international resistance, presenting the defense of sovereignty as a global political project.

Interestingly, Russia’s illiberalism does not focus its criticism on economic liberalism. Today’s Russian authorities frame the neoliberal reforms of the post-Soviet transition as externally imposed experiments that produced inequality, social dislocation, and state weakness, and reassert the state as the primary guarantor of economic stability and national development, particularly in strategic sectors. But they do not reject capitalism, free markets, nor globalization per se.^[20] On the contrary, the idea that international competition is good for Russia because it cancels out the West’s normative advantage has continued to shape the mindset of Russia’s technocratic elite.[21] Russia’s dissatisfaction with its place in the liberal international economic order has been articulated in a very weak way compared to its dissatisfaction with the liberal international political order, and it has accepted its peripheral status in the global economy and its role as a raw-materials appendage.[22]

Civilizationism provides the third register through which Russian illiberalism contests liberal universalism. Liberalism is depicted not as a neutral or universally valid system, but as a culturally specific Western ideology that has been falsely elevated to a status of global normativity.[23] The regime has continued to play on diverse civilizational repertoires: for a long time, it presented Russia as having civilizational features similar to Europe’s and some forms of Western culture, yet at the same time as following its own distinctive course of development. The regime then gradually moved more decisively toward claiming full “civilizational autonomy.” By asserting the country’s status as a distinct “state-civilization,” Russia’s illiberal discourse rejects the idea of a single path to modernity and advances the legitimacy of plural civilizational trajectories. This framing allows Russia to position itself simultaneously as a challenger to Western epistemic dominance and as a defender of cultural diversity. Civilizationism also enables the strategic appropriation of postcolonial language, recasting resistance to liberal norms as a form of emancipation from Western moral and political hierarchies.

Conservatism completes the illiberal configuration by articulating a response to cultural liberalism.[24] Post-1960s emancipatory norms surrounding gender, sexuality, family, and religion are portrayed as symptoms of moral decay, relativism, and social fragmentation, linked to the broader failures of liberal modernity. Russian conservatism advances an anthropological vision centered on hierarchy, rootedness, and collective identity, rejecting liberal individualism as corrosive to social cohesion.^[25] In November 2022, a presidential decree on the “Fundamentals of State Policy to Preserve and Strengthen Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values” codified 17 such traditional values, which cover a large spectrum of human sentiments that are not unique to Russia, combined with some notions more clearly oriented toward the status quo, such as love for the motherland and duty toward the state.Traditional values function not only as domestic moral guidelines, but also as instruments of international positioning, enabling Russia to forge symbolic alliances with conservative actors across regions and cultures.

Taken together, majoritarianism, sovereigntism, civilizationism, and conservatism form a coherent illiberal worldview that redefines democracy, sovereignty, and international order without abandoning their normative vocabulary. These illiberal scripts also supply the conceptual bridge across which Russia reinterprets its own historical relationship to the former Third World. It is precisely at this juncture that illiberalism opens onto an anticolonial narrative, allowing Russia to recast its past and present as part of a broader struggle against Western normative and moral hierarchies.

Revisiting Soviet Anticolonialism through a Conservative Lens

The idea that Russia has been both colonized by the West and engaged in self-colonization has deep roots in Russian political and intellectual history. Nineteenth-century thinkers had captured this tension as well, most notably in Vasily Klyuchevsky’s observation that Russia “colonizes itself,”[26] expanding territorially while remaining culturally dependent on Western reference points. Russian elites have long perceived the country as caught between Europe—viewed as a dangerous normative center to be emulated—and the East—seen as a periphery to be governed.[27] This in-betweenness produced two enduring interpretations. One portrayed Russia as colonized by its own Westernized elites, a core insight of Slavophile thought that criticized the imperial elite’s acculturation to Europe and its disconnection from the common people. The other framed Russia’s imperial expansion as a compensatory response to European marginalization, justifying Russia’s domination over Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia as a civilizing mission, even as Europe continued to view Russia itself as backward and semi-Asian.

This unresolved contradiction was radically reworked after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 through both Eurasianism and Soviet internationalism. Eurasianist thinkers rejected Europe’s claim to universality and denounced Western cultural hegemony, arguing that Russia must “unlearn the West” and embrace civilizational plurality.[28] This position, which anticipated postcolonial critiques, converged with Bolshevism in its opposition to Europe and its support for anticolonial movements worldwide. Indeed, from its inception, Soviet internationalism rested on an ideological equivalence between industrial workers in advanced capitalist states and subjugated populations in colonial and semicolonial societies, a pairing that became central to its global political vocabulary. After the Second World War, the USSR emerged as a major patron of anti-imperial struggles, extending assistance not only to regimes aligned with socialism but also to actors within the broader Non-Aligned Movement. This approach was most visible in Southeast Asia and Latin America and, with particular intensity in the 1970s, in Africa, where Russia supported revolutionary movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, as well as the African National Congress in its struggle against apartheid in South Africa.[29]

At times Soviet internationalism supported anticolonial movements that were conservative in social or cultural terms, even if this sat uneasily with Marxist-Leninist ideology. Indeed, Soviet support was driven far more by geopolitical and anti-imperialist calculations than by any strict alignment on values. Many liberation movements framed their struggle primarily in nationalist, religious, or traditionalist terms rather than in explicitly socialist ones, and Moscow was often willing to overlook conservative positions on gender roles, religion, or social hierarchy so long as these movements opposed Western colonial powers and aligned themselves, even loosely, against US influence. The USSR tended to interpret anticolonial struggle itself as a progressive force, assuming that national liberation would eventually open the path to socialist transformation, regardless of a movement’s immediate ideological content.

This pragmatism was especially visible in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Several Soviet-backed movements combined anti-imperialism with strong appeals to tradition, religion, or patriarchal social structures. For example, Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa socialism in Tanzania, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s doctrine of African socialism in Senegal, or Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea emphasized cultural and spiritual authenticity, traditional social cohesion, and customary authority as the foundations of socialist national liberation.[30] In the Middle East too, Soviet partnerships with Arab nationalist regimes often involved accommodation with socially conservative norms and religious institutions. While Moscow sometimes encouraged secularization and socialist reforms after independence, it generally avoided making cultural liberalization a precondition for support. In this sense, Soviet internationalism implicitly accepted that resistance to imperialism could coexist with conservative values systems, reinforcing a broader pattern in which anti-Western alignment mattered more than ideological purity.[31]

While Soviet foreign policy was defending anticolonial movements worldwide, debates about self-colonization resurfaced domestically, especially among Russian conservative and nationalist circles who reinterpreted the spread of Marxism itself as a form of Western colonialism. Conservative values were also inherent in established social practices. Throughout the life of the Soviet Union, the party-state rhetorically emphasized its adherence to the idea of progress and its focus on the future and youth. Yet allegiance to left-wing ideas—such as Marxism-Leninism, atheism, and socialism in politics and economics—was also combined with right-wing social and cultural conservatism. A notable element of state-sanctioned Soviet values was a kind of prudishness, manifest in the preaching of “high morals,” the condemnation of adultery, criticism of premarital sex, and the criminalization of homosexuality.^[32] In addition, morality mattered in foreign affairs, as capitalism was described as deeply immoral—one can find here the main root of today’s official rhetoric about perverted liberalism.

Moreover, though the perestroika years are often remembered in the West as a flowering of liberal thinking, the moral aspect of this brand of liberalism has often gone unnoticed. As Guillaume Sauvé has shown, Russian liberalism rose on the premise of a moral revolution against an immoral Soviet regime.^[33] But the liberalism of the 1990s, and especially economic neoliberalism, combined with a rise in criminality and wild capitalism, destroyed the moral legitimacy of liberalism in the eyes of many Russians, pushing many erstwhile liberals to embrace a kind of situational conservatism. In the 1990s, this narrative was revitalized by illiberal actors who cast shock therapy, globalization, and elite-driven liberalization as the final stage of Western neocolonial domination.[34]

Russia’s De-Westernization and Its Ideational and Narrative Features

It is against this layered historical backdrop that contemporary Russian anticolonial discourse must be read. This section examines two key features of Russia’s illiberal anticolonialism, which drive its “de-Westernizing agenda”^[35] and attempts to erode the liberal international order. First, a renewed prominence of anticolonial rhetoric in Russian political discourse since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine beginning in 2022 and its promotion in the Global South. Second the crafting of the notion of a “World Majority,” as advanced by Russian foreign policy expert Sergey Karaganov.

Russia’s New Anticolonial Strategic Narrative and Its Objectives

As discussed above, the language of anticolonialism was central to Soviet foreign policy, but largely faded from the lexicon of Russian politics in the post-Soviet era until 2022. Although traces of anticolonial rhetoric were already discernible in the late 2010s, notably during the First Russia-Africa Summit, held in Sochi in October 2019, it was the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine that firmly reintroduced anticolonialism into contemporary Russian official discourse and diplomatic language.^[36] This strategic narrative is not only deployed domestically (for instance, to denounce alleged Western attempts to politically and ideologically “colonize” Ukraine and Russia) but is extensively used in international forums and in messages directed at foreign audiences to promote the de-Westernization of the international order.

According to our analysis, Vladimir Putin has used the lexical field of colonialism three times more frequently throughout all of 2022 (44 occurrences), 2023 (84 occurrences), and 2024 (33 occurrences) than during the entirety of his presidency prior to the war (54 occurrences from 2000 through 2021, see Figure 2). In an article published ahead of the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg, and translated into English, Arabic, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, the Russian president asserted that “a new multipolar world order, the contours of which are already seen, will be more just and democratic. And there is no doubt that Africa, along with Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, will take its worthy place in it and finally free itself from the bitter legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism, rejecting its modern practices.”^[37] In another interview, published in June 2024 in the official North Korean newspaper Rodong Shinmun (Workers’ Newspaper), on the eve of a state visit to Pyongyang, Vladimir Putin went further, suggesting that “the United States is going out of its way to impose on the world what it calls the ‘rules-based order,’ which is essentially nothing more than a global neo-colonial dictatorship relying on double standards.”^[38] Finally, during a forum gathering numerous BRICS parliamentarians in Saint Petersburg in July 2024, Putin compared the practices of Western elites to “classical colonialism at its best,” through which they “seek to cement a certain order based on their own so-called rules that nobody has ever seen, discussed or adopted.”^[39]

Anticolonialism is also now formally enshrined in the latest Russian Foreign Policy Concept, that of 2023, which defines the main strategies of the Russian Federation’s foreign policy while also providing discursive guidelines for the various administrators responsible for implementing it. Article 5 of the document states that:

Russia, taking into account its decisive contribution to the victory in World War II and its active role in shaping the contemporary system of international relations and eliminating the global system of colonialism, is one of the sovereign centres of global development performing a historically unique mission aimed at maintaining global balance of power and building a multipolar international system.^[40]

Reflecting the close interdependence between state discourse and state media production, this resurgence of anticolonialism has extensively permeated the Russian media space, and it informs both domestic and international news coverage. Excluded from Western markets, and seeking new audiences in the Global South, the transnational Russian state-run media outlets RT and Sputnik have incorporated anticolonialism as a new key pillar of their editorial line, supporting their redeployment in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Brazil.^[41] In a notable advertising campaign conducted in the summer of 2023 across several major English-speaking African cities and entitled “Your Values, Shared,” RT promoted itself by displaying the faces and quotations of prominent leaders of independence movements, anticolonial struggles, and pan-Africanism. Billboards in Accra, Ghana, for instance, featured the image of President Kwame Nkrumah (1960–1966) alongside the slogan: “Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.”^[42]

The anticolonial narrative has finally been employed in Russia’s information operations targeting countries of the Global South. This is exemplified, for instance, by content disseminated in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the Sahel region and the Central African Republic, by Wagner mercenaries seeking to discredit the French military, and through the late warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Lakhta project and its regional branch of troll farms, Africa Politology.^[43] The organization and news agency African Initiative, which is allegedly supervised by Russian intelligence services, has played an active role in promoting Russia’s strategic narratives and interests in the Africa since the death of Prigozhin in an airplane crash in August 2023 that most observers have seen as orchestrated by the Kremlin.[44]

Figure 1. “World Majority” versus “Collective West”: A New Narrative to Unite the Rest against the West

Source: Maxime Daniélou based on Russian Federation Government; Sergey Karaganov, Alexander Kramarenko, and Dmitri Trenin, “Russia’s Policy towards the World Majority,” Higher School of Economics, 2023.

A key concept in this anticolonial strategic narrative is the notion of “World Majority” (mirovoe bol’shinstvo), which, in its Russian version, can be attributed to the academic and former presidential adviser Sergey Karaganov, who first mentioned it in an article published in September 2022.[45] He proposed this term to replace that of “non-West” (ne-Zapad), which designates the highly heterogeneous group composed of all non-Western states. Karaganov criticizes the designation of “non-West” as being overly negative and Western-centric, explaining that “World Majority” also emphasizes the idea that the West constitutes a minority. Furthermore, the emergence of this narrative can be seen as a conceptual effort to find an alternative to the “Global South,” within which the inclusion of Russia can be easily challenged, at a moment when Russia needs to rethink its identity, moving ever further away from the West.[46]

From the Russian perspective, the world is now divided into two camps (See Fig. 1). On the one hand, countries included in the Russian government’s list of “unfriendly states” that condemn Russia in international forums, levy economic sanctions against it, and provide military or economic aid to Ukraine—these constitute the “collective West.” On the other hand, there are all the others, including neutral states, which the Kremlin conveniently presents as “friendly” or “constructive.” The goal of the “World Majority” narrative is to get this division internalized by the entire non-Western world as the new, defining geopolitical cleavage in international relations.  

Opposing the West to the non-West, the “World Majority” narrative directly echoes Samuel Huntington’s 1993 theory of the “Clash of Civilizations,” in which he argued that “the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between ‘the West and the Rest.’ ”[47] It is worth noting that Huntington’s ideas gained significant popularity in Russia as early as the 1990s, particularly because they positioned Russia as the core of a distinct Orthodox civilization, offering symbolic comfort in the face of the sense of decline and the ideological void caused by the collapse of the USSR.[48] However, many in Russia criticized Huntington’s theory for its destabilizing potential, arguing that it fuels hostility toward China and the Muslim world and exposes Russia’s internal fragility. According to Tsygankov, the world system theory developed by Immanuel Wallerstein is more consensual among Russian scholars.[49]

The civilizational foundation of the “World Majority” narrative also places it within the intellectual lineage of neo-Eurasianist thought. This is particularly evident in the work of its most influential figure, Alexander Panarin, who has argued that Russia acts as the guardian of civilizational diversity against the expansionist ambitions of a declining West.[50] Parallels can also be drawn with the ideas of the far-right ideologist Alexander Dugin, whose far more nationalist and antagonistic interpretation of Eurasianism centers on the defense of Traditionalism. He argues that Western global dominance will lead to “the destruction of racial, religious, ethnic, national, and cultural boundaries.”[51] By combining aspects of both Panarin’s and Dugin’s thought, the “World Majority” narrative positions Russia in the vanguard of the confrontation between the West and the non-West—united in the defense of civilizational diversity.

While no clear link has been established yet, the Russian version of the “World Majority” is preceded by another formulation with a distinct origin. The “Majority World” idea was first coined in the 1990s by Bangladeshi photographer and political activist Shahidul Alam. In a 2008 article, he explained that his goal was to find a substitute for the terms “Third World” and “developing world,” which he considered reductive and negative, and which were imposed by a minority of wealthier states on the rest of the world. He also emphasized that the states of the “Majority World” were those that had been colonized and continued to suffer the effects of colonialism. The aim, therefore, was to revalue the image of these states and challenge the symbolic dominance of a minority, represented at the time, according to Alam, by the G8, which then included Russia.[52] The “World Majority” therefore represents an example of an idea originating in the South that has been reshaped according to Russia’s discursive needs in the context of its post-2022 transformations.

The development and promotion of the “World Majority” narrative follows a pattern similar to the earlier promotion of the “Turn to the East” and “Greater Eurasia” concepts, which Karaganov and his team developed and advanced from 2012 onward[53] to provide the Russian state with a conceptual framework for the ongoing de-Westernization of Russian foreign policy—an agenda of which he became one of the most prominent advocates.

To promote his ideas, Karaganov can rely on a powerful network of experts and institutions, such as the Valdai Discussion Club, the Higher School of Economics (HSE), the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, or the influential journal Rossiia v global’noi politike/Russia in Global Affairs. The “World Majority” was first mentioned by a high-ranking state representative, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, on December 15, 2022, less than three months after its first appearance in Russia in Global Affairs. Over the course of 2023, this narrative became increasingly prominent in the discourse of Russian political leaders, with a first reference by Vladimir Putin during the Second Russia-Africa International Parliamentary Conference  (Moscow, March 19–20, 2023), where the Russian president stated that Russia, together with African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries, “constitute the World Majority.”^[54] It then reached a broader international audience during his speech at the 2023 BRICS Summit in Johannesburg.

Demonstrating a desire to establish this narrative in the Russian and international intellectual debate, Sergey Karaganov and his team organized a consequential international conference on the “World Majority,” bringing together scholars from over a dozen countries across Asia, Africa, and South America (Moscow, November 30–December 1, 2023). Participants were welcomed by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Rudenko and HSE Rector Nikita Anisimov. It was during this conference that Karaganov presented what remains the most substantial conceptual text on the “World Majority” narrative to date, coauthored with Alexander Kramarenko of the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Dmitri Trenin, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, who joined Karaganov’s team at the HSE after the war started.[55] A few days after the conference, the report was published on the official website of the Russian Foreign Ministry, granting it the status and authority of a quasi-official state concept.

The emergence of the “World Majority” narrative appeared to be well aligned with the discursive needs of the Russian state as it assumed the BRICS presidency for 2024. It was fully integrated into the official discourse of the organizers, as exemplified by the statement made on November 27, 2023, by the Head of Russia’s BRICS Organizing Committee, Yuri Ushakov, who declared that “the BRICS constitute the vanguard of the World Majority.”[56] It also appeared in the nomenclature of official BRICS events, such as the BRICS Inter-Party Forum organized by Putin’s United Russia party under the theme, “World Majority for a Multipolar World” (Vladivostok, June 16–19, 2024).

In the second major report devoted to the “World Majority,” the authors emphasized that the diffusion of ideas and narratives constitutes Russia’s most important task vis-à-vis the non-West: “The competition of ideas means as much as the competition of economic and military capabilities.”[57] Although it is now firmly entrenched in domestic state and media discourse (Putin used the concept seven times during his Valdai speech of October 2, 2025)[58] the “World Majority” narrative has not, for now, achieved comparable resonance internationally. As the same report acknowledges, “the World Majority concept has not yet been incorporated into the discourse of countries that are friendly to Russia and is not used at the level of political statements, documents, or declarations.”[59] According to Kapoor, the main obstacle to its diffusion in the non-West lies in its lack of originality, as it reproduces ideas that have been developed for more than seven decades in the Global South, dating back at least to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and in the fact that it dismisses the agency of non-Western countries in doing so.[60]

Discursive Evidence of Illiberal Anticolonialism in Russia’s Turn to the South

The limits of the “World Majority” narrative’s international reach do not diminish the analytical interest of its content: it remains a revealing lens through which Russia’s four illiberal registers (majoritarianism, sovereigntism, civilizationism, and conservatism) operate in practice. As seen in Figure 2, the expansion of the lexical field of coloniality in Russian presidential discourse, which we use as a barometer of a broader consensus among the Russian elite, since February 2022 has been indeed accompanied by a growing prominence of references to multipolarity and traditional values.

Figure 2. The lexical field of anticolonialism, multipolarity, and traditional values in Russian presidential discourse from 2000 to 2025.

Source: Authors, based on Dekoder, https://share.dekoder.org/putinspecial/?img=6f5c1410-3927-4aaa-9a7b-d9ae6925a8b4&terms=colonial%2Bcolonialism%2Bcolonisation%2Bneocolonial%2Bneocolonialism%2Bcolony%2Cmultipolarity%2Bmultipolar%2Ctraditional%20value%2Bfamily%20value&langId=en.

Majoritarianism as a Rhetorical Instrument

The roots of Russia’s contemporary majoritarian rhetoric lie in the reorientation of its foreign policy initiated with the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1996. Breaking with the Western-centric foreign policy that had reflected the dominance of liberals during President Boris Yeltsin’s first administration, the new foreign minister focused on restoring Russia’s status as a great power.^[61] His doctrine of a “multipolar world” rested on the premise that US unipolarity was both illegitimate and dangerous, and it encouraged Russia to seek partners outside the West while presenting these partnerships as the foundations of a more democratic international order.^[62] Over the following two decades, this approach became institutionalized through successive efforts to strengthen ties with China, consolidate Eurasian regional structures, and build coalitions through non-Western groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS. The growing demographic and economic weight of these groupings contributed to the development of Russia’s majoritarian rhetoric, used to legitimize its foreign policy and its critique of the Western liberal international order.

The “World Majority” can be seen as the narrative materialization of Russian majoritarian rhetoric, specifically tailored for the Global South. It frames Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and its Western allies as a struggle against a self-serving minority, whose primary objective is to maintain American hegemony and an unequal international system through imperialist and neocolonial policies that favor developed countries at the expense of the Global South. This argument is reinforced by the theory of the “golden billion,”^[63] widely disseminated by the Russian president and his entourage since the beginning of the conflict and directly incorporated into the “World Majority” narrative: “The unipolar model of global development has served the golden billion, which for centuries has fueled its excessive consumption by relying on Asian, African, and Latin American resources.”^[64] This framing allows Russian leaders to present their challenge to Western governance and values as part of a broader movement for the democratization of the world order.

The analysis of the “World Majority” narrative shows that majoritarianism as mobilized by Russian leaders is profoundly instrumental. According to Sergey Karaganov’s definition, “The ‘World Majority’ means a community of non-Western countries that have no binding relationships with the United States and the organizations it patronizes—those who do not impose sanctions against Russia, recognize American dominance, etc.”[65] It appears that this group of non-Western states, allegedly united by common interest, is not defined through objective criteria but through such states’ political alignment with Russian interests. This self-referential definition reveals the instrumental function of this strategic narrative. It aims to create a symbolic community in which Russia can claim to speak on behalf of the Global South while legitimizing its actions—including the war in Ukraine—as part of a wider anticolonial struggle. The manifest instrumental nature of the “World Majority” narrative may help explain its failure to gain traction internationally and more broadly illustrates one of the limits of Russia’s discursive strategy towards the Global South.

Sovereigntist Convergences

The Russian anticolonial stance and its critique of the liberal international order clearly align with the contours of sovereigntism.^[66] First asserted in Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, Russia’s sovereigntism takes concrete form in Europe through its critique of the European Union as a supranational entity that denies the sovereignty and independence of European nation-states. The editorial line of the European branches of the RT network is an illustration of this ideological posture.^[67] In recent years, however, this political orientation has found new manifestations in Russia’s foreign policy toward the Global South.

The growing Russian presence in Sub-Saharan Africa offers a particularly relevant context for examining the convergence of sovereigntist and anticolonial discourses among Russian and African actors. Both draw on these two repertoires to legitimize their respective positions through a shared denunciation of Western “neocolonialism.” Historically shaped by the “dilemma” between advocates of continental unity and defenders of national sovereignty, pan-Africanism, as Rita Abrahamsen notes, can accommodate both a commitment to multilateralism, on the one hand, and a sovereigntist, antiliberal understanding of the international order, on the other hand.^[68] The “neo-Pan-Africanist” and “neo-sovereigntist” African actors^[69] with whom Russian counterparts engage, especially in the Sahel region and with the Alliance of Sahel States, align themselves with this latter interpretation.

The “neocolonial” presence of France has, of course, been a primary target of these Russian and African actors in recent years. However, their sovereigntist critique has also been directed at supranational actors operating in Africa, such as United Nations and European Union missions. The UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) and its counterpart in Mali (MINUSMA) have been accused of defending Western interests by local organizations supported by Russian actors, including Bangui-based Radio Lengo Songo, the news website Ndjoni Sango, the NGO Aimons notre Afrique (ANA: love our Africa), and the pan-Africanist activist group Yerewolo-Debout sur les remparts (“The Dignified Ones-Standing on the Remparts”).^[70]

Civilizationism against Western Universalism

The emergence of the “World Majority” narrative must also be understood within the broader civilizationist turn in Russia that was formalized in the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept.^[71] This critique of Western universalism is central to contemporary Russian civilizationist discourse,[72] which sees it as “both a philosophical threat to the God-given diversity of the world and as a political lie organized by the West to obfuscate its strategic interests.”^[73] As Karaganov, Trenin, and Kramarenko argue, the “World Majority” should oppose “the extremist mutation of the liberal idea currently underway in the West,” and instead articulate its own response to global challenges, aligned with “the cultural and philosophical traditions of different civilizations.”[74]

From this point of view, the “World Majority” is presented as the political awakening of non-Western civilizations, whose collective resistance is supposedly led or inspired by Russia, which constitutes “its military-political core.”[75]  According to Putin, “the phenomenon of the world majority is a new development in international affairs. The overwhelming majority of states worldwide are oriented towards pursuing their own civilizational interests.”^[76] Drawing on its multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural character, Russia is portrayed as uniquely positioned to mediate between other civilizations and to guide the emergence of a polycentric order. In line with the Kremlin’s increasingly messianic rhetoric, Karaganov estimates that Russian civilization holds a unique historical mission: “we are a civilization of civilizations, called upon to unite those of Greater Eurasia and the world.”^[77]

This logic also structures Russia’s interpretation of the war in Ukraine. By reversing the accusations leveled against them, Russian leaders present the February 2022 invasion as a defensive act against the United States and its allies, who allegedly instrumentalize Ukraine to prevent the loss of their hegemony.^[78] The goal of this narrative is to rally non-Western public opinion (as well as to provide talking points for pro-Russian foreign leaders) by presenting the war as a struggle against imperialism, in which a Russian victory would signify the dawn of a multipolar and “multicivilizational” era: “Russia’s victory in Ukraine will give an impetus to further efforts to change the global balance of power in favor of mutual respect and equal dialogue, and eventually establish a world order based on cultural and civilizational diversity.”[79]

Defending Traditional Values against Western Post-Humanism

The conservative component of Russia’s new anticolonialism is at last salient in the discourses and content about traditional values produced by Russian actors in their communication aimed at audiences in the Global South.The above-mentioned first usage by Vladimir Putin of the notion of a “World Majority” during the 2023 Russia-Africa Parliamentary Summit was clearly associated with the defense of traditional values and resistance to Western ideological “colonization”: “Russia and the countries of Africa uphold the moral norms and social foundations traditional to our peoples, and resist the externally imposed neo-colonial ideology. Incidentally, many states in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America hold similar positions—together, we constitute the World Majority.”[80]

The Russian leadership frames Africa in particular as a normative ally in a global confrontation between liberal and traditional values systems, portraying shared moral conservatism as the basis for resisting Western “neocolonial” influence.^[81] In Sub-Saharan Africa, numerous political and cultural events have been organized in recent years at Russia’s initiative to embody this conservative ideological convergence between Russian and African societies. The first edition of the BRICS Traditional Values Forum was held by the State Duma in Moscow in November 2024, at the initiative of the Russian nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin and the national-conservative deputy and cofounder of the World Christian Association of Parliamentarians, Dmitry Kuznetsov.

The forum, attended by parliamentarians from Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, the Republic of the Congo, and Uganda, suggested that “countering the LGBT propaganda of the collective West” represented “one of the most important tasks of the BRICS countries” in the emergence of a world “without Satanism and obscurantism,” to use Prilepin’s expression.^[82] Russia’s revamped cultural diplomacy in Africa also participates in this process. In January 2024, the Russian Federal Agency for Cultural Diplomacy, Rossotrudnichestvo, inaugurated a new Russian House (russkii dom) in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, alongside members of the Burkinabè government. A few weeks later, the Russian House and the Burkina Faso branch of African Initiative co-hosted a conference devoted to “the protection and preservation of customary and traditional values in the face of Western influence.”^[83]

Russian diplomacy is also involved. In an interview with African Initiative, Anatoly Bashkin, Director of the Department of African States South of the Sahara at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stated that Russia’s “main difference with the former colonial powers” lay in the fact that it does not “impose ready-made models on Africans.” According to him, “the foundation for intercultural interaction in Africa rests on the solid base of traditional values, which play a dominant role in almost all African communities. In this respect, we have much in common with our partners, including the need to counter the neoliberal pseudo-values being promoted everywhere by the West.”^[84]

This issue has crystallized around LGBTIQ+ rights, on a continent where 31 out of 54 African countries still criminalize consensual same-sex relations between adults.^[85] An investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Russian Ambassador to Uganda Vladlen Semivolos reportedly played a significant role in accelerating the legislative process leading to the adoption, in March 2023, of a particularly severe Anti-Homosexuality Act in a country already known for its governmental homophobia. The Russian ambassador is said to have argued for the need to counter what he described as the promotion of “homosexuality propaganda” by Western governments in Ugandan schools^[86]—mirroring the situation in Russia, where the Law for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values, commonly known as the “anti-LGBT law,” was adopted in 2023.

At last, the Russian Orthodox Church is a key actor in the intertwining of anticolonial and conservative discourse. During the Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg of 2023, Patriarch Kirill contrasted what he described as the “arrogance,” “moral relativism,” and “cultural and spiritual degradation” of the Western world—still unable, in his view, to overcome its colonial past—with the supposed moral affinity uniting African and Russian peoples. He emphasized their “shared understanding of the fundamental tenets of human life” and common attachment to “imperishable moral values,” citing faithfulness to tradition, the heteronormative concept of family, and respect for one’s country’s history as “essential principles of our civilization.”^[87] Founded in 2021, the Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa of the Russian Orthodox Church actively participates in promoting traditional values across the continent while aligning itself with the anticolonial rhetoric advanced by Russian foreign policy.^[88]

Conclusion

Russia’s illiberal anticolonialism designates a distinctive mode of resistance to Western dominance. Reworking Soviet internationalist legacies through sovereigntist, civilizational, and conservative frameworks, it advances a vision of decolonization centered on normative pluralism and state sovereignty rather than individual emancipation. To appeal to countries of the Global South, these narratives mobilize familiar themes of political and economic emancipation: the democratization of the international order, resistance to economic imperialism, and the rejection of neocolonial hierarchies. But this “illiberal emancipation” targets mostly the collective body of the nation and the state as its champion, while abandoning the liberal idea of a progress for individuals and their right to free themselves from different forms of domination.

This hybrid configuration allows Russia to present itself as a champion of the post-Western international order while revealing the internal tensions of an emancipation project grounded in illiberal premises.First, despite a genuine power of attraction and ability to promote its strategic narratives in the Global South, Russia remains seen by many, both at home and abroad, as culturally, demographically, and economically being a country from the Global North, and as the continuation of the former socialist Second World rather than a member of the former Third World. Second, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and alignment with China, Iran, and North Korea diminish its credibility among actors such as Brazil and South Africa, who are disillusioned with the West, but where a large part of the population is skeptical of authoritarian alternatives.

Indeed, what limits Russia’s anticolonial appeal is that de-Westernization does not automatically equate with de-liberalization. The rejection of Western epistemic authority and geopolitical leadership does not inherently imply the abandonment of democratic norms and the embrace of illiberal governance. Many actors in the Global South articulate demands for greater sovereignty, recognition, and multipolarity while simultaneously reaffirming commitments to pluralism and individual rights. Russia’s trajectory thus represents not the only option for de-Westernization but a particular trajectory that speaks to some but not all of global public opinion.

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* Maxime Audinet’s research was carried out with the support of the French National Agency for Research (ANR) and the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

[1] Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, “Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia at the 2nd Russia–Africa Summit, Saint Petersburg, July 27, 2023,” text reproduced by OCP News Service / DECR, July 30, 2023.

[2] We use the notion while taking into consideration its intrinsic limits and its homogenizing character. On this issue, see Sinah Theres Kloß, “The Global South as Subversive Practice: Challenges and Potentials of a Heuristic Concept,” Global South 11, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 1–17, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/globalsouth.11.2.01.

[3] Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

[4] Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

[5] Clifford Bob, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner, The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022).

^[6] Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle, Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 3.

[7] Denys Kiryukhin, “From Left to Right? The Soviet and Contemporary Russian Anti-Colonial and Decolonial Discourses”, Ideology and Politics Journal 28, no. 2 (2025): 89–118, http://dx.doi.org/10.36169/2227-6068.2025.02.00004.

[8] Marlene Laruelle, “Illiberalism: A Conceptual Introduction,” East European Politics 38, no. 2 (2022): 303–327, https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2022.2037079; Marlene Laruelle, “Introduction: Illiberalism Studies as a Field,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by Marlene Laruelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024): 1–40.

^[9] G. John Ikenberry, “The Liberal International Order and Its Discontents,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 3 (2010): 509–521, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829810366477.

^[10] Marlene Laruelle, “Introduction: Illiberalism Studies as a Field,” in Marlene Laruelle, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (Oxford University Press, 2024), 1–40.

[11] Marlene Laruelle, “Making Sense of Russia’s Illiberalism,” Journal of Democracy 31, no. 3 (2020): 115–129, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2020.0049.

[12] See details of the quantitative analysis of Putin’s speech in Marlene Laruelle, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2025).

^[13] Vladimir Putin, “Poslanie Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii Ot 18.03.2014 g.,” Kremlin.ru, March 18, 2014, http://kremlin.ru/acts/bank/39444.

^[14] Ielena Chernyshova, “V. Putin podtverdil, chto on ‘nastoiashchii liberal,” RBK, January 19, 2014, https://www.rbc.ru/politics/19/01/2014/570416189a794761c0ce5bf4.

^[15] Lionel Barber, Henry Foy, and Alex Barker, “Vladimir Putin Says Liberalism Has ‘Become Obsolete’,” Financial Times, June 17, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/670039ec-98f3–11e9–9573–ee5cbb98ed36.

[16] For more on these topics, see Laruelle, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime.

[17] David Lewis, Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

[18] Richard Sakwa, Russia against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

^[19] Andrej Krickovic and Richard Sakwa, “War in Ukraine: The Clash of Norms and Ontologies,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 22, no. 2 (2022): 90–91.

^[20] Peter Rutland, “The Contradictions in Putin’s Economic Nationalism: From Western Partner to Fortress Russia,” Russian Politics 8, no. 1 (2023): 24–47, https://doi.org/10.30965/24518921-00801002.

[21] Vladislav Surkov, “Suverenitet – eto politicheskii sinonim konkurentosposobnosti,” Edinaia Rossiia, February, 22, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060418035317/http://www.edinros.ru/news.html?id=111148.

[22] Ivan Timofeev, “ ‘Russian Rebellion’: Local and Global Consequences,” Russian International Affairs Council, June 15, 2022, https://russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/analytics/russian-rebellion-local-and-global-consequences/.

[23] Paul Robinson, Russia’s World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2025).

[24] Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Mikhail Suslov and Dmitry Uzlaner, eds., Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes, and Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Glenn Diesen, Russian Conservatism: Managing Change under Permanent Revolution (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

^[25] Elena Stepanova, “‘The Spiritual and Moral Foundation of Civilization in Every Nation for Thousands of Years’: The Traditional Values Discourse in Russia,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 16, nos. 2–3 (2015): 119–136, https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2015.1068167.

[26] Vasilii Kliuchevskii. Kratkoe posobie po russkoi istorii (Moscow: Printing house G. Lissner and D. Sobko, 1908), 24.

[27] Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2011).

[28] Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington, DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

[29] Alvin Rubinstein, Moscow’s Third World Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Carol Savietz, The Soviet Union and the Gulf in the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1989).

[30] See, for example, Abdoulaye Niang, “Political Ethics of Léopold Sédar Senghor,” in Nimi Wariboko and Toyin Falola, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36490-8_16; Hannah Boesl, “The Concept of Ujamaa and Its Impact on Postcolonial Tanzania,” Konrad Adenauer Stiftung papers, 2023, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep48753.

[31] Galia Golan, “The Soviet Union and Third World National Liberation Movements: The Soviet Role,” Journal of International Affairs, vol. 40, no. 2, 1987, pp. 303–324,  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95213-0_6.

^[32] Anatolii G. Vishnevskii, Serp i rubl’. Konservativnaia modernizatsiia v SSSR (Moscow: VHE, 2010); Oleg V. Kirichenko, Granitsy sovetskogo traditsionalizma: iz opyta russkogo naroda v XX veke (Moscow: Aleteia, 2021).

^[33] Guillaume Sauvé, “The Lessons from Perestroika and the Evolution of Russian Liberalism (1995–2005),” in Mario Cucciolla, ed., Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism: Historical Drama and New Prospects (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag, 2019): 139–151.

[34] Ivan Grek, “The Grassroots of Putin’s Ideology: Civil Origins of an Uncivil Regime,” East European Politics 39, no. 2 (2023): 220–329, https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2023.2164849.

^[35] Maxime Daniélou, “ ‘De-Westernization’ as a Russian Strategy for Transforming the International Order,” Hérodote 3, nos. 190–191 (2023): 237–249, https://doi.org/10.3917/her.190.0237.

^[36] Maxime Audinet, “ ‘Down with Neocolonialism!’ Strategic Narrative Resurgence and Foreign Policy Preferences in Wartime Russia,” European Journal of International Security, published online July 31, 2025: 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2025.10011.

^[37] Vladimir Putin, “Russia and Africa: Joining Efforts for Peace, Progress and a Successful Future,” Kremlin website, July 24, 2024, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71719.  

^[38] Vladimir Putin, “Russia and the DPRK: Traditions of Friendship and Cooperation through the Years,” Rodong Shinmun (Pyongyang), June 18, 2024, available on the Kremlin website at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/74317.

^[39] 10th BRICS Parliamentary Forum, Kremlin website, July 11, 2024, http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74528.

^[40] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, March 2023, https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/fundamental_documents/1860586/.

^[41] Maxime Audinet, Un média d’influence d’État: Enquête sur la chaine russe RT (Bry-sur-Marne: INA, 2025), p. 271–274; Precious Chatterje-Doody, Maxime Audinet, “RT India: How the Kremlin Is Spreading Its ‘West v the Rest’ Narrative to a Global Audience,” The Conversation (news site), December 9, 2025. RT has opened new newsrooms and offices in Brazil, India, and Senegal since 2023.

^[42] See the RT website: https://www.rt.com/rt-promo-2022-en/#RTAfrica2024.

^[43] Maxime Audinet, Colin Gérard, “Les ‘libérateurs’: Comment la ‘galaxie Prigojine’ raconte la chevauchée du groupe Wagner au Sahel,” Le Rubicon, February 15, 2022, https://lerubicon.org/la-galaxie-prigojine-promoteur-de-wagner-au-sahel/.

[44] Maxime Audinet and Colin Gérard, “Under the Radar Crisis, Reorganization and Clandestinization in Russia’s Ecosystem of Information Influence after the Invasion of Ukraine,” Réseaux 3, no. 245 (2024): p. 113–152, https://doi.org/10.3917/res.245.0113.

[45] Sergey Karaganov, “Ot ne-Zapada k Mirovumu Bol’shinstvu,” Russia in Global Affairs 20, no. 5 (2022): 6–18, https://doi.org/10.31278/1810-6439-2022-20-5-6-18.

[46] Nivedita Kapoor, “A Global South 2.0? Evaluating the Concept of World Majority in Russian Foreign Policy,” Journal of Eurasian Studies vol. 0, no. 0 (2025): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/18793665251410574.

[47] Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49, https://doi.org/10.2307/20045621.

[48] Anastasia Mitrofanova, “Geopolitics in Contemporary Russia,” Hérodote, nos. 146–147 (2012): 183–192, https://doi.org/10.2307/20045621.

[49] Andrei P. Tsygankov, The “Russian Idea” in International Relations: Civilization and National Distinctiveness (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023).

[50] Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism.

[51] Alexander Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki [Foundations of Geopolitics] (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1997).

[52] Shahidul Alam, “Majority World: Challenging the West’s Rhetoric of Democracy,” Amerasia Journal 34 (2008): 88–98, https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.34.1.l3176027k4q614v5.

[53] Sergey Karaganov and Timofei Bordachev, “Toward the Great Ocean – 5: From the Turn to the East to Greater Eurasia,” Valdai Discussion Club website, September 6, 2017, https://valdaiclub.com/a/reports/toward-the-great-ocean-5-from-the-turn-to-the-east/.

^[54] “International Parliamentary Conference Russia: Africa in a Multipolar World,” Kremlin website, March 20, 2023, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/70745.

[55] Sergey Karaganov, Alexander Kramarenko, and Dmitri Trenin, “Russia’s Policy towards World Majority,” Higher School of Economics, 2023, https://www.mid.ru/upload/medialibrary/c98/cjmfdf73760bme0y99zqllj51zzllrvs/Russia%E2%80%99s%20Policy.pdf.

[56] TASS, “BRICS a Vanguard of ‘Global Majority’: Russian Presidential Aide”, Russian News Agency TASS, November 27, 2023, https://tass.com/politics/1712467.

[57] Timofei Bordachev, “The World Majority and Its Interests,” Valdai Discussion Club website, 2024, https://valdaiclub.com/files/45663/.

[58] “Valdai Discussion Club 22nd Annual Meeting,” Kremlin website, October 2, 2025, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/78134.

[59] Bordachev, “The World Majority and Its Interests.”

[60] Kapoor, “A Global South 2.0.”

^[61] Andrei P. Tsygankov, Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity, 6th ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).

^[62] Yevgeny Primakov, Vstrechi na perekriostkakh [Meetings at the Crossroads] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2015).

^[63] Popularized in Russia during the 1990s within conspiracy and nationalist circles, the “Golden Billion” theory (zolotoi milliard) denounces a system of global predation in which a minority of wealthy countries extracts the world’s resources and deliberately keeps poorer countries in a state of underdevelopment.

^[64] “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the General Debate of the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 24, 2022”, Website of the Russian MFA, September 25, 2022, https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1831211/.

[65] Karaganov, Kramarenko, and Trenin, “Russia’s Policy towards World Majority.”

^[66] In his original article on “illiberal democracies,” Fareed Zakaria himself identifies this “absolute conception of national sovereignty” as one of the fundamental characteristics of illiberalism. See Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracies,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (November/December 1997), p. 30.

^[67] Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz, Precious N. Chatterje-Doody, Rhys Crilley, and Marie Gillespie, Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order: RT as Populist Pariah (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024); Audinet, Un média d’influence d’État.

^[68] Rita Abrahamsen, “Internationalists, Sovereigntists, Nativists: Contending Visions of World Order in Pan-Africanism,” Review of International Studies 46, no. 1 (2020.): 56–74, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210519000305.

^[69] When we refer to African “neo-sovereigntism,” we mean its populist, non-democratic, and illiberal version, defined by Achille Mbemble as “a watered-down and distorted version of Pan-Africanism,” in “Afrique-France: Neuf thèses sur la fin d’un cycle,” Le Grand Continent, September 4, 2023. See also Augustin Loada, “Le souverainisme de l’État Sahélien à l’épreuve du défi sécuritaire: Le cas du Burkina Faso,” Afrique contemporaine, no. 278, (2024/2) p. 209–226, https://doi.org/10.3917/afco1.278.0209; Alain Antil, “Néo-panafricanisme et souverainisme africain,” Ramses 2026, Institut Français des Relations Internationales, Dunod, 2025): pp. 146–151.

^[70] Maxime Audinet, “Le Lion, l’Ours et les Hyènes: Acteurs, pratiques et récits de l’influence informationnelle russe en Afrique subsaharienne francophone,” Étude 83, IRSEM, July 2021; “Yerewolo, le groupe pro-russe du Mali qui exige le départ des forces de l’ONU,” BBC News Afrique, August 7, 2022 ; Valentin Châtelet, “Pro-Russian Facebook Pages Spread Anti-French, Anti-UN Content in West Africa,” Atlantic Council, Digital Forensic Research Lab, August 6, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/08/06/russia-fb-france-un-minusca/.  

^[71] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, March 2023, https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/fundamental_documents/1860586/.

[72] Robinson, Russia’s World Order.

^[73] Marlène Laruelle, “Russia’s Ideological Construction in the Context of the War in Ukraine,” Russie.Eurasie.Reports, no. 46 (March 2024).

[74] Karaganov, Kramarenko, and Trenin, “Russia’s Policy towards World Majority.”

[75] Karaganov, Kramarenko, and Trenin.

^[76] “Valdai Discussion Club 22nd Annual Meeting”, Kremlin website, October 2, 2025, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/78134.

^[77] Sergey Karaganov, “To Eurasia with Intellectual Freedom,” Russia in Global Affairs, March 31, 2025, https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/eurasia-karaganov/.

^[78] “Statement by Vladimir Putin during BRICS leaders’ extended format meeting in Johannesburg”, Kremlin website, August 23, 2023, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/72089.

[79] Karaganov, Kramarenko, and Trenin, “Russia’s Policy towards World Majority.”

[80] “International Parliamentary Conference Russia,” Kremlin website.

^[81] Olena Snigyr, Ideological Agenda of Russian Information Influence in Africa, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2024.

^[82] “The First BRICS Traditional Values Forum Kicked Off in Moscow,” African Initiative, November 18, 2024, https://afrinz.ru/en/2024/11/the-first-brics-traditional-values-forum-kicked-off-in-moscow; “‘Without Satanism and Obscurantism’: What the BRICS Forum ‘Traditional Values’ Was Memorable for,” African Initiative, November 19, 2024, https://afrinz.ru/en/2024/11/bez-satanizma-i-mrakobesiya-chem-zapomnilsya-forum-briks-tradiczionnye-czennosti/.

^[83] “Défi de la protection et conservation des valeurs coutumières et traditionnelles: ‘African Initiative’ invite à la réflexion,” Burkina 24, March 22, 2024.

^[84] “ ‘Africa’s Voice Is Growing Stronger’: Interview with the Head of the Department of African States of the Russian Foreign Ministry,” African Initiative, August 14, 2025, https://afrinz.ru/en/2025/08/africas-voice-is-growing-stronger-interview-with-the-head-of-the-department-of-african-states-to-the-south-of-sahara-of-the-russian-foreign-ministry/.

^[85] “LGBTIQ+ in Africa: Unabated Discrimination against People with Non-Conforming Sexual Orientations and Gender Identities,” European Parliamentary Research Service, May 2025.

^[86] “Russia and US Religious Conservatives See Common Foe in Africa: Gay Rights,” Wall Street Journal, September 2022, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/russia-and-u-s-religious-conservatives-see-common-foe-in-africa-gay-rights-53edee87.

^[87] Patriarch Kirill, “Address by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill at the 2nd Russia–Africa Summit,” July 27, 2023, https://mospat.ru/en/news/90568/.

^[88] Mikhail Suslov, “The Russian Orthodox Church Turns to the Global South: Recalibration of the Geopolitical Culture of the Church,” Religions vol. 15, no. 1517 (2024), 17, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15121517.