Introduction
The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world … We are proud that in the 20th century our country led the anti-colonial movement, which opened up opportunities for many peoples around the world to make progress, reduce poverty and inequality, and defeat hunger and disease. To emphasise, one of the reasons for the centuries-old Russophobia, the Western elites’ unconcealed animosity toward Russia is precisely the fact that we did not allow them to rob us during the period of colonial conquests. Footnote 1
This fierce diatribe was delivered by Vladimir Putin in a speech from the Grand Kremlin Palace on 30 September 2022, just after the ratification of the annexation treaty of four Ukrainian regions occupied by Russian forces. A closer look at Russian political discourse since 24 February 2022, reveals that, alongside the bellicose language that has accompanied Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been a notable resurgence of a rhetoric from another era: anti-colonialism. As the Russian president’s statement shows, this discourse is most often used to denounce the ‘neocolonial’ interventionism of Western nations and the geopolitical entity that Russian officials have long referred to as the ‘collective West’.
This rhetorical shift is intriguing for several reasons. First, Russian political discourse in the post-Soviet era already boasts a diverse repertoire of anti-Western themes,Footnote 2 including the ‘unipolar’, ‘hegemonic’, ‘Russophobic’, ‘decadent’, or ‘globalist’ West. Second, while anti-colonialism was central to Soviet foreign policy’s internationalist and anti-imperialist agenda, it all but vanished from Russia’s diplomatic lexicon following the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Lastly, this narrative is paradoxical, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is widely analysed outside the country as a form of ‘neo-imperial’ adventurism, if not a ‘neocolonial’ extension of its foreign policy.Footnote 3 The academic debate over the ‘colonial’ nature of Russian and Soviet imperialism, as well as calls to ‘decolonise’ the field of Slavic studies, has gained a renewed traction since February 2022.Footnote 4 Meanwhile, in contemporary Russian official discourse, any reference to ‘colonialism’ is strictly avoided when discussing the expansionism of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, and the topic is increasingly sidelined in Russian academic circles.
In previous research on Russia’s influence strategy in French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa, we observed a growing reliance on the notions of colonialism and neocolonialism, starting in the late 2010s. This rhetoric was notably employed by individuals and groups associated with the Wagner Group, particularly in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Sahel region.Footnote 5 Similarly, the objective was to undermine the legitimacy of the Western – mainly French – presence in countries where Wagner’s mercenaries were active, while facilitating the expansion of Russia’s influence across the continent. The simultaneous reemergence of this anti-colonial lexicon and the strengthening of Russia’s ties with sub-Saharan Africa calls for closer scrutiny. Existing research has yet to thoroughly investigate the scope of this rhetoric within Russian foreign policy discourse or to analyse the factors driving its resurgence in Russia following the 2022 invasion.
I argue that this anti-(neo)colonialFootnote 6 rhetoric should be understood as a new prominent strategic narrative for Russian foreign policy since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Building on this, I propose that this storytelling process – from the creation of the strategic narrative to its dissemination through Russia’s ecosystem of information influence abroad – offers valuable insights into Russian foreign policy preferences. This is particularly evident in the context of Moscow’s justification of its war of aggression in Ukraine, its contestation of the liberal international order and calls for the ‘de-Westernisation’ of the international system, and its pivot towards the countries of the ‘Global South’, or, to use a term currently popular in Russia, the ‘world majority’.
‘Narrative turn’ in IR, strategic narratives, and the case of Russia
International Relations (IR) and its subfields, including foreign policy analysis and security studies, have embraced over the past years the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences. This approach, primarily driven by critical constructivist and post-structuralist traditions in IR, emphasises the importance of narratives as a means of understanding and analysing world politics and the relational nature of its socio-political processes.Footnote 7 ‘Narratives matter’, as Ronald Krebs argued in his work on ‘security narratives’,Footnote 8 because narratives – widespread, socially constructed, highly selective, and intrinsically normative forms of discourse through which we make sense of reality and experience – can significantly shape identities, political behaviours, and public policy.Footnote 9 Mollie Patterson and Kristen Monroe introduce the concept of ‘ontological narratives’ to describe stories that illuminate how individuals make sense of their past, present, and future selves, forging a connection between their identity and agency.Footnote 10 Literary theory, particularly its ‘narratological’ branch, identifies several criteria that constitute a narrative: its selective nature, highlighting some events while omitting others; the organisation of these events in a specific temporality (one event following another) and within a causal chain (event x causing event y); the presence of a plot (or rather a ‘mise en intrigue’, [emplotment] to use philosopher Paul Ricœur’s term) that brings coherence to disordered reality; and the existence of characters who act, experience, or react to their environment.Footnote 11
Building on this ‘narrative turn’, Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle have introduced the concept of ‘strategic narratives’, which questions the narrative dimensions of foreign policy and influence.Footnote 12 This concept has gained significant traction in the literature, including in research using Russian practices as a case study.Footnote 13 Strategic narratives possess a strong temporal dimension and involve political actors constructing a ‘shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international politics in order to shape the behaviour of domestic and international actors’.Footnote 14 I show that the revival and adaptation of the anti-colonial narrative, extensively employed during the Soviet era and recontextualised for contemporary Russia, aligns with this framework.
Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle identify three interconnected levels of strategic narratives: (1) system narratives, which reflect how political actors conceptualise the international order; (2) identity narratives, through which actors project their own identity – values, history, role in global affairs – and those of others; and (3) policy narratives, formulated to explain and legitimise a specific public policy, whether domestic or foreign. Notably, the contemporary Russian anti-(neo)colonial narrative is embedded within these three levels of discourse, projecting a distinct representation of the international system, Russia’s role within it, and specific external policies.
Research on strategic narratives typically examines three key phases of their existence: formation, projection, and reception.Footnote 15 Scholars have extensively explored the conditions under which narratives are produced and their content and structure, as well as their impact on target audiences. The case of Russian narrative practices has often been used as a case study to explore these different dimensions and contribute to the ongoing discussion on the narrative analysis of foreign and security policies. Researchers have focused on the discursive and emotion-based constructs central to Russian strategic narratives, including discourses of fear,Footnote 16 blame,Footnote 17 or antagonistic ‘others’,Footnote 18 while other studies have examined how these narratives are employed to project Russia’s great-power identity (derzhavnost’).Footnote 19 Another dynamic and expanding scholarship on the impact of strategic narratives has explored how Russian narratives, once disseminated, are received by their intended audiences, with a focus on evaluating their persuasiveness and effectiveness. Based on a large-scale experiment on the reception of narratives projected by Sputnik in Sweden, Charlotte Wagnsson and Magnus Lundström show that target audiences can find a narrative credible even without personal experience of the topic.Footnote 20 When strategic narratives are accepted or appropriated by target audiences, however, they become powerful tools for shaping preferences, setting the agenda, or generating support. Several scholars, including Olivier Schmitt, Natalia Chaban et al., Joanna Szostek, Vera Tolz, Stephen Hutchings, and Valentina Feklyunina, have demonstrated that Russian strategic narratives are most effective when they align with existing local political myths;Footnote 21 are historically contextualised and resonate with the recipient’s memory and historical references;Footnote 22 and are communicated by narrators with whom the audience shares a cultural or personal connection, or considers that they both belong to the same socially constructed reality.Footnote 23
While most of these studies focus on the effects and reception of Russian strategic narratives in Europe, my article adopts a decentred perspective by shifting the focus to their projection towards non-Western audiences, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This new empirical focus helps developing another under-researched dimension. In the wake of the narrative analysis of foreign policy, the article examines what the construction and dissemination of strategic narratives reveal about the expected effects of foreign policy and the underlying preferences of its proponents.
Strategic narratives and the inference of foreign policy preferences
The assessment of the preferences and intentions of other states’ foreign policy – particularly great powers – is one of the most disputed issues in International RelationsFootnote 24 – one that foreign policy analysis has long sought to address.Footnote 25 The discussion highlights the selection and prioritisation of key material, ideational, domestic, or international indicators and variables used to uncover actors’ intentions and behaviour. While defensive realists emphasise military capabilities as the primary determinant, alternative frameworks – such as neoclassical realism, constructivism, liberalism, and foreign policy analysis – underscore the significance of other factors, including political regimes, ideologies, domestic policies, public opinion, or political culture.Footnote 26 Inferring foreign policy preferences of adversaries is also a fundamental challenge for policymakers and governments. The challenge becomes even harder when dealing with the intentions of authoritarian or totalitarian states, marked by closed environments and opaque decision-making processes. Through archival analysis and interviews, Keren Yarhi-Milo and Toms Rostoks examine the indicators – often varying significantly across different communities – favoured by the British and US governments to assess the intentions of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the Soviet Union during the Cold War,Footnote 27 and by Latvian decision-makers to interpret Russian intentions in the post-Soviet era.Footnote 28
Assessing Russia’s foreign policy intentions has indeed become an increasingly critical task for expertise and scholarship following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which many failed to anticipate.Footnote 29 This topic has garnered significant scholarly attention, with a focus on various determinantsFootnote 30 and on the two primary drivers of Russia’s foreign policy: status-seeking and Russia’s great-power ambitions, on the one hand, and security concerns, on the other.Footnote 31 Building on this debate and adopting a practice-based approach to foreign policy, Schmitt proposes to analyse the practices of Russian diplomats in multilateral security organisations as an indicator for inferring their primary motives. Between 2014 and 2020, the policies advocated and the narratives employed by Russian diplomats suggest a prioritisation of status recognition over security concerns.Footnote 32
Drawing on the case of Russia’s renewed anti-colonial discourse, this article argues that strategic narratives serve – when combined with other indicators – as a valuable ideational indicator for inferring foreign policy preferences, particularly when their use and circulation among political elites, strategic doctrines, public debate, or the media environment reach a significant scale. Under such conditions, a detailed examination of the processes through which these narratives are constructed and disseminated offers a powerful methodological framework for more effectively identifying the intentions of the actors involved.
One could suggest, using a sceptical, rationalist argument, that narratives carry with them a manipulative potential through which states intentionally obscure their preferences to influence and mislead audiences. This would limit their explanatory value and capacity to reflect actors’ genuine preferences.Footnote 33 This argument is all the more understandable in the case of states like Russia, known for their uninhibited use of propaganda. However, the extensive and sustainable deployment of the Russian anti-colonial narrative since 2022, as this article seeks to demonstrate, calls for a more nuanced perspective aligned with the rigour and ‘extreme care’ of narrative analysis.Footnote 34 As Jelena Subotić aptly observes with a constructivist perspective, ‘the fact that narratives are manipulated for political purposes does not make them any less important. In fact, it makes them critical to our understanding of what motivates political action in the first place.’Footnote 35
Russia’s anti-(neo)colonial narrative must be understood within the broader context of its active efforts to frame the war in Ukraine in a way that suits its interests and challenge the Western-based liberal international order while advancing a ‘de-Westernisation’ agenda globally,Footnote 36 notably in the countries of the ‘Global South’. Building on the converging efforts of authoritarian Russia and China to contest the normative structures of the rules-based order, Gregorio Bettiza and David Lewis conceptualise norm contestation as a manifestation of power struggles and competition for influence in world politics that takes place within the ideational sphere and employs ‘symbolic instruments’.Footnote 37 As discursive tools intended to influence and shape the behaviour of both domestic and international actors, strategic narratives serve as key indicators of these contestation practices.Footnote 38
Questions and methodology
This article empirically focuses on the agency (the narrators of the story), setting (its background), characterisation (its characters), emplotment (its unfolding), circulation, and significance of Russia’s anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative since 2022. It is driven by the following research questions: How is this narrative constructed in Russian political discourse? Who are its narrators and intended audiences? How is it disseminated abroad through Russia’s ecosystem of information influence? Finally, why has the war in Ukraine led the Kremlin to revive this strategic narrative in its official discourse, and what does it reveal about contemporary Russia’s foreign policy preferences?
To explore these questions, I employed a mixed, predominantly qualitative methodology. The attempt to infer preferences from narratives primarily relies on content analysis and the examination of multiple textual and audiovisual data. The analysis draws from multilingual corpora (Russian, French, English) composed of both primary sources (political speeches, doctrines, media content, images, social media posts) and secondary sources (reports, policy papers). Digital data from larger corpora – including Putin’s speeches and texts produced by the actors of Russian influence – were extracted and analysed using tools of computational analysis, which allows the processing of large corpora that would be much too time-consuming to examine manually. In the aftermath of the ‘exogenous shock’ of the 2022 invasion,Footnote 39 which has made the Russian field even more inaccessible to researchers, the ‘computational turn’ in Russian studies has accelerated.Footnote 40 The explorations of ‘digital fieldwork’ have recently emerged as a promising avenue for methodological innovation within the field,Footnote 41 and for research in authoritarian environments more broadly.Footnote 42 Such methodologies are also suitable for analysing actors involved in foreign policy and influence activities. They facilitate the investigation of not only their practices and relational network, but also the content, discourses, and narratives they produce and disseminate.
Initially, I extracted textual corpora from Russian official and media outlets’ websites using Octoparse, an open-access web-scraping tool. Some of them were subjected to two types of analysis. First, I used the open-access software IRaMuTeQ for textual analysis, which develops statistical analyses of the vocabulary used in large corpora or datasets.Footnote 43 This approach, also known as ‘lexicometry’, has undergone significant developments in French linguistics since the 1950 and has been adopted in social sciences.Footnote 44 Based on the Alceste algorithm developed by linguist Max Reinert, IRaMuTeQ segments and formally organises sequences of texts, producing a non-supervised topic modelling that highlights latent topics of the chosen corpus in the form of a dendrogram. Secondly, I relied on the Television Explorer TV news monitoring tool from GDELT Database, which leverages data from the Internet Archive to list all terms used in the broadcasts of several dozen news networks, including the Russian transnational state media RT. This tool segments airtime into 15-second intervals, allowing for the tracking of specific keyword frequencies over time.
These methods facilitate the identification of keywords, topics, and narratives favoured by the actors under study, along with their lexical environment and the specific timing of their use. However, linguistic limitations exist, as widely spoken languages in the regions under study where Russian influence is projected – such as Arabic, Hausa, Bambara, Sango, and Mossi in the CAR and Sahelian countries – are not covered by these monitoring tools. To minimise potential analytical bias and semantic misinterpretations, these methods must be complemented by other qualitative approaches and require a preliminary understanding of the corpus. Combined with long-term online monitoring of Russia’s international communications, this methodological approach sheds light on the scale of both the domestic construction and external projection of the Russian anti-colonial narrative. I argue that the magnitude of this process, highlighted throughout the analysis, ultimately enables inferences about Russia’s foreign policy preferences.
The article is structured into three parts. The first section examines the political ‘narrators’ behind the resurgence of the anti-(neo)colonial narrative. The second part examines how this narrative is disseminated by the actors of Russia’s ecosystem of information influence, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The third part discusses these findings and emphasises the objectives of this strategic narrative.
The political narrators: Anti-(neo)colonialism in contemporary Russian official discourse
The construction of a strategic narrative is the result of a complex process involving various state and non-state actors. From its creation to its formulation, the contemporary Russian anti-(neo)colonial narrative is driven by political actors and embedded within their discourse. This section focuses on these political ‘narrators’, examining statements from President Vladimir Putin, key regime figures, parliamentary debates, diplomatic communications, government doctrines, and the conceptual contributions of experts and ‘political technologists’ close to the regime – akin to what Subotić terms ‘narrative entrepreneurs’.Footnote 45
A breakthrough in Putin’s discourse
In his work on the narratives crafted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II, Krebs observes that ‘the presidency is a source of great narrative authority, particularly regarding foreign policy and national security’.Footnote 46 Similarly, in Russia, Vladimir Putin, backed by the presidential administration, is a key producer and spreader of keywords and narratives.Footnote 47
I examined the extensive corpus of Putin’s statements, spanning from his rise to power in December 1999 to December 2024, which includes 7,847 texts.Footnote 48 These texts – speeches, interviews, meetings, and press conferences – were extracted from the English-language version of the Kremlin’s website. Dmitrii Medvedev’s presidency from June 2008 to April 2012 is excluded from this analysis. Figure 1 presents the frequency of terms related to two distinct lexical fields: the first, focused on colonialism, tracks occurrences of words such as ‘colonial’, ‘neocolonial’, ‘colonialism’, ‘neocolonialism’, ‘colony/colonies’,Footnote 49 and ‘colonisation’. To offer a comparative perspective, I also tracked terms related to conservatism, a central ideological framework in Putin’s discourse since his third term,Footnote 50 using terms like ‘conservatism’, ‘conservative’, and ‘traditional values’.
Figure 1. The use of the lexical fields of conservatism and colonialism in Vladimir Putin’s statements (2000–2024).
Both lexical fields appear infrequently during early Putinism. However, conservatism becomes prominent in Putin’s rhetoric following his 2013 conservative manifesto, with 232 total occurrences by the end of the period under study. In contrast, the colonialism-related lexicon was rarely used before 2022, except for a brief surge in 2019 during the Russia–Africa summit in Sochi. It is only after the invasion of Ukraine – a major factor driving Putin’s discursive choices – that this lexicon gains significant traction, with 36 occurrences in 2022, 66 in 2023, and 31 in 2024. In sum, Putin invoked (neo)colonialism 2.6 times as often in three years (133 occurrences in 1076 statements) as he had in the previous 21 years of his presidency (51 occurrences in 6,771 statements).
In addition to this general observation, a few emblematic examples illustrate how Putin has mobilised this vocabulary, often in forceful terms, for both domestic and international audiences. They offer insight into how Russia and its allies, adversaries, and enemies are portrayed in the international arena by the highest levels of Russian leadership.
On one hand, Vladimir Putin has recently recontextualised his long-standing critique of the Western-based liberal international order within the framework of anti-(neo)colonialism, including by grafting it onto his interpretation of the war in Ukraine. At the Moscow Conference on International Security in August 2022, he condemned ‘Western globalist elites’ for seeking to ‘retain [non-Western] countries and peoples in the grip of what is essentially a neocolonial order’ and a form of ‘neoliberal totalitarianism’.Footnote 51 Western foreign policy attitudes are disparaged in a similar vein. Denying Ukraine any agency of its own, Putin stated a few weeks later that ‘the West has been shamelessly draining and exploiting [Ukraine’s] resources for years, while encouraging genocide and terror in Donbass, in fact turning that country into a colony. Now the West is cynically using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder.’Footnote 52 During his speech at the 9 May 2024 parade in Red Square, Putin attacked Ukrainians for ‘distort[ing] the truth about the Second World War’ and drawing inspiration from ‘those who have developed a habit of basing their effectively colonial policy on duplicity and lies’. During a government meeting on 19 July 2023, he invoked an anti-colonial rhetoric in the context of Russia’s suspension of the Ukrainian grain deal, or ‘Black Sea Grain Initiative’: ‘[Western countries] blame Russia for almost all the disasters befalling the populations of African countries and several others, which the West once robbed and pushed into the abyss of wars, hunger and poverty, and now continues to plunder these states under its neo-colonial system’.Footnote 53
Putin’s discourse on post-2022 Russian–African relations has, indeed, widely been shaped by the anti-(neo)colonial narrative. Unlike the first Russia–Africa summit in Sochi in 2019, anti-colonialism played a significant role – with nine occurrences – in Putin’s plenary speech to African heads of state and government at the second summit in St Petersburg in July 2023. ‘When we are told that we must live by the rules written by who knows who, it is an attempt to preserve this neo-colonialist system, because they do not want to change these rules, and you have just called for changing the rules that have developed over the past decades. I completely agree with you here’, he told his audience, answering to the then president of Senegal Macky Sall.Footnote 54 A few weeks later, at the 8th Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin referenced the Russian-African diplomatic summit in greater detail:
The main point is that we have never acted as colonisers anywhere. Our cooperation has always been based on equality or a desire to provide help and support. The countries that are trying to compete with us, including now, had a completely different policy. When people look at what happened in the past during their cooperation with Russia, or the Soviet Union … and with other countries, their scales are tilted in favour of Russia … What did the former colonisers do? Back in 1957 – I was recently been shown a photograph – they brought people from Africa in cages to European countries, for example, Belgium. It is an ugly sight, children put up on display in cages. And now they are trying to … pursue their neo-colonial policy there. Footnote 55
The Russian president has therefore mobilised this narrative not only to frame the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and engage non-Western partners in a shared contestation of Western practices in international affairs, but also to cultivate new partnerships to circumvent Western sanctions and reinforce Russia’s pivotal role in shaping a multipolar, post-liberal, and post-Western order. A final example illustrates this. On 12 October 2023, at the plenary session of the Russian Energy Week, the Russian president expressed his views in the following terms: ‘Why do many countries share Russia’s views? Because Russia is actively working towards a fairer multipolar world order. Why do they support Russia? Because Russia is at the forefront. And why do they refuse to support something else? Because nobody, for example, in Africa, has forgotten the colonial era.’Footnote 56
A narrative endorsed by political elites and doctrines
While Vladimir Putin has played a significant role in bringing the anti-(neo)colonial narrative to prominence, its dissemination has extended far beyond the presidential discourse. Evgenii Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov were early proponents, using this terminology before February 2022, as Russian–African relations intensified. In a meeting with his Malian counterpart Abdoulaye Diop in Moscow on 11 November 2021, just weeks before Wagner’s deployment in Mali, Lavrov contrasted Russia’s actions with the West’s, which he portrayed as duplicitous and responsible for regional instability: ‘The legacy [of Russian–Malian relations] includes, in particular, the fight against colonialism, against colonial dependence, and then against the neo-colonialist recurrences that we observed in Africa, and that we unfortunately continue to observe.’Footnote 57 Since then, Lavrov has frequently employed this rhetoric in bilateral and multilateral meetings.
Similarly, at the opening of the 2022 Moscow Conference on International Security, former defence minister Sergei Shoigu condemned the ‘desire of member countries of the collective West to restore the order and rules of engagement characteristic of the colonial period’.Footnote 58 In a June 2024 op-ed published in the government daily newspaper Rossiiskaia Gazeta,Footnote 59 former president and current deputy chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, known for his inflammatory rhetoric since 2022, also declared that ‘humanity should get rid of the colonial system heritage’. Medvedev’s statement echoed anti-imperialist tones reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s:
The meeting starkly demonstrated the urgent need to drastically intensify cooperation among all progressive forces against neocolonialism … Neocolonialism has long been a challenge in human history. The term was firmly established in the mid-20th century to describe the strategies employed by former colonial powers to contain the development of younger nations that had recently gained formal independence. These strategies were implemented in order to compensate for the metropoles’ own losses caused by decolonisation … Despite humanity’s persistent efforts to eradicate neocolonialism, the Western world vehemently resists it. It aims to transition from isolated and national to global neocolonialism. Footnote 60
Medvedev goes on to elaborate on the ‘subversive practices of the neo-metropolises’ in his pamphlet, which contains 73 occurrences of anti-colonial terms. He specifically targets the US in Latin America, France’s ‘monetary neo-colonialism’ in the ‘Françafrique’, the Netherlands in Indonesia, British ‘legal neo-colonialism’, and Italy’s ‘Mattei plan’ for Africa. Medvedev’s critique extends to Western interference in the post-Soviet space, where he provocatively labels Ukraine a ‘neo-colonial stronghold’ (neokolonial’nyi platsdarm) of the West, suggesting the considerable flexibility of this narrative across different environments.
This extensive denunciation follows several parliamentary works organised by the Duma since 2023, which contributed to the promotion of the Russian anti-(neo)colonial narrative by hosting numerous national and international events. In February 2024, the ruling party United Russia launched an international ‘Forum of Supporters of the Struggle against Modern Practices of Neo-colonialism’ in Moscow. The summit attracted political, parliamentary, and governmental leaders from around 50 countries, including Central African president Faustin-Archange Touadéra. It also marked the launch of the movement ‘For the Freedom of Nations!’, an initiative backed by United Russia, with the declared aim of convening every two years to unite political parties opposed to Western ‘neo-colonial’ interference.Footnote 61
In parallel, the Russian diplomatic network has been instrumental in disseminating the anti-(neo)colonial narrative. Since 2022, Russian embassies’ online communications have become notably more assertive,Footnote 62 particularly in Africa. The Russian embassy in South Africa, for instance, has been especially active on X, where its account ranks among the most followed in Russian digital diplomacy. Recent posts highlight Russia’s historical support for African sovereignty: ‘Russia helped, in every possible way, the peoples of the African continent to attain their freedom and sovereignty’ and ‘It was not Russia who has been interfering in the affairs of African states for 60 years … building a neo-colonial network of influence’.
In June 2024, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a damning critique of French colonisation and its contemporary foreign policy on its official website.Footnote 63 The document, titled ‘France’s historical and international legal responsibility for colonial and post-colonial crimes’, was later echoed by other Russian embassies, including the one in Paris. The introduction asserts that ‘the colonial model imposed by Paris was particularly brutal and caused enormous damage to the peoples of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania’. The text goes on to meticulously detail the crimes of French colonisation, while condemning what it describes as ‘modern-day French neo-colonialism’, evident in regions like the Sahel, Lebanon, and French overseas territories, including Mayotte and New Caledonia. The latter, according to the document, is where ‘France is using every avenue to suppress the independence movement’ and ‘has consistently worked to sabotage the decolonisation process in New Caledonia’.
Finally, the formalisation of anti-(neo)colonialism in the official discourse was further solidified by its inclusion in the latest Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, adopted in 2023.Footnote 64 This doctrinal text, drafted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and approved by the president, outlines Russia’s key foreign policy preferences and objectives. The anti-(neo)colonial narrative plays a central role, appearing six times – whereas it was entirely absent from the previous 2016 doctrine. The relevant sections are as follows:
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. (art. 5)
In order to help adapt the world order to the realities of a multipolar world, the Russian Federation intends to make it a priority to eliminate the vestiges of domination by the US and other unfriendly states in global affairs [and] create conditions to enable any state to renounce neo-colonial or hegemonic ambitions. (art. 19)
The anti-(neo)colonial narrative finally makes its formal appearance in Article 57 of the Concept, which focuses on relations with sub-Saharan Africa. Compared to previous versions, Africa’s importance has been significantly elevated. The article asserts that ‘Russia stands in solidarity with the African states in their desire for a more equitable polycentric world and elimination of social and economic inequality, which is growing due to the sophisticated neo-colonial policies of some developed states towards Africa’.
The role of official expertise: Anticolonialism and the ‘world majority’
The issue of Russia’s anti-(neo)colonial posture has been further reinterpreted by Russian think-tanks and expert circles close to the Kremlin. Marlène Laruelle has described the Kremlin’s relationship with Russia’s competitive ‘market’ for political ideas as ‘a two-way street’: on the one hand, the Presidential Administration draws from the conceptual pool provided by ‘political technologists’, intellectuals, or ideological entrepreneurs to integrate these ideas into official discourse and doctrines; on the other hand, these actors absorb and amplify certain narratives promoted by the Kremlin, reformulating them within public debate.Footnote 65 The contemporary Russian anti-(neo)colonial narrative, popularised by the Wagner Group in Africa before becoming part of presidential discourse, seems to follow this pattern.
I explore the case of a notion that has gained traction in Russia since its large-scale invasion of Ukraine: the ‘world majority’ (mirovoe bol’shinstvo). Unlike the anti-colonial framework, the term ‘Global South’ is absent from Russian doctrines and is infrequently used in official rhetoric.Footnote 66 Vadim Grishin attributes this omission to a perceived incompatibility between Russia’s identity as a ‘state-civilisation’ – emphasised in its latest Foreign Policy Concept and influenced by Samuel Huntington’s theoriesFootnote 67 – and its association with the geographically distinct and historically complex ‘Global South’, to which Russia does not belong.Footnote 68
In place of the ‘Global South’, the notion of ‘world majority’, proposed in 2022 by influential Russian IR expert and spin doctor Sergei Karaganov, has emerged as a catchphrase for Russian foreign policy.Footnote 69 It has since been widely discussed among political technologists and ‘narrative entrepreneurs’ close to the government and is regarded as a seemingly more adaptable option by the Kremlin:
[The West] continues to talk about an obscure ‘new world order’ which, in reality, is essentially the same as before: hypocrisy, double standards, pretensions to exceptionalism and global domination, preservation of what is in essence a neo-colonial system. The West is well aware that the emergence of a multipolar world order is gathering pace, and it deploys the same means every time, such as Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and Russophobia, to hinder the progress of independent sovereign countries and divide the world majority. (V. Putin, meeting with representatives of religious authorities, 23 October 2023)
The term ‘world majority’ is indeed a more fitting keyword for Russian elites aiming to position Russia within an entity less geographically specific than the ‘Global South’, while also underscoring Moscow’s role in shaping a new international order. Combining both the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global East’,Footnote 70 the ‘world majority’ is positioned in this storytelling in opposition to the Western ‘world minority’.
I have reviewed 26 articles mentioning the notion of ‘global majority’, published between October 2022 and January 2024 on the websites of two of the most influential, now government-aligned Russian sources in International Relation – the journal Russia in Global Affairs and the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC). Alongside figures like Karaganov and Lavrov, these articles feature prominent Russian foreign policy experts, such as Fyodor Lukyanov, Dmitrii Trenin, Timofei Bordachev, and Ivan Timofeev. Together, these experts outline two core arguments linking the ‘world majority’ with the anti-(neo)colonial narrative. The first argument, both political and normative, advocates for a ‘de-Westernisation’ of the international system by rejecting ‘American-Western global hegemony’ and calling for a ‘democratisation’ of post-1945 international institutions. According to this view, the ‘world majority’ must work towards a more equitable and ‘polycentric’ international order that gives greater voice to non-Western countries currently subject to ‘neocolonial’ forms of dependence. The second argument, moral and ideological in nature, promotes the conservative and ‘traditional’ values purportedly shared within the ‘world majority’, contrasting them with the liberal, ‘post-humanist’, and ‘anti-human’ values championed by the West. Complementing the anti-(neo)colonial narrative, the concept of a ‘world majority’ therefore aligns with Russia’s counter-hegemonic stance in challenging the liberal international order.
At last, the anti-(neo)colonial narrative was also echoed within Russia’s strategic and siloviki community (military, intelligence and security services, etc). For instance, Andrei Il’nitskii, a prominent adviser to the Russian Ministry of Defence known for his concept of ‘mental warfare’ (mental’naia voina) – a Russian counterpart to the notion of ‘cognitive warfare’ – discussed the expression of ‘mental neocolonialism’ in the renowned military journal Voennaia Mysl’ in 2023. He argued that contemporary Western colonialism is no longer primarily about the seizure of territories and resources but rather a ‘mental genocide’ against Russia, consisting in the ‘occupation of the information environment and the reprogramming of mass consciousness’.Footnote 71
Promoting anti-(neo)colonialism: The role of Russia’s ecosystem of information influence
The Russian ecosystem of information influence consists of a complex network of state and non-state actors that deploy a range of practices leveraging information resources and technologies to shape the perceptions and behaviours of a target audience, with the aim of achieving outcomes aligned with their preferences, desires, or interests.Footnote 72 This ecosystem is primarily controlled by the state through transnational media outlets RT and Sputnik, as well as digital diplomacy efforts and intelligence service units responsible for information operations. In addition to these state actors, Russia also relies on a range of unofficial players whom we, along with Laruelle, Limonier, and Gérard, have described as influence entrepreneurs, influence contractors, and disinformation providers.Footnote 73 These actors have been delegated some state functions or subcontracted to carry out influence operations on behalf of the government.
Due to Russia’s authoritarian system, the actors within its influence ecosystem are, with few exceptions, highly receptive to official discourse. Beyond its formulation among Russian elites, this section explores how the anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative has been absorbed and extensively propagated internationally by this network, underscoring its potential significance in revealing Russia’s foreign policy preferences.
A pioneer: The Prigozhin galaxy in Africa
The ‘Prigozhin galaxy’ has emerged as a pioneer in the resurgence of Russia’s anti-colonial rhetoric, even prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This term refers to the network of entities controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, established in tandem with the expansion of the Wagner Group. His business model is built on three key pillars: the provision of security and mercenary services; resource extraction; and influence. The third pillar is exemplified by ‘Project Lakhta’, which has conducted information operations and deployed political technologies to legitimise Wagner’s presence and that of its local allies, discredit opponents, and promote a favourable image of Russia.
Prigozhin himself used this narrative in his communication channels to endorse his mercenaries’ actions in the CAR and the Sahel. ‘The time of the colonels’ has come, heralding a ‘new era of decolonisation’, Wagner’s founder proclaimed on 25 January 2022, via his Concord company’s VK account, referencing the military officers who had seized power through coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea. He and his associates also portrayed Mali’s transitional president, Assimi Goïta, as the ‘African Che Guevara’, invoking the metaphor once used to describe the revolutionary, anti-imperialist Burkinabé leader Thomas Sankara.
This narrative also permeates content produced by media outlets connected to the Project Lakhta. A prominent example is the ‘news agency’ RIA FAN, part of Prigozhin’s media holding Patriot, which was sanctioned by the West and shut down following Wagner’s mutiny in June 2023. RIA FAN played a key role in legitimising Wagner within Russia, embedding correspondents with the mercenaries and portraying Russia’s engagement in Africa as a genuine ‘alternative to Western neo-colonialism’ (20 January 2021). The agency depicted the Russian flag as a ‘symbol of the liberation movement’ for African nations (27 January 2021), while its coverage of Operation Barkhane highlighted alleged French duplicity towards jihadist groups and the ‘plundering’ of mining resources as France’s true motivation (30 January 2022).
At the local level, Wagner’s influence extended to outlets like Lengo Songo, a Central African radio station funded by the Russians via their mining company Lobaye Invest. These outlets have since disseminated and laundered Wagner’s propaganda in CAR in French and Sango. Lengo Songo began heavily featuring anti-colonial rhetoric in February 2021, after the re-election of President Touadéra and during a counteroffensive by the Central African Armed Forces (FACA) and Wagner against rebel groups. France, in particular, was targeted for its interventionism:
France in the Central African Republic has never been well-regarded for its neocolonial policies, and there has been a recent surge of popular indignation [against] France, especially as relations between the CAR and Russia set an example of honest, open, and successful cooperation. The people saw real help from Russia, while from France, only manipulation and self-interest. In this context, France began to lose significantly, and this is the only thing Russia can be accused of. (Lengo Songo, 31 May 2021)Footnote 74
In an article titled ‘President Touadéra fights for the total liberation of the Central African People from the yoke of modern neocolonialism’, Lengo Songo highlighted his participation in the above-mentioned Moscow-based International Forum of Supporters of the Struggle against Modern Practice of Neocolonialism:
Will this Forum be the means of securing the CAR’s complete liberation from the yoke of imperialism imposed by its former colonizer? The answer is certainly ‘YES’. This is the will of the entire Central African people, without exception, apart from a few political leaders, manipulated and corrupt to the core, who continue to serve as France’s henchmen, pandering to this former colonial power for their own selfish interests. (20 February 2024)
Information operations carried out on social networks by the ‘troll farms’ of Project Lakhta, including its offshore subsidiary Africa Politology,Footnote 75 have also contributed to amplifying this narrative. Propaganda materials such as the ‘Bear and Lion’ cartoon, produced by Lobaye Invest and shown in schools in Bangui,Footnote 76 or several video clips circulated on social media – like ‘the Rat Emmanuel’ in Mali – employ anthropomorphism, a recurring propaganda technique. This approach clearly reflects the characterisation of the actors involved in this narrative. In these two examples, the French presence is personified as scavengers (hyenas) or pests (rats), plundering the resources of the local population. Often depicted as a bear or represented by a Wagner mercenary, Russia is on the contrary portrayed as the force called upon to eliminate these invasive animals.
Wagner-linked Russian operatives have also sought to embed themselves within local media, cultural, and political ecosystems to establish their influence, co-produce narratives, and find local actors to legitimise their presence. The Foundation for the Defence of National Values (FZNTs), led by political technologist Maksim Shugalei, has played a key role in this regard by co-opting political and activist figures in host countries. Wagner has engaged with, and at times financially supported, African actors who identify as Pan-Africanists (or ‘neo-Pan-Africanists’),Footnote 77 with a portion of their discourse focused on denouncing ‘Western neocolonialism’. Prominent activists Nathalie Yamb, known as the ‘Sochi Lady’ following her speech at the first Russia–Africa Summit in October 2019, and Kemi Seba, head of the organisation Urgences Panafricanistes (URPANAF), have played crucial roles in co-producing and amplifying an anti-neocolonial narrative aimed at condemning French influence in Africa.Footnote 78
Anti-colonialism on RT and Sputnik
Since 24 February 2022, RT and Sputnik have been sanctioned and subsequently banned within the European Union, leading to the dismantling of their decentralised network in Western countries. In response, the two Russian networks have adapted by employing various circumventing methods to continue broadcasting their content to European audiences. Their reorganisation has also included a reorientation towards regions where they previously had little or no engagement, such as sub-Saharan Africa.
In this context, how have the editorial teams of RT and Sputnik contributed to disseminating the anti-(neo)colonial narrative? Figure 2, generated using GDELT’s Television Explorer, compares the frequency of the terms ‘colonial’, ‘colonialism’, ‘neocolonial’, and ‘neocolonialism’ across the English-language channels of RT, Al Jazeera, and the BBC. While the use of these terms remains stable on Al Jazeera and the BBC, their frequency rises sharply on RT from spring 2022 onwards. In terms of raw data, the number of times these terms were mentioned on air over the entire period stands at approximately 3,800 for the BBC, 18,200 for Al Jazeera, and 25,800 for RT.
Figure 2. The use of (neo)colonial lexical field on RT, Al Jazeera, and BBC News, Mar. 2018–May 2024 (with Television Explorer and Internet Archive).
The analysis reveals that RT is responsive to the anti-(neo)colonial narrative and, by extension, to official discourse. Similarly, 491 articles were published across Sputnik Afrique (180), Sputnik Africa (160), and Sputnik International (151) websites tagged with ‘colonialisme’ and ‘colonialism’ in the same period, with 75 per cent of them released after February 2022. RT and Sputnik regularly cover the French presence in sub-Saharan Africa through this narrative to critique French military and diplomatic interventionism. Headlines such as ‘Niamey reacts to the withdrawal of French troops, these “imperialist forces” and “neocolonialists”’ (Sputnik Afrique, 25 September 2023), ‘Farewell, colonizer: France’s malign influence still hangs over Africa, and that needs to change’ (RT, 20 February 2024), and ‘La colonisation: French history of death, torture and indescribable violence in the pearl of its evil empire’ (RT, 10 April 2024) typify this coverage. ‘The West’ as a whole is also critiqued under this framework: ‘Paradise of lies: How the West manipulates Africa through neocolonial media’ (RT, 10 May 2024), and ‘Global apartheid: How the colonial West continues to betray the rest of the world’ (RT, 17 November 2023).
More recently, RT has made the anti-(neo)colonial narrative central to its communications strategy in Africa. This is exemplified by an outdoor advertising campaign conducted in the summer of 2024 across several English-speaking African cities. The campaign featured prominent African independence leaders alongside their anti-imperialist quotes, accompanied by RT’s logo and the slogan: Your Values. Shared. One billboard installed in the streets of Accra showed, for instance, a portrait of President Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and a leading Pan-Africanist figure, featuring a paraphrase of his famous quote: ‘Neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism’.Footnote 79 The motto Your Values. Shared emphasises a concerted effort to align RT’s messaging with local discourses. Its communication team suggest that ‘RT is raising the level of discourse around the essential values of liberty, sovereignty and independence’ carried by these leaders, before concluding that ‘the time for neo-colonialist narratives is over’.Footnote 80 The tone of the campaign highlights RT’s and Sputnik’s strategic shift towards African audiences, positioning themselves not merely as alternatives to ‘mainstream media’, as they do in the West, but as champions of sovereignty and opponents of Western interference.
African Initiative, the new agent of Russia’s influence in Africa
A content analysis of the organisation ‘African Initiative’ complements this section. This self-described ‘news agency’ was established in October 2023 and has emerged as a key agent of Russia’s influence operations in Africa following Prigozhin’s death. African Initiative serves as the flagship project of the Initsiativa-23, an Russian company allegedly led by an operative of the FSB’s Fifth Service.Footnote 81
African Initiative has played an active role in legitimising the ‘Africa Corps’, a new Russian ‘expeditionary force’ deployed in the Sahel since autumn 2023. Under the supervision of the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) and its intelligence service (GRU), this umbrella organisation aims to replace or absorb the Wagner Group contingents, with varying degrees of success. According to Igor Korochenko, a military expert closely aligned with the MoD, the Africa Corps ‘will undertake large-scale military operations across the continent to help countries finally free themselves from neo-colonial dependence, expel Western influence, and achieve full sovereignty’.Footnote 82 In providing informational support to the African Corps, African Initiative seems to draw inspiration from Project Lakhta. In early 2024, it was activated to support the arrival of Russian troops in Ouagadougou, through an operation that accused France of backing a coup attempt and assassination plot against Ibrahim Traoré, who rose to power in Burkina Faso after the September 2022 coup.
I conducted a textual analysis and unsupervised topic modelling of a corpus of 493 articles published on the English-language version of African Initiative between its creation in September 2023 and February 2024. The corpus was extracted using Octoparse and subsequently analysed with IRaMuTeQ. The results are shown in Table 1 as a dendrogram, which identifies six lexical clusters within the corpus.
Table 1. Lexical clusters of the African Initiative corpus and their proportion of the total lexical surface, September 2023–February 2024 (using IRaMuTeQ).
Cluster no. 3 (in green), which accounts for nearly 13 per cent of the corpus, prominently features the terms ‘Western’, ‘colonialism’, and ‘neo-colonialism’. It highlights the frequent resurgence of anti-colonial rhetoric in discussions of Western involvement in Africa, alongside other pejorative terms like ‘racism’ and ‘disinformation’. By contrast, Russia’s official presence in Africa is more clearly represented in cluster no. 4 (in light blue), which adopts a more positive tone, reflected in terms such as ‘cooperation’ (in ‘defence’, ‘technical’, ‘university’ sectors). Below, I provide the two text segments that statistically align most closely with cluster no. 3:
This opens up prospects for Russia and is of great concern to Western elites, as it destroys the neo-colonial system that was built up over decades and under which neither the interests nor the lives of Africans mattered. (November 2023)
Western countries promote in Africa only educational programmes designed to form pro-Western elites of journalists and political scientists ready to serve the neo-colonial system. Russia, where more than 35,000 African students study, trains doctors, teachers, agronomists, scientists, those who will break this neo-colonial model! (January 2024)
Inferring foreign policy preferences: Russia’s renewed anti-colonialism and the ‘de-Westernisation’ of the international system
The emplotment and setting of Russia’s anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative, evolving from its roots in official discourse to its amplification by its ecosystem of information influence, revolves around three principal characters: contemporary Russia, positioned as the successor to Soviet-era anti-imperialism; the ‘collective West’, depicted as pursuing hegemonic ambitions through a ‘neo-colonial’ foreign policy; and Russia’s existing or prospective non-Western allies within the ‘world majority’. This concluding section discusses three findings of the article’s empirical contribution. It suggests that analysing the anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative provides a clearer understanding of Russia’s foreign policy preferences and intentions at a time of its war of aggression in Ukraine, pivot to the South, and declared intentions of ‘de-Westernising’ the international system.
Rehabilitating Russia’s status and prestige through historical legacy
The first result centres on Russia’s status-seeking intentions and the legitimation of its current foreign policy by historical precedent. As discussed above, the recognition of its great power status (derzhavnost’) is a fundamental motive of Russia’s ‘statist-realist’ foreign policy tradition under Vladimir Putin,Footnote 83 and the anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative provides a lens for exploring it. By portraying itself as the rightful successor to Soviet foreign policy in the ‘Third World’, Russia intends to reshape its reputation and enhance its status in Southern countries. As many examples indicate, the anti-(neo)colonial narrative invokes various memorial and historical references, drawing a line of continuity between contemporary Russian foreign policy and Soviet support for national liberation movements and decolonisation.Footnote 84 According to Nikita Panin, a researcher at the Institute of Africa of the Academy of Sciences – Russia’s premier research institute for African studies – ‘the discourse of neo-colonialism became critical for Russian policy after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine; with regard to African countries, this approach, according to Russian officials, establishes a certain continuity between the USSR’s role in Africa and contemporary Russian actions’.Footnote 85
Soviet anti-colonialism, which emerged as part of Marxist–Leninist discourse from the 1920s, called on nations colonised by Western European powers to join the World Revolution. It also condemned the internal colonialism carried out by the Russian Empire, a critique that arose, among others, from the Pokrovsky schoolFootnote 86 but has not been mobilised in contemporary times. Other distinct Russian intellectual traditions – ranging from the 19th-century Slavophiles to dissident nationalists of the 1960s and 1980s, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the founding fathers of Eurasianism in the 1920s – also contributed to constructing an anti-colonial narrative based on the idea that Russia itself had been ‘ideologically colonised’ by Europe, a discourse rekindled in recent years.Footnote 87 Anti-colonialism became institutionalised in Soviet foreign policy during the Khrushchev era (1958–64), and was designed to win the favour of the ‘Third World’ and non-aligned states:
Over the years, the Soviet Union has gained great prestige in the eyes of all people who fight for peace, progress, and liberation from colonialism. The goal of our foreign policy hasn’t been to enrich our own state at the expense of other states; we have never believed in the exploitation of man by man, of state by state … Our foreign policy is rooted in our conviction that the way pointed out to us by Lenin is the way of the future, not only for the Soviet Union, but for all countries and all peoples of the world. (Nikita Khrushchev, 1955)Footnote 88
Similar to the Soviet Union’s stance towards the ‘Third World’, post-Soviet Russia is positioned in this narrative as being in the vanguard in defending the sovereignty of the ‘world majority’ subjected to Western ‘neocolonialism’. Russia’s post-Soviet and ‘illiberal’ anti-colonialism is, however, deprived of its progressive ideological roots.Footnote 89
The revival of Soviet anti-imperialist memory is part of a broader movement in which the Kremlin has instrumentalised national history and selectively constructed a heroic, mythologised past to legitimise its domestic policies, identity, and interventionism abroad.Footnote 90 This revisionist approach is evident in the ‘denazification’ narrative used to justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, invoking the memory of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (1941–1945) and reframing the fight against fascism in contemporary terms. Narrators and disseminators of the Russian anti-(neo)colonial narrative in Africa also suggest, by extension, that Russia, and the USSR before it, were never colonial powers on the continent. While academic literature has extensively debated the colonial nature of Russian and Soviet expansionism in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, this endogenous aspect is completely omitted from contemporary Russian official discourse and strategic narratives.
Advancing ‘multipolarity’ by coopting new friends in the ‘world majority’
The second finding extends from the first. The narrative shift that occurred after February 2022 stemmed from the Kremlin’s need to engage new audiences and secure new partners, in response to partial isolation, new Western sanctions, and growing delegitimisation on the international stage following the invasion of Ukraine. Through this narrative repertoire, Russia seeks to promote its long-standing foreign policy concept of ‘multipolarity’ and enhance its appeal to non-Western countries, collectively referred to by official expertise as the ‘world majority’. By advocating for the ‘de-Westernisation’ of the international system, this narrative also aligns with a foreign policy goal that is developed, mobilised, and expressed in other parts of the world – one in which Russia does not hold a monopoly. Attacking ‘Western neocolonialism’ fundamentally aims to unite those who collectively denounce the ‘hegemonic’, ‘globalist’, and ‘anti-democratic’ role played by Western countries in international relations, undermining the emergence of a truly ‘polycentric’ international system. Vladimir Putin wrote in an article published a few days before the Russia–Africa summit in Saint Petersburg in July 2023:
The constructive, trustful, forward-looking partnership between Russia and Africa is especially significant and important … We are sure 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. Footnote 91
As Ivan U. Klyszcz suggests, Russia’s political project of ‘multipolarity’ should also be understood as an offshoot of its long-standing, multifaceted messianism.Footnote 92 Advocating for an international order free from Western dominance is an extension of the enduring belief in Russia’s special destiny and ‘unique mission’ in international relations,Footnote 93 a lexicon used in the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept. This renewed messianism is closely intertwined with Russia’s foreign policy in sub-Saharan Africa, which offers a promising backdrop for observing this attempt at narrative convergence and affinity between Russian and African actors.Footnote 94 In particular, these actors strive to articulate the traditional repertoires of radical Pan-Africanism and sovereignism around a mutual denunciation of former Western colonial powers. The rhetoric of Malian, Burkinabé, and Nigerian leaders within the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – established in September 2023 with strong backing from Russia and in opposition to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) – illustrates this approach. Historically, Pan-Africanism has been built around the debate – indeed, the ‘dilemma’ – between supporters of continental unity and defenders of national sovereignties. According to Rita Abrahamsen, it accommodates both a defence of multilateralism and a sovereignist vision of the international order.Footnote 95 Pan-Africanism can resonate with the sovereignist positions defended by Russia on the international stage, despite the paradox that its armed forces have attacked Ukraine and profoundly challenged this country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. This rhetorical combination and attempt at ideological synthesis also permeates the content produced by the actors of Russia’s information influence aimed at African audiences. Because it aims to construct ‘a shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international politics’, the anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative ultimately represents one of the key resources of Russia’s ‘niche’ soft powerFootnote 96 and revived ‘messianic multipolarity’ in Africa.
Undermining Western policies and norms with a ‘whataboutist’ perspective
Thirdly, the anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative attributes to the ‘collective West’ the perpetuation of its colonial practices towards formerly colonised nations, other non-Western countries, and Ukraine since the 2004 Orange Revolution and 2013 Euromaidan. The latter argument is based on Russia’s imperialist representation of Ukraine as part of the ‘Russian World’ and its broader civilisational space, stripped of national sovereignty and identity, and artificially severed from its ‘natural’ place by the West. Here again, it posits an intrinsic historical continuity between past and present Western practices. While these practices have been documented,Footnote 97 their narration – based on real, exaggerated, or falsified grounds – primarily allows Russian elites to update their critique of Western interference, which had been articulated for years through denunciations of its ‘hegemonic’ and ‘unipolar’ character. Additionally, this narrative emphasises Russia’s sovereignist positioning on the international stage, particularly in its critique of Françafrique’s legacy and French neocolonialism in Central and West Africa.
As Subotić suggests, ‘traumatic events such as wars … are particularly useful windows of opportunity for selective narrative activation’.Footnote 98 As a factor influencing the political choices of Russian elites, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also led the Kremlin to adopt the anti-(neo)colonial strategic narrative as a means of enabling accusatory inversion. It suggests that aggressive and ‘neo-imperialist’ interventionism is a trait of the West, and not a Russian characteristic, whose posture in Ukraine would be purely reactive and defensive. Russian actors shape and exploit the differing perceptions of the war in Ukraine among Western nations and many African, Latin American, and Asian countries. Ueli Staeger observes that most African governments view the war as a result of ‘great power rivalry between the West and Russia’.Footnote 99
The anti-(neo)colonial narrative is thus used to divert the attention of its target audience. It aligns with tu quoque or ‘whataboutist’ rhetoric, a typically fallacious technique of argumentation whereby speakers discredit their interlocutors by highlighting their own shortcomings or suggesting that they share culpability for actions that undermine their legitimacy. A hallmark of contemporary Russian official discourse,Footnote 100 whataboutism is extensively employed by Russia to denounce the ‘double standard’ (dvoinoi standart) of Western countries and undermine their norms and policies.
Conclusion
Building on the resurgence of anti-colonial rhetoric in wartime Russia, this article contributes to the study of strategic narratives and foreign policy analysis by examining a relatively under-researched dimension: the inference of foreign policy preferences through narratives themselves. I have argued that analysing strategic narratives offers a valuable methodological approach for identifying the intended effects of discourse produced by the actors contributing to foreign policy, thereby enhancing our understanding of their preferences and intentions. This argument holds in cases where the circulation of a strategic narrative among political elites and doctrinal frameworks reaches a large scale, and when this narrative is actively and sustainably promoted abroad through public diplomacy and information influence efforts.
Empirically, this article shows that anti-(neo)colonialism has emerged as a new, prominent strategic narrative in support of Russia’s foreign policy since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This narrative is at first sight negative, denouncing Western ‘neo-colonialism’ as it affects contemporary Ukraine, former colonised nations, and many countries in the ‘Global South’. By positioning itself as a defender against such exploitation, Russian elites have updated their critique of the ‘collective West’ since 2022, transferring the blame for aggressive interventionism to their Western adversaries. Yet the apparent success of this narrative also relies on a positive political and normative basis, rooted both in the selective, ‘illiberal’ exploitation of Soviet anti-imperialist memory, in a widespread aspiration to transform the international order, and in the increasingly popular notion of ‘world majority’. Using this rhetoric and driven by its quest for status and belief in Russia’s mission to the world, the Kremlin has tried to position Russia at the forefront of the reorganisation of the international system and resistance to Western dominance, a sentiment that Ivan Timofeev has described as the ‘rebellion of the discontented’ (bunt nedovol’nykh).Footnote 101
In summary, this research contributes to the literature on understanding foreign policy preferences through ideational indicators, integrating foreign policy analysis with narrative analysis. Using wartime Russia as a case study, this discussion can be extended to other cases where strategic narratives circulate widely both domestically and internationally, such as China’s ‘Community of Common Destiny’ (人类命运共同体) or ‘Global Civilization Initiative’ (全球文明倡议), India’s ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्, or ‘The world is one family’), or the European Union’s concept of ‘strategic autonomy’.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at the ISA 2024 Annual Convention in San Francisco, where I received valuable feedback on the ‘narrative turn’ in International Relations. I am deeply grateful to Elie Baranets, Marlène Laruelle, Olivier Schmitt, Paul Charon, and Nina Wilén for their insightful discussions and comments. I also wish to express my sincere thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful critiques and recommendations significantly strengthened the paper.
Maxime Audinet is a specialist in Russian politics, a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM, Paris), and an associate fellow at the Centre d’analyse et de recherche interdisciplinaires sur les médias (CARISM) of Paris Panthéon Assas University and at the Geode Centre of Paris 8 University. He holds a PhD in political science and Slavic studies from the University of Paris Nanterre. His research focuses on the role of influence in the foreign policy of authoritarian states and takes a particular interest in the actors and practices of Russia’s information influence in the post-Soviet space, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. In 2023, he co-founded the research collective CORUSCANT for the renewal of Russian studies after 2022.
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