Coloniality and the Global North war against disinformation: the case of the European Union

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing contestation of the liberal international information order and an increasingly aggressive pushback by Global North governments. The pushback has been accompanied by burgeoning research on the contentious politics of international political communication. Reviewing this research, I find and critique that it fails to embed the Global North’s war against disinformation in the global matrix of the coloniality of knowledge. I elaborate Mignolo’s conceptual couplet dewesternisation/rewesternisation in relation to political epistemology to develop the claim that braided into the Global North’s counter-disinformation campaigns are discursive practices that entrench international epistemic privilege anchored to the global geopolitical hierarchy of knowledges. To substantiate my argument, I zoom in on the European Union’s counter-disinformation campaign against Russia. I end by reflecting on the broader take-away of my paper for decolonial thought and practice.

Keywords:

• Coloniality
• disinformation
• liberal international information order
• Global North
• European Union
• Russia

Acknowledgements

I thank the reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments, which helped me to improve the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Public diplomacy refers to ‘information and communication activities addressing foreign publics … trying to influence foreign audiences’ (Fanoulis and Revelas 2022, 2). In EU parlance, public diplomacy covers ‘Strategic Communication, Press & Information and the fight against disinformation’ (EEAS 2022). Strategic communication is ‘the purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfil its mission’ (Hallahan et al. 2007, 3). A strategic narrative is a strategic communication with a particular narrative structure, including a setting, characters, a plot and a moral (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Zeng 2021).

2 Incidentally, Alphabet has tweaked the Google search algorithm so that a search using the words ‘Russia’, ‘report’, ‘human rights violations in EU’ no longer turns up any results pertaining to the regular reports the Russian foreign ministry issues on the human rights situation in the EU. The search rather directs users to human rights violations in and by Russia.

3 Disclaimer: My claim that experience-based criticisms of NATO cannot simply be rejected out of hand, as StratCom does, without engaging in gaslighting does not entail a moral or political justification of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

4 As Allison (2020, 977) argues, ‘Russia has developed a dual track in its legal argumentation and normative expectations’. In the post-Soviet region sovereignty is qualified by Russia while in the wider international system Russia gives great emphasis to sovereignty.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Merlingen

Michael Merlingen is Professor of International Relations at the Central European University, Vienna, Austria. His research is concerned with mobilising Marxist and decolonial concepts and insights to analyse EU foreign and security policy.