Політичні дослідження (Jun 2024)
Mapping a „Nowhere Nation”. The Toxic Spell of „Imperial Knowledge” and Challenges of Decolonization
Abstract
The article explores the reasons for the protracted absence of Ukraine from the mental maps of most Europeans and people elsewhere. Until 1991, this was explained by the absence of Ukraine on political maps and the prevailing tendency to identify nations with states that made stateless nations politically „invisible”. The appearance of Ukraine on political maps after its independence did not solve the problem: formal „visibility” could not guarantee adequate perception of the country and, consequently, effective policy toward it. The lack of an adequate international response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent hybrid war was a clear manifestation of this inadequacy, which has not been fully overcome even after the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion. The article proves that the main reason for Ukraine’s „invisibility”, as well as current cognitive misunderstandings, is the uncritical adoption by the international community of the Russian point of view, both on Russia itself and on the peoples it colonized. This point of view is articulated by a system of narratives developed by the empire with the primary goal to deprive the subjugated nations of any agency, to make them virtually invisible for the rest of the world and inferior for themselves. Ewa Thompson defined this system of narratives as „imperial knowledge”. Over the past two centuries, the empire has successfully institutionalized and disseminated it in the world as allegedly „scientific” and therefore unquestionable; normalized, elevated it to the level of „common wisdom” that should not be questioned. It was the international normalization and internalization of that knowledge that contributed to the misguided policies of most governments toward both Russia and Ukraine. Its false postulates still contribute to the global penetration of Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda and preclude a unified international response to Russian aggression. The article proposes a radical deconstruction of that „knowledge”, within the ongoing global processes of decolonization.
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