I.

I keep postponing Part II of “Decolonial Shocking Surprises.” Each time I sit down to write it, something in the news sends me elsewhere. What follows is one of those detours—though it still belongs to the larger chain of decolonial surprises I have been tracing.

The latest detour came on May 24, 2026, when an op-ed in Diario Red caught my attention. Ramón Cuesta had published a piece in the section “Tirando del Hilo” (“Pulling the Thread”) titled “La influencia de las teorías de Alexander Dugin en VOX y en los movimientos neonazis y rojipardos (moderate left, WM) españoles. Parte I: El Desembarco,” in Diario Red.

The piece stood out because I have spent the past year reading Dugin alongside the growing commentary around him. I have already touched on some of these questions in a published article in The Thinker,and I am returning to them in two short chapters of a book manuscript.

I am interested neither in promoting nor in denouncing Dugin’s work, as so often happens in both scholarly and journalistic writing. There are, of course, important exceptions, among them the work of the French scholar Marlène Laruelle, one of the leading specialists on Russian ideology and Eurasian debates.

Laruelle argues that Alexander Dugin should be understood less as Vladimir Putin’s personal “guru” than as an influential ideological broker. His importance, in her view, lies in shaping and circulating a neo-Eurasian, anti-liberal worldview that casts Russia as a distinct civilizational force opposed to Western modernity and liberal democracy.

Laruelle also underscores Dugin’s broader transnational role. He has cultivated ties with anti-liberal and far-right currents beyond Russia, especially in Europe, helping connect Russian expansionist ideas with wider networks of radical-right thought. More recent analyses add another layer to this picture, presenting him as an agile digital influencer whose online presence amplifies themes of traditionalism, civilizational struggle, and resistance to the liberal global order.

Laruelle and Cuesta have also co-authored an article on Dugin’s global influence, titled “Russia’s Metaphysical Diplomat: Dugin’s Diplomatic Circulation in the Global South,” published by Studies in Comparative International Development. In this article, Dugin appears as a kind of metaphysical diplomat within Russia’s post-2022 strategy of de-westernization.

The key point. for Laruelle and Cuesta, is that he is not simply exporting a finished doctrine. He offers, rather, a flexible ideological grammar that different actors can adapt to their own struggles against liberal modernity. Drawing on case studies from India, Brazil, Argentina, and West Africa, the article shows how his discourse travels through symbolic diplomacy and transnational networks of fellow travelers.

Its central claim is clear: Dugin’s project works less like a rigid doctrine than like a modular system, one whose themes—anti-liberalism, spiritual traditionalism, civilizational multipolarity—can be selectively reworked in very different settings.

II

That summary leads me to a simple question: what, exactly, is supposed to be new here? For centuries, Western powers practiced their own forms of metaphysical diplomacy—sometimes religious, sometimes secular, always universalizing. If we recognize that Western expansion projected its theological and secular truths across the globe for more than five hundred years, then we also have to recognize that it helped create the conditions for counter-projects such as Dugin’s. One need not admire those projects to see the historical sequence.

The point of my argument is not approval or disapproval; it is genealogy. Western modernity advanced as if it were salvation, but it did so through coloniality: domination, oppression, and the dismissal of local languages, memories, economies, institutions, and forms of life. My concern here is not VOX or the rojipardos as such. It is Dugin’s politics from the moment emerges as a theorist of Eurasianism, and the extent to which that politics can—or cannot—be folded into the European far right. My point, put simply, is that not all cats are grey at night. Russia, with its own history and civilizational trajectory, is one thing; Europe, with its distinct history and civilization, is another. What matters is not only what is being said, but who is saying it, where, when, and for what purpose. Similarities exist, of course. So do decisive differences.

III

What interests me most, then, is not Dugin in isolation but the Western gaze fixed on him. I want to read scholars and journalists writing about Dugin through their own enunciations—through the anxieties, assumptions, and evaluative habits that shape what they think they are seeing. In other words, is Dugin and right wing thinker like the European one even if Russia is outside of Europe were left, right and center has regional or provincial meaning?

One of the key terms in the Laruelle-Cuesta article is dewesternization, though the term’s genealogy remains unspoken. It has been in circulation at least since 2008, when Kishore Mahbubani used it in The New Asian Hemisphere and tied it to what he called “the return of history.” For Mahbubani, dewesternization refers largely to efforts by states and institutions to reduce Western dominance in political, economic, and institutional life. In that sense, K Mahbubani’s expression “the return of history” remains a useful way to think about dewesternization as the state politics of China, Russia, Iran and to a certain extent India and Turkey.

 My own decolonial (which is neither of the right, the left, or the center) approach puts the stress elsewhere: on epistemic disobedience, on changing the terms of knowledge, and on shifting the locus of enunciation—not simply on watching power move from one set of states to another.

Cuesta’s article is accompanied by a striking set of images, that you can see in the link of his article, above). One of the most suggestive shows what appears to be a book cover titled Ni Capitalismo ni Comunismo (Neither Capitalism nor Communism) linked by lines or arrows to a cluster of names: Jean-François Thiriart, Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, and Alexander Dugin. The first three are Europeans (French and Italian), Dugin is not. The visual message is straightforward: these figures belong to one intellectual family. Do they really?  My point is that the gesture is too quick. As I have said before, not every cat is grey at night.

IV

Take the differences one by one. First the three Europeans. Julius Evola rejected democracy, liberalism, Christianity, and fascism alike in the name of a hierarchical order modeled on ancient pre-Christian Rome and Aryan civilizations. Jean Thiriart proposed something else: a unified and politically independent “Euro-Soviet empire from Dublin to Vladivostok. ¨ His path ran from postwar neo-fascism toward a form of National Bolshevism that first imagined Europe as independent from both Washington and Moscow, and later as aligned with Russia.

Alain de Benoist took yet another route, developing a broad critique of modern Western society, calling for a renewed European cultural identity, rejecting egalitarianism, and advancing a decentralized anti-capitalist worldview. Over time, his thought shifted from an early emphasis on biology to a later emphasis on ethnopluralism and a right-wing “war of position.” These thinkers are not interchangeable, even when some of their refusals overlap.

Several critics have objected to de Benoist’s appropriation of Gramsci’s notion of a “war of position.” As I understand Gramsci, however, he never suggested that such a strategy was the exclusive property of the left. Wars of position are waged by the right, the left, and the center alike. As for Alexander Dugin, there is ample evidence that, before the fall of the Soviet Union, he leaned toward fascism and Nazism as one way out of both capitalism and communism.

 At that stage, Dugin was being influenced by sectors of the European far right, not the other way around. A recent article by a Ukrainian writer tells the story in the publication of Zurich Center for Security Studies. However, the late 90s and in his Fourth Political Theory (2009), Dugin detach himself from the three basic ideologies of Western modernity. In his word, Liberalism, Marxism and Fascism. Or, if you need more details, here they are.

Dugin identifies liberalism as the First Political Theory, describing it as the dominant ideology of modern history.He argues that liberalism is characterized by individualism, materialism, and consumerism, and has evolved into a form of totalitarianism. An appreciation difficult to be heard by Western scholars and intellectuals of progressive persuasion. Communism or Marxism is the Second Political Theory, which centers on class but ultimately failed to offer a lasting global alternative to liberalism. The Third Political Theory is fascism or National Socialism, which focuses on race or the state and was defeated in 1945, leaving liberalism as the prevailing global force.

Dugin then introduces Eurasianism as the Fourth Political Theory. It's important to note that the first three theories are rooted in European thought and are not universal. Eurasianism, by contrast, is not a European political theory. Eurasianism gives the Fourth Political Theory its geopolitical substance, positioning Russia as a distinct Eurasian civilization that must resist Western liberal dominance. 

More specifically, the First Political Theory, Dugin sees liberalism, as  the dominant victor in modern history. He characterizes liberalism by its emphasis on individualism, materialism, and consumerism, arguing that it has evolved into a form of totalitarianism. The Second Political Theory, communism or Marxism, centers on the concept of class but ultimately failed to present a lasting global alternative to liberalism. The Third Political Theory, fascism or National Socialism, focuses on race or the state and was defeated in 1945, marking another unsuccessful challenge to liberalism’s dominance.

Some of Dugin’s critics also acknowledge that his position changed after the Soviet collapse and, I suspect, as the sense grew that the West was now moving against Russia. Given the range of his reading, it is hard to imagine that Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”—first published in 1989 and later expanded into The End of History and the Last Man—escaped him. Nor is it likely that Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” thesis, first published in 1993 and expanded into a 1996 book, did. Huntington’s argument, as is well known, was that post–Cold War conflicts would be driven less by ideology or economics than by civilizational and religious identities, with future confrontations unfolding along the “fault lines” between major civilizations.

Then came 1997, when Dugin published his sprawling Foundations of Geopolitics. Books of that scale are not written overnight. Which makes it difficult to believe that Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s arguments were received merely as descriptions of a new world. They also read as projections, even programs. It is telling, in that regard, that the same year Dugin published Foundations of Geopolitics, Zbigniew Brzezinski published The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Strategic Imperatives.  The book could be found in the CIA’s archives.

One need not be a specialist in geopolitics and political philosophy to see that Brzezinski was not simply describing unipolarity. He was outlining its strategic horizon, while Dugin was already pointing towards dewesternization. Am I “defending” Dugin? I do not think so. I think I am unveiling certain shortcomings of Western scholars, intellectuals and journalist. Decolonial relational reasoning is better suited for the situation than Western ontological reasoning.

V

In the previous section I sketched the positions of several European thinkers who are often gathered because they reject both liberal capitalism and state communism. I left Dugin aside because he does not properly belong to that European formation. He became, instead, one of the most forceful advocates of Eurasianism. That distinction matters. Dugin’s Eurasianism, de Benoist’s Europeanism, Thiriart’s Euro-Sovietism, and Evola’s attempt to revive pre-Christian Rome and Aryan civilizations may overlap in places, but they are not the same project. More work is needed to clarify both the relation between renewed Europeanism and renewed Eurasianism and the direction Dugin’s influence may be taking in the Global South.

From there, I turn now to the Third World—now more often relabeled the Global South—and, more specifically, to the Bandung Conference of 1955. In his opening address Sukarno made clear that the recently independent nations of Asia and Africa should not allow themselves to be trapped within the Cold War binary, either liberal capitalism or state communism. His call was not to choose one bloc against the other, but to imagine a political horizon grounded in anti-colonial solidarity, sovereignty, and historical self-affirmation.

That distinction is crucial. Sukarno’s position cannot simply be folded into the European far right or into Dugin’s non-European Eurasianism. His argument grew out of anti-colonial struggle and the broader trajectory of Third World nationalism. Are Third World nationalisms the same as First World nationalisms, or as the civilizational projects later gathered under the name of Eurasianism? Clearly not. I keep repeating at night not all cats are grey. One must attend to the enunciation and not get lost in the enunciated. To reject both capitalism and communism at Bandung was not to revive imperial civilizational projects; it was to affirm political independence, collective dignity, and the right of formerly colonized peoples to define their own futures.

In that address, Sukarno linked independence to solidarity among newly decolonized nations. He called for cooperation against colonialism and imperialism and emphasized the shared historical experience of domination across Asia and Africa. The question, then, is not whether every rejection of liberal capitalism and state communism means the same thing. Clearly it does not. There are decisive differences between European far-right projects, Dugin’s Eurasianism, and the anti-colonial nationalisms that emerged across the Third World. Sukarno’s intervention belongs to the latter history: a history of decolonization, non-alignment, and the attempt to build political futures beyond the terms imposed by Western hegemony and Cold War rivalry.

The principles associated with Bandung reflected that orientation: respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-interference in the internal affairs of states, peaceful coexistence, mutual benefit, and a commitment to justice and human rights. Those principles later informed the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought a path independent of both Cold War blocs. Bandung, then, did more than refuse two rival ideologies. It named a different geopolitical and ethical horizon—one grounded in equality, independence, and peace. As a state project, was a call for dewesternization. As a vision of the political society of the moment, was a call for decolonization.

V

The argument announced in the title can now be stated plainly. “Neither capitalism nor communism” is not, in this essay, a slogan with a single meaning. It names a contested terrain. In some cases, that refusal feeds European far-right projects; in others, it informs Dugin’s Eurasianism; in still others, it opens onto anti-colonial horizons that belong to a very different history. To collapse these trajectories into one would be to confuse distinct genealogies, distinct enunciations, and distinct political aims.

That is, why Dugin´ Eurasianism, de Benoist´s et al. Europeanism, and Sukarno dewestern/decolonial nationalism, must be read in relation (relational reasoning), but not in sameness (ontological reasoning). Dugin’s project emerges from a Russian civilizational and geopolitical horizon; the European thinkers grouped around him belong to another formation altogether; Bandung, by contrast, names the anti-colonial attempt to refuse both Cold War blocs without reproducing imperial fantasies in a new key. The point, then, is not simply to ask who rejects capitalism and communism, but how, from where, and toward what future. Once that question is asked, the landscape changes. Not all cats are grey at night.