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

Michael Merlingen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)744-761
Number of pages18
JournalThird World Quarterly
Volume44
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 25 Dec 2022

Keywords

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

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