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

Michael Merlingen

Third World Quarterly, 2023, vol. 44, issue 4, 744-761

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.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2022.2154647

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