Ali Usman Qasmi | Right-Wing Decoloniality and Civilizational Discourses: A Critical Analysis

Stanford Global Studies, the Stanford Program in International Relations, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures present Professor Ali Usman Qasmi, Associate Professor of Histor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.

In this workshop, Ali Usman Qasmi talks about the parallel trajectories of multiple civilizational discourses with a focus on British India: the Nehruvian vision of India as a flowing stream enriched by diverse currents, the racial exclusivity of Savarkar's core Hindutva identity centered on a sacralized geographical entity of Bharat; and the Muslim nostalgia for the empire as a civilization, which served as a mode of belonging and a claim to equality during colonial subjugation. The end of the Cold War and the shifting geopolitics of the early 2000s have brought civilizational discourses back into focus. With the rise of emerging global economies like China, India, Turkey, Brazil, and Russia, these states have been able to stake a much larger claim in the geopolitical arena due to their successful replication of the capitalist developmental model. A convenient discursive strategy has been to argue in decolonial terms, using metaphors and ideas such as delinking and de westernization as a rationale for establishing civilizational states. Unlike previously demarcated nation states, these civilizational states are not necessarily geographically defined nor bound by the international legal order, underpinned by its pretentious liberal values. The desired outcomes of establishing or advocating for civilizational states vary in different contexts, but they all converge on a shared agenda that is either deeply illiberal or profoundly Islamophobic.