Coloniality is so baked into Western state powers and institutions that attempts to take ‘short cuts’ through making ‘decolonial’ claims and statements can easily feed into existing hierarchies.

It would be nice to pretend that we still lived in a modernist world of meaningful choices, where taking sides was part of a broader grand narrative of struggle and progress.

Totalizing moral binaries are particularly dangerous in the sphere of international relations, where international law lacks universal mechanisms of enforcement.

Coronavirus shows the limits of resilience. If we are the security threat as well as the subjects to be secured, then we cannot be trusted to secure ourselves.

Without Western responsibility for the outcome of the intervention in Libya and without any transformative promise, Western powers were strengthened morally and politically through their actions, whereas in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, they were humbled and often humiliated.