Conception: Benjamin Zachariah, Potsdam
With Francisco Bosco, Rio de Janeiro; Bodhisattva Kar, Cape Town; Joachim Kurtz, Heidelberg; Anastasia Piliavsky, London; Dhruv Raina, Delhi

What happens to a dissenting framework of thinking when it becomes the official ideology of states? The appropriation of postcolonial theory as a form of national self-legitimation is now a widespread practice. The BRICS group of countries provides a cluster of such examples. One can argue that there isn’t a right or wrong postcolonialism or decoloniality, only various instrumentalisations that are flexible and reusable. Is this set of usages implicit in the logic of post- or decolonial thinking, or can it be seen as distortion or misuse?