Westsplaining

The term Westsplaining (or Westplaining) emerged as a critique in the context of discussions on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. To our knowledge, no established definition exists yet, but users generally agree on a number of core elements. Journalist George Monbiot defines Westsplaining as a “tendency of certain [Westerners] to ascribe everything that happens east of Germany to Western policy” (Monbiot, 2022). More broadly, Westsplaining refers to the biased conviction held by some that everything important in international politics is caused by Western policies.

Importantly, critics of Westsplaining also add a dimension of epistemic injustice to their definition. As Smoleński and Dutkiewicz put it: “Speaking about Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans without listening to local voices or trying to understand the region’s complexity is a colonial projection” (2022). Certain Western-centric accounts of international politics miss essential points due to a lack of knowledge of the region, combined with a form of Western arrogance that ignores or silences voices and expertise from the non-Western regions where the develoments under study occur (Hendl, Burlyuk, O’Sullivan, & Arystanbek, 2024).

Western critics of US imperialism – on both the left and the right – have pointed to NATO’s expansion into the former Warsaw Pact countries and the former Soviet Union as a provocation and as the main trigger for Russia’s aggression against Georgia in 2008 and against Ukraine since 2014. Their evaluation is that Eastern European countries should have remained a neutral buffer between Russia and NATO. Perhaps the most frequently cited proponent of this position is the neorealist scholar John Mearsheimer (Mearsheimer, 2014, 2022).

This account is seriously flawed both ontologically and morally. Ontologically, it ignores the agency of non-Western actors, beginning with Russia. By identifying Western actions as the primary cause of Russian aggression, it remains blind to centuries-long and still active Russian imperialism and the oppression of dozens of neighboring peoples. Ukraine and other nations are well aware of Russia’s colonial project. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they actively sought NATO and EU membership in order to escape Russia’s sphere of influence and to seek protection. Westsplaining thus also overlooks Eastern European agency, without which NATO expansion would not have occurred. The Western-centric account is morally problematic because it places most of the blame on the United States and its Western allies rather than on Russia’s ultranationalist and imperialist leadership. The latter decided to invade Ukraine, while there was never a Ukrainian or NATO plan to attack Russia.

Theoretically, accusations of Westsplaining often reflect a radical critique of realism. As noted above, structural or neorealism tends to downplay agency. Many Eastern European scholars also criticize the style with which some Western realists engage in the debate, faulting them for a lack of empathy and for treating geopolitics and war as a strategic board game with Ukraine as just a pawn.

At the same time, these scholars are also at loggerheads with Western and Global Southern left-wing “anti-imperialists,” such as Noam Chomsky, who frame the war against Ukraine as a ‘proxy war’ between the United States and Russia. This framing erases the reality of Russia’s illegitimate invasion and Ukraine’s war of liberation (Hendl et al., 2024; Smoleński & Dutkiewicz, 2022).

By combating the idea that the West and Russia should decide the fate of Eastern European nations, and by denouncing the accompanying epistemic injustice, these Eastern European scholars represent a distinct decolonial strand. This strand often stands in opposition to other decolonial thinkers in the West and the Global South who dogmatically focus exclusively on narratives that cast Western governments as the primary – or sole – culprits.