The Afterlife of Empire: Unlearning Russocentrism Through a Feminist Politics of Knowledge

Russocentrism operates not only as a geopolitical orientation but also as a knowledge regime shaping how gender, race, violence, and modernity are understood across Eurasia, a term the author use broadly to encompass East Europe, the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East, and the North, as well as parts of East-Central Europe whose intellectual and political histories intersect with multiple empires. As the author continues, "As a Belarusian feminist scholar working between the intellectual worlds of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and Eurasian studies, I have long been unsettled by how Russocentrism is minimized or dismissed as an impolite accusation rather than recognized as a structural condition." This essay arises from that unease and from feminist, queer, and transnational epistemologies grounded in the lived realities of the Eurasian borderlands. It speaks to feminist theorists attentive to global power relations and to scholars of Eurasia who are grappling with the endurance of imperial histories. This is not to reify an artificial divide between “feminist” and “Eurasian” scholarship, but to highlight how feminist thinkers in the region have always been part of a transnational intellectual landscape.

Recent Russian military interventions and the responses to them have intensified a long-standing question: Why has the legacy of Russian and Soviet imperialism remained so consistently obscured in scholarship? Why have disciplinary routines from area studies’ linguistic hierarchies to certain feminist frameworks shaped by Cold War imaginaries so often defended rather than interrogated this imperial afterlife? When critiques of Russocentrism are dismissed as NATO sympathies, geopolitical posturing, or emotional “trauma,” they are stripped of their analytic force and dislocated from the intersectional concerns gendered violence, racialized hierarchies, and militarism that feminist scholarship has long foregrounded elsewhere. Yet the Eurasian borderlands often emerge as a “unique” exception to global capitalist and imperial dynamics.

Link for the essay.