Attacks on Postcolonial Studies Mirror the Imperial Logic They Denounce, Study Argues

Postcolonial studies have become one of the most contested fields in the German-speaking academic world. Over the past several years, scholars, students and institutions associated with the tradition have faced fierce attacks in universities, media and politics, a pattern also documented in Switzerland, France and the United States. A new peer-reviewed analysis by Nils Riecken of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, published in the journal Geographica Helvetica, argues that these attacks are not simply disagreements about historical method. Instead, Riecken contends, they project the imperial and racializing assumptions of a dominant German and Western anti-antisemitism discourse onto the very field that set out to expose those assumptions.

The study situates the controversy within a broader struggle over what Riecken calls the time-space of the political community that identifies itself as “the West.” Drawing on the geographers John May and Nigel Thrift, he treats social space and time as historically situated, contested elements of material practice rather than neutral containers. From this perspective, the “West” is narrated as a civilizational project, the culmination of Enlightenment, progress, democracy, human rights and secularism, that must be aggressively defended against external enemies. Postcolonial criticism, which analyzes imperialism and colonial forms of knowledge as constitutive of Western modernity, breaks with this narrative, and Riecken argues that this break is precisely what provokes the hostility.

Central to the analysis is the concept of the “German catechism,” formulated by the historian A. Dirk Moses in 2021. According to Moses, this is an identity discourse advanced by state and non-state actors that regulates the limits of what can be said in Germany. Its five interlocking convictions are the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the categorical separation of antisemitism from racism, the memory of the Holocaust as a civilizational rupture rather than an effect of modernity, Germany’s special responsibility for Israel’s security as articulated by former Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2008, and the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Riecken argues that this catechism presents Germany’s reckoning with Nazism as a civilizational teleology, casting the Nazis as barbarians outside modernity rather than, as postcolonial scholars would argue, products of a shared modern history of imperialism, colonialism and racism.

Overlapping with this national discourse is the transnational apparatus built around the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. Riecken documents how this discourse has been inscribed into administrative regulations, court proceedings, police practice, Bundestag resolutions, a national strategy against antisemitism, university policies and state-funded monitoring bodies such as RIAS. Critics, including one of the definition’s original drafters, Kenneth Stern, have argued that it is being weaponized in ways that chill legitimate speech, yet Riecken finds that such criticism has barely slowed its institutional spread. Within this framework, the coinage of a “postcolonial antisemitism” has gained plausibility, he writes, because postcolonial perspectives question the discursive boundaries that both the catechism and the IHRA discourse draw.

The stakes became sharper after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, which killed about 1110 people with some 250 taken hostage, and the subsequent Israeli siege of Gaza, whose death toll the article cites as at least 75,000 based on recent survey-based research and United Nations reporting. Riecken describes how statements characterizing Israel’s actions as genocide, including a widely discussed analysis by genocide scholar Raz Segal published on 13 October 2023, were branded antisemitic within the IHRA framework, even as a growing number of legal scholars, historians and genocide researchers, among them the Israeli Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, reached similar conclusions. Goldberg’s argument, Riecken notes, does not treat the Nazis as returning ghosts but situates both historical cases within a larger history of modern state violence, in which perceived self-defense is a primary motive for genocide.

According to Riecken, the accusations leveled at postcolonial scholarship, that it is unscientific, Manichean, hostile to universalism, glorifies violence and endorses antisemitism, function as mirror accusations. The charge of a dichotomous worldview, he argues, reflects the attackers’ own non-relational conception of history, which schematically separates the histories of the “West” and its others in order to tell a story of civilizational progress. Similarly, the claim that postcolonial scholars practice mere identity politics conceals, in his view, that the attackers themselves advance a racially underpinned identity project, one that identifies the Israeli state with all Jews and thereby renders non-Jewish Israelis and non-Zionist Jews invisible.

The article also connects the discursive policing of academia to material repression. Following the sociologist Vanessa Thompson, Riecken reads the criminalization of postcolonial scholarship and of student protests against the Gaza war as an expression of “carceral racism,” in which groups deemed unproductive within a neoliberal calculus face criminalization, police violence, assembly bans, defunding and house searches. He links this to the “war on terror” and a “war on antisemitism” logic in which rights are suspended in the name of an undefined security, with anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism central to the enemy imaginaries involved. Hannah Tzuberi’s work on the “reforestation” of Jewish life in Germany illustrates, for Riecken, how the vitality of the nation is tied to a homogenized figure of the Jew as either victim or avenger of antisemitism.

Against these attacks, Riecken reconstructs the analytical contributions of the postcolonial tradition. Scholars such as Patrick Wolfe used settler colonialism to trace a logic of elimination of native populations across diverse contexts, including German warfare against Jews, Sinti and Roma, and the dispossession of Indigenous Americans and Bedouins in Palestine. Thinkers from Aimé Césaire to Zygmunt Bauman and Detlev Peukert placed the Holocaust within the violence of modernity, while Moses’s concept of “permanent security” distinguishes illiberal and liberal logics of state violence, the latter drawing on colonial civilizing missions. The Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui’s critique of the liberal concept of freedom shows, Riecken argues, how the idea that all humans are free historically legitimized a colonial “right to intervention.” Postcolonial criticism, on this reading, does not reject the universal but historicizes it in order to reconfigure it more broadly.

Ultimately, Riecken concludes that the anti-antisemitism discourse, with its demand for confessions and absolute truth, systematically misreads postcolonial argument through a Eurocentric epistemology. The accusations reveal the discourse’s own premises: an ethnocentric concept of identity and singularity, a dichotomy of West and rest, a categorical separation of Holocaust from other genocides and of antisemitism from racism, and an authoritarian, securitized understanding of politics. Postcolonial perspectives, by contrast, work with a relational understanding of space and time, treating borders as historically produced and asking how shared imperial histories continue to structure the present. The article, which appears in a special issue on the policing of the academy and underwent double-blind peer review, frames the controversy as a fundamental dispute over who belongs to the national community, who defines its memory, and whether democratic order can be imagined beyond the exclusions that current discourses of civilization continue to produce.

Subject of Research: The projection of imperial assumptions in German anti-antisemitism discourse onto postcolonial studies

Article Title: Feindbild postkoloniale Studien: imperiale Projektionen des (deutschen) Anti-Antisemitismus

Article References: Riecken, N. (2026). Feindbild postkoloniale Studien: imperiale Projektionen des (deutschen) Anti-Antisemitismus. Geographica Helvetica, 81(4), 547-566. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-547-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-547-2026

Keywords: postcolonial studies, antisemitism, Germany, IHRA definition, settler colonialism, Holocaust memory, academic freedom, genocide studies, carceral racism, historiography, Israel-Palestine, discourse analysis