PSCRP-BESA Reports No 210 (June 14, 2026)
by Kiryl Kascian
An article titled “Coloniality by proxy: Albania’s road to Brussels runs through Tel Aviv” appeared in my social media feed a few days ago. Under normal circumstances, it would have been easy to skip. The contemporary pro-Palestinian analytical genre has become highly predictable. This narrative usually affirms Israel’s right to exist at the level of principle, as a matter that cannot be publicly contested, while simultaneously interpreting its actions in a way that places that legitimacy under constant moral exception. Within this interpretative framework, Israel increasingly occupies a rather exceptional position. Few other states are discussed so consistently through the language of structural suspicion. Military actions that would elsewhere be analyzed within the framework of security dilemmas, strategic calculation, or asymmetric warfare are instead frequently interpreted through morally predetermined categories such as settler colonialism, racial hierarchy, or systems of domination. The result is not simply criticism of Israeli policy, which is entirely legitimate in itself, but a tendency to treat Israeli actions as requiring a different moral grammar altogether. The events of October 7 and the security reality that followed are acknowledged, yet often pushed into the analytical background with remarkable speed.
What made me click, however, was a reference at the beginning of the text to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and his state visit to Jerusalem in January 2026. That detail briefly interrupted my usual reading filter, mainly because Rama was one of the keynote speakers at the Second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism. I attended that event and heard his speech in person. That memory was the only reason I kept reading the article to the end. Somewhat unexpectedly, it turned out to be worth it.
The more revealing material appeared only at the very last paragraph. There, the authors argued that Albania’s relations with Israel should be understood primarily through “the role that Western geopolitical expectations have prescribed for it,” claiming that Tirana views the Palestinian cause as “an inconvenient variable to be managed, minimized, and ultimately ignored on the road to Brussels.” In this interpretation, Albania was not acting as a sovereign political actor making its own strategic calculations. Instead, it appeared as a small state adjusting itself to the demands of Euro-Atlantic integration. At that very final point, the article stopped being merely another exercise in post-colonial critique and began to resemble something familiar from an entirely different geopolitical register.
Anyone familiar with Russian strategic communication toward Eastern Europe, particularly the Baltic states and Ukraine, will recognize the similarities almost immediately. For years, Russian official discourse has consistently promoted the claim that smaller states pursuing policies critical towards Russia, especially those aligned with NATO or the European Union, do not possess fully authentic sovereignty. Their policies are portrayed as externally generated and their governments less as independent political actors than as transmission belts for decisions made somewhere within the so-called “collective West.”
One of the main figures articulating this narrative is Maria Zakharova, the longtime spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry. In her public appearances and press briefings, Zakharova routinely contrasts what Moscow calls the “collective West” with the so-called “world majority.” The latter is presented as a broad community of states supposedly committed to sovereign decision-making and a multipolar international order, in contrast to a West portrayed as increasingly ideological, hegemonic, and detached from the rest of the world. Within this framework, Russia positions itself not as an isolated power, but as part of a larger global coalition resisting Western political and moral dominance.
The vocabulary of Russian propaganda and contemporary post-colonial discourse is obviously different, but the underlying logic feels strangely familiar. The Kremlin usually speaks more directly about puppets, proxies, and externally controlled regimes. Contemporary post-colonial discourse prefers the language of hegemonic structures, normative pressure, and systems of domination. Still, both tend to arrive at a fairly similar conclusion when small states are treated as genuinely sovereign mainly when they position themselves against the West.
Once countries align themselves with NATO, the EU, the United States, or Israel (which, by most geopolitical standards, is itself a rather small state), their political agency suddenly becomes questionable. Their decisions are no longer seen as fully their own because somebody larger and more powerful must supposedly be acting through them. The irony here is difficult to miss. In The Plague, Albert Camus wrote that “the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” He was writing about more than disease. Certain political reflexes survive in much the same way. They simply return under different vocabularies and moral fashions. A discourse presenting itself as anti-imperial gradually reproduces a logic very similar to the one through which Moscow has spent years denying political agency to Eastern Europe altogether. This overlap is probably not entirely accidental because both contemporary post-colonial rhetoric and Russian geopolitical discourse seem uncomfortable with the possibility that smaller nations may voluntarily align themselves with the broader Western sphere for reasons of history, security, or simple political preference.
In both frameworks, sovereignty becomes conditional. It is acknowledged when exercised against the West and questioned when exercised alongside it. That is precisely why the final paragraph of the Albanian article turned out to be far more revealing than the rest of its fairly predictable criticism of Israel. Or, to borrow from Leonard Cohen, “there is a crack in everything.” In this case, the crack appears precisely at the point where anti-imperial language begins unconsciously reproducing imperial assumptions of its own.
Dr. Kiryl Kascian is Head of the Centre for Communication Influences and Propaganda Research, Faculty of Communication of Vilnius University, Lithuania, [email protected]