Once We Spoke of Derrida and Arendt. Today, We Wonder What Became of That Friendship.

The US attacks on Venezuela and Iran followed by the near silence of its allies have revived memories of colonialism many believed had long settled. And in doing so, it may have fundamentally altered how a post-Cold War generation relates to the West. For many in the Global South who came of age after the 1990s, the West was not an empire but an aspiration. It was a destination for learning, mobility, prosperity and intellectual refuge. Racism still arrived in hostile encounters, but it was often absorbed within a larger narrative of opportunity.

That imagination now stands fractured. Not just because of the violence inflicted by the West but because of the opportunistic silences and selective outrages within Western societies. What is at stake now is not only geopolitics but friendships; the trust that underlies companionship, collaboration and shared intellectual worlds.

This generation is now realising that the political leadership of the West does not come from a vacuum; it reflects deeper currents within their society, their chosen hierarchies, their preferences for whose suffering matters, whose can be overlooked – and whose can be celebrated.

These asymmetries always existed, but have become increasingly difficult to ignore in recent years. The outpouring of empathy for Ukraine was immediate and necessary. But it arrived just before the convenient silence that accompanied the devastation of Gaza. Europe opened its borders and purses with generosity to those fleeing one war, but it remained guarded, even hostile, to those escaping others. Poland was praised for embracing the fleeing Ukrainians, even as its hostility to West Asian migrants remained largely unnoticed.

Those of us who had formed intellectual and personal bonds within Western worlds had learned to live with these dissonances. We treated them as inconsistencies within otherwise sincere commitments to justice. We acknowledged that our friends couldn’t immediately shed their colonial inheritance.

These friends spoke the language of equality and justice. They quoted Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida on violence. And they have now fallen quiet when we needed them the most. They now appear constrained in a way that invites suspicion of complicity.

It was once possible to hold on to friendships while setting aside the unease. That space is now harder to sustain. Both morally and politically.

This is not an indictment. It is an unsettling recognition. Affection has not disappeared, nor does mutual respect. But the bond has altered.

This is not the first instance of such disillusionment with the Western mind. The colonised people were aghast to find that the imperial rulers who preach high ideals in their country practiced cruel racism in their colonies.

Then arrived the post-colonial phase. People in the South expected that the West would now shed its cultivated hierarchies. But several transnational friendships ruptured in the last century when those in advantageous positions refused to see the victim. Edward Said was disillusioned upon realising that his elite colleagues in the American academy professed the abstract idea of justice, but turned evasive over Palestine.

Even Albert Camus couldn’t bring himself to completely endorse the Algerian struggle for independence. It took an Algerian Muslim seven decades to remind the world that while they celebrated the murderer-protagonist of Camus’s iconic novel Outsider (1942), the one who was killed remained unsung – an Arab without a story. Only after Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013) offered a retelling of the French novel did the world come to know the perspective of the deceased victim. Someone Camus’s book didn’t even care to name.

Franz Fanon’s disenchantment was even deeper. Shaped by the ideals of the French revolution, he witnessed the horrors of racism in colonised Algeria. The French colony of Martinique, where Fanon was born, has not attained freedom till date. It is now called the overseas department and region of France.

The US assault on the world order had brought a similar realisation to a generation which wanted to believe, perhaps naively, that the aforementioned chapters of history had been relegated to textbooks. We only now realise that the solidarities we had imagined as universal carried fractures we had chosen not to see.

What emerges from this moment remains unclear. But for those who once sought – and still seek – a meaningful dialogue with the West, a profound shift is taking place.

The consequence is not limited to diplomacy or statecraft. It enters the domain of the personal. Friendships have now begun to carry an undercurrent of doubt. We are now confronting the unsettling silence of our generous hosts, our companions in thought, with whom we attended fellowship programmes, and worked on joint research papers. We have begun to suspect that even daily transactions carried an entrenched hierarchy.

If it’s a moment of geopolitical realignment, it may also herald a moral awakening. The wars Europe fought with itself in the twentieth century weakened the continent’s authority and opened space for anti-colonial struggles and new claims to justice.

As the US-led order hollows out, it might lead to new movements for rights that do not speak in the language of the West, that recognise and revive localised struggles.

And it may also push people to reconsider their relationships. It might be easier for statecraft to forge new alignments, the recalibration of a bond once sustained by shared evenings and common ideals carries a human cost – to both sides – that’s yet to be reckoned with.

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