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Bringing postcolonial critique into discussions of the global right at the current conjuncture is instrumental in two ways. First, it brings into focus postcolonial nationalism as a prevalent political strategy used by right-wing actors in the Global Easts and South to legitimate authoritarian, conservative, and ethnonationalist projects through mobilizing subaltern identities and anti-colonial or anti-imperialist rhetoric. Authoritarian leaders in countries such as Russia, Turkey, and China routinely use criticisms of Western dominance and liberal hypocrisy as a pretext for justifying domestic oppression and their own imperialist pursuits ( Morozov, 2015 , Çapan and Zarakol, 2017 ). In the Philippines, Duterte’s invocation of anti-colonial nationalism has not only helped him win over “ideologically diverse coalitions” as the country navigates the terrain of inter-imperialist rivalry, but also equipped him with responses to Western criticisms of illiberalism and human rights abuses during his presidency ( Nair, 2023 , Regilme, 2021 ). Anti-feminist and homophobic mobilizations in postcolonial settings have long sought to discredit gender equality and LGBTQ movements by equating them to Westernness or coloniality. Conditioned by a semi-alterity to the hegemonic West, conservatives in Central and Eastern Europe present themselves as simultaneously victims to ideologies of the “Western liberal elites” and defenders of “true” European values. Korolczuk and Graff (2018) note that “anti-gender” organizations in Poland employ an anti-colonial frame to reject “gender ideology” as being imposed on them by “Western elites” and imagine Poland as a saviour of “traditional values” and “the West” itself. Similarly, Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán has claimed that adopting what he calls “Western European liberalism” would mean “spiritual suicide” for Central Europeans 2 and that “the West has moved to Central Europe”. 3 Anti-feminists and misogynists in India, China, and Turkey invoke a more straightforward politics of difference in their association of feminism with Western influence ( Lodhia, 2014 ; Eslen-Ziya, 2022 , Huang, 2022 ). Anti-feminist discourses in these “emerging powers” represent their respective construction of “traditional” values as threatened by the influence of “Western feminism”, which have a religious dimension in Turkey and India and a pronounced geopolitical dimension in the Chinese context. Amidst heightened geopolitical tensions between China and “the West”, the anti-feminist backlash frames feminists as agents of “foreign hostile forces” and antagonistic social movements as an ideological threat to the Chinese regime ( Huang 2022 ; Huang, 2023 ). Common to these developments is a renewed energy of misogynistic nationalism in pushing back against feminist challenges to gender hierarchies and norms through resorting to anxieties of the masculinized nation and framing feminism as anti-national (see also Kaul, 2021 ). From a different perspective on gender and state power in postcolonial regimes, Diazcontextualizes Duterte’s “masculinist decolonial ideology” within a longer, transpacific history of “women’s subjectification under Philippine authoritarianism” and its claims for postcolonial sovereignty ( Diaz, 2019 : 695). Diaz shows that in sanctioning gendered violence at home and denouncing violence against Filipina women abroad, Duterte uses women as a mechanism for projecting narrow conceptions of postcolonial national autonomy even though women remain “marginalized within the structures of the nation” (2019: 697).