Belarusian and Ukrainian intellectuals have been applying postcolonial theory to Russia since the 1990s. But they have largely been ignored in the West. Now it is time to listen to those voices from the ‘borderlands’. War and peace There are some who believe that philosophy makes things more complicated than they really are. There are others who maintain that we do not know the nature of things and that philosophy simply shows them to be more complicated than they seem. There are, however, certain contexts in which clarity is desirable, and for that reason I will begin with definitions. When we speak of the ‘Russian World’, we have in mind a particular ideological doctrine and the corresponding actions of the