Rusmir Mahmutćehajić (1948–2026)

Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, the leading Bosnian Traditionalist, died in Sarajevo on 5 April 2026.

Mahmutćehajić discovered the writings of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon as a young man. He trained as an electrical engineer, did a PhD in Italy, and taught electrical engineering in Croatia during the last period of Yugoslavia. 

When the Bosnian war started, he joined the Bosnian defense, arranging the provision of arms to the defenders of Sarajevo and serving in the first Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Minister of Energy, Mining and Industry and as Vice President. He resigned from the government in protest at the Dayton Agreement, which ended the war but accepted the de facto partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina into Muslim, Serb and Croat entities. As a believer in the transcendent unity of religions, Mahmutćehajić also believed in the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which he worked with devotion after Dayton in a private capacity, though without success—the forces keeping the three entities apart were too strong for anything or anyone to counter. 

Mahmutćehajić founded the International Forum Bosnia and the journal Dijalog, wrote many articles and  books (several of which were translated into English), and played an important part in the reception of Traditionalism in Bosnia, described in Samir Beglerović and Mark Sedgwick, "Islam in Bosnia Between East and West,” for which see here. 

Of his books in English, the three most notable are:

• The Denial of Bosnia (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000)
• Bosnia the Good: Tolerance and Tradition (Central European University Press, 2000)
• Sarajevo Essays: Politics, Ideology, and Tradition (State University of New York Press, 2003)

My thanks to ND for bringing this news to my attention.

Evola's Samurai in context

A new article places Julius Evola’s understanding of the figure of the Samurai in its Italian context. It is Michele Monserrati, “The Transnational Samurai: Nation-Building and Community for the Italian Far-Right,” Japan Review 41 (2026): 255–280, available (open access) here.

Italian interest in the Samurai started after the Japanese victory against Russia in 1905, and was initially guided by the English-language Bushido: The Soul of Japan by the Japanese nationalist Inazō Nitobe (1862–1933), which understood the Samurai ethic in terms of medieval European chivalry. Bushido was translated into Italian in 1917 but many Italians had by then reimagined the Samurai in terms of the classical Roman hero, popular among Italian nationalists. There then emerged two models of the Samurai in Italy, according to Monserrati, a Shinto-inflected model that emphasized patriotism and a Zen-oriented model that that emphasized individual spirituality. The Shinto-inflected model, which the article examines in detail, was dominant until the end of Fascism, which killed Italian militarism, leaving the field to the Zen-oriented model, of which the most important proponent (though not the first) was Evola. For Evola, “the samurai’s warrior ethos represented a potential archetype for rediscovering a lost Western tradition of heroic spiritual transformation.” He “emphasized the spiritual reawakening of the individual as a condition for the heroic gesture.” This view, writes Monserrati, subsequently became popular among the Far Right, but he spends less than a page on this.

Monserrati says he is not investigating Orientalism but what he calls “the process of cultural translation.” In this case reception was positive, though inevitably molded by the circumstances and interests of the period.

Dugin and the Decolonial School

Alexander Dugin’s modernity, like that of René Guénon but more explicitly, is located in the West. Dugin therefore calls for the end of Western hegemony and the liberation of other civizational spheres. He is not alone in doing this, as has been pointed out in a recent article by Miri Davidson, an assistant professor in Political Theory at the University of Warwick. The article is “On the concept of the pluriverse in Walter Mignolo and the European New Right,” Contemporary Political Theory 24 (2025), pp. 469–489, available open access at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00732-x.

Davidson compares the views of Walter Mignolo, an American scholar of Argentinian origin and doyen of the post-Marxist “decolonial school,” with those of Dugin and Alain de Benoist, the French doyen of the “New Right.” The term “pluriverse” was popularized by Arturo Escobar, another member of the decolonial school, as an alternative to the dominant Eurocentric, conquering, capitalist worldview. It is, Davidson shows, comparable to Benoist’s ethnopluralism and Carl Schmitt’s great spaces as adopted by Dugin. Yet there is a difference, she maintains: the decolonial pluriverse is open, “composed of many related and entangled worlds which mingle and coexist with one another,” while the pluriverse of Benoist and Dugin is closed, as “culturally diverse worlds can only live a healthy existence in separation from one another.” This is probably true of Benoist, but not—at least in principle—of Dugin, for whom traditional civilizations can and should combine.

Davidson makes another interesting point, that both versions of the pluriverse imagine hegemony erasing difference. This, she argues, misunderstands the nature of imperialism, which “does not only homogenise and erase difference—which it certainly does on a cultural level—but also constantly and relentlessly produces difference in the form of striated, hierarchical, and often essentialist ethnic, racial, national, and sexual identities.”

An interesting article, which shines a new light on Dugin’s theories, and also (though Davidson does not say this) shows the limits of classification in terms of “left” and “right.”