Russia and China are ready to fill a “global governance gap” if the West, is reluctant to use its power, a professor said

Misplaced guilt over the West’s colonial past risks allowing authoritarian regimes to expand their influence on the world stage, a leading academic has warned.

Bruce Gilley said that countries such as China and Russia were prepared to fill a “global governance gap”. This opening would appear if modern democracies were put off intervening overseas through a fear that they would be accused of empire-building — leaving the world a “much worse place”.

Mr Gilley, a political science professor at Portland State University, Oregon, provoked controversy last year after claiming that colonialism was a force for good. He said that independence movements had created a “cesspool of human suffering”. Furious responses led to his paper being withdrawn and half the editors of the Third World Quarterly