No colonial order stands by the army alone; it first produces a portrait of a human being in need of being governed. The opposite of domination is not a rupture in which nobody touches anybody, but being able to relate without governing one another.
When colonialism is mentioned, ships sailing to distant continents, occupying armies and foreign flags come to mind. This image is true, but it makes colonialism look like nothing more than a territorial occupation left in the past. Even when empires dissolve, the economic relations they built, the hierarchies of knowledge and the thinking that divides people into governors and governed can go on living.
First making people look in need of being governed
No colonial order can stand for long by military force alone. It produces a story about the necessity of inequality. Colonised people are said to have fallen behind, to be unable to manage their resources and to need strong guidance. Plunder is presented as civilisation, control as education, and obedience as development.
This discourse also takes from people the authority to interpret their own lives. They cannot say for themselves what they are living through and what they need; rulers and experts speak on their behalf. Local knowledge counts as superstition and knowledge from outside as science; local organisation counts as disorder and central bureaucracy as progress.
Maps and categories
Colonial administrations divided lands into maps and people into fixed identities. Once it was decided who was native, foreign, civilised or dangerous, the distribution of rights was determined too. Classifying was not merely understanding the world but breaking it into governable pieces.
Today’s states and companies also divide people into categories such as credit score, consumer profile and security risk. Not all classification is colonialism; but every system in which people are defined independently of their own words, and their opportunities determined by those definitions, carries a similar problem of power.
The economy while the flag changes
Political independence does not automatically bring economic independence. Former colonies can inherit an order of production that exports raw materials and buys high-value products from the centre. While debts, trade agreements and multinational companies limit governments’ room for movement, there is no need for direct occupying rule.
This relation can also be built between a country’s centre and its periphery. A region’s minerals, water and labour are transferred to the centre; environmental pollution and poverty are left with the local population. The people who appear to own those resources have no say over their future.
Governing the mind from the centre
One of colonialism’s lasting effects is determining which knowledge and which life will count as developed. Speaking the centre’s language, passing through its education and resembling its culture become conditions of advancement. In time a person looks at themselves through the centre’s eyes; they may feel ashamed of their accent, their past and their local knowledge.
Opposing this is not romanticising the past. Local traditions can carry violence and hierarchy too. The point is to accept that the authority to criticise and to transform does not belong solely to an authority coming from outside. People can change on the basis of their own experience, in relations of equality with other societies.
Solidarity and saviourism
Leaving colonial logic behind does not mean communities breaking away from one another. Knowledge and resources can be shared. The question is how the relation is built. A saviour knows in advance what must be done and treats the people they help as objects of their project. Solidarity, by contrast, listens first, thinks together and recognises the decision rights of those affected.
Saviourism can measure its own success by how far the people it helps come to resemble it. Solidarity protects the right to remain different. A community accepting outside support should not mean giving up its own priorities and decision-making authority. If whoever provides the resource also sets the agenda, help can turn into an invisible contract of government.
Goodwill does not by itself make an unequal relation equal. The moment we assume we know another’s needs better than they do, we can begin to speak in their name. Colonial logic lives exactly here, in the thought that some people are better suited to governing and others to being governed.
Leaving this logic behind is not completed by condemning the old empires. We must look at whether we reproduce the same relation in our own institutions, our knowledge and our ways of helping. The opposite of domination is not a rupture in which nobody touches anybody; it is a world in which different people can relate without governing one another.
Colonial logic first divides the world into centre and periphery. The centre is the owner of knowledge, order and progress; the periphery is seen as raw material, cheap labour and a population to be governed. This division can live on after military occupation ends, in trade agreements, debt relations, technology standards and the production of knowledge. While a country looks politically independent, the direction of its economy can be determined by companies, credit institutions and supply chains abroad.
In the data age the resource extracted is not only minerals and agricultural produce. People’s behaviour, languages and cultural production are turned into raw data for global platforms. Knowledge produced by local communities can be taken to develop systems that do not know them; the economic value accumulates in other centres. When technology is presented as universal and neutral, which languages, needs and worldviews are left out remains invisible. Digital colonialism can be built through dependence on infrastructure and the ownership of data.
Aid and development projects can also reproduce the same hierarchy with good intentions. If the institution providing the resource alone determines the problem, the solution, the measure of success and the timetable, local people turn into implementers of their own lives. Holding a participation meeting does not mean decision-making power has been shared. Real solidarity requires that the helper be able to withdraw and to change according to the priorities of those they support. Knowledge is not carried only from outside; local experience is an equal source of the decision.
Going beyond colonial logic is not limited to remembering the crimes of the past. We must ask on which cheap labour and ecological destruction our present consumption rests, whom the knowledge we use cites as its source, and how the role of saviour grants us superiority. The opposite of domination is not rupture but reciprocity. Unless relations are built in which different communities can choose their own paths and in which resources and decision-making power are shared fairly, the centre will go on governing the periphery even after the flags have changed.