The expansive view of colonizer relations

I'd like to look through the topic of liberation and decolonization across broad perspectives – of not just about state sovereignty and political independence but also about our minds and spirits, the ways that colonial relations warp the ways that we see ourselves and each other, and the ways that it prevents us from having true solidarity and building community. Here, I'm drawing inspiration from Frantz Fanon's writings in books like The Wretched of the Earth, where he has an expansive understanding of the idea of decolonization as something which also manifests in our psychologies and social relations while also shaping and warping the systems around us.

I think that the ways the word colonization is used in different systems, of biology and ecology, also works as a metaphor for the way that colonization works within us. In bodies, colonies of bacteria can set up ground, spread through our bodies and minds, drive our bodies to respond with biological reactions we have no control over, make our cells create a fever response, make us cough to spread, make us weak in our limbs, fog our minds so even our thoughts are different. In ecology, colonies of invasive species disrupt ecosystems, alter natural balances, displace webs of relations between the beings in that system, ultimately change the entire environment to divert the flow of rivers or prevent the regeneration of grazing grassland or the natural clearings of forests. Ultimately, colonization affects even the ways that those affected by it think, the ways they can act, the relations they have with others, the environment whether physical or social in which they exist, even sets the limits of our imaginations and the frames for our understanding of the future.

In both senses, colonization is not just restrictive or limiting, it is warping. Excising the colony isn't enough, because what's left behind isn't what was there originally, or the way it would have kept growing without the colony's presence. So decolonization ends up having to also be a process of reinvention, rebuilding, reimagining our own imaginations, our models of thinking, the language of our arguments, the assumptions in our conversations and beliefs, the framing of our visions and dreams, and the nature of our social relations. Colonization often placated us by making each other the sites of alternative loci of control, to accept the inferiority that it also drilled us to internalize and the lack of power to shape our own circumstances. And decolonization includes understanding that the effects of the colonizer relations have also warped us in some ways that we can change back, but that we can't do so by ourselves alone, because the ways we were warped has given us blind spots we may not even notice about ourselves. What was warped has to be reshaped with each other, covering for each other, reconstructing new relations, as a process of solidarity.

So in this view, there is an expansive understanding beyond just the traditional imperialist relations of occupation and subjugation and extraction. Here we talk about the ways in which existing power relations keep people in colonized states of beings and leaves our psychologies and minds in the same twisted shapes, that poisons the well of our pure human relations and solidarity in the same ways. It also stretches Marxism, where these are all different forms of the same phenomenon. Colonizer relations and capitalist relations, both requiring a formation of either political consciousness or class consciousness between the colonized and working class respectively, with these groups often heavily overlapping or entwined. Often, the wealthy classes of countries even once formally independent and sovereign, still perpetuate the dysfunctions created both within individuals and within a society due to colonial relations. Even a new ruling class made up of local elites who inherited the colonial apparatus still perpetuates inequality, still discourages solidarity and humanism to preserve a status quo, still generates internalized inferiority among those who aren't within the elites, still sets the tacit terms and premises for conversations about issues including about nationalism, and all those other dynamics which create the dysfunctions highlighted by Fanon and which we aim to both exorcise from ourselves and from the wider body politic through decolonization.

Internal replication of colonizer dynamics

So we can look at it in these more expansive terms, what colonial relations would we see in my country, the Maldives? What dynamics set the terms and premises of discussion, decide what's seen as normal vs not, create either internalized inferiority and psychological resentment or unearned superiority and carelessness, and generally aim to have an extractive relationship over the other component of society? I think there are four main things which have all of these elements, including the monopoly over discursive framings and systems, and the psychological dynamics. So these aren't just the same as Marxist class dynamics between the wealthy and the working class, even if there is often overlap.

First, the power of the urban capital region of Male', from the traditional era down to present power of Male' over the islands. Traditionally Male' inhabitants saw the rest of the Maldives as all but a different country with colloquial language putting the other islands closer to other countries as different from how Male' people saw themselves, up until early leadership in the newly formalized Republic in the earlier 20th century explicitly unified the two under a single name for our people as Dhivehin or "Maldivians". But even to this day, Male' sets the tone of everything, has around half the total population of which tens of thousands are migrants from other islands, dominates political power and state resources, has most economic opportunities and advanced healthcare and better-resourced education. Islanders staying in islands have limited resources, and those migrating to Male' face a lot of struggles with housing.

Under colonization, the colonized person internalizes the colonizer's worldview and comes to see themselves through the colonizer's eyes. The colonizer's assumptions and the context of their thinking becomes as invisible as grammar or punctuation, just things you practice as a given as if they are rules without even thinking consciously about it, the same way you don't think to put a full stop at the end of a sentence. Even for someone who might consciously be proud of their identity and might openly reject the colonizer, these framings can persist. The colonizer's culture becomes civilization, modernity, progress; the colonized person's own culture becomes tradition at best, backwardness or superstition at worst. This internalized inferiority persists even during resistance or independence because the colonized find themselves arguing on the colonizer's terms, accepting the colonizer's premises as the starting point for debate, measuring their own worth against the colonizer's standards even when rejecting the colonizer's authority. Nation-building happens by attempting to build a nationalized version of the colonizer state. Island development becomes about what policies can make islands more like Male'. There is an extraction of human capital from periphery to centre, terms are set and conversation framed by the centre, some internalized sense that Male' is where real life happens and the islands are lesser. Young people from islands who stay in islands often feel they are missing out, that they are being left behind, that real opportunity exists only in the capital. Given current resource distribution, this feeling is largely accurate, which makes it self-reinforcing.

Next is the resort ownership class versus the rest of the country. The resort ownership class being the massively powerful capitalist class that have an extractive relationship with natural resources with massive political influence, and so on. Resort wealth is framed as the lifeblood and liberation of the Maldives, something we should be grateful for as allowing us to rise up from mud huts through to an upper-middle-income state. Resorts themselves are enclaves where locals are largely not able to go, in islands completely separated from inhabited islands where locals live. Since the early 2010s, the Maldives has also rapidly grown a guesthouse and hotel tourism industry where smaller hotels in local islands have fuelled a massive growth in more budget tourism. Without Maldivian tourism only being for ultra-luxury and people able to still enjoy beaches and sun in local islands, even if it would be with less luxury, the direct economic and political imbalance has begun to shift. But this still remains as a dominant dynamic where the wealthy elites with resort wealth are often quite siloed away from the rest of the locals, with different lifestyles and massive influence.

Another is the relationship between men and women. The economic value of unpaid domestic and care labor is extracted without compensation or recognition, enabling the paid economy to function while remaining invisible. Women's workforce participation is high, but who reaches leadership shows the pattern: women perform the labor of institutions while men disproportionately direct them. What counts as "serious" politics – economic policy, foreign affairs, infrastructure – reflects male framings, while issues disproportionately affecting women are treated as niche concerns rather than central questions about social organization. Even when women's participation in public life is encouraged, the terms of participation are set: what dress is appropriate, what demeanor is acceptable, what topics women can speak on with authority. Women entering politics navigate expectations they did not set and are judged against standards designed around male default. The psychological internalization follows: the sense that women's ways of thinking, feeling, or approaching problems are somehow less rigorous, less serious, more emotional – and the way women themselves sometimes adopt this view, policing themselves and each other. The colonized learns to see herself through the colonizer's eyes, and this applies to gender as it does to the other dynamics.

Religious discourse is selectively deployed here. The gatekeepers of religious knowledge are predominantly male authorities, and religious discussion emphasizes that the opinions of knowledgeable authority should be unquestioningly followed. In the domestic sphere, the religious principles of wives' duty to obey husbands and fulfil their needs are emphasized while the duties of husbands toward their wives are not advocated for with the same vigor. When religious authority is framed as something where questioning is wrong, the dynamics of who receives authoritative religious education repeat themselves in private life: women in marriages are expected to defer to the religious framings of more religiously knowledgeable men, replicating the colonizer relation even within the home.

And one remaining, maybe the most classic recreation of colonialism, is the relation between locals and migrant workers, especially in the capital city. The elements of colonizer relations are still here: migrant workers perform essential labour; they face poor conditions and limited legal protections; they are politically scapegoated when convenient. This is a population that is needed but treated as disposable. Legal and social frameworks position them as a subordinate class; there is perceived superiority among locals regardless of actual economic position; there is extraction of labour without corresponding recognition or rights. This is very similar to more classic colonialism albeit very inverted, with the wealthy "colonial estates" from which governance and dominance were applied being owned by the locals instead of foreigners, and the more oppressed groups out in the periphery being a large population of migrant workers (who make up almost a third of the total population) rather than locals. This example really shows how the recreation of colonizer relations aren't only about sovereignty but also about what Fanon saw, as the mixture of extractive relations, dominance over setting the terms and premises of discourse and thinking, psychological dysfunction and the promotion of inferiority. These also all aren't exact examples and don't meet every condition, but I see this as a good broadened understanding of the warping nature of colonizer relations.

External colonizer dynamics

These dynamics operate internally. But Maldivians also exist within colonizer relations that operate from outside the country's borders.

One is the long but increasingly accelerated Arabization of the country. There is a common perception that the Arab way of doing things and living is a better practice of Islam, more devout, and that mimicking Arab culture is inherently more pious. In some cases, there is a perpetuation even of the idea that following the Sunnah means following Arab culture since it would have taken place in the Arab world; Arabic being the language of the Quran, the life of the Prophet having taken place on the Arab peninsula, and the presence of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia grant just the Arab world and especially Arab leadership a feeling of religious authority by association. Many feel that mimicking Arab culture and ways of living is bringing them closer to Islam. This feeling is one that has been actively pushed by forces within the Arab world that ultimately do see their goals as a form of cultural imperialism where they envision countries brought into the fold of an Arab-led global spiritual caliphate.

This accelerated after the 2004 tsunami in which the Maldives faced significant destruction. Much Saudi funding flowed into the Maldives with conditions attached: scholarships to particular religious schools, funding for mosques and religious education that followed specific traditions, a wave of religious instruction in styles trained by Saudi clerics. Local religious and cultural practices that had existed for centuries as syncretic, island-influenced, distinctively local ways of being Muslim – where Islam existed alongside local identity and folklore – were delegitimized. Authentic Islamic practice was increasingly defined as whatever was being imported from the Gulf. The psychological aspects of colonizer relations are seen here: widespread internalized inferiority about Maldivian religious practice relative to Arab practice, the sense that to be properly Muslim one must approximate Arab culture in dress, in language, in social organization, in religious observance. As if what Maldivians had been doing for centuries was insufficient, inauthentic, and requiring correction from outside.

And since being a Muslim country is such a massive part of the Maldivian identity, and this new movement wrote off a lot of the way Maldivians had been practicing Islam as being un-Islamic, reconciling that dissonance meant a complete gaslighting and erasure of the past. A foundational aspect of the Maldivian national identity is an unbroken tradition of centuries as a Muslim country – arguably the entire nation's founding myth is even about the conversion to Islam, where the history of the Maldives is often seen to begin at the moment where the traveller Abu Barakat al-Barbari liberated Male' from the grip of an ocean-demon by reciting the Quran, and the Maldivian population converted to Islam upon seeing this. So since then, there is a collective amnesia about the way religion used to be practiced, and everyone pretends that pre-2004 religious traditions never happened. These includes community-building traditions, including the hosting of elderly religious reciters during Eid and Mawlid, and traditions from other branches of Islam beside the now-standardized Saudi Sunnism, such as the recital of rosary prayers and talismans. Maintaining this foundational national myth required a collective gaslighting and the kind of subsequent psychological dysfunctions that Fanon often diagnosed in those he worked with.

There is now considerable popular rejection of Saudi influence and Arabization. This pushback has intensified considerably with the Israeli genocide of Palestine, which exposed the hollowness of Arab states' leadership in ways that could not be ignored. The inability or unwillingness of Arab states to take meaningful action when it mattered most, their ultimate subservience to Western interests despite all the rhetoric, the bombings of Lebanon and Qatar, and the handover of their own sovereignty – all of this stripped away whatever legitimacy remained for the claim that Arab states should lead the global Muslim community. With enormous wealth from oil, Arab states have not used it to support their actual Muslim peers in the ways that would matter most. They have not funded the rapid energy transitions that climate-vulnerable Muslim nations need to protect their populations. Beyond the influence across Asia and Africa, even cultures and identities within Arab states themselves have been erased or subordinated to construct a standardized "Arab" identity dominated by Saudi influence, that is itself largely a construct only created in the 20th century.

The broader dynamics of Global North over Global South also continue to operate with colonizer relations, especially in the dominance over framing and the psychological impacts. The prestige attached to speaking English fluently, without an accent, with the idioms and slang of native Westerners, functions as a marker of sophistication and education. The weight given to educational credentials from the US, UK, or Australia far exceeds what is given to credentials from institutions in the Global South, even when the actual quality of education may be comparable or superior. The assumption that international best practice means practice from wealthy Western countries goes largely unquestioned in policy circles, even when those practices developed in completely different contexts and may not transfer well. The perception that only research by Western institutions published in prominent Western journals count as legitimate research findings or academic referencing is ever-present. Even in a basic sense, whiteness still shapes what is seen as beautiful, sophisticated, or worldly.

Global North-South dynamics, including through the groups of international development organizations that were mostly formed as Western institutions, set the framings and discursive boundaries. The idea of local ways being provincial or insufficient until validated by external standards, the fact that a local policymaker who cites research from MIT carries more weight than one who cites research from a respected Asian university, regardless of the actual quality of the research or of whether white American college students are a less accurate sample than Asian islanders, the reality that a development program which follows World Bank templates is more fundable than one developed locally to address local conditions… These dynamics have been so thoroughly internalized that questioning them feels naive or impractical. To go back to an earlier metaphor, the conventions of working in policy entirely rely on the 'grammar' established by Western powerbrokers. Recent events in particular have highlighted how institutions and an international order established by Western powerbrokers can no longer even pretend to be collaboratively developed institutions.

Climate change as colonial violence

Climate change is typically discussed as an environmental issue, as a technical challenge of emissions reduction and adaptation. But there is a justice and colonial aspect to this, to the dynamic between developed and developing countries. The countries that industrialized first did so using cheap fossil fuels. Their wealth was built on a century of high emissions – emissions that were not accidental byproducts but essential inputs to the economic growth that made them wealthy. Those emissions are now causing destruction in countries that did not benefit from that development and often were actively prevented from developing through colonial extraction during the same period. The Maldives, for example, contributes approximately 0.006% of global CO2 emissions; if the entire country vanished tomorrow and stopped emitting anything, the effect on global temperature trajectories would be statistically unmeasurable.

But with all that, the framing of the conversation positions climate change as a shared global problem requiring shared sacrifice. Poor countries are expected to constrain their own development for the sake of climate stability. Every dollar a poor country puts toward emissions reduction or mitigation is a dollar not invested in schools, hospitals, infrastructure, or poverty reduction. The premise of international climate discourse is set by the major emitters: they define what counts as reasonable ambition, what counts as sufficient action, what timeline is acceptable. Vulnerable countries like the Maldives can do little beyond be a moral voice, giving moving speeches at international forums, appealing to conscience, being praised for leadership – while the countries that actually control the outcome continue pursuing their economic and political interests with minimal real constraint. Terms are set by the powerful: the entire structure of climate negotiation reflects the interests and timelines of major emitters. There is psychological pressure toward internalized acceptance: vulnerable countries are supposed to be grateful for whatever attention and assistance they receive, to perform their victimhood appealingly, to avoid being too demanding or confrontational.

And notably, the colonizer grants concessions only when continuing becomes more costly than changing – which raises the question of what would make continuing more costly than it currently is. There is violence in colonizer relations; the response in return is also a form of violence. Colonizer relations responds to consequences. Fanon wrote, that the native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing – whatever the native may gain through political or armed struggle is not the result of the kindness or goodwill of the settler; it simply shows that he cannot put off granting concessions any longer. The colonizer relation here itself is physically, economically, and psychologically violent. The status quo is violence. The question is whether to accept that violence passively or to create conditions where continuing it becomes more costly than ending it.

Sea level rise will displace millions of people from their homes and their countries. Heat waves with wet-bulb temperatures – where humidity prevents the body from cooling through sweat, making outdoor activity fatal regardless of hydration or shade – will kill hundreds of thousands of the poor who cannot afford air conditioning, who must work outdoors, who live in the regions most affected by these changes. Cities will be lost entirely. Mass displacement will create political instability, conflict, and suffering on scales that are difficult to comprehend when described in aggregate statistics but will be experienced individually by millions of people who did nothing to cause the conditions destroying their lives. This violence is the direct, causal result of emissions by wealthy nations over the past century and continuing into the present. And the international legal and diplomatic framework treats this violence as acceptable, as the starting point from which other options must be evaluated rather than itself being evaluated against alternatives.

Meanwhile, attempts by vulnerable nations to protect themselves are treated as dangerous, as too risky, as reckless experiments in planetary-scale meddling with the atmosphere. For example, geoengineering as a potential means of reducing global warming to buy time for climate emissions reductions or even eventual emissions reversals. There are real concerns, yes. Geoengineering might trigger cold snaps in the Global North, affect crop growth, or have long-term effects that are difficult to reverse. These are not trivial risks and they should not be dismissed. But even here, the Global North's definition of acceptable risk is taken as given. Their crops, their weather patterns, their stability – these are what must not be disrupted. The potential harms to them are what make geoengineering too dangerous to pursue. But the question is: are millions of dead and displaced in the Global South not an unacceptable risk? Are decades of pumping greenhouse gases unchecked and allowing the planet to warm not reckless experimental planetary-scale meddling with the atmosphere – simply because it was an industrial byproduct? The violence of the status quo is invisible. The potential violence of changing the status quo is what gets regulated, what gets prohibited, what gets described as too risky to attempt. Even the stigmatized word "geoengineering" – is 1.8 trillion tons of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere not geologically engineering a rapidly warming planet?

The colonizer grants concessions when the cost of continuing becomes greater than the cost of changing. Not before. Not out of goodwill or moral awakening. When they cannot put off granting concessions any longer because the alternative has become more costly to them than making the concession would be. A coalition of climate-vulnerable nations has an interest in making clear that unconventional options are on the table. This needs to be viewed as a serious possibility, not just a bluff. The stakes are high enough that desperate measures become rational. Communicating that credible commitment – through research, technical preparation, coalition building among countries with aligned interests – means making clear that preparation for break-glass-in-case-of-emergency options is underway if climate trajectories continue to worsen without adequate action from major emitters. The wealthy countries that grew rich off cheap fossil fuels have a direct obligation to fund the transition for everyone else, as the minimum acknowledgment of causal responsibility for the current crisis. Developing countries should get to continue to invest in schools, hospitals, and poverty reduction for their current populations while industrializing directly into renewable energy without passing through the fossil fuel stage that made wealthy countries wealthy.

Decolonization as solidarity and conviction

Decolonization will require brutal commitments. Examining our own societies honestly, identifying the hierarchies and framings that reproduce colonial patterns domestically, and taking responsibility for addressing them rather than focusing only on external imposers who are easier to name. It will require us to think through our own beliefs, realizing where we argue only within frames built to constrain us, and refusing to accept that the violence of the status quo is a default, recognizing when we are operating within premises that others have set, rejecting those premises rather than merely arguing more skilfully within them. It will require building solidarity across the divisions that colonial systems create, across borders, across the categories meant to keep the colonized separated from each other and competing rather than cooperating.

And scariest of all, which makes sense since this was also the argument by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth that most scared or bothered readers – it comes with aggressive willingness to create consequences, making clear that vulnerable nations are not asking for concessions out of the goodness of anyone's heart, that they are preparing options, building coalitions, developing the capacity to act in their own interests if those interests are not accommodated by existing arrangements. The colonizer only grants concessions when continuing becomes more costly than changing. Creating those costs, or credibly threatening to create them, is a scary process that will invite massive pushback and even danger.

Fanon said that decolonization is a violent process. Of excision, of reformation, of destruction and reconstruction, of threats and fear. Excising the colonized version of ourselves inhabiting our minds, reforming our social relations, destroying what is warped within our societies and reconstructing a shared humanity in solidarity, standing up to a world that assumes a meek response from us and being willing to commit to being a threat that demands concession.

Fanon also wrote about how the colonized learn to stay in their place and not to go beyond certain limits, and how this produces what he called a particular kind of dreaming among the colonized: "dreams of prowess, dreams of action and aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing." Liberation is messy. Liberating the body politic through this decolonial process will be challenging and scary. But for the rebirth brought about by this liberation, the new world we can create through solidarity, the shared humanity we can build – I feel these same dreams of prowess, action, aggression. I feel as strong as ever.