The fight against colonialism is happening every day - look around! World Reframed 15

Across the world, from Morocco to Madagascar, Nepal to Indonesia, young people are rising. They are marching against corruption, inequality, and the hollow promises of democracy that never seem to reach them. These movements are often dismissed as reactions to local scandals or youthful unrest. But in fact they represent something far more profound: the continuation of the global struggle for decolonization.

The colonial era may have formally ended in the mid-twentieth century, but the structures it created remain firmly in place. The protests we are witnessing today are the awakening of a generation confronting a system that has failed to deliver the opportunity their parents were promised.

Colonialism without colonisers

When people think of colonialism, they imagine European powers governing distant lands. But colonialism was never only about territorial control, it was driven by extraction - of minerals, humans, animals, heritage. It was a system that organised the world so that wealth flowed in one direction - south to north. Although many of the outward structures which symbolised that system were dismantled almost a century ago, the motors remain.

Today, the Global South continues to serve as a source supplying raw materials, cheap labor, and data to feed the consumption and profits of the North. The ruling classes of many postcolonial countries have not dismantled this system but they have learned to profit from it. Our elites, once charged with creating a fairer world, now send their children to the same private schools as their former colonisers and lock up their fortunes in the same tax havens. They no longer govern on behalf of their people but as junior partners in a global order of inequality.

Throughout the history of colonialism, occupying powers used local elites to execute their projects. This proved so much to the benefits of those elites that many have accepted their role and others still seek to adopt it.

Shrinking horizons

For the young people of the Global South, this reality has created a profound crisis of faith. Many of them are educated, connected, and ambitious, but their societies offer no place for them. They see politicians doubling their salaries while youth unemployment remains sky-high. They scroll through social media and find the children of ministers and party officials parading in designer clothes, boasting of opportunities they could never dream of.

It is easy to dismiss these reactions as envy, but they stem from something deeper: the realisation that merit and effort have been decoupled from reward. Like the educated middle classes who led anti-colonial movements a century ago, this generation is turning its disillusionment into defiance. They may not frame their struggle in the language of empire and liberation, but the substance is the same, a demand for dignity and freedom.

Controlling access

A key feature of the colonial economy was dependency: colonies exported raw materials and imported finished goods. That pattern still defines much of the developing world. Commodity dependence locks countries into cycles of boom and bust, enriching a small rentier elite while depriving the majority of stability or liberty. These elites make their fortunes not by producing value but by controlling access to oil, to land, to contracts or even to the state itself.

This structure breeds corruption, weak institutions, and hopelessness. It also deprives societies of the fiscal relationship that sustains democracy. When governments rely on resource rents or foreign aid rather than taxes, they have no incentive to be accountable to their citizens. They don't develop and their people remain poor as a result.

Breaking the chains

Escaping this trap requires more than political reform; it demands a reimagining of the global economic order. In the 1970s, leaders of the global South proposed a New International Economic Order to deliver a fairer distribution of trade, technology, and investment. But without international cooperation to end resource dependency, poverty and instability will persist no matter who holds office.

Domestically, postcolonial states must rediscover the activist role once played by the developmental states of East Asia. In the 1950s, China’s economy was comparable to Haiti’s; South Korea was poorer than parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Both transformed themselves by rejecting the laissez-faire orthodoxy still promoted by international lenders. They built strong, strategic states that used carrots and sticks and rewarding investment in productive industry. That industrial policy, with strict safeguards, lifted millions out of poverty.

Dividing the world

Every year, thousands of young people risk their lives crossing deserts and seas. The debate about whether they are economic migrants or victims of war and persecution misses the point. They are not fleeing their homelands out of greed or laziness but they are seeking a life.

The response of wealth countries in attempting to build fortresses is a wilful misinterpretation of the nature of the problem. Unless underlying issues are addressed, the world we all share will break irreparably.

Technology: Liberation or Control?

Fortunately, faster than walls can be built in any domain, technology is providing the ladders to scale them. The catalyst for the uprisings in Nepal, social media gives access to ideas and the power of coordination. It is in this power that the hope of a better future lies. Yes, these tools of technology can be used by the elites to lead, to restrict, to surveil. But ultimately they are too powerful to be confined in one direction. The disruption they bring, and the opportunity, provides the best hope that people in the Global South can connect behind a common purpose and overcome the hidden structures that still maintain colonialism's grip.

This article is based on Duncan Hooper's discussion with Mohammed Elnaiem, director of the Decolonial Centre.

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World Reframed is produced in London by Global South World, part of the Impactum Group. Its editors are Duncan Hooper and Ismail Akwei.

ISSN 2978-4891