top of page
Search

#IndigenousDay BLOG 🌿 "Decolonisation is not branding! The Institutional Cooptation of Decolonisation"

  • Writer: Manushya Foundation
    Manushya Foundation
  • 43 minutes ago
  • 8 min read
ree


Decolonisation is not branding!


The Institutional Cooptation of Decolonisation


by Dr Jean Linis-Dinco*


In the last five years, I have seen a surge in interest in the topic of decolonisation. It has become a recurring theme in many conferences, panels and webinars I have attended, so much that its presence can no longer be ignored. For decades, decolonisation has only been confined to radical movements, revolutionary texts and the margins of academic discourse in social science departments. Part of me is glad to see how the language of resistance has reached places that once ignored it. But that kind of visibility makes it the perfect candidate for performative politics, something that institutions can parade without having to change anything material. 


A deeper look at how decolonisation is talked about, debated and argued today reveals how deeply it has been absorbed into liberal frameworks, falling into the familiar cleavages of empty inclusion and diversity gestures that barely challenge the status quo. The contemporary usage of the word has become far too removed from its historical meaning. That is, the struggle by the colonised people to achieve national liberation through protest and revolution. The departure from that definition was marked by the withdrawal of colonist’s army and the rise of post-colonial states, reinforced by the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to colonial countries and peoples. These events, whilst significant, repackaged decolonisation purely within statist and diplomatic frameworks, reducing liberation to the establishment of new nation-states, often governed by narrow elites who inherited colonial institutions without dismantling their logic.


These postcolonial states rarely reflected the cultural, linguistic and class diversity of their populations. Instead, they reproduced the same centralising tendencies of colonial rule through the imposition of a singular identity whilst concentrating power in the hands of the local bourgeoisie. Take the Philippines as an example, a country handed from one coloniser to the next as if it was a ball of yarn for three cats to play, only to be dominated after independence by a single identity and ethno-linguistic group rooted in Imperial Manila. The rich diversity of the archipelago, home to hundreds of indigenous nations, Muslim communities and regional languages was flattened to give way for a centralised republic designed around the interests of landed elites and political dynasties. Backed and shaped by decades of Spanish and American occupation and influence, the postcolonial Philippine state reproduced the same extractive and repressive structures left behind by its colonisers. Even the much-celebrated events of February 1986 left the underlying political economy intact and preserved elite rule (Abinales, 2007). Over time, the very marginalisation that the state institutionalised became a fertile ground for reactionary forces like the Dutertes who have weaponised this resentment to forge a populist, fascistic identity rooted in anti-Tagalog sentiment. The failure of decolonisation in the Philippines created not only a centralised state but also the conditions for its manipulation from below, where anger at historical neglect is redirected away from elite class structures and instead into regional strongman politics. In this case, decolonisation did not only liberate the margins, it helped give domination a new face.


Decolonisation has become a rather politically flexible terminology, stretched between the revolutionary struggles that gave it life, the bureaucratic state-building projects that claimed to complete it and the opportunistic elites who now weaponise it to silence all forms of dissent, rooted in identitarian politics. The real danger is in treating liberation as a finished story, in what Angela Davis described in her 2013 speech at Birkbeck University as the tendency to ‘enact historical closures’ and present them as a ‘model for the world.’ And she was right to warn us about how labelling movements as complete creates a convenient fiction that lets reactionary forces diffuse radical demands.


All these circumstances are what paved the way for the further cooptation of the vocabularies of resistance in the service of capital accumulation. This is where we see how the phrase ‘decolonise XYZ’ turns into a slogan that carries no threat to private property, global value chains and imperial power. Just as how corporations such as Amazon gutted queer struggle by turning it into Glamazon aesthetics, or how police forces march in Pride whilst still brutalising queer and racialised communities, decolonisation has been pulled into the same cycle of performativity where it has become a placeholder adjective for institutions to sound more progressive.


NGO-isation of decolonisation

We see this cooptation most clearly within the NGO and aid sector, where terms such as ‘decolonisation’ and ‘postcoloniality’ have become staple words in their thesaurus yet rarely disrupt the underlying colonial architecture. Amidst the glamourised linguistic shifts, projects labeled as ‘decolonial’ retain the same vertical bureaucracy wherein power remains concentrated in headquarters located in Washington, Geneva, Brussels and London. Budgets remain in the hands of the expatriate living on the 20th floor of an exclusive gated condominium in Manila, Nairobi or Bangkok, insulated from the socio-political realities on the ground that they are supposed to engage with. 


The aid-industrial complex functions as the extension of the imperial capital. Simon Kapwepwe was right when he said that ‘if we don't handle our independence very well, the coloniser will come back in the form of investors.’ And return they did, but this time, they brought papers and contracts instead of guns and battalions of soldiers. Robbin (2023) contends how aid has been transformed into a money-making business for Western firms which operate as the functional arm of donor agencies. These firms arrive in Iraq, Cambodia and Bolivia with their pre-written methodologies that focus on SMART metrics that they can publish in colourful bar charts and line graphs. And occasionally, they will bring ‘local experts’ as subcontractors for white consultants (Kami, 2018) as a symbolic rubber stamp labeled as so-called participation. Further down the line, the ‘decolonisation’ aspect will now take the form of ten diversity workshops and four gender listening sessions that reduce local experience and political contexts to footnotes in their annual reports. These projects will claim success by what they count, not by what they have dismantled. The British empire called it ‘civilising mission’ (Pekanan, 2016) as they starved millions in India in man-made famine. The Belgians preferred ‘mise en valeur’ (Lyons, 1992) as they plundered and drained the Congo of rubber and blood. And now, they take the form of capacity building, localisation and decolonisation workshops that barely scratch the surface.


Local bourgeoisie

But the machinery of the empire would not work had it been working alone. It requires people, bearing the same face and heritage of the colonised, to translate the language of the colonists into palatable pieces of jargon. The local elites become the ‘intermediary’, as Franz Fanon (2004, p. 100) had described them, between the international and the local. These elites, whose positions exist because of the structural dependencies of postcolonial state, are not just passive recipients of imperial power as they often become conduits who manage labour and police dissent. They help translate foreign interventions as local empowerment, often distant from the actual needs of the community under the language of ‘reform’. We find these elites in higher positions in their organisations, occupying panels and roundtables where they preach virtues of diplomacy and reform, whilst replicating the language of the empire. They even go as far as to package the language of liberation for elite audiences, turning themselves into consultants that convert community struggles into personal capital delivered through Linkedin courses, TED talks or executive coaching sessions. Cultural sensitivity is not the same as decolonisation, particularly in boardrooms that profit from the suffering of the many.


These elites do not sit too far from their fellow compradors who weaponise decolonisation to silence dissent. The ambiguity of the modern usage of the term has become a shield for those in power in postcolonial states, where decolonisation is repurposed as a rhetorical device that frames all critiques of state violence, dispossession and inequality as foreign sabotage. It is within this context where we encounter decolonisation as bourgeois nationalism cloaked as liberation whilst deliberately loyal to the capital and hostile to the struggles of the working class.


Why we need to take it back

Sixty four years after his death, the words of Fanon (2004) remain more relevant today than ever. ‘Decolonisation never takes place unnoticed’ (p. 2), Fanon reminds us that decolonisation is not the same as diversity and inclusion projects that seek reform as if it were a performance devoid of politics. It is not a metaphor, as Tuck and Yang (2012) rightfully asserted. Neither is it asking for a chair at the table where the oppressors once sat. It was never meant to be polite. What started as a struggle against the colonial system that was built on exploitation, extraction, racist ideologies and capitalist accumulation has been infantilised and assimilated into empty reactionary gestures. And this will continue until we reclaim the language back from the hands of power and return to the struggles that gave it life. To decolonise, then, is not to long for a precapitalist past, but to dismantle the current system that continues to exploit, extract and dispossess.


Decolonisation demands to be felt and to be seen not as mere acknowledgement for centuries of oppression. So long as decolonisation is filtered through institutions that depend on inequality for their existence, it will remain a hollow echo of its former self. If decolonisation is to mean anything again, it must confront power head on. It must make donors nervous. It must break the funding cycles, disobey the grant conditions and refuse the metrics. It must return to the land occupations, the strikes and the protests on the streets. In its truest form, decolonisation is anti-capitalist. Anything less is betrayal.


*This Opinion Piece is written by Dr Jean Linis-Dinco,

Digital Rights Advisor, Manushya Foundation



References








 
 
 
bottom of page