The Colonial Frontier: Settler Violence, Energy Imperialism, and the Crisis of the Global South
How Israeli–U.S. Aggression Reveals the
Terminal Logic of Northern Capital and Why the Global South Must Respond
Mohan Jyoti Dutta
Professor and Dean’s Chair in Communication, Massey University;
Founding Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and
Evaluation (CARE)
The escalating Israeli–U.S. military
aggression across the Middle East and beyond is not an aberration of the
liberal international order. It is, rather, the order’s logical terminus. What
the world is witnessing—from the ruins of Gaza to the threats levelled against
Iran and the destabilization of Venezuela—is the violent convergence of settler
colonialism and imperialism, now operating in their most undisguised form. This
convergence is not incidental. It is structurally determined by the crisis of
neoliberal capitalism, which, having exhausted the possibilities for
accumulation through market mechanisms, must now resort to brute
colonial-imperial seizure of land, energy, and raw materials across the Global
South. The implications of this moment are civilizational. If the Global South
does not recognize and resist this convergence, the architecture of Northern
domination will deepen irreversibly.
THE DIALECTIC OF SETTLER COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM
To understand the current conjuncture,
one must first apprehend the structural relationship between settler
colonialism and imperialism as co-constitutive logics. Israel, as a
settler-colonial state, operates through the eliminatory imperative: the systematic
displacement, dispossession, and destruction of the indigenous Palestinian
population to consolidate territorial sovereignty. The United States, as the
preeminent imperial power, provides the material, diplomatic, and ideological
infrastructure that sustains and expands this project. Together, they form what
can be described as a colonial-imperial assemblage—a mutually reinforcing
architecture in which settler-colonial violence on the ground is enabled by,
and in turn serves, imperial geopolitical interests.
Gaza is the paradigmatic site of this
assemblage. The genocidal assault on Gaza’s civilian population—its hospitals,
schools, mosques, and infrastructure of daily life—has functioned not merely as
a punitive operation but as a laboratory. What has been tested in Gaza is a
model of total war against a colonized population: the weaponization of
starvation, the targeting of journalists and medical workers, the obliteration
of cultural and educational institutions, and the systematic rendering of a
territory uninhabitable. This model is now being exported. The rhetoric and
material practices of elimination rehearsed in Gaza are being extended
outward—toward Iran, toward Venezuela, and toward any site in the Global South
that resists incorporation into the Northern imperial framework.
THE END OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM AND THE TURN TO COLONIAL SEIZURE
The violence we are witnessing cannot be
understood in isolation from the structural crisis of global capitalism.
Neoliberal capitalism, the dominant accumulation regime since the late
twentieth century, premised itself on the fiction of infinite growth through
market liberalization, privatization, and the financialization of all
dimensions of social life. That fiction has reached its material limits.
Capital has progressively exhausted the reservoirs of cheap labor, raw
materials, and exploitable land upon which its expansion depended. The
ecological crisis—itself a product of extractive capitalism—has further
contracted the horizons of accumulation. Climate breakdown, resource depletion,
and the saturation of consumer markets in the North have created a structural
impasse from which capital cannot escape through its own internal mechanisms.
In this terminal phase, capital turns
outward with renewed ferocity. When the mechanisms of neoliberal
extraction—structural adjustment, trade liberalization, debt dependency—prove
insufficient, the colonial option reasserts itself. The seizure of land, the
violent expropriation of resources, and the physical elimination of populations
that stand in the way of accumulation become not aberrations but structural
necessities. What we witness today in the U.S.–Israeli axis is precisely this
reversion: the reassertion of direct colonial-imperial control over territories
and populations whose resources are deemed essential to the reproduction of
Northern capital.
ENERGY COLONIALISM AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF EXTRACTION
At the core of this colonial-imperial
resurgence is energy. The concept of energy colonialism captures the systematic
processes through which the Global North secures access to the energy resources
of the Global South through mechanisms of domination, dispossession, and, when
necessary, direct military occupation. The Middle East has long been the
primary theater of energy colonialism, and the current aggression must be
situated within this longer history. The destruction of Iraq, the
destabilization of Libya, the sanctions regime against Iran, and the ongoing
siege of Gaza are all, at their material base, operations designed to secure
Northern control over the region’s hydrocarbon wealth and its strategic energy
corridors.
Iran represents the current frontier of
this energy-colonial project. Iran’s vast petroleum and natural gas reserves,
its geostrategic position at the nexus of Central Asia, South Asia, and the
Middle East, and its refusal to subordinate its energy sovereignty to Northern
interests make it the primary target of the colonial-imperial assemblage. The
rhetoric emanating from the Trump administration—including statements that can
only be characterized as genocidal in their invocation of civilizational annihilation—reveals
the eliminatory logic that underpins this project. When a head of state
threatens to “wipe out” a civilization, this is not hyperbole. It is the
articulation of a colonial-imperial intention that meets the threshold of
incitement to genocide under international law. It is a war crime uttered in
plain language.
Venezuela provides another instructive
case. The Bolivarian Republic’s nationalization of its petroleum industry, its
redistributive social policies, and its alignment with multipolar frameworks
have made it a persistent target of Northern aggression. The attempted coups,
the crippling sanctions regime, and the repeated threats of military
intervention are all expressions of the same logic: the refusal of the imperial
center to tolerate sovereign control over energy resources in the periphery.
THE FAILURE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ITS WHITE SUPREMACIST
ARCHITECTURE
The current conjuncture has laid bare the
catastrophic failure of international law to restrain colonial-imperial
violence. This failure, however, is not a malfunction. It is a feature.
International law, as it has been historically constituted, is an edifice built
within and by the structures of white supremacy and Northern imperial power.
From the Westphalian order to the United Nations Charter, the architectures of
international legality have been designed to codify, legitimize, and reproduce
the sovereign prerogatives of European and Euro-descended states while
constraining, disciplining, and subordinating the sovereignty of the colonized
world.
The International Court of Justice and
the International Criminal Court have issued rulings and warrants that Israel
and the United States simply ignore with impunity. The UN Security Council’s
veto mechanism ensures that no substantive action against the permanent members
or their client states can ever be taken. The United States exercised three
vetoes in 2024 alone on resolutions regarding the situation in the Middle East
and the admission of Palestine to the United Nations, shielding Israel from even
the most minimal legal accountability. International humanitarian law’s
prohibitions on collective punishment, the targeting of civilians, and the use
of starvation as a weapon of war have been rendered entirely meaningless in
Gaza. The Genocide Convention, drafted in the aftermath of the Holocaust with
the solemn pledge of “never again,” has been exposed as applying only
selectively—operative when invoked against enemies of the North, null when the
North itself is the perpetrator.
This is not a crisis of enforcement
alone. It is a crisis of the epistemological and ontological foundations upon
which international law rests. A legal order that was constructed to serve the
interests of colonial powers cannot, without fundamental reconstitution, serve
the interests of the colonized. The ruins of international law are not a site
for repair within the existing framework. They are a site from which an
entirely new architecture must be built—one grounded in the epistemologies,
values, and lived experiences of the Global South.
IF IRAN FALLS, THE GLOBAL SOUTH FALLS
Iran today occupies the position of the
frontier. It is the line at which Northern colonial-imperial expansion either
advances or is checked. If Iran is subjected to the same treatment as
Iraq—invaded, dismembered, its state institutions destroyed, its people
subjected to occupation and sectarian fragmentation—the consequences for the
entire Global South will be devastating. An Iran brought to its knees would
remove the single most significant state-level obstacle to unimpeded Northern
hegemony over the Middle East’s energy resources. It would embolden the
colonial-imperial assemblage to extend its reach further—into Central Asia,
into Africa, into any territory where resources remain to be seized. It would
demonstrate, definitively, that no degree of sovereignty, no civilizational
depth, no population size can protect a Global South nation from elimination
when it stands in the way of Northern accumulation.
This is why the defense of Iran’s
sovereignty is not merely an Iranian concern. It is a concern of the entire
Global South. The dialectic of colonial-imperial power and anticolonial
resistance dictates that the fate of one site of resistance is structurally
linked to the fate of all others. When one front collapses, the pressure on
every other front intensifies. Conversely, when one front holds, the
possibilities for resistance everywhere are expanded.
ANTICOLONIAL RESISTANCE AND THE GRAMMAR OF REFUSAL
Colonial and imperial power is
dialectically intertwined with anticolonial, anti-imperial resistance. This is
a foundational insight of decolonial theory, and it has never been more urgent.
The current moment demands not only critique but praxis—organized, sustained,
and solidaristic resistance across the Global South.
Iran’s own resistance offers instructive
lessons. Its articulation of sovereignty in the face of overwhelming military
threat, its development of indigenous defense capabilities, and its strategies
of economic refusal—including the cultivation of trade networks outside the
dollar-denominated financial system—recall some of the most powerful tactics in
the anticolonial repertoire. The resonance with Gandhi’s formulation of Hind
Swaraj—self-rule as both political independence and civilizational self-sufficiency—is
striking. The Swadeshi movement’s insistence on economic self-reliance, the
strategy of boycott as a refusal of the colonizer’s economic infrastructure,
and the principle of non-cooperation as a withdrawal of consent from
illegitimate authority all find contemporary expression in Iran’s posture of
strategic defiance.
These are not mere historical analogies.
They are living strategies that demonstrate the enduring vitality of
anticolonial praxis. The refusal to be integrated into the imperial economy on
the colonizer’s terms, the insistence on sovereign control over national
resources, and the cultivation of South–South solidarities as alternatives to
Northern dependency are all expressions of a political grammar that the Global
South must now articulate with renewed clarity and collective force.
GLOBAL SOUTH LEADERSHIP: THE EVIDENCE OF A TURNING TIDE
The current crisis has not only revealed
the bankruptcy of the Northern-dominated order; it has catalyzed an
unprecedented assertion of Global South leadership across juridical,
diplomatic, economic, and institutional domains. What is emerging is not a scattered
set of reactive protests but a coordinated, multi-front challenge to the
architecture of impunity, one that draws its force from a shared analysis of
colonial-imperial violence and a shared commitment to an alternative global
order.
South Africa: The
Juridical Vanguard
South Africa’s decision to bring a case
against Israel at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide
Convention in December 2023 stands as perhaps the single most consequential act
of Global South leadership in the contemporary period. The case, formally
titled Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), directly invoked
the juridical instruments of the existing international order against its most
powerful beneficiaries. In January 2024, the ICJ issued provisional measures
directing Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of
genocide, to ensure humanitarian access, and to preserve evidence—a ruling
adopted by a vote of fifteen to two. In March 2024, the Court issued further
emergency measures ordering Israel to ensure basic food supplies as famine
conditions intensified. In May 2024, the ICJ ordered Israel to immediately halt
its military offensive in Rafah—an order Israel rejected and defied, continuing
its operations with impunity.
South Africa filed its memorial in
October 2024, comprising over 750 pages of text and more than 4,000 pages of
exhibits and annexes documenting the systematic character of the violence. In
its official statement accompanying the filing, South Africa’s Department of
International Relations and Cooperation named the violence for what it is: “The
Palestinian struggle against imperialism, Israeli Apartheid and settler
colonialism is the daily reality of the Palestinian people.” This language is
significant. It marks the explicit deployment of anticolonial and
anti-apartheid frameworks by a state that itself emerged from the struggle
against racialized domination—a genealogy of solidarity that connects the South
African liberation movement to the Palestinian cause across decades.
Crucially, South Africa’s action has not
remained solitary. A growing constellation of states has formally joined the
proceedings. Colombia filed a declaration of intervention in April 2024,
followed by Nicaragua, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Türkiye, Chile, the
Maldives, Bolivia, Cuba, Belize, Ireland, Brazil, and Belgium. By mid-2025,
more than a dozen countries from across the Global South—and several from the
Global North—had joined the case, transforming it from a bilateral dispute into
a collective juridical indictment of settler-colonial genocide. Several of
these same states—South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, Djibouti, Chile,
and Mexico—also referred the situation in Palestine to the International
Criminal Court, bolstering the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants against
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav
Gallant in November 2024.
Latin America:
The Anti-Imperial Front
Latin America has emerged as the most
assertive regional bloc in the Global South’s challenge to Israeli-U.S.
aggression, with actions ranging from the severance of diplomatic ties to the
cancellation of trade agreements and the creation of new multilateral
accountability mechanisms. Bolivia severed diplomatic relations with Israel in
October 2023, citing the “disproportionate military offensive” in Gaza.
Colombia, under President Gustavo Petro, followed in May 2024, with Petro
declaring before a mass rally that Israel’s government was “genocidal” and
asserting that “if Palestine dies, humanity dies.” Nicaragua formally broke
ties in October 2024, condemning what it called “the brutal genocide that the
fascist and war criminal government of Israel continues to wage against the
Palestinian people.” Belize had already suspended relations in November 2023.
These diplomatic ruptures were
accompanied by material actions of economic refusal. Colombia suspended arms
purchases from Israel in February 2024, cancelled its free trade agreement with
Israel in late 2025, banned coal exports to Israel, and expelled all remaining
Israeli diplomats following Israel’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla
in October 2025. President Petro’s government subsequently issued a sweeping
presidential directive institutionalizing pro-Palestinian policies across all
branches of government, including instructions to diplomatic missions to
actively promote UN resolutions on Palestinian rights and to review all
existing contracts with Israeli companies. Chile withdrew its military attachés
and recalled its ambassador, excluded Israeli companies from its international
defense exhibitions, and initiated legislative efforts to ban the import of
products from illegally occupied territories. Cuba, which severed relations
with Israel in 1975, led a public demonstration in Havana in March 2024 at the
José Martà Anti-Imperialist Platform. Venezuela and Cuba, having long
maintained no diplomatic relations with Israel, continued to anchor the
anti-imperialist flank.
The most structurally significant
development was the formation of the Hague Group in January 2025, co-chaired by
Colombia and South Africa, with founding members including Bolivia, Cuba,
Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, and Senegal. This coalition of states committed
itself to operationalizing international legal obligations by implementing the
ICJ provisional measures, complying with ICC arrest warrants, and preventing
the transfer of arms and military materiel to Israel. At the group’s emergency
summit in Bogotá in July 2025—attended by more than thirty states including
Algeria, Brazil, Chile, China, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Pakistan, Qatar,
Türkiye, and Venezuela—twelve states announced immediate implementation of six
concrete measures: arms embargo enforcement, port access denial for vessels
carrying weapons or fuel to Israel, trade and economic sanctions, and the
activation of domestic legal mechanisms to hold Israel accountable. Francesca
Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the
occupied Palestinian territories, described the summit’s outcomes as “lifelines
for a people who are under relentless assault and a world that has been
paralysed for too long.”
The United
Nations General Assembly: The Voice of the Majority
While the UN Security Council has been
rendered impotent by the veto mechanism—a structural embodiment of the white
supremacist architecture of the postwar order—the General Assembly has served
as the principal site where Global South numerical majority translates into
normative force. In September 2024, the General Assembly passed a landmark
resolution demanding an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory
within twelve months, with 124 votes in favour. In December 2024, the Assembly
adopted a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional, and permanent
ceasefire in Gaza with 158 votes in favour, with only nine states voting
against—including the United States, Israel, and a handful of Pacific
micro-states. A companion resolution affirming full support for UNRWA’s mandate
received 159 votes in favour. These margins left the United States as the only
G7 member still opposed to a ceasefire, a fact of considerable symbolic and
political significance.
Earlier in May 2024, the Assembly voted
143 to 9 to upgrade Palestine’s rights as an observer state and to urge the
Security Council to favourably consider its full membership—an application the
United States had vetoed. In September 2024, the Assembly adopted a resolution
co-drafted by France and Saudi Arabia endorsing a comprehensive roadmap for a
two-state solution, with 142 votes in favour. The ICJ’s own advisory opinion in
July 2024, requested by the General Assembly, declared Israel’s occupation of
Palestinian territory to be illegal and called upon all states to take
effective action—a finding subsequently operationalized by the Hague Group’s
six-point implementation framework. Taken together, these General Assembly
actions represent the clearest articulation of a global consensus from which
only a small core of Northern and aligned states dissent—a consensus built and
sustained by the diplomatic labor of Global South delegations, from Algeria’s
Security Council resolution proposals to Malaysia’s consistent advocacy, to the
sustained diplomatic campaigns of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
Pakistan: The
Peacemaker on the Frontier
Pakistan’s role in brokering peace amid
the escalating aggression against Iran represents a particularly significant
assertion of Global South diplomatic agency. That a South Asian Muslim-majority
state has positioned itself as a mediator and peacemaker in the face of
Northern belligerence is itself an act of epistemic disruption—a refusal of the
Northern narrative that casts the Global South as the object rather than the
subject of international diplomacy. Pakistan’s engagement draws on its deep
strategic relationships with both Iran and the broader Islamic world, its
experience navigating the complexities of great-power competition, and its own
history of resisting colonial incorporation. The leadership demonstrated by
Pakistan in this context is not merely tactical; it is an assertion of the
principle that Global South states possess the institutional capacity, the
diplomatic sophistication, and the moral authority to manage crises that
Northern powers have created and exacerbated.
China: The
Structural Counterweight
China’s role in the current conjuncture
is critical not merely because of its geopolitical weight but because of the
structural alternatives it provides to the architecture of Northern dependency.
China’s brokering of the Saudi–Iran rapprochement in March 2023 was a
diplomatic watershed—the first time a non-Western power had mediated a major
Middle Eastern diplomatic breakthrough, thereby disrupting the monopoly that
Washington had long claimed over regional diplomacy. China’s advocacy for
multipolarity in international institutions, its co-sponsorship with Brazil of
the “Friends for Peace” initiative, and its provision of economic alternatives
to the Washington Consensus model have created material possibilities for
Global South autonomy that did not exist a decade ago. The Belt and Road
Initiative, whatever its contradictions, represents an infrastructure of
South–South and East–South connectivity that partially loosens the stranglehold
of Northern financial and logistical control. At the 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio
de Janeiro, the bloc unanimously condemned Israeli and U.S. military strikes on
Iran and Israel’s continued war against Palestinians in Gaza—a collective
statement of considerable geopolitical significance.
BRICS and the
Infrastructure of a Multipolar Order
The expansion of BRICS represents perhaps
the most structurally consequential development in the reconfiguration of the
global order. With the admission of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab
Emirates in 2024, followed by Indonesia in 2025, and the designation of nine
additional partner countries including Algeria, Nigeria, Bolivia, Malaysia, and
Türkiye, BRICS now encompasses approximately forty-five percent of the world’s
population and thirty-five percent of global GDP. The inclusion of major energy
producers—Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—gives the bloc a decisive presence in
global energy markets, directly challenging the Northern monopoly on the
geopolitics of extraction.
The BRICS New Development Bank has
expanded its lending operations as an alternative to the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank, offering infrastructure financing without the
structural adjustment conditionalities that have historically functioned as
instruments of neoliberal disciplining. The bloc’s de-dollarization
initiatives—including the expansion of trade in national currencies and the
development of alternative payment systems such as China’s Cross-Border
Interbank Payment System—represent a direct challenge to the dollar’s hegemony,
which has long served as the financial infrastructure of imperial power. Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei articulated this logic plainly in January
2025: “One of our problems today is being dependent on the dollar. Those
countries have also understood this… we must strive to eliminate the dollar in
trade as much as possible.” The very fact that Trump has threatened BRICS
members with one hundred and fifty percent tariffs for pursuing de-dollarization
reveals the degree to which the imperial center recognizes these efforts as a
material threat to its structural power.
BUILDING FROM THE RUINS: TOWARD A GLOBAL SOUTH JURISPRUDENCE
The task before the Global South is not
to salvage the existing international order. It is to build anew. The ruins of
international law—exposed as such by the genocidal impunity enjoyed by Israel
and the United States—must become the foundation for an alternative
jurisprudence rooted in Global South theory, epistemology, and ethical
commitments. This means drawing on the rich traditions of Third World
Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), on Indigenous legal traditions, on
Islamic jurisprudence, on African communitarian ethics, and on the diverse
philosophical resources of the South to construct legal frameworks that
genuinely protect sovereignty, prohibit colonial aggression, and hold imperial
powers accountable.
Such a jurisprudence would begin from
fundamentally different premises than those of the existing order. It would
recognize that sovereignty is not a privilege granted by the international
community but an inherent right of all peoples. It would define aggression not
merely as the violation of territorial borders but as the structural violence
of economic domination, resource extraction, and cultural erasure. It would
establish mechanisms of accountability that cannot be vetoed by the very powers
they are meant to constrain.
This is the work of a generation, and it
will not be accomplished without struggle. But the conditions for its
possibility have never been more favorable. The moral bankruptcy of the
Northern-dominated order is now visible to the world. The material capacities
of the Global South have never been greater. And the solidarities forged in
resistance—from the streets of Tehran to the refugee camps of Gaza, from the
Bolivarian communes of Venezuela to the diplomatic corridors of Islamabad,
Beijing, Bogotá, and Pretoria—constitute the social infrastructure upon which a
new order can be built.
CONCLUSION: THE MOMENT OF RESISTANCE
The colonial-imperial assemblage of the
United States and Israel has reached a point of maximal aggression precisely
because the system it serves—global neoliberal capitalism—has reached a point
of terminal crisis. This is the dialectic: the more the system falters, the
more violent its custodians become. But this is also the moment of greatest
possibility for resistance. The very extremity of Northern aggression has
created the conditions for a counter-hegemonic response of unprecedented scale
and coherence.
The evidence is before us. South Africa
has mobilized the juridical instruments of the international order against the
genocide in Gaza, backed by a growing coalition of states from across the
Global South and beyond. Latin American states have severed diplomatic ties,
cancelled trade agreements, banned arms transfers, and created new multilateral
accountability mechanisms through the Hague Group. The UN General Assembly has
voted by overwhelming margins to demand a ceasefire, end the occupation, and protect
UNRWA. Pakistan has asserted diplomatic leadership in brokering peace on the
Iranian frontier. China has disrupted the Northern monopoly on Middle Eastern
diplomacy and provided structural alternatives through the Belt and Road
Initiative and the BRICS framework. BRICS itself has expanded into an
eleven-member bloc with partner states spanning four continents, pursuing
de-dollarization, alternative development financing, and a collective voice
against Northern aggression.
The Global South must seize this moment.
It must stand in solidarity with Iran, with Palestine, with Venezuela, and with
every people targeted by the colonial-imperial machine. It must refuse the
legal, economic, and epistemic frameworks imposed by the North. It must
build—patiently, collectively, and with the urgency that the moment demands—the
institutions, alliances, and intellectual foundations of a different world. The
anticolonial movements of the twentieth century demonstrated that empires can
be defeated. The task of the twenty-first century is to ensure that they are
not merely defeated but replaced—by an order that is genuinely plural,
genuinely sovereign, and genuinely committed to the dignity of all peoples.
History does not wait. The frontier is
now.