alt Hacker NewsI worry Colonialism will come back again. Or at least in a different form.
Most International Relations practitioners are followers of (Systems) Realism. You might find some minor power with Idealists/Instituitonalists, but they only get that privilege by being under the umbrella of a great power.
Colonialism was not some greedy merchant/state thing, it was an Arms Race. It follows the inevitable forces produced by anarchy, there are no police to call so power is the greatest form of security. It causes a Tragedy of the Commons situation in the form of an Arms Race.
After Colonialism, we had essentially client states, which seems similarly brutal.
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Um, colonialism never left. It just morphed. The most common form is the economic colonialism/imperialism by the United States.
The World Bank and IMF are tools of colonialism. We extract resources and exploit cheap labor from the Global South. We kidnap heads of state and seize that country’s oil.
We may not send settlers like we did in the colonial era. We’ve just found a more efficient method.
You may be right - Russian invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza (most westerners don't even know that Israel is a settler-colony - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 that has been deliberately oppressing, chasing and killing Palestinians for a long time) and Trump demanding Greenland - all indicate that certain oligarchs are working to bring back imperialism.