Attending to the many faces of coloniality: Setting the stakes on when ‘the digital’ matters for theories of empire

In search of a colonial canon

If colonialism and coloniality exist in myriad geographical and temporal manifestations where epistemic and material violences are embedded at multiple scales, then the search for a singular digital colonial canon is a Sisyphean task. Nevertheless, in Uneven Datafication Akbari (2026) systematically wades through the dense literature to surface the most prominent debates in our current academic landscape, extricating the productivity and limitations of various analytical frames. In particular, the article sifts through some of the most enduring dimensions of colonialism. One of which is colonialism's epistemic projects, of eradicating alternative ways of knowing and unifying the conceptual basis on which much of contemporary society is based on. This includes our current knowledge production systems. As such, this warrants reflection on how ‘colonial algorithms’, as Akbari calls it, remain imbued in academic processes and how this shapes our collective work.

A great deal of the world's communities is omitted from theory-building practices within the walled gardens of academia. However, as Akbari (2026) crucially notes: ‘theories and empirics in/from the Majority World are vital to informing our grounded understandings of coloniality’. How should we, as scholars attending to coloniality, enact this in meaningful ways?

At the very least, it is important to assess who is left out of the room. Current debates on data/digital colonialism are often focused on the biggest unifying theories and the subsequent debates of their merits and limitations set by the terms of theoretical giants. The limited pages of traditional academic outputs typically require, by convention, debating the most prevalent (and often Western) canonical literature first, leaving little room for other discourse, perspectives and starting points – and especially ones not packaged in theoretical vehicles that are ready to be debated, off-the-shelf, in this way. Consequently, many bodies of work that offer crucial lessons are often sidelined as we struggle to fit everything within practical word counts and conventional outputs. This is a familiar limitation. However, to go further, it is a useful reminder that the inclusion of minoritised communities in our theoretical frameworks is not necessarily a radical move in itself, especially if it results in homogenising injustices and histories of the oppressed, as many scholars have discussed.

In Sociology, Bhambra (2014) warns that decolonial histories should not be regarded as an addition to traditional frameworks, which would, in effect, contribute to the status quo of the theoretical building exercise. She argues that the issue is not necessarily about new or understudied histories but about the methodologies themselves. Instead, she advocates for a need for theories to reconstruct and transform previous theoretical categories; for conceptual frameworks to recognise the plurality of processes not merely as description but as an opportunity to reconstruct knowledge. The consequence of integrating different histories must be to re-examine our pre-existing categories and see them in a different light. Similarly, in Geography, Barnett (2020) draws attention to the conventional view of theory formation in Urban Studies, which regards its primary task as broadening geographic cases into generalisable frameworks. In contrast, Barnett discusses the field of Southern urbanism that seeks to interrupt the deductive assumptions of grand urban theorising and universalising modes of ontological reasoning. He describes how in this field, engaging in theory ‘is closer to a sense of shared vernacular than to the production of generalising theoretical frameworks’ (2020: 14). Barnett argues that Southern urbanism challenges off-the-shelf models of theory, and that Southern contexts are not alternative reference points to generate grand theory but are sites of rethinking themselves.

Our discourse on colonialism intersects with these interrogations in crucial ways: here, the risks are reproducing empire, the very thing anti-colonial scholarship seek to break down. The difficulties of theoretically broadening coloniality and navigating this conceptual quagmire can be seen in the critical and complex debates around the issue. For instance, Tuck and Yang's (2012) seminal paper on ‘Decolonisation is not a Metaphor’ was followed by Garba and Sorentino's (2020) response paper, ‘Slavery is a Metaphor’. Here, Garba and Sorentino argued that Tuck and Yang's paper emphasises the forms of settler colonial violence experienced by Natives by centring land in the efforts of decolonisation, which, in effect, undermined the ontological violence that emerged from the brutal histories of slavery and anti-Blackness. However, in response to Garba and Sorentino, Curley et al. (2022) highlighted what they believe to be misguiding the larger discussion: the framing of Black and Indigenous scholarship as antagonistic. They elaborate on how this framing is only made possible when settler and Native epistemologies are conflated – ‘a consequence of white academic structures’ (1044). In this case, the framing of Black and Indigenous scholarship as antagonistic is based on a settler-colonialist, positivist understanding of land as property rather than a more expansive Indigenous understanding of land as relational and political.

These demonstrate some of the difficulties theorising work on digital coloniality will inevitably contend with. Such debates remind us that these topics often hits close to home for many authors, and there is still much work to do on reconstructing our knowledge practices – or to reflect on the position of Western intellectuals as ‘the custodian of the totality’ as Akbari argues. If we hope to shape productive avenues of discourse around coloniality, it is necessary to interrogate empire's enduring hold on our epistemological practices, including in academia. The rest of this intervention thinks about this further through the tensions of coloniality and the consequences of our theories.

The plural temporalities of coloniality

Akbari's piece carefully parses through the thick landscape of literature contending with digital colonialism, coloniality, imperialism, feudalism and fascism. In this process, Uneven Datafication as a theoretical framework ultimately settles on multiple complicated temporalities – probably a necessary end point for theories contending with the intersection of digital processes and colonialism.

Akbari argues that digital coloniality cannot be fully accounted for without considering the various histories of colonialism, of which there are many starting points. However, the paper also contends that there is something unique about both data and this current moment. On the idiosyncrasies of data, she explains how ‘data fundamentally differs from traditional commodities subject to exchange’. Moreover, ‘[…] the issue is not solely the commodification of data, but rather how data serves as both the means and the end of a new, emergent value production system’. Additionally, building on Harvey's argument that there are three distinct waves of imperialism, Akbari contends that ‘uneven datafication marks a fourth wave of accumulation by dispossession’. She asserts that the aspects of dispossession she highlights ‘were defining features of past colonial relations and, [remain] central to contemporary digital colonial capitalism’.

Ultimately, Akbari crucially reminds us that we must ‘resist atemporal, ahistorical and apolitical narratives of datafication’. On the other hand, however, it is also a difficult question of what it means to juggle multiple temporalities and geographies while also attending to specific overarching eras of digital temporalities in processes of coloniality. For example, how should we contend with these broader temporalities of today's data processes alongside the diverse histories of empire that have long utilised data processes for its colonial projects? Which versions and aspects and genealogies of both data and coloniality should we attend to and when? I will illustrate these tensions through two examples.

Browne (2015), in her foundational book, Dark Matters, problematises several common narratives and starting points for understanding surveillance based on her archival exploration of the transatlantic slave trade and Black traditions of resistance. Here, Browne questions the premise that biometrics were born out of modern digital technologies. She argues that some of the early applications of biometric surveillance can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade, which included the brutal branding of slave bodies, and the extensive record-keeping practices that noted the characteristics of each slave, such as height and lip shape, in order to track these populations to trade and sell as property; an expansive form of dispossession that enacts dehumanising epistemic and material violence. Browne argues that it is important to understand these connections as these historical practices anticipate the epistemic and material social sorting of today's datafied surveillance practices in the United States.

In another direction, often omitted from wider theoretical debates on digital colonialism, in part due to factors discussed above, is scholarship from authors based in explicitly colonial contexts that explain how colonialism is mediated through datafied technologies without necessarily seeking to craft large unifying theories. This might include work that pins its starting point in the deep interrogation of colonialism rather than necessarily the processes of technology first and foremost – or work that is more focused on attending to colonial specifities instead of broader patterns of datafication. Even if not necessarily neatly packaged in a generalisable theory or perhaps lacking specific keywords that might tie it to this debate, this body of work is necessary to our understanding of the modern condition. For example, Tawil-Souri's (2012a, 2012b, 2015, 2016, 2026) extensive body of work examines digital infrastructures in Palestine since the 1990s and demonstrates how Israel's regime of colonialism, apartheid and genocide is an inextricable foundation of these examinations. In Surveillance Sublime, Tawil-Souri (2016: 57) argues that in Palestine, ‘surveillance cannot be separated from Zionist strategies to create different categories of people and places, which have ultimately served to dispossess and control Palestinians’. Tawil-Souri traces various origins of the Zionist surveillance state to the British Mandate authorities’ systems of documentation in the 1920s that quantified life in Palestine, which ranged from population census, land surveys and tax lists. She argues that today,

surveillance is manifested through a gamut of discursive, corporeal, and material tools […] through tools of power quotidian and formal, low-tech and hi-tech, and through minutely focused, routinized, and systematic applications that collectively define the workings of the Israeli surveillance regime's management of territory and population. In other words, in Israel, surveillance hides the more ominous practice of colonialism. (58)

Both Browne and Helga Tawil Souri's interrogation of datafied violence as it emerges from specific histories of empire maps on to question of what temporalities should we attend to, when to extend a frame of analysis, why it matters right now; but also the incisive question set out by Amrute (2020): for whom does modern-day surveillance and violence signify a radical aberration? Returning to Uneven Datafication, some important questions that emerge include what (or where) specifically is worth highlighting if the processes of de/re-territorialisation through datafication have long histories emerging from different empires – is it the scale these operate on today or perhaps how they overlap with other colonial vehicles? When, exactly, might we put the starting point of the fourth wave of dispossession and what might we learn from this temporal framework? And how might different colonial genealogies intersect with this broader fourth wave of dispossession?

Both the uniqueness of data and of the fourth wave of dispossession are located in the enduring debates around the distinction between the digital and non-digital, which can be seen in the previous papers in this journal. For instance, Beer's (2025) intervention provocatively asks: what use is the concept of the digital? He argues the term digital has become a catch-all and reminds that these processes are always in flux. Beer argues that ‘definitions are not really what is at stake, rather [it's] a question of limits, purpose and focus. It's about rediscovering or reasserting the value of the digital as an analytical terrain.’ To ask further about the difficult maintenance work Akbari does behind defining the digital as a productive analytical terrain, one question might be: what can privileging the uniqueness of data and a fourth wave of dispossession do for us? Undoubtedly, these are questions that the author (and many of scholars in/around digital coloniality) has mulled over many times, and I hope these continue to be useful lines of inquiry. However, rather than go down the route of debating which theory has the most analytical purchase or is most accurate across the biggest number of contexts, which are common metrics of the academy, this intervention concludes by steering the discussion of these questions through the stakes of theory instead.

What is at stake for theories of empire?

Chakravartty (2021) cautioned that when using concepts such as colonialism, we need to be ‘mindful of how we are using these terms and drawing from people for [whom] these terms have real stakes’. They argue that violence against specific types of people needs to be central to such analysis, not additional. This is because the stakes of such analysis have real-world consequences. Like how Akbari contends that coloniality needs to be understood through a differentiated lens, the differentiated authors, co-creators and recipients of theories must also be considered. Questions here include: why does it matter where our starting points of coloniality is? And who are the subjects of our efforts in theorising colonialism? There are many answers to these tricky questions. This intervention will focus on a thread of thought informed by abolitionist scholarship, which, as I have argued in my past work, often offers a clarifying analytic for such debates (Au, 2025).

Any interrogation will have to slice and dice in particular ways, and no single theory can look at everything, everywhere, all at once. The way we segment, prioritise and foreground certain elements matters, and the subsequent solutions reflect this. To this end, abolitionist theory provides a clarifying analytic lens, enabling distinction between non-reformist reforms and reformist-reforms. Non-reformist reform addresses the root causes of issues. Reformist-reforms, however, maintain and fine-tune the status quo. In Gilmore’s (2014, viii) words:

big problems require big solutions. Nothing happens all at once; big answers are the painstaking accumulation of smaller achievements. But dividing a problem into pieces in order to solve the whole thing is altogether different from defining a problem solely in terms of the bits that seem easiest to fix. In the first instance, the remedy for each piece must develop in relation to its effect on actual or possible remedies for the other pieces. The other way is to solve a small part without considering whether the outcome strengthens or weakens the big problem's hold on the world.

Under abolitionist frameworks, the debates on digital colonialism might be reflected through the lens of whether theories lead to analytics and solutions that reinforce pre-existing colonial foundations, or does it work towards interrupting such foundations in the long run? For instance, as other authors have argued, Zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism pinpoints the problem as rogue mutation of capitalism and thus the solutions offered are ways to refine capitalism (Morozov, 2019; Sadowski and Ongweso, 2020); or in other words, these solutions tend to be reformist-reforms. Similarly, previous frameworks of digital colonialism that emphasise the extraction of data as a resource over other types of colonial violence might result in solutions revolving around property rights (Gray, 2023) – yet, colonial legacies are often baked into many of our current legislative landscapes, international law and liberal understandings of justice (Chakravartty, 2021). Does strengthening property rights legislation in places shaped by long, vicious histories of settler colonialism produce solutions for those most oppressed? Or could such solutions simply preserve the politics of empire for longer yet?

In Uneven Datafication, Akbari points to a different set of root problems to ruminate on—territorialisation, dispossession, unequal exchange—opening up a different set of possibilities around reforms. Some questions then include how this theory might shape subsequent discussions. If Uneven Datafication highlights the uniqueness of data, a fourth wave of accumulation, and a need to attend to a differentiated workforce that upholds the political economy of data, what might solutions in this direction look like? What might the roads that pave the way for a better world look like and what are the previous epistemologies we might be able to break down and reconstruct? Of course, these are big questions, however, since debates on epistemology, meta-theory, and stakes are often sidelined as out of scope for the limited pages of our papers, I hope we can use this space to think a little more together on these areas which remain shaped by colonial legacies. This is especially as, part of the arduous task in the search for non-reformist reforms is that these require a ‘jailbreak’ (Kaba and Hayes, 2018) of our imagination and difficult discussions about the broader picture which is not always easy to see Gorz (1967: 7).

In the mulling over of the wider configurations and consequences of theory, I hope we can plant further lines of inquiry for ourselves and the larger community on how we might intentionally build space in our collective work for alternative imaginings, theorisations and mobilisations of justice to grow.