alarm

Istanbul, Turkiye – When investigations by Al Jazeera and other media outlets in 2024 revealed that Israeli-linked artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Lavender and Gospel had helped generate thousands of military targets in Gaza, critics warned that warfare was entering a new era – one driven not only by soldiers and bombs, but by algorithms, data, and surveillance technology.

Then, in September 2024, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah exploded in coordinated attacks in Lebanon, widely attributed to Israeli intelligence operations that had turned ordinary communication devices into weapons.

And, last year, reporting by Al Jazeera also raised concerns about the use of cloud and data infrastructure linked to major US technology companies in Israeli surveillance operations involving Palestinians.

For a growing number of scholars, economists and political thinkers, such developments reflect more than just the changing nature of conflict. They show how power in the modern world is increasingly exercised not just through military force, but through technology, finance and control over information.

That argument has revived broader debates around decolonisation – a term historically associated with the dismantling of European empires after World War II, when countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East gained formal independence.

But many proponents of what is termed “decolonial theory” – a school of thought arguing that colonial-era systems of power and hierarchy still shape modern politics, economics and knowledge – argue that colonial power structures never fully disappeared. Instead, they evolved, embedding themselves in global financial systems, technology platforms, media networks and even the production of knowledge itself.

Dependence of Global South countries on Western technology, digital infrastructure and global markets can create new forms of political and economic vulnerability, particularly across the Global South.

“A generation may have grown up believing they had never experienced colonialism or exploitation,” Esra Albayrak, board chair of the NUN Foundation for Education and Culture and daughter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told Al Jazeera during the World Decolonization Forum in Istanbul on May 11-12.

“Yet, mentally, they may still be living under colonial influence.”

The war in Gaza marked a turning point, Albayrak says, shining a spotlight on how international principles are not applied equally. Global institutions have so far failed to stop what many countries and rights groups have described as genocide against Palestinians.

“The world is sounding an alarm, and we can no longer afford to remain indifferent to it,” she said.

A techno-feudal era

Albayrak argues that a handful of technology companies are emerging as new, invisible centres of power, shaping how information is produced, circulated and consumed in the digital age.

She describes the digital sphere as the realm of what she calls “future colonialism”, warning that AI systems trained largely on Western-centric data risk reinforcing existing global inequalities.

“When AI systems are run by those tech companies and trained on Western sources, they risk carrying the hierarchies of the past into tomorrow’s digital world, as they now have personalised data, suppressing identity,” Albayrak said.

By this, she means that most major AI models are still trained largely on English-language and Western-produced data – a pattern critics say risks sidelining non-Western languages, cultures and perspectives.

On social media platforms, algorithms tend to amplify some conflicts while rendering others nearly invisible, effectively shaping what billions of users see, discuss and remember online.

Walter D Mignolo, professor at Duke University, argues that while what we historically see as “formal colonialism” may have largely ended, systems of Western dominance continue through economics, culture, technology and knowledge production.

“Coloniality is not over. It is all over the world,” Mignolo said, arguing that modern ideas of development and progress often have the effect of pressuring societies to conform to Western norms.

Rather than simply resisting those systems, he said, societies must find a way to “re-exist” by rebuilding intellectual and cultural autonomy outside dominant global frameworks.

Colonisers in the financial age

The March 2026 Global Debt Report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveals that 44 countries face severe debt burdens, often aggravated by global conflicts, forcing some governments to spend more on interest payments than on health or education.

This is not a new phenomenon, as developing countries have been labouring under the weight of foreign debt for decades.

But British political economist and author Ann Pettifor told Al Jazeera that modern forms of domination are now increasingly embedded not in empires or nation-states, but in financial systems operating beyond democratic oversight.

Pettifor points to the growing influence of “shadow” banking networks – financial institutions operating largely outside traditional banking regulations – and giant asset managers such as BlackRock, which manages $13 trillion in assets.

Much of the global financial architecture now functions largely outside the regulatory control of governments, she says, including that of Western states themselves.

“This is not a state colonising other states,” Pettifor said. “This is the financial system colonising the whole world, including my country and the US.”

She argues that elected governments increasingly struggle to control key economic realities – from energy prices to commodity markets – because those systems are dictated by global financial actors operating far beyond public accountability.

In Nigeria, for example, Pettifor says, efforts to expand domestic refining capacity continue to face pressure from international financial institutions and global energy markets to keep fuel prices tied to global markets and maintain reliance on imported refined oil products, despite its vast oil reserves.

Coordinated cooperation between developing nations may be necessary to challenge the dominance of Western-centred financial systems, Pettifor says, pointing to growing efforts across parts of West Africa to expand regional refining capacity and reduce dependence on imported fuel. Yet such ambitions can also leave critical sectors dependent on the decisions and influence of a small number of powerful private actors.

Global financial markets, algorithm-driven platforms, and foreign-controlled digital infrastructure increasingly define everyday life – from fuel and food prices to the information people consume online and the technologies governments and societies depend on, observers say.

A ‘mastery complex’

As wars become increasingly influenced by AI, digital infrastructure and financial dependency, debates around colonisation are focusing less on territorial control and more on who influences energy prices, lending systems, access to technology and the flow of information across borders, observers say.

Albayrak draws a parallel between today’s debates around technology and global power and Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden”, published as the US took control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. The poem framed colonial expansion as a moral obligation to “civilise” other societies rather than an exercise of domination.

Albayrak said such traces of “mastery complex” still survive today, though in different forms – not necessarily through military occupation, but through technological, financial and informational influence.

But what the world really needs, she argues, is a global order built not on hierarchy, but on shared responsibility.

“The burden should belong to humanity collectively.”

Warning follows Jewish man’s arrest over brutal attack in which a nun was pushed and kicked in Jerusalem this week.

The head of a Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem has condemned a brutal attack on a nun in the city earlier in the week and warned of growing concerns over the future for Christians living in the Holy Land.

Archbishop Atallah Hanna said on Facebook that “the attack on a nun in the city of Jerusalem comes amid escalating violations against Christian institutions in the city”.

He added that “this reflects increasing concerns about the future of the historic Christian presence in the Holy Land”.

In his post, which was accompanied by a video, he warned that such attacks “are no longer isolated incidents, but part of a recurring pattern that threatens the Christian presence,” calling for international action to stop them.

On Thursday, Israeli police released a video showing what witnesses said was an attack by a Jewish man on a French nun in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

Video footage showed the man following the nun, forcibly pushing her to the ground, causing an injury to her head, then briefly walking away before returning to kick her as she lay on the ground, before bystanders intervened.

According to The Times of Israel, police said they had arrested a Jewish man suspected of assaulting the nun in Jerusalem.

“The suspect, a 36-year-old male, was identified and subsequently arrested by police,” the police said in a statement on Wednesday, adding it viewed with “utmost severity” any violent act “driven by potentially racist motives and directed toward members of the clergy”.

Father Olivier Poquillon, director of Jerusalem’s French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research, told the AFP news agency the 48-year-old nun is a researcher at the institution and did not wish to speak publicly.

Rising attacks on Christians

Attacks on Christian communities in occupied East Jerusalem and Israel have risen in recent years, according to the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, which tracks such incidents.

Churches in Jerusalem have repeatedly called on Israeli authorities to act decisively to put a stop to them.

On Tuesday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the incident a “shameful act” in a statement on X.

“In a city sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, we remain committed to protecting all communities and ensuring those responsible for violence are held accountable,” the ministry added.

Last month, a viral photograph showing an Israeli soldier smashing a statue of Jesus Christ in southern Lebanon with a sledgehammer caused outrage.

The military said an investigation had been opened and that “appropriate measures will be taken against those involved in accordance with the findings”.

Israel later said the soldier had been jailed for 30 days, along with another soldier who had been filming him. Six other soldiers have been summoned for questioning.

Jessica Govea Thorbourne, a charismatic organizer for the United Farm Workers union, who raised early alarms about fieldworkers’ exposure to dangerous pesticides and led table grape boycotts in Canada that helped win acceptance for the union at home, died Jan. 23 of breast cancer at a rehabilitation center in West Orange, N.J. She was 58.

Govea Thorbourne worked closely with UFW co-founder Cesar Chavez for 16 years, beginning when she was 19. Two years later she was directing crucial boycotts in Canada that helped the union win one of its first contracts with a California grape grower and ultimately settle with the entire industry.

She also led voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives for a number of Democratic candidates, including presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy during his California Democratic primary campaign, Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Alan Cranston and Art Torres, who served 20 years in the California Legislature before becoming the first Latino chairman of the state Democratic Party.

She later moved to the East Coast and spent the last two decades as a labor educator, teaching organizing skills at Rutgers and Cornell universities.

Govea Thorbourne’s contributions to the farmworker movement have been largely unheralded, but stories such as hers “are really the true history of the union,” Jerry Cohen, the UFW’s general counsel from 1967 to 1981, told The Times this week. “She is like the heart and soul of the union when it was at its best.”

Born in Porterville, Calif., Govea Thorbourne went to work in the fields with her parents when she was only 4. She spent every summer until she was 15 in backbreaking toil, filling bags with cotton bolls, scrambling on her knees to pick up prunes that been shaken from trees, and clipping bunches of grapes from row after row of vines while trying to avoid the wasps that hovered over the fruit.

A childhood photo of her shows a smiling, pigtailed girl in a white shirt and denim pants leaning on a shovel, but Govea Thorbourne’s memories of those days were far from sunny. Her skin would itch and burn, which she at first thought was caused by the heat but later attributed to the pesticides that covered the plants she touched every day. “The thing I hated most, though, was that there was no toilet. I just had to find a place and hope no one could see,” she said in the 2001 book “We Were There, Too,” which profiles reformers whose activism took root during their youth.

Her father, Juan Govea, was a respected leader of the Mexican American community in Bakersfield when Cesar Chavez and Fred Ross Sr. recruited him to help organize local workers for their Community Service Organization, a precursor of the UFW. Govea Thorbourne accompanied her father as he went door to door, listening to people’s stories of the struggles they encountered in their jobs, at government offices and in their children’s schools.

“My father never talked down to people. He listened carefully and spoke respectfully,” she said. “I learned a lot about organizing just from listening to these conversations.”

By age 9 she was helping her father turn out leaflets about the Community Service Organization meetings and reciting patriotic poems at rallies. At 12, she was president of the Junior CSO and led other farmworker children in a successful petition drive for a neighborhood park after her best friend was killed by a speeding truck while taking her siblings to a park three miles away. “That was the first time she led an organizing campaign,” said Fred Ross Jr., a fellow organizer who worked for the UFW from 1966 to 1977.

After she graduated from Bakersfield High School, Govea Thorbourne joined the National Farm Workers Assn. (later renamed the United Farm Workers), which Chavez had formed in 1962. She was a caseworker helping union families when three women came to her for help dealing with rashes, headaches and dizzy spells. They were told their problems were caused by heat exhaustion, but Govea Thorbourne believed the cause was pesticide poisoning.

At first, union leaders did not pay much attention to the alarms she was trying to raise, but she persisted until they “finally made pesticides an issue,” Cohen said.

The adverse effects of pesticide exposure became a central part of the story UFW organizers told to build support for the boycotts. The issue received national attention when then-Sen. Walter F. Mondale (D-Minn.) made pesticides a focus of Senate hearings on migrant workers in 1969.

“When we won contracts with the grape industry,” Cohen said, “we put in clauses to protect farmworkers from pesticide. Jessica was the first to raise the issue in an insistent manner.”

Govea Thorbourne was only 21 when she and Marshall Ganz were sent to Canada in 1968 to enlist consumers there in the union’s fight against growers.

“She earned a real following up there,” said Ganz, now a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

“She was a gifted speaker … and she could sing [the farmworkers’ story] as well as speak it,” he added, recalling songs she sang that conveyed the longing and sadness in the workers’ lives.

By winning broad-based support among students, labor and churches, Govea Thorbourne and Ganz drew millions of Canadians in Toronto and Montreal — then among the top five markets for California table grapes — into the boycott, which gave the UFW critical leverage in its fight for recognition at the bargaining table.

“The boycott they led was one of the most effective and key in settling the grape strike,” said Eliseo Medina, a former UFW board member who is now a national officer of the Service Employees International Union. “Mind you, when the boycott began, there was no formula for how to do a boycott. Marshall and Jessica invented the formula, and many of us learned from that.”

Govea Thorbourne would later serve as national director of organizing for the union and in 1977 became a member of the UFW’s executive board. Years later, as an educator, she would often tell the young union workers she was training that she was not even sure where Canada was when she volunteered to go there.

“People who were thinking they could never do something like this drew strength from hearing her talk. She was very humble,” said Ken Margulies, who worked closely with her as director of training programs for labor organizers at Cornell’s School of Industrial Labor Relations.

At Cornell she worked extensively with Chinese-speaking members of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents healthcare workers. She also helped train coffee-processing workers in El Salvador in the early 1990s.

Although she could not prove the connection, she believed that her cancer, which was diagnosed in 1993, was caused by her exposure to pesticides as a youth working in the fields, according to her husband, Kenneth Thorbourne Jr., whom she married in 1987.

She also is survived by her mother, Margaret Govea; two sisters; and two brothers.

Her husband said that, despite her suspicions about the origins of her illness, she was never bitter about her fate and continued to work until last fall, when the cancer spread to her brain.